26 September 21
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They call it a $3.5 trillion spending bill. More accurately, it’s a $60 billion-a-year investment bill. Imagine how different the debate would be if the journalistic shorthand were that.
The phrase has three constituent elements—$3.5 trillion, spending, and bill. What the Democrats in Congress are working on is indeed a bill, so I have no quarrel with that part. But the $3.5 trillion, in journalistic shorthand, makes it sound like the Democrats want to go out there and spend it all immediately on every loopy cause under the sun.
In fact, it will be parceled out over a decade. This 10-year window is a convention of the budgeting process, so it’s not that it’s wrong to talk about it this way, and to be sure, sometimes the 10-year time frame is mentioned. But usually not. So it would be more accurate to refer to this $3.5 trillion as $350 billion a year.
Now, that’s still a lot of money, I’ll grant that. But compared to what? Do you know the total size of the federal budget? I had a rough idea—a few trillion—but I had to Google it myself. In 2020, the government spent $6.55 trillion. So $350 billion is around 5.3 percent. You can call that significant, I guess. But it isn’t insane. If you decided to spend 5 percent more a year on maintaining your house, redoing the insulation or replacing the windows, and you confided this fact to your neighbor, she would not think you a wanton, irresponsible fool.
Also, as it happens, $350 billion is almost exactly half the size of the defense budget. We have no mortal enemy as we did in the Cold War days (to the extent that some might want to pin that label on China, bear in mind that its defense budget is estimated to be less than a third of ours, around $209 billion). And we just got out of two wars. Yet military spending just keeps going up and up, and somehow it’s never controversial. It should be—read this story about how every fiscal year, the Pentagon has many millions of dollars that it has to spend before fiscal year’s end because if it doesn’t spend every penny, the brass worry that Congress will give it less. So, in the closing weeks of F.Y. 2019, for example, the Pentagon spent $2.3 million each on lobster tails and snow crab.
So $3.5 trillion is highly misleading. But there’s an even more persuasive reason that this is so. The Democrats have put revenue on the table of $2.9 trillion. In other words, they are not “spending” $3.5 trillion—or technically they are, but most of it is paid for. So in terms of new money being laid out, the actual figure is $600 billion. Broken down over 10 years, that’s $60 billion. That’s less than 1 percent of the total federal budget. Still sound profligate?
Now let’s consider the word “spending.” This is a real pet peeve of mine. Let me illustrate it with numbers and an example that your average person could readily understand.
Suppose I somehow luck into an unexpected $2,000. I mull what to do with it. I might spend it on a vintage 1970s Gottlieb pinball machine of the sort I spent hours playing in my teens in the pizza parlors and gaming arcades of dear old Morgantown (it’s hard but not impossible to find one for around two grand). Or I might put it in my daughter’s 529.
Those are both, strictly speaking, “spending.” But are they morally indistinguishable? Obviously not. The pinball machine really would be spending in the sense that Republicans characterize Democrats’ plans—heedless, ill-thought, selfish. The 529 investment would be just that—an investment.
The Democratic policy proposals are all, every single one, investments. Universal pre-kindergarten is an investment in children, mostly poor, who don’t have access to that now, and a jillion studies show it pays off. Paid family leave is an investment in families’ mental well-being. A national network of childcare facilities is an investment that will free many parents, especially the single mothers for whom life is rarely a breeze, to realize their earning potential.
The difference between spending and investing is that spending returns nothing save gratification, whereas investing offers a return. Those returns don’t necessarily show up in the federal budget. Some do, or would—the prescription drug price negotiating plan would lower costs for Medicare and Medicaid. Others don’t, but that’s fine. They show up on the broader ledger of society, like how getting more people health care coverage lowers overall health care spending, which we know is so because the nations of Europe, which offer their people various forms of universal coverage, all spend less on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States.
I could go on, but you get the picture. The phrase “$3.5 trillion spending bill” sounds on the edge of insanity. But imagine if the journalistic shorthand were, say, “$60 billion-a-year investment bill”? It would be just as accurate. In fact, it would be more accurate. The very terms of debate would be radically altered. The people who want to make these modest investments would sound like the sensible, prudent people that most of them are, while those in opposition would sound like the irresponsible ones.
Thus do the media unwittingly (perhaps I’m being charitable there) structure the entire debate in a way that tilts the conversation toward the right’s point of view. Top editors and media executives need to reconsider how they portray the bill. Large media institutions make easy changes on some matters—language with respect to questions of racial diversity changes all the time, and I’m for that. But on matters of money and class, they’re not so eager to reexamine their assumptions.
And I’m buying that pinball machine someday. Probably El Dorado.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York walk out of a budget resolution meeting at the Capitol on Monday. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
This big, scary-sounding number represents just 1.2 percent of U.S. GDP over the next 10 years.
Left out of the coverage, though, is one key issue: How much money is that, really?
$3.5 trillion certainly sounds like a lot. Human brains aren’t equipped to understand numbers of this magnitude; in our regular lives, we never encounter 3.5 trillion of anything, let alone actual dollars.
But the reality is surprisingly modest: $3.5 trillion is just 1.2 percent of the U.S. economy over the relevant time frame.
The fact that the media has resolutely failed to provide this context is an act of true malfeasance. It contributes to public ignorance in general and supports the right’s favorite narrative of wild liberal profligacy. If the Build Back Better plan fails, or is significantly reduced in scope, the media’s behavior will be a big reason why.
To start with, the $3.5 trillion represents a combination of new spending and tax cuts that would take place over 10 years. There are many examples of coverage that literally never mention this, even in higher-quality news outlets. When the Senate moved forward with the agenda in early August, NPR reported it had “narrowly endorsed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution early Wednesday morning in a 50-49 party-line vote.” The 10-year time period appeared nowhere in the piece.
Later in the month, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, “House Passes $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan for Vast Expansion of Safety Net.” Like NPR, the Times never mentioned that this was $3.5 trillion over a decade.
The same basic fact is missing here (New York Times), here (New York Times), here (Washington Post), here (Washington Post), here (Washington Post), here (Wall Street Journal), here (Wall Street Journal), and almost uniformly on television.
But even more egregiously, the corporate media has failed to explain how much $3.5 trillion is in comparison to the most relevant metric, the size of the U.S. economy. The significance of this should be obvious: After all, $1,000 is a real expense if you make $10,000 a year, but not if you make $1 million.
No one can say exactly how big the U.S. economy will be over the next decade, but the Congressional Budget Office projects that the cumulative gross domestic product of the United States during the 10 years from 2022 to 2031 will be $288 trillion. The $3.5 trillion Build Back Better agenda is therefore just 1.2 percent of GDP.
There appear to be no examples of this number appearing in corporate news coverage. Even members of the Democratic caucus in Congress almost uniformly fail to mention this — with the notable exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who noted recently on CNN: “We’re talking about close to $300 trillion [in GDP] over the next 10 years. This is 3 1/2 trillion, barely more than 1 percent of that.”
