13 February 22
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13 February 22
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The court has approved or tolerated massive voter roll purges, extreme gerrymandering and election laws that have a disparate impact on minorities
The echoes of a brutal past are resonating in this decision.
After the civil war, Congress passed the 1867 Reconstruction Act, which provided that Black men had the right to vote, and then Congress followed that with the 15th amendment, which banned states from using race, color or previous conditions of servitude to undermine the right to vote.
In a series of decisions in the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, however, the supreme court systematically dismantled those protections, as well as others crafted to support African Americans’ citizenship rights and defend against white domestic terrorism waged by the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations. Focusing on voting rights gives some indication of how pernicious the decisions were. The 1874 Minor v Happersett ruling asserted that the right to vote was not part and parcel of American citizenship.
In 1876, United States v Reese et al dealt with a Black man who was trapped in a malicious catch-22 that prevented him from voting. He tried to pay his poll tax, which was required to vote, but the tax collector refused to accept the payment and the registrars would not allow him to cast a ballot without payment. The court ruled, despite this crude and brazen denial of his right to vote, that the 15th amendment “does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one”.
As states then began fully implementing Jim Crow legislation to disfranchise African Americans, the court, in the Williams v Mississippi (1898) decision, looked at the poll tax and the literacy test and ruled that those chokepoints to the ballot box – which had already removed 90% of registered Black voters in Mississippi from the rolls – did not violate the 15th amendment.
In a 1903 case out of Alabama, Giles v Harris, the supreme court determined that it was powerless to stop a state from disfranchising Black voters even if the methods were unconstitutional.
This assault on African Americans’ right to vote was an assault on American democracy aided and abetted by the highest court in the land. The results were devastating. By 1960, there were counties in Alabama that had no Black voters registered, while simultaneously having more than 100% of white age-eligible voters on the rolls. In Mississippi a mere 6.7% of eligible Black adults were registered to vote.
It took the blood, the courage and the martyrdom of civil rights workers combined with the political spine of a president and congressional leaders to break this stranglehold on the right to vote. The legislature passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which would save America from its worst self. And, this time, in the late 1960s, the US supreme court came down on the side of democracy and the 15th amendment. Two crucial decisions buttressed the VRA, noting that it was not only constitutional but also created to deal with “the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of race”.
The Roberts court, however, bears no resemblance to the one in the 1960s and has all the anti-voting rights earmarks of the court after the civil war. The Roberts court’s assault on the VRA and the 15th amendment has been relentless and brutal to American democracy.
The Shelby County v Holder (2013) decision ended the most powerful tool in the VRA’s wheelhouse, pre-clearance, and allowed states and jurisdictions with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to implement laws and election policies without the prior approval of the US Department of Justice or the federal court in Washington DC.
Within two hours of that decision, Texas implemented a voter ID law that led district court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos to rule that the new measure not only had a discriminatory effect, it also had a discriminatory intent. The state appealed to the fifth circuit, pleading with the judges to not dismantle the voter ID law because it would be too disruptive to the looming midterm election in 2014.
When the case reached the US supreme court, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority ruled in favor of Texas without comment. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, however, tore away at the state’s ruse that it was too close to the midterms to stop a racially discriminatory law in its tracks. The greatest threat to confidence in elections, she wrote, was to allow a “purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters” to be used in a federal election.
But the majority on the US supreme court was fine with letting discrimination run wild in the election system.
That has been abundantly clear in a number of voting rights cases that have come before the Roberts court since the Shelby County v Holder decision. Each one, whether massive voter roll purges in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, extreme partisan gerrymandered districts, or election laws that have a disparate impact on minorities, has been approved, either by acts of commission or omission, by the US supreme court.
There are consequences.
The very legitimacy of the court is at stake. Right now it’s as precariously perched as the right to vote and American democracy. Unfortunately, the Roberts court has played a major, horrific role in this preventable disaster.
Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Ron Wyden, right, is pictured with Sen. Martin Heinrich on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 13, 2017. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Civil liberties watchdogs condemn agency’s collection of domestic data without congressional or court approval or oversight
The surveillance program was exposed on Thursday by two Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico alleged that the CIA has long concealed it from the public and Congress.
The pair sent a letter to top intelligence officials arguing that the program operates “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection”.
Wyden and Heinrich added: “It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a … CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records.”