The media could also usefully compare the size of the Build Back Better bills to current government spending. The CBO projects that the federal government will spend $63.4 trillion from 2022-31. Because the $3.5 trillion in Build Back Better proposals includes both spending and tax cuts, and the mix is not finalized, it’s difficult to say precisely how much the agenda would increase government outlays. But if Congress were to pass a bill that included $2.5 trillion in additional spending over the next 10 years, that would represent about a 4 percent rise in federal expenditures.
This should make clear how much easier the media has made it for opponents of the Build Back Better agenda to fearmonger about its size. Of course, opponents of the Build Back Better proposals could still legitimately oppose it based on a philosophical objection to any new nonmilitary spending. But it’s much more difficult to object when everyone’s hearing the nonscary-sounding “1.2 percent of GDP” number rather than the huge, terrifying “$3.5 trillion.”
And this barely scratches the surface of how badly the corporate press has bungled this subject. The $3.5 trillion proposals would not increase the federal debt by anywhere near that amount, because the Democrats are proposing significant tax increases. In The New Republic, Michael Tomasky explains what should be an obvious point: The agenda should be thought of not as money we’ll never see again, but as investments that will come back to us in the form of a much better, healthier, better-educated America. Most importantly, modern monetary theory persuasively suggests that the constraint on spending is not how many dollars Congress has, since the government can print however many it wants, but whether the spending generates inflation. And the Build Back Better proposals are specifically designed to increase the productive capacity of the U.S. economy, lessening inflationary pressures.
All in all, it’s been a grim performance by the media, aided and abetted by the Democrats, who seem to have no understanding of how to communicate with normal Americans. The fact that the Build Back Better agenda may survive despite this, at least in some form, demonstrates just how popular it is.
Darren Parry, the former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation overlooks the site of the Bear River Massacre where the soldiers in the U.S. Army killed more than 350 of his ancestors in 1863. (photo: WP)
The 1863 Bear River Massacre decimated the Northwestern Band of the Shoshones but was overshadowed by the Civil War.
The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving roughly 90 women and children among the dead.
The death toll, historians say, exceeded some of the country’s most horrific Indian slayings, including the 1864 slaying at Colorado’s Sand Creek, where 130 Cheyennes were killed. And the death count was nearly double the roughly 150 Sioux killed at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, four days after Christmas in 1890.
Some accounts put the Bear River death toll even higher than 350.
In one account of the brutality, Danish immigrant Hans Jasperson in his 1911 autobiography, said he walked among the bodies, counting 493 Shoshone Indians dead, according to a 2008 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. Jasperson wrote, “I turned around and counted them back and counted just the same."
Historians said roughly two dozen U.S. soldiers died at Bear River.
“It almost annihilated us as a people,” said Darren B. Parry, former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. “But it’s largely been forgotten.”
Many historians say the biggest reason the Bear River slaying is lost — or ignored — in history lessons is because its “carnage [was] eclipsed by Civil War battles” raging at the time, according to Charles S. Peterson, a historian at Utah State University who wrote the foreword on a book called “The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre.” He said it’s ironic it receives so little attention, given the well-known Native American woman — Sacagawea — was Shoshone and became famous for having served as a guide to explorers Lewis and Clark across the West earlier in the 19th century.
Jonathan Deiss, a military historian based in Washington, compared the slaying of Native Americans in the 1800s to mass shootings in the 21st century. “People became numb to them,” Deiss said.
“People considered Indians not really humans,” Deiss added, “so it was easy to justify killing them or mistreating them.”
The Shoshones were once a nation that had 17,000 people that included several bands that stretched across parts of Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. They traveled with the seasons. In early autumn, they went to Salmon, Idaho, to fish. In the spring and summer, they’d go to Utah to gather seeds, berries and roots.
When cold weather hit, they hunkered down in the Cache Valley, which runs through northern Utah and southeast Idaho. The willow and sagebrush in the valley helped protect them from the wind and snow of winter blizzards and the “Big River,” or “Boa Ogoi” as the Shoshones called it, had an abundance of fish, plus the area was rich with wild game.
In the 1800s, the Shoshones and other tribes faced a slew of hardships and troubles as the U.S. government wanted to rid the country of what officials called the “Indian problem.” Settlers moving west and Mormon farmers invaded Shoshone land, and miners caused skirmishes as they passed through on their way West to find gold.
After the Civil War started in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln sent regiments from the 3rd Regiment California Volunteer Infantry in the Union Army who were stationed at Fort Douglas near Salt Lake City to help protect the mail routes and telegraph lines that ran through the Cache Valley area. But many of the troops were frustrated they were there and wanted to be on the front lines of the Civil War.
On Jan. 5, 1863, ten miners traveling south on the Montana Trail were said to have been murdered by Indians. A day later, a group of White men headed to Salt Lake City got lost and were allegedly robbed by Indians. In an argument about returning some livestock, a White man named John H. Smith was fatally shot. A judge issued a warrant for some of the Shoshone men who were accused of killing him with orders for U.S. Army Col. Patrick E. Connor to “effect the arrest of the guilty Indians,” according to records from the National Park Service.
By then, cold weather had set in and the Shoshones were in their winter grounds for the season. But when a spiritual leader told of a dream where Indians were killed by soldiers on horseback, about 50 left and went to another site. But many stayed with Shoshone Chief Sagwitch.
“How can you move people in four feet of snow to anywhere you couldn’t be followed?” Parry said.
On Jan. 29, 1863, Connor’s unit of almost 300 infantry and cavalry came down a frozen, wintry bluff into the Shoshone’s winter camp.
That morning, Sagwitch got up early. He saw steam from the mountains and realized as they got closer it was the horses’ breath in the cold air. Sagwitch told his people he was going to try to talk to the military leaders, and he ordered his warriors not to be the first to fire weapons, according to Mae T. Parry, who was a great granddaughter of Sagwitch and wrote about the massacre.
Sagwitch “thought the colonel would ask for the guilty men,” and he would hand them over, wrote Mae Parry, who was an activist and a tribal historian. “He told his people to be brave and calm,” wrote Mae Parry, who died in 2007 and was Darren Parry’s grandmother.
But the colonel didn’t ask for the men before his soldiers started to fire.
In his memoir, William F. Drannan — who was an Army scout — said when they started to fire “it frightened the Indians so that they came running out ... like jack rabbits and were shot down like sheep.”
The Indians had “very few rifles,” according to Darren Parry. They fought with tomahawks, spears, bows and arrows.
The soldiers pushed the Indians closer to the river.
“They flanked the Indians,” Darren Parry said, and the river “became their last resort.” Some jumped into the river but were shot and others were swept away in the icy current and drowned.
Another Shoshone Chief — Bear Hunter — faced torture after soldiers captured him. Whipped and kicked he said “not a word, nor did he cry out,” according to Mae Parry’s writings. “To him,” she said, “that would have been a sign of cowardice.”
Because he showed no fear of the pain, soldiers heated a rifle bayonet and “ran it through his head from ear to ear,” Mae Parry said.
“They wholesale massacred the tribe,” Darren Parry said. “Men, women and children. They lost their lives.”
Mae Parry said her relatives told of how the “blazing white snow” turned “brilliant red with blood.”
Some 150 Shoshones survived, according to tribal historians.
Chased by soldiers with her baby strapped to her back, Anzee Chee — a Shoshone woman — jumped into the river and hid under an overhang along the bank. But she had a hard time trying to care for her own wounds and she couldn’t keep her baby from crying, according to writings from Mae Parry.
“She knew that if the soldiers heard the crying baby they were both sure to die,” Mae Parry wrote, The only way Anzee Chee believed for “one of them to live was to throw the baby into the river, and that she did.”
Chief Sagwitch’s 12-year-old son — Yeager Timbimboo, whose Shoshone name “Da boo zee” meant “cottontail rabbit” — became caught in the gunfire and looked for shelter. He eventually found his grandmother hiding in a teepee packed with people, according to Mae Parry’s writings.
According to a website of the tribe’s history, she was afraid the teepee would go up in flames and told him to lay very still. But Yeager raised his head and found himself looking into the barrel of a soldier’s gun. Shoshone historians said Timbimboo later told of how the soldier raised his gun and lowered it twice, looking into his eyes. Then he put it down and walked away.
After the massacre, Conner, the colonel who lead the attack, told of the “bodies on the field” in a report he sent to the then-U.S. War Department. He said had destroyed over 70 Indian lodges and captured 175 horses. He noted that he left “a small quantity of wheat for the sustenance of 160 captive squaws and children whom I left in the field.”
Capt. James L. Fisk visited the site months later and wrote, “Many of the skeletons of the Indians yet remained on the ground, their bones scattered by wolves,” according to the National Park Service. Connor was promoted to the rank of brigadier general after the massacre.
A Shoshone tribal history called the massacre a “clash of two diverse cultures trying to share the same land, and the Shoshone lost.”
Ever since the 1863 massacre, the land where the massacre happened has been privately owned. At one point decades ago, landowners said they tried to plow the land for farming but too often found human remains believed to be those of Indians.
In 1990, it was designated as a national historic landmark and Mae Parry and other Shoshones fought for decades to have it be recognized as a massacre and not as a battle, as some historical markers had called it. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought about 550 acres of Bear River land in 2018. The tribe, which now has a population of about 560, plans to build an interpretive center to honor the history and those lost at Bear River.
“It’s our place where our old people died,” said Rios Pacheco, a tribal elder, said speaking in Shoshone in a video produced about the slaying. “They were killed by the Army. Their spirits are still here and we are still here.”
Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat, speaks at a press conference after the House passed the Women's Health Protection Act. (photo: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock)
Party sees new urgency – and political opportunity – amid growing threat to Roe v Wade
Nearly half a century after the court established the constitutional right to abortion, it allowed a near-complete ban to stand in Texas, the second-most populous state. Though the 5-4 decision did not address the substance of the Texas law, Democrats warn that it was a mere taste of things to come from the court – and Republicans who helped expand its conservative majority.
“When this court embraced this shameful Texas law, they brought shame to the United States supreme court,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said at a press conference on Friday, ahead of a vote on legislation effectively codifying abortion rights into federal law. “What were they thinking, or were they thinking, or were they just rubber-stamping what they were sent to the court to do?”
After her remarks, Pelosi returned to the chamber to preside as Democrats narrowly approved the bill. The vote was largely symbolic – Republican opposition in the Senate all but ensures the measure will not become law. Yet the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said he planned to bring it to the floor anyway.
The urgent push, however futile, was a reflection of just how powerful Democrats believe the issue could be in coming elections.
“We’re in totally uncharted territory,” said Cecile Richards, a former president of Planned Parenthood who now co-chairs a Democratic political action committee, American Bridge 21st Century. “This is a day that people certainly hoped would never come. But that’s where we’re at now and there’s no way to be on the sidelines.”
In Washington and beyond, Democrats are embracing the struggle over abortion, portraying themselves as the last line of defense against further erosion – or outright abolition – of a constitutional right many believed settled long ago.
Joe Biden has weighed in, promising a “whole of government” response. The justice department is suing Texas over its law, which bans abortion at roughly six weeks, before most women even know they’re pregnant.
This week, the supreme court announced it would hear oral arguments on 1 December in a case involving a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, a direct challenge to Roe. A ruling is expected next year, before the November elections.
‘Moments of crisis’
The Democrats’ focus on reproductive rights also reflects shifting political dynamics.
Unity on abortion is a relatively recent development for the party. After successive defeats in rural America, and defections among white working class voters, Democrats won majorities in Congress with a coalition of urban and suburban college-educated voters who tend to be more socially liberal.
While Americans’ views are notoriously difficult to survey, polling has found that attitudes on abortion have remained relatively consistent. A solid majority say the procedure should remain legal with some restrictions.
A recent Monmouth University poll found that a majority of Americans want abortion to be legal in all or some circumstances. More than six in 10 said they did not want the court to revisit Roe. Among Americans with a college degree, support for keeping abortion mostly legal was even higher.
Public opinion hasn’t been a barrier for anti-abortion activists, who have aligned with the Republican party to enact laws severely restricting access to the procedure in states across the country. They also made the supreme court a political priority, culminating in a 6-3 conservative majority, led by three appointees of Donald Trump.
“Reproductive justice organizers were effectively out-organized in state legislatures, particularly after the Tea Party wave in 2010, and there really hasn’t been an effective response since then,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University and author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v Wade to the Present. But, she said, that could change as more Americans come to terms with the reality that abortion is now effectively outlawed in a state like Texas.
Mobilizing support for abortion rights becomes “easier, ironically, in moments of crisis like this because everybody agrees that criminalizing abortion would be really bad if you’re on the pro-choice side of the debate”, Ziegler said.
Democrats say fear of losing Roe is motivating voters beyond their liberal base.
“People have always believed that somehow, at the end of the day, no matter what politicians did, that the judicial system would be there to back up women,” Richards said. “That just simply isn’t true any more. Now we actually have to face the consequences of making abortion illegal.”
But the issue is also energizing abortion opponents, activists say.
“This moment is a culmination of years of pro-life strategy and the stakes have never been higher,” said Mallory Quigley, a vice-president of the Susan B Anthony List. She said her group was already knocking on doors in battleground states including Arizona and Georgia, seeking to mobilize “pro-life base voters” as well as those “who can be persuaded to vote for the pro-life candidate”.
Nationally, Republicans have been more circumspect.
Republicans “have long been able to talk aggressively about abortion while knowing that the most aggressive policies would either fail in legislatures or be struck down by the courts”, said Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver and author of The New States of Abortion Politics.
That certainty is gone now.
“If Roe is overturned or otherwise significantly eroded,” Wilson said, “the GOP will own that change.”