The two senators, frequent critics of the CIA, said they are not allowed to reveal specifics about what type of data has been subject to bulk collection and called for more details about the program to be declassified.
Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified on Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out.
The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or US businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.
The senators’ disclosure triggered fresh concerns about privacy protections. Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans.
“The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”
Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, wrote on Twitter: “You are about to witness an enormous political debate in which the spy agencies and their apologists on TV tell you this is normal and OK and the CIA doesn’t know how many Americans are in the database or even how they got there anyway. But it is not ok.”
And Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman, tweeted: “Rogue agencies like the NSA, FBI, and CIA are a more serious threat to liberty in America than the enemies they claim to protect us from.”
There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties. The FBI secretly recorded the conversations of Martin Luther King; the CIA investigated whether the anti-Vietnam war movement had links to foreign countries.
On Thursday the CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the privacy and civil liberties oversight board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about US citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.
Additional documents released by the CIA revealed limited details about a program to collect financial data against the Islamic State terrorist group. That program also has incidentally snared some records held by Americans.
Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement: “CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of US persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission. CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect US information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as “unmasking.”
Wyden and Heinrich have previously pushed for more transparency. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to America’s spy chief presaged Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.
In 2013 Wyden asked then-national intelligence director James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.”
Later that year Snowden revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through US internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Reports in the Guardian and Washington Post generated worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress.
Clapper would later apologise in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee, admitting that his response to Wyden was “clearly erroneous”.
Jon Selke holds his forearm over Tuggle's neck and face. (photo: Purdue Exponent)
A police officer at Purdue University is being accused of aggressively arresting a man in a now-viral video.
On social media, the victim has been identified as Adonis Tuggle. “I NEED HELP!!!” he posted Wednesday on Instagram. “Please share this to as many ppl as possible and spread the news.”
“Officer Jon Selke of Purdue Police punched me repeatedly, elbowed me in the face, smothered my face into the snow, and choked me with his elbow while having me pinned to the ground the entire time,” Tuggle posted of his Friday night encounter. “Purdue police refuse to give me body cam footage and have concluded Officer Selke ‘did no wrong’. Help me get justice and hold this man accountable.”
A privately captured video shared on The Purdue Exponent shows the officer pinning Tuggle — who the Exponent says is a junior in the College of Health and Human Sciences — to the ground as he shouts that the officer is hurting him. A woman heard in the video repeatedly says her boyfriend is being hurt, and at one point, the officer turns to her and says if she touches him again, he will taser her. She has been identified by the Exponent as Nicole Dubish.
The video clip is raising the ire of people both on and off campus.
On Twitter, a message reads, “I am in no way posting this to perpetuate the cycle of black trauma, I am posting to spread awareness in an effort that that officer Jon Selke(Badge 91) is held accountable for his actions. This act of brutality happened at Purdue University to a classmate of mine Adonis Tuggle.”
Another social media post appears to be from a group called Black Purdue, where Tuggle himself writes how “on campus I had the Purdue police called on me while I was having an argument with my gf. Officer Jon Selke arrive on the scene and was completely out of pocket toward me probably for being black. Without even talking to me this man PUNCHED multiple times, elbowed me in the face, smothered my face in the snow, and even was CHOKing me multiple time and not once stoped. And I was just informed that internal investigation felt the officer did NO wrong…completely to be left off the hook!”
The Exponent report states that an investigation is underway, according to Purdue University Police Chief John Cox, who said the officer was responding to a call that a woman was being held against her will. Police spokesperson Capt. Song Kang said officers were called by a bystander because of a “domestic disturbance of a couple arguing during a breakup.”
Tuggle was subsequently arrested for resisting law enforcement, a misdemeanor.
“I don’t have the details of the step-by-step conversation, but he just didn’t follow the instruction of, ‘Hey, come over here,'” Kang said. “The subject did not follow the instruction of the officer, so he was getting detained, and he resisted, therefore he was arrested.”
A meeting about Tuggle’s arrest is reportedly planned on Thursday at Purdue’s Black Cultural Center.
Police arrive to clear protesters and their vehicles from a blockade at the entrance to the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario on Saturday. (photo: Cole Burston/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: The Canadian Trucker Convoy
Is an Unpopular Uprising
But as of Saturday afternoon, hundreds of protesters were walking around the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario, according to The Detroit News — a significant increase from the morning, when only a few dozen were present. It was unclear when the bridge would reopen.