Even as Republicans in states like Florida, Arkansas and South Dakota promise copycat legislation, polling has found that most Americans believe the Texas law goes too far. Particularly objectionable, surveys found, is the failure to include exceptions for rape or incest and a provision effectively deputizing ordinary citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who “aids or abets” an illegal abortion – with the potential to earn $10,000.
‘There’s so much at stake’
Democrats face a challenging electoral landscape in 2022 as they seek to defend their fragile majorities in the House and Senate and defy a historical pattern in which the president’s party suffers midterm losses. Whether abortion remains front and center in national debate will depend on a number of factors, including the state of the pandemic and the economic recovery.
Elections in Virginia this fall will provide the first major test of how the issue resonates with voters , particularly suburban women who were critical to Biden’s win.
The Democrats running for statewide office have all seized on the Texas law as a harbinger of what is to come in Virginia if Republicans are elected.
Terry McAuliffe, a former governor running to recapture the office, is portraying himself as a “brick wall” against efforts to restrict abortion access. His opponent, Glenn Youngkin, hit back at McAuliffe in a digital ad, calling the former governor’s stance on abortion “too extreme” for Virginia.
Olivia Gans Turner, president of the Virginia Society for Human Life, said voters who oppose abortion had been mobilizing since 2020, when the Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, signed legislation that overturned longstanding restrictions.
“We in Virginia who care about the pro-life issue were already very alert and aware of the stakes,” Gans Turner said. McAuliffe’s “obsession with the subject”, she said, had helped to put it front and center in a way that she believed would further motivate abortion opponents and possibly alienate moderates.
Abortion rights activists say fear that Roe is at risk is resonating with voters across Virginia, including with those who may not have previously considered abortion a priority.
“There’s so much at stake now that Texas’s abortion ban has opened the floodgates to similar bans across the country,” said Jamie Lockhart, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, which is working to elect Democrats. “A Texas-style ban could easily come to Virginia if Glenn Youngkin is elected governor and Republicans take control of the house of delegates.”
Lockhart said she had observed an increase in enthusiasm among voters and volunteers, some of whom pointed to the Texas law.
“From what we’re seeing on the ground – the increased level of enthusiasm that we’re seeing from from our volunteers and supporters,” she said, “there absolutely is the potential that Virginians’ support for abortion rights is the difference-maker in this election.”
A nurse receives one of the first vaccinations at Mt. Sinai Hospital from Pfizer-BioNTech during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., December 15, 2020. (photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
The plan, outlined in a statement from Hochul on Saturday, would allow her to declare a state of emergency to increase the supply of healthcare workers to include licensed professionals from other states and countries as well as retired nurses.
Hochul said the state was also looking at using National Guard officers with medical training to keep hospitals and other medical facilities adequately staffed. Some 16% of the state's 450,000 hospital staff, or roughly 72,000 workers, have not been fully vaccinated, the governor's office said.
The plan comes amid a broader battle between state and federal government leaders pushing for vaccine mandates to help counter the highly infectious Delta variant of the novel coronavirus and workers who are against inoculation requirements, some objecting on religious grounds.
Hochul attended the Sunday service at a large church in New York City to ask Christians to help promote vaccines.
"I need you to be my apostles. I need you to go out and talk about it and say, we owe this to each other," Hochul told congregants at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, according to an official transcript.
"Jesus taught us to love one another and how do you show that love but to care about each other enough to say, please get the vaccine because I love you and I want you to live."
Healthcare workers who are fired for refusing to get vaccinated will not be eligible for unemployment insurance unless they are able to provide a valid doctor-approved request for medical accommodation, Hochul's office said.
It was not immediately clear how pending legal cases concerning religious exemptions would apply to the state's plan to move ahead and terminate unvaccinated healthcare workers.
A federal judge in Albany temporarily ordered New York state officials to allow religious exemptions for the state-imposed vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, which was put in place by former Governor Andrew Cuomo and takes effect on Monday.
A requirement for New York City school teachers and staff to get vaccinated was temporarily blocked by a U.S. appeals court just days before it was to take effect. A hearing is set for Wednesday. read more
The highly transmissible Delta variant has driven a surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the United States that peaked in early September and has since fallen, according to a Reuters tally. Deaths, a lagging indicator, continue to rise with the nation reporting about 2,000 lives lost on average a day for the past week, mostly in the unvaccinated.
While nationally cases are down about 25% from their autumn peak, rising new infections in New York have only recently leveled off, according to a Reuters tally.
In an attempt to better protect the most vulnerable, the CDC on Friday backed a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech (PFE.N), COVID-19 vaccine for Americans aged 65 and older, adults with underlying medical conditions and adults in high-risk working and institutional settings. read more
On Sunday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky fleshed out who should be eligible for the booster shots based on their work in high-risk settings.
"That includes people in homeless shelters, people in group homes, people in prisons, but also importantly, our people who work...with vulnerable communities," Walensky said during a TV interview. "So our health care workers, our teachers, our grocery workers, our public transportation employees."
Walensky decided to include a broader range of people than was recommended on Thursday by a group of expert outside advisers to the agency. The CDC director is not obliged to follow the advice of the panel.
British soldier keeps vigil at a vantage point overlooking the Belfast Docks in Northern Ireland in February 1975. (photo: AP)
A proposed sweeping amnesty that would stop all investigations into crimes committed during the Troubles, including those by the British military, threatens to thwart the pursuit of truth and justice for victims’ families.
Communities emerging from bitter conflict also want and need to understand how to prevent it recurring. How can a divided community look to the future if it cannot agree at all about its past?
Those questions are vital to sustaining any deal, anywhere, that brings warring parties together to reach agreement. Resolving, or trying to resolve, the legacy of conflict is an integral part of peace-making.
‘A wall of silence’
In what is often called “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, more than 3,500 people died between 1969 and the April 1998 Good Friday Agreement peace accord between the Catholic community, who mainly wish for an independent, united Ireland; the Protestant community, who mainly wish to remain part of the United Kingdom; and British state forces.
London’s rule in Northern Ireland continues but, although all parties to the conflict are on record as wishing victims’ questions answered, the British government has unilaterally decided to dispense with any post-conflict search for truth.
The proposal for British state impunity continues a pattern and mirrors this year’s “Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act” that has blocked investigations into alleged British human rights violations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like that Act, the latest plan amounts to a sweeping amnesty for London’s own military and security services who, some would argue, have most questions to answer (as do paramilitaries from both camps).
The proposals would close down all current and future inquiries including:
- Inquests ordered by the attorney general for Northern Ireland on the basis of new evidence
- Civil actions for compensation against the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI, as legal inheritors of liability for the Royal Ulster Constabulary), the British Ministry of Defence and the Northern Ireland Office
- Prosecutions where the independent Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland has deemed charges are in the public interest and a conviction is possible
- Investigations by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, even where there is “grave and exceptional” evidence of wrong-doing
- Investigations passed to the Legacy Investigation Branch of the PSNI (which would be abolished under the proposals)
The people who would be affected are, for example, the family of Sean Brown, a 61-year-old father of six children, who was abducted on the evening of May 12, 1997. The Police Ombudsman recommended a new inquest and, since 2014, the British Ministry of Defence and Police Service of Northern Ireland have refused to disclose documents related to the murder although the family has evidence of collusion with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
And the family of Kathleen Thompson, a 47-year-old mother of six, shot dead by a British soldier while standing in her garden. A new inquest into her death began in 2018 but has been frustrated by a “wall of silence”. The proposed legislation will end all inquests.