Throughout the week, hordes of truckers parked pickup and semis across the bridge, protesting Canada's COVID-19 vaccine mandate and additional public health precautions that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implemented.
"Enforcement continuing, individuals who are located within the demonstration area are subject to arrest. People are advised to immediately vacate the area," Windsor police tweeted just a few hours after announcing it had "commenced enforcement" at the bridge.
The process of beginning to remove the truckers marks a change from Friday night when the crowds grew in size, disregarding federal orders to disperse.
On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency — signaling that any protesters arrested would be met with fines reaching $100,000 and could face up to a year in jail.
The order prompted Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz to intervene, issuing an injunction that gave protesters until 7 p.m. Friday to leave without facing punishment.
But many truckers stayed, deciding to continue the blockade through the night.
The blockade has hampered automakers
The Ambassador Bridge marks a key border crossing — a fourth of U.S.-Canada trade passes through it.
The blockade has particularly worsened supply-chain problems and caused production delays across the auto industry.
Major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, were forced to cancel shifts or reduce capacity at locations in Michigan and Ontario.
Canada has seen a frenzy of similar protests over the past weeks, including within the capital city of Ottawa and at U.S. border crossings in Alberta and Manitoba.
"I want to make something very clear," Trudeau said in an address Friday night. "The illegal blockades seeking to take our neighborhoods and our economy hostage, and that collective COVID fatigue we are facing, are two very separate things. If you joined the protests because you're tired of COVID, you now need to understand you're breaking laws.
"We've heard your frustration with COVID, with the measures that are there to keep people safe," Trudeau added, "We've heard you. It's time to go home now."
Wall Street. (photo: Chenyu Guan/Unsplash)
A new lawsuit challenges an interest-rate scheme that critics say helped Wall Street loot communities across America.
Worse, when the region’s highway authority had the opportunity to invest in its mass transit infrastructure, money that could have gone to buses and trains was instead siphoned to a handful of the world’s most powerful banks, thanks to a complex municipal loan deal signed in the lead-up to the financial crisis more than a decade ago.
As that so-called interest-rate swap scheme continues to blow a hole in the highway authority’s budget, Orlando is now at the center of a landmark legal battle to unwind the transactions with UBS, JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and the Royal Bank of Canada. The suit is being brought by a retired county official and a former Democratic member of Congress. They say local officials were duped into an agreement by predatory Wall Street bankers who misled and entrapped them into signing away their communities’ economic future.
If the suit is successful, it could open up a spate of similar litigation in other communities ravaged by such deals.
“Complex financial swaps don’t benefit our region at all, not Main Street, or the working class,” said Naqiy Mcmullen, the cochair of Central Floridians for Public Transit. “We have per-capita [transit] funding of just 71 dollars, lower than nearly every other major region. There’s a lack of dedicated funding that has been an issue for decades; so they can’t expand bus services.”
Finance industry players have said that municipal deals always come with risks, and that interest-rate swaps were shrewd ways for states and cities to raise capital without having to jack up taxes.
“Issuing variable rate debt, together with a variable-to-fixed rate swap, is intended to provide a lower fixed cost of borrowing,” testified bond attorney Steven Turner at a Securities and Exchange Commission hearing a decade ago. “Issuers enjoy the lower interest rates, and underwriters earn both the underwriting fee and continuing remarketing fees. In theory, these swaps are advantageous for both parties . . . In my experience, the nature of such risks was carefully explained to issuers, both orally and in writing, and, more importantly, were understood by them.”
But analysts aligned with labor and community groups point to debacles like Orlando to assert that interest-rate swaps are one of the most destructive legacies of Wall Street’s predatory behavior in the lead-up to the financial crisis.
Such swaps were “built and sold to public borrowers as a way to save money on debt,” said Saqib Bhatti, the co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, who has spent much of the past fifteen years working to address municipal financial crises caused by swaps. “They are loaded with lots and lots of risk — risks that materialized because of the 2008 financial crisis and has since drained billions of dollars from taxpayer coffers.”
A Wall Street Heist on Main Street
The Orlando case is the latest development in a two-decade-plus saga of interest-rate swaps, an exotic financial product peddled by Wall Street bankers who promised to give budget-strapped cities and states the equivalent of low-interest loans to help them pay for schools, roads, and other public sector initiatives.