Or the families of six men, shot dead in 1973 by British soldiers in the New Lodge Road area of Belfast. A new investigation was ordered after the original was ruled inadequate. This investigation is also now at the mercy of the proposed legislation.
Potentially, it could even include the Reavey family who the Police Ombudsman informed, just this week, that a file on a former serving RUC man with evidence of his involvement has been sent to the Public Prosecutor. The three young Reavey brothers, Brian, John-Martin and Anthony, were gunned down in January 1976 as they watched TV in their modest home in County Armagh.
Having waited nearly 50 years for justice, they too could find it snatched from their hands.
A ‘betrayal of victims’
The British proposals have prompted unanimous condemnation from all sides, in a rare show of political unanimity, both in Ireland and internationally – leaving London isolated as the proposals’ sole defender.
The British government has lauded its own approach as “conciliatory” – but no group involved in the conflict; no political party represented at the power-sharing assembly in Belfast, no victims’ group and no human rights organisation agrees. Neither does the Irish government.
This universal condemnation has been led by, among others, two United Nations rapporteurs who say the proposals are a “flagrant violation of [London’s] international obligations” and would foreclose “the pursuit of justice and accountability for the serious human rights violations committed during the Troubles” and thwart victims’ rights to truth and effective remedy.
By trying to bury the truth, they all say, London will prolong division, break the hearts of hundreds of families and delay any hope of reconciliation.
Amnesty International has also waded into the row, calling on the UN Human Rights Council to challenge London’s plans as “an utter betrayal of victims” that “not only breaches the UK’s international and domestic human rights obligations, but unduly interferes in our justice system and undermines the rule of law”.
“We cannot allow those responsible for murder, torture and other grave human rights violations to be placed above the law and beyond accountability.”
The British government, in response, states the purpose of its proposals is to fulfil an election manifesto promise to end prosecutions of former soldiers currently facing court hearings.
London has characterised any court action against its military as a “witch-hunt”, claiming the soldiers have already been cleared of the illegal use of lethal force. This, however, ignores the practice (from 1970-1973) of barring the RUC from questioning soldiers under what was called an “RUC Force Order”.
The order meant that any soldier who killed while in uniform was not questioned, as normal, by the police but by another arm of the British Army – the Royal Military Police. The process, it was admitted even at the time, was solely for managerial purposes (sometimes called “tea and sandwich interviews”), not as part of a criminal investigation.
The bereaved families and lawyers for those killed, therefore, argue that there never was an investigation compliant with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which Britain is a signatory, which stipulates inquiries must be effective and independent.
The extent of the effective amnesty afforded to the British military, even as early as the mid-1970s, is evidenced by the huge pay-outs made to families at the time. More than 400 out-of-court settlements were made amounting to more than six million pounds (in today’s money – more than $8 million) where otherwise, it was expected, a soldier would be found guilty in court. Only four uniformed soldiers were ever convicted of murder, although they killed more than 300 people. Britain allowed all four convicted murderers to return to their regiments.
This protection of soldiers from police questioning was described in court earlier this year as an “appalling practice … designed, at least in part, to protect soldiers from being prosecuted and [which] in very large measure … succeeded.”
Hiding Britain’s ‘misdeeds’
The proposals mirror London’s own view of itself as a neutral arbiter in the Northern Irish conflict, remaining above the fray, motivated by an altruistic desire to encourage peace and reconciliation between the warring factions.
This self-image has been seriously challenged by a series of court cases, inquests, ad hoc inquiries and research carried out by lawyers, journalists and the bereaved families themselves which show that, despite the passage of time, significant new information can still be found both to console grieving families and expose criminal behaviour.
That has led many to ask if the real reason for closing down all paths to justice is London’s desire to draw a curtain over the past to hide its own covert misdeeds.
One of the most damning outcomes of recent work by human rights activists, families and lawyers was a verdict on what has become known as the “Ballymurphy Massacre” – named after the predominantly Catholic West Belfast working-class housing estate where 10 people (including a Catholic priest and a mother of eight children) were shot dead across three days in August 1971 by members of the 1st Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment.
Although, at the time, all the dead were labelled gunmen, in May this year an inquest found all 10 were “entirely innocent of any wrongdoing on the day in question” and the use of force was unjustified and in breach of the ECHR.
A botched apology from the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, was rejected by the families who are now embarking on civil legal actions and seeking an authentic apology.
The British proposals are to end all judicial activity on “Troubles-related conduct across the spectrum of criminal cases, and current and future civil cases and inquests”. There is no ambiguity – London proposes to close down every possible avenue to truth and justice.
Murder weapons in museums
Another vehicle used by families to uncover the truth is civil legal action. Although technically a device for seeking financial compensation, most families use this process to uncover documentary evidence previously withheld from them in state archives.
In one such case, the shooting dead of five people at a betting shop in 1992 on Belfast’s Ormeau Road, an inquiry carried out by the (now defunct) Historical Enquiries Team (HET) told the victims’ families that one of the murder weapons used in the attack had been “disposed of”. It was later discovered on display in the Imperial War Museum in London.
The families then took a civil action whereby the existence of significant new material was (inadvertently) disclosed by the PSNI that had earlier been withheld from the both the HET and the Police Ombudsman investigations, despite the latter having full police powers of search, seizure and right to access intelligence information.
Nevertheless, in other cases, the Ombudsman has been able to obtain truth for families. In July 2021 the office identified significant investigative failures by the RUC in relation to the 1993 murder of 17-year-old Damien Walsh as well as evidence of “collusive behaviours” by police such as a failure to share intelligence.
This report said police had “failed to capitalise on a series of significant investigative opportunities, including failing to arrest suspects, not conducting searches of their homes and failing to ensure that important forensic enquiries were undertaken”.
Although the HET has been disbanded, other ad hoc inquiries have been set up. One is “Operation Kenova”, led by former British chief constable, Jon Boutcher. His work began with an inquiry into claims a double-agent within the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was responsible for multiple murders.
The inquiry has now been greatly expanded and is investigating more 200 murders. Its work has been praised both by families and in an independent legal review carried out by barrister, Alyson Kilpatrick, who has benchmarked it with Article 2 of the ECHR.
One of the inquiries under the Kenova umbrella is into the murderous activities of the “Glenanne Gang” – permutations of which killed 120 people in the mid-1970s in what became known as the “Murder Triangle”. The gang included members of the British Army and RUC, as well as ruthless loyalist paramilitaries.
Among the attacks its members carried out were the May 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, when four bombs were set off, three in the Irish capital, killing 34 people, including an unborn child – the worst single day’s toll of death in the entire conflict.
‘Torture’
Judicial Review is another legal path used by those who believe either they, or their loved ones, were subject to the use of illegal force by the state. This gives the courts power to rule on the legality of both legislative and executive branches of government, which would include the police and military forces.
This avenue was used by a group known as “The Hooded Men”, who claimed they were tortured while interned-without-trial in the early 1970s. One outcome is a Belfast Court of Appeal ruling that the 14 men were subjected to treatment – hooding, sleep and food deprivation, prolonged periods forced against a wall on their toes and fingers, loud “white noise” and beatings, which “if it occurred today” would “properly be characterised as torture”.
Another judicial review led to a court ruling that the Omagh bombing of August 1998, in which 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, perished (the largest single death toll in any one explosion in the conflict) could have been prevented had the security forces acted on information received.
The judge recommended that both the British and Irish governments undertake human rights compliant investigations into the bombing. This will not happen if London’s proposals are implemented.
These prosecutions, civil actions, inquests, Ombudsman’s inquiries and other investigations show that it is possible to undertake valuable inquiries, even into events that occurred 50 years ago. There are, however, drawbacks.
Replacing the ‘imperfect with the disastrous’
Many families bereaved in the conflict have not embarked on any journey to truth, by whatever avenue, either because they do not know how; fear publicity, or are reluctant to come forward. There is no standard or best-practice guide to ensure equality of treatment.
Most of those taking action, whether legal or otherwise, have found the process slow-moving, and psychologically draining. Fighting for disclosure through the courts can be expensive with no guarantee of success at the end of the road.
There is also no mechanism through which wider themes can be examined and lessons learned. Neither is there an over-arching oral history process to capture memories. With all its drawbacks, however, there has been forward movement – movement that the British government is now planning to curtail completely.
“Current mechanisms are deeply imperfect but the British government is proposing to replace the imperfect with the disastrous – no mechanism at all,” said Paul O’Connor of The Pat Finucane Centre (PFC). The PFC, for which I work, is one of several advocacy groups assisting families through the legal and quasi-judicial frameworks.
“It would be far better if each and every family was accorded the same quality of investigation – and that investigators have full police powers. They must also have the right to obtain all documentary material, whoever holds it, subject to the law and keeping people safe and secure”.
Mark Thompson of Relatives for Justice (RFJ), another advocacy group, accuses London of starving investigative processes of resources, making truth-recovery far more difficult for families. “The authorities routinely withhold information and obfuscate inquiries – then they say inquiries cannot work, ignoring the fact they are the main delaying factor themselves”.
The PFC has written to the Bar Council of Britain pointing out that one of its members, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, is promoting the proposals, despite the Council’s key principle of supporting the rule of law stating: “Everyone needs to be able to seek expert advice on their legal rights and obligations and to have access to skilled representation in the event of a dispute or litigation.”
The PFC lists the families of 14-year-old Annette Mc Gavigan, killed by a British soldier in 1971; 15-year-old Paul Whitters, killed by an RUC officer in 1981; 11-year-old Stephen Mc Conomy killed by a British soldier in 1982; 16-year-old Henry Cunningham, killed by loyalists in 1973; Sean Dalton, a father-of-six killed by the IRA in 1988; and Sean Brown, a father-of-six killed by loyalists in 1997, who have all been awaiting inquiries for decades.
The Good Friday Agreement
Both the PFC and RFJ – along with others – are planning campaigns to inform MPs in London of the dire consequences of passing the proposed legislation, should the British government bring it to parliament, unamended, later this year.
They are also lobbying Washington. Already the “Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement” in the US has issued a letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, urging him to withdraw the amnesty proposals.
Noting cross-community opposition, the Ad Hoc Committee said they had “carefully considered” the proposals, consulted with human rights groups, legal experts, victims and survivors, and had concluded the proposals are “at odds with both the spirit and architecture of the Good Friday Agreement”.
A bi-partisan group of 36 members of Congress have also sent a letter, strongly objecting to the proposals to the British embassy in Washington and further congressional and campaigning action is being planned for later this year.
100 percent amnesty
The most comprehensive de-bunking of London’s proposals came on September 7, from a team of lawyers based at Queens University, Belfast (QUB) and human rights activists at the Committee on the Administration of Justice who jointly produced a 69-page report concluding they “would not work, legally, morally or politically”.
This group, known as the “Model Bill Team” was launched originally in 2015 at the House of Lords in London and has given expert evidence to the US Congress, Dáil Éireann (lower house of the Irish government) in Dublin, the Northern Ireland Select Committee and Defence Committee at Westminster and held dozens of meetings with interested parties.
One of the authors of the Team’s rebuttal of London’s proposals, Professor Louise Mallinder, an expert on international post-conflict amnesties at QUB, said the proposals were “sweeping” and “unconditional”. Pointing out that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) only allows for amnesties where they do not interfere with the right to truth or which prevent a return to conflict, she called London’s proposals “Pinochet plus”.
She also points out that, whereas Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile through an illegitimate military dictatorship, the UK proclaims itself a liberal Western democracy where the rule of law prevails, which has its own Human Rights Act, which is fully signed up to the ECHR and which has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Her study shows that only 25 percent of 289 global-wide amnesties between 1990 and 2016 extended to state forces and only 37 percent were unconditional. Only 6 percent prevented civil court cases, none prevented inquests or other investigations and none has been granted 23 years after a peace agreement, as would be the case in Northern Ireland.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, received 7,116 amnesty applications but only granted 1,167 full amnesties and 139 partial amnesties. London’s proposal is for amnesties to be granted in 100 percent of cases and those receiving them would not even have to apply.
London’s proposals would set up what it calls an “Information Recovery Body” (IRB) but this would only have powers to “take statements” from people with information and seek disclosure from British state agencies. There would be, as currently proposed, no sanction for those bodies or individuals who refused to comply.
The proposed powers for the putative IRB would fall significantly short of the investigative powers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Police Ombudsman, as well as the powers of discovery in judicial proceedings such as prosecutions, inquests and civil actions.
Moreover, as London is now proposing new criminal offences under the Official Secrets Act, it is entirely possible that the only people liable to prosecution for conflict-era matters could be either IRB staff; those providing the IRB with information, if they make unauthorised disclosures; journalists or state whistle-blowers.
While the proposals are undoubtedly capable of damaging confidence in the rule of law, they are also likely to damage public and political confidence in the Good Friday Agreement itself, the hard-won deal made in April 1998 and the cornerstone underpinning the peace process and power-sharing in Belfast.
The proposals breach the Agreement, in terms of its commitment to the incorporation of the ECHR into domestic law; in terms of the devolution of justice powers to Northern Ireland and in overturning the right of direct access to the courts to challenge alleged breaches of the ECHR.
Truth-recovery
London cannot say there are no alternative options. There have so far been at least three proposals, all reached only after extensive consultation with victims and the political parties. The third proposal, still theoretically on the table, is the Stormont House Agreement (SHA) – a comprehensive political treaty signed by four of the five main parties, and the Irish government.