Big banks pitched cities and states on schemes that seemed like a budget panacea: instead of facing fixed interest rates at potentially higher levels, governments could borrow money at a variable rate that rose and fell with the market, but then periodically swap that debt for fixed rate loans — like a classic thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage. Such complex swaps offered — in theory — the potential for the best of both worlds: lower interest rates and predictable payments.
But critics say the interest-rate swaps have often operated exactly like predatory adjustable-rate mortgages, with repayment rates suddenly skyrocketing when the economy went south.
While variable-rate debt was marketed as being attractive for its initial low interest rates, it also carried inherent risks, because it is impossible to predict what future debt payments will be since the rates are tied to fluctuating global interest rates. If those interest rates are manipulated — like they were in the now-infamous rate-rigging scandal — it can financially destroy municipalities.
If the municipal borrower wants to get out of the swap early because payments end up being too high compared to interest rates on the open market, the swap deals require the borrower to pay huge termination fees.
The financial carnage from such deals has been widespread.
Detroit paid $85 million in termination fees during its bankruptcy in 2014 as it was cutting services across the city.
Illinois paid $618 million to large banks, with a total cost of more than $1.4 billion.
New Jersey spent $720 million to terminate their swap agreements.
In Denver, the local school district paid $215 million in termination fees to banks to unwind a deal negotiated by then-superintendent Michael Bennet, before he was appointed to the US Senate.
Rampant misconduct in the negotiation of swaps forced JPMorgan to cancel the $647 million it said it was owed by Jefferson County, Alabama.
The big banks earned nearly $400 million in termination fees from swaps gone south in Puerto Rico.
Higher education has gotten caught up in such arrangements as well. Harvard spent $1.25 billion winding down its swaps. The City University of New York system spent nearly $200 million, and Michigan State spent more than $130 million.
Perhaps most egregious was Chicago, which spent $537 million in swap termination fees during the mayoral tenure of Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, a period that coincided with the closure of forty-eight public schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods in the city. The Chicago Teachers Union has frequently assailed the school district’s usage of swaps, organizing protests at the banks and financial firms that profited from the arrangements. In 2014, the Chicago Tribune caught then-mayor Emanuel lying when he said that he had not negotiated any swap deals, when in fact he had negotiated four of them.
“Swaps are a perfect example of just one more way that the big banks rigged the system,” said Bhatti. “Just like they sold predatory loans to Black and Brown folks, they similarly sold predatory municipal products to cities, states, and school districts across the country.”
The interest-rate swaps, he said, “ended up having a terrible impact on some of the same folks who were impacted by predatory lending in the first place. It’s been a double whammy for communities subject to predatory lending at the individual household level, and then their cities, states, and school districts at the governmental level.”
“They Were Played for Chumps”
In Orlando, the Central Florida Expressway Authority, the regional highway operator, paid $177 million to the banks last year to terminate rate swaps from 2005, on top of $117 million paid to the banks in 2013 to terminate swaps from 2003. The $177 million payment to banks was larger than the total 2021 operating expenses for Lynx, the regional bus agency.
But now Rick Fitzgerald, a former Goldman Sachs executive and retired county official, is suing to demand accountability from Wall Street — and to get back the money that he says the banks used wrongful means to obtain from the authority. He is partnering with prominent Wall Street critic and trial attorney Brad Miller, a former five-term Democratic congressman from North Carolina who sat on the financial services committee.
According to the lawsuit, the banks failed to fully disclose the risks of the rate swaps to the highway authority.
“The information that [the banks] provided the [highway] Authority were sales pitches intended to induce the Authority to enter the synthetic fixed-rate financings, not to inform the Authority of the magnitude of the risks of the transactions,” the complaint says.
Miller told the Daily Poster that the scheme followed a key statutory change by Florida lawmakers.
“Until 2002, Florida required that the bond issues be done by a state agency,” said Miller. Prior to the 2003 swaps, the authority “had always had plain vanilla financings. The legislature changed the law, likely because of lobbying from the banks, and [the authority] suddenly jumped right in the deep end into two half-billion dollar financings that were as complicated as it gets.” The swaps were “completely unfamiliar to this board. Nobody on the board had any expertise in municipal finance, he said.”
The suit is based on Florida’s False Claims Act, which states that anyone can bring what is called a “qui tam” case alleging defrauding of the government. While the rate swaps in question were started in 2003 and 2005, the plaintiffs argue that their claim is still covered within the False Claims Act’s six-year statute of limitations because the termination payments to the banks were made as late as 2021.