This proposed a set of three differing institutions whereby the public, and specifically victims, could seek truth and justice through both judicial and less formal investigative actions. It amounted to a form of truth-recovery process which, while unlikely to result in criminal prosecutions, left the door open.
One body would have had police-type powers, capable of robust investigation. Another body would have been responsible for an innovative process by which families, privately and voluntarily, could have engaged in a confidential interlocutory channel with those who were responsible for their bereavement.
More than 16,000 responses to these proposals were received during a statutory consultation process – but despite a majority being generally in favour of the proposals, London has to date failed to implement them in law and is trying to scrap the SHA that it brokered itself.
‘Fighting for the truth’
Meanwhile, those families who have been seeking the truth, sometimes for more than 50 years, are left hanging.
The most disturbing outcome of London’s proposals, should they be implemented, is that the failure of community cohesion in Northern Ireland – the continuation of sectarian tensions – will not be addressed and resolved, even slightly.
Legacy issues continue to poison the political atmosphere. If a society cannot agree at all on what happened over the past half-century, or even begin to examine it, how can it hope to build a truly peaceful future?
Then there is the outcome for all the individual families who suffered most and who are struggling to come to terms with their loss, together with the effects of intergenerational trauma – depression, addiction, lack of self-esteem, low aspirations.
Sandra Peake, of the cross-community “WAVE” organisation, which advocates for victims, said, “To tell people who have suffered unimaginable grief and trauma that what happened to their loved ones is no longer of any interest to the state is perverse and obscene.”
Tracey Mulholland is the 42-year-old granddaughter of Arthur Mulholland, who was shot dead in County Tyrone in February 1975. An HET review found evidence of both police and military involvement in his murder, but the family is still waiting for official acknowledgement of the state’s role.
Her loss is one of the 120 murders currently being reviewed by the Kenova team under Jon Boutcher which may be curtailed if London gets its way. Her anger is shared by hundreds of other families.
“The politicians at the power-sharing Assembly should walk away,” she said. “London clearly takes no notice of what our elected politicians want.”
“Most people could live with an end to prosecutions, but they will never give up the battle for truth. We have seen people die fighting for the truth and being blocked time and time again,” Mulholland told Al Jazeera.
“My entire life I have been fighting for the truth and I am not about to give up now.”
The small number of legal firms in Northern Ireland who specialise in these “legacy cases” are certain that the UK government’s proposals breach the European Convention on Human Rights – but it will take years of litigation in the courts to establish this legally.
Meanwhile, ageing relatives – who have waited decades to be accorded the respect of being told the truth – will die without any resolution of the questions that have tormented them.
They will fight the proposals. One bereaved relative put it simply, on realising their significance, “They treated us as second-class citizens in life – we won’t let them do the same in death.”
The question remains, will the proposals be implemented against the wishes of bereaved families, victims’ groups, human rights organisations, lawyers, international bodies, the Irish government, all the Northern Ireland political parties and the Labour Party opposition at Westminster?
Will the British government, with its majority of 80, trample over every other conceivable interest and enforce its will despite being warned of the potentially tragic outcome?
Garment workers in a textile mill in Gazipur, Bangladesh on March 18, 2021. (photo: Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
The result? An unsustainable clothing industry that does more than give you FOMO — it's wreaking havoc on the planet and the people who produce it.
What Is Fast Fashion?
"Fast fashion" refers to mass-produced clothing that's made quickly, cheaply, and in trending styles. The goal of fast fashion marketers is to get runway styles into shoppers' hands as quickly as possible, no matter the quality or external costs.
These trendy pieces tend to be of poor quality, and most won't last more than a few wash cycles. But that's no hardship for the buyer because they didn't invest much to begin with.
Fast fashion has upended the clothing industry. It's turned updating your wardrobe from a semi-annual investment to the equivalent of ordering takeout. The trend towards disposable clothing is taking over the world, but it didn't happen all at once.
How Fast Fashion Got Started
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, individuals were primarily responsible for sourcing materials to make their clothes. Starting in the 18th century, inventions like the power loom and the sewing machine took clothes making out of the house and into the garment factory, which scaled up production in unprecedented ways.
Even so, clothing costs stayed relatively high for the following centuries. Dresses in the 1950s cost about $70 to $100 in today's money. By the 1960s, the Average American bought just two dozen pieces of clothing each year — all made in the United States — and spent more than 10% of their income to do so.
The 1970s harkened a massive change in clothing manufacturing as factories started leaving the U.S. in favor of cheaper labor in Asia and Latin America. The result was cheaply made, mass-produced clothing, and shoppers scaled up their buying habits accordingly. Americans spend less than 4% of their budget on clothes each year but bring home about new 70 pieces, one of which might be made domestically.
Cheaper production is only part of the story of fast fashion. Innovations in supply chain management made it possible to get trending styles in shoppers' hands faster, which sped up the entire fashion cycle. While designer labels once released four collections a year, many have now increased the turnover rate to 20+ unique collections in the same timeframe.
The Consequences of Fast Fashion
Why is fast fashion bad? It turns out that lower prices and the quicker turnover of trends has significant impacts on the planet.
Increases Carbon Emissions
Considering their short lifespan, fast fashion clothes have an outsize carbon footprint.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation blames the fashion industry for 10 percent of global CO2 emissions — more than all international flights and shipping combined. That's primarily due to the long transportation journeys that textiles take from manufacturing to purchasing and their eventual disposal.
Polyester production alone emits more than 700 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, and some estimate the 2030 annual levels will be as high as 1.5 billion.
Overproduces Toxic Textiles
Fast fashion manufacturers cut corners whenever possible to keep costs low. Most pieces are made from ultra-cheap synthetic materials that won't break down in landfills.
Even natural fibers like cotton take a toll. Cotton is a thirsty crop that requires upwards of ten gallons per plant, pulling precious water resources away from food crops in many growing regions. Commercially grown cotton is a heavy feeder that requires large amounts of synthetic fertilizer but still depletes and degrades the soils it's planted in.
This disposable clothing doesn't even spend long in your closet. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Americans throw away about 70 lbs of textiles each year. This results in 17 million tons of annual waste, of which just 2.5 tons are recycled.
Pollutes Water Systems
Dyeing cheap clothes involves a toxic cocktail of chemicals. Denim production alone is the second-largest polluter of fresh water on the planet. An estimated 70% of Asia's lakes and rivers are contaminated by over 2.5 billion gallons of waste from the textile industry, resulting in a massive ecological and public health crisis.
Xintang, China, considered the denim capital of the world, has recorded evidence of toxic heavy metals associated with jeans production in more than three-quarters of water testing sites. The problem is so extreme that it's becoming almost impossible to convince people to live in the region.
Another problem is that polyester sheds microfibers after every wash cycle. These trace materials land in the water system. There, they increase the ocean's plastic concentration and disrupt marine food chains. Studies show these tiny fibers end up in animal stomachs and even make it onto our plates within seafood.
Harms Animal Welfare
Even animals aren't immune to the effects of fast fashion. The ever-expanding clothing industry requires massive amounts of land for factories and fiber production. This concentrates pollution and fragments habitat space for wild animals, which leads to declines in biodiversity.
Domestic animals don't fare much better, as cutting costs for leather, fur, and wool production often leads to animal abuse. In one noteworthy case, real fur from tortured dogs and cats was passed off as fake because it was cheaper to produce it illegally than to use synthetic alternatives.
Leads to Human Rights Abuses
Fast fashion might be cheap at the store, but someone else is paying the full price. The textile industry has been built around workers' rights abuse since the Industrial Revolution.
Garment workers today work extreme hours for poverty wages, often in dangerous conditions. In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed due to shoddy construction, killing 1,100 people and injuring another 2,500. This was hardly an isolated incident, as hundreds of Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires over the past decade.
Children aren't exempt from the challenges of producing cheap clothes. There are an estimated 168 million underage workers in the world today, many of them children pulled out of school to work in garment factories.
Why Do Consumers Turn a Blind Eye to Fast Fashion's Flaws?
Considering the costs associated with cheap clothes, why are $20 jeans still widely available?
Put bluntly — most shoppers just don't care enough to change their habits. As things stand today, fashion retailers rarely, if ever, lose out on significant numbers of customers due to poor environmental or labor practices.
Research shows that shoppers prioritize price over almost any other selling point, and that they are quick to forget when products are made unethically or unsustainably. Even in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, Americans still purchased millions of dollars worth of clothes from similar factories in Bangladesh that year.
The fast fashion industry shows little sign of slowing down, and part of the blame lies with social media. Rather than waiting for print magazines to tell us what's trendy, we can hop on our favorite celebrity's Instagram to see their fashion-forward choices in real-time. Likewise, the rise of influencer culture and micro-marketing has created a subgroup of stars whose job it is to convince us to buy more.
The internet provides constant exposure to all the world's trends at once, which speeds up the fast fashion cycle and leaves us forever feeling one step behind what's stylish. One London-based survey from 2017 found that 41% of 18 to 25-year-olds felt pressure to wear different clothes every time they left the house.
In short, when every outfit is scrupulously documented for the socials, it becomes passé to wear the same clothes more than once.
What Companies Are Involved With Fast Fashion?
Both traditional and newly established clothing brands alike are responsible for fast fashion.
As the oldest fast fashion giant around today, mega-retailer H&M (short for Hennes and Mauritz) opened in Sweden in 1947 and only made it to the States in 2000. The company specializes in cheap runway knockoffs and a short supply chain. H&M doesn't own factories but instead relies on 800 independent suppliers — mostly in Asia — to produce its apparel.
Zara offers similar speedy merchandise. This Spanish-based retailer has made it its mission to bring a garment from the design stage to store shelves in just three weeks — no matter the cost for the people and places producing it.
The company also strives to overwhelm shoppers with choice by producing more than 10,000 unique pieces each year (the industry average is 2,000-4,000), hoping that customers will come home with more apparel than they anticipated after every shopping trip.
Some fast fashion stores are feeling the pressure as online shopping further cheapens and speeds up the supply chain. Once a mall staple for teenage shoppers, Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
But compared to traditional retailers, internet-based brands have advantages in the world of fast fashion. They cut out the middleman of retail space, which eliminates display costs. This makes it cost-effective to manage a large, continually changing inventory that can be adapted as trends change.
And, because the stock from online retailers is constantly shifting, shoppers feel pressure to make impulse buys when they find pieces they like for fear the items will soon be unavailable.
Is your favorite apparel retailer suspect? Here are some of the common characteristics of fast fashion brands to avoid.
- Clothes are made outside the United States and Europe.
- The brand offers hundreds, even thousands of styles.
- There is a limited quantity of any specific style.
- The brand sells styles mere weeks after they are seen on celebrities or the runway.
- The clothing is made from low-quality material and wears out quickly.
How to Move Towards Sustainability With the Wardrobe
The news isn't all bad. There is hope today to move the world of fashion in a more ecologically sound direction. But to be effective, this change has to happen both on an industry level and a personal level.
As Industries
Change is slow, but shoppers are showing more interest in alternative ways to get clothes, including renting and buying secondhand. Some retail giants, including select Macy's locations, have started selling used clothing from ThredUp.
Other stores, such as H&M, are becoming more transparent about their supply chains and striving to make environmentally conscious improvements. These include retail-specific changes like powering its stores with renewable energy and expanding its clothing recycling programs.
Unfortunately, these improvements rarely address the far worse impacts of the clothing production process itself or the fashion world's disturbing habit of burning unsold clothes to dispose of them.
Other brands, like Zara, are building a name for themselves in the sustainability sphere through limited-release collections made from organic cotton and other eco-friendly materials. In many cases, these collections make up a tiny portion of the company's profits and effectively act as fast fashion greenwashing to distract attention from the problems with its primary clothing lines.
As Individuals
As long as there is demand for fast fashion apparel, brands will continue to supply it. For this reason, making real changes in the clothing world comes down to changing your buying habits.
One approach is to embrace the idea of slow fashion. When shopping, look for timeless, quality-made pieces that are versatile enough for a variety of outfits. The goal is to create a smaller, capsule wardrobe built around pieces you'll wear frequently.
Buying less also means it's easier to justify spending more per item. Research manufacturers for evidence of fair labor practices and environmentally sustainable manufacturing. Seek out natural materials when possible, and learn whether the company offers recycling or other sustainable end-of-life services for its garments.
Make each piece of apparel last longer with careful maintenance. Wash your clothes only when necessary, using gentle detergents that won't break them down. You can also learn basic sewing skills to repair rips, lost buttons, and even broken zippers. One way to get more use out of any item is to get a tailor to modify it to your measurements. After all, trends come and go, but well-fitting clothes will always be in style.
To make a more significant impact, skip buying new altogether in favor of used clothes. The environmental cost has already been paid for these items, and by wearing them, you'll keep the material out of landfills for a little longer. Traditional thrift stores can offer surprising bargains, or you can take the shopping online through resale sites like ThredUp, Poshmark, and even Facebook Marketplace or other local buy-sell groups.
If you can't resist the allure of the latest fashions, consider renting instead of buying. Companies like Nuuly and Rent the Runaway offer more sustainable ways to try on trending clothes without them permanently taking up space in your wardrobe. Just note that there are high environmental costs associated with continually cleaning and shipping these clothes from one renter to another.
Takeaway
The world of fast fashion has run unchecked for far too long, and the planet is facing the consequences. It's time to make changes to how you approach your own wardrobe in an effort to improve your personal impact.
So, buy less, buy smarter, and hold onto what you own for as long as possible. Making sustainable, slow fashion trendy is a proven way to take some of the sting out of the global clothing industry and fight back against fast fashion.
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