Violations of Florida’s False Claims Act are subject to triple damages, meaning that if successful, the authority could reap a windfall of more than $800 million. But more than that, says Miller, the lawsuit could also bring much-needed accountability to Wall Street, which he argues should have faced consequences for such behaviors years ago.
“It should have been like the asbestos settlement, or the tobacco settlement, because (financial swaps) were so far ranging,” Miller said. “[The banks] were able to keep a lid on it because nobody wanted to say they were played for chumps. The fact was they were played for chumps.”
As of press time, UBS, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Canada, Citi, and Morgan Stanley did not respond to requests for comment.
“The banks didn’t fully explain the risk to the municipal issuers,” said Joe Fichera, a Wall Street veteran who has been a vocal critic of the arrangements. “Nobody disclosed the full cost to cancel the swaps, [such as] the termination payments. Municipal issuers didn’t understand what they were getting into. There wasn’t sophistication on the side of the issuer.”
A Federal Solution
If the Orlando lawsuit is successful, other cities and states could follow with their own similar lawsuits.
“There is a possibility of more litigation like this,” said Miller. “There certainly are a lot of allegations of bad conduct.”
Many other states, notably Illinois, have false claims statutes similar to Florida’s. In Illinois there is also a six-year statute of limitations, but the state made swap termination payments as late as August 2018, leaving the door open for litigation there.
While Fitzgerald and Miller’s lawsuit could lead to reforms, another potential solution to Wall Street’s predation in municipal debt markets is to eliminate the behavior altogether.
If the Federal Reserve began to lend directly to municipal governments at a zero-percent interest rate — a process that would be entirely legal — state and local governments would not only save $160 billion in interest payments every year, but they would also avoid the trap of interest-rate swaps and other complex forms of Wall Street financing like capital appreciation bonds.
“[We’re] calling on the Fed to make direct loans to states and municipalities,” said Bhatti. “The reason why you have swaps, LIBOR [London Interbank Offered Rate] manipulation, auction rate securities, and variable rate debt obligations is because we go to private markets. If the Fed would just provide the financing for free, we wouldn’t have to deal with predatory interest rate swaps.
While the Fed did launch an initiative to purchase municipal bonds in the aftermath of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act economic stimulus bill passed in March 2020, the central bank ended up offering money to communities at far higher rates than it provided to Wall Street banks and corporations.
“The Fed is using public money to purchase a bond from Chevron at a rate of 0.9% over more than 4.5 years,” said then Bailout Oversight Commission member Bharat Ramamurti, who’s now deputy director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council. “A state like Wisconsin, with the exact same rating as Chevron has to pay 1.28 percent over 3 years.”
Until there’s a federal solution, cities and states are left to fend for themselves. In fact, changes in Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law related to refinancing municipal bonds have been a selling point for financial firms seeking to peddle additional swap deals.
In Arizona, for example, an authority with close ties to Republican governor Doug Ducey is now embracing swaps, changing its regulations so it can enter into new deals that closely resemble the Orlando highway authority agreements.
Elsewhere, local reform efforts have struggled to gain traction. In Pennsylvania, legislation was introduced by a Republican state representative in 2019 that would have restricted local governments from entering into additional swap agreements. Despite the state’s acute history of misconduct in the space, the bill failed to make headway.
Back in Florida, Orange County mayor Jerry Demings, husband of Democratic representative Val Demings, has proposed increasing the county sales tax from 6.5 to 7.5 percent to improve the region’s mass transit systems. The tax hike would disproportionately impact lower-income Central Floridians, but it would bring in $600 million annually.
While the tax increase is likely necessary, the money paid to the big banks over the swaps could have also helped address the problem.
“The money they spent on the interest rate swaps could double bus service alone,” said McMullen, the transit activist. “The rising cost of transit has really caused displacement. Mass transit benefits everyone — it reduces congestion, reduces carbon emissions, and saves lots of money for our vulnerable working class.”
New York, around 1970. (photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Lyrics Leonard Cohen, There Is a War
From the 1974 album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony
There is a war between the rich and poor,
A war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn't.
Why don't you come on back to the war, that's right, get in it,
Why don't you come on back to the war, it's just beginning.
Well I live here with a woman and a child,
The situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says "I guess you call this love"
I call it service.
Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
Why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
Why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous.
You cannot stand what I've become,
You much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war.
Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be embarrassed,
Why don't you come on back to the war, you can still get married.
There is a war between the rich and poor,
A war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
A war between the black and white,
A war between the odd and the even.
Why don't you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
Why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get even,
Why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?
Vaquitas continue to face a host of threats, including a lucrative illegal fishing industry, political apathy, and conservation measures that have been largely ineffective. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
The rare marine mammal is facing an existential threat from fishing nets. Scientists hope they can be saved, but time is running out
Now scientists say their future is more precarious than ever, after a recent survey found less than 10 individuals left in the waters of their limited home range between Baja California and Mexico.
But some say there is still hope for the endangered species that has persisted against the odds.
“We are looking for a needle in the haystack – but we know the needle is there,” says Barbara Taylor, a marine conservation biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, noting how researchers can still hear their high-pitched calls and echolocation clicks, collected on auditory monitoring equipment placed throughout their habitat. Taylor has tracked endangered species that have been pushed out of existence before and she’s determined to stop the small, shy, cetacean from joining that list.
The task won’t be easy. Vaquitas continue to face a host of threats, including a lucrative illegal fishing industry, political apathy and conservation measures that have been largely ineffective.
Dangers from the fishing industry
Vaquitas share the Gulf of California with highly coveted sea creatures including the totoaba, an endangered fish with perceived medicinal properties that retails in China’s black market for thousands of dollars. Vaquitas, alongside sea turtles and whales, can easily become entangled in the massive mesh netting known as “gillnets” used by totoaba poachers and local fishers.
The US has sought to put pressure on Mexico over the issue. On Thursday, the Office of the United States Trade Representative announced that it was requesting consultations with the Mexican government over whether environmental commitments made under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – which replaced Nafta in 2020 – that were intended to protect vaquitas had fallen short.
The US has also enacted embargoes on the Mexican seafood industry, including banning importation of seafood typically caught in gillnets in vaquita territory. Last year, the US also stopped importing all Mexican wild-caught shrimp citing concerns over sea turtle protections.
The Mexican government has outlawed totoaba fishing and made the use of gillnets in the area illegal, but few of the promised penalties have been carried out. There have also been efforts made to compensate fishers who replace the dangerous gear but the funds were not equitably distributed, frustrating fishers who were left in the lurch.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who oversaw a policy reversal and rolled back enforcement in the protected area has spoken out about sanctions against the Mexican seafood industry and international interventions.
Meanwhile, as enforcement from authorities waned, illegal fishing has flourished. Backed by the cartels, the expansion of the totoaba market has coincided with vaquita numbers dropping roughly 50% annually. International advocates have struggled to shift the tides.
“When we were out there the last three times it was gillnets everywhere,” Taylor says of survey trips that took place in 2018, 2019, and earlier this year.
Without strong consequences or enough compensation, there’s little motivation to change. Called the “cocaine of the sea”, totoaba prices far outpace anything fishers could make in above-board markets. Cartels have cashed in, further increasing the incentives to ignore the regulations. “There was no one that was trying to hide anything from us,” Taylor said.
Conservation versus the local economy
Even those who appreciate the danger vaquitas are in have raised questions about the value of protecting them at the expense of local livelihoods. Local economies and culture are closely entwined with fisheries in the vaquita range. Even before the totoaba market exploded, gillnets were used to catch blue shrimp and other species that dwell in the biodiverse waters.
“The government still hasn’t given us a solution or an effective way to support our families without going out to fish illegally,” Ramón Franco DÃaz, president of a federation of fishing cooperatives in San Felipe, told the New York Times last autumn. “The children need food and clothes.”
“For many of the local community the vaquita is a nuisance that the sooner it goes extinct the better, because then they can poach unhampered,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She noted that these issues have existed in the Gulf of California for decades, predating the spike in overseas demand for totoaba, and highlights the “enormous challenge” inherent in environmental conservation. “The issue of how to fund conservation - paying communities not to poach - is something that we are really going to be confronting at a greater scale,” she said.
Vaquitas have never been particularly abundant. They tend to produce calves only once every two years and it takes decades for them to mature and reproduce. But Felbab-Brown says that the absence of law enforcement in the area has only exacerbated the issue. “The sense is that anything goes,” she said. “Now in a situation where we have 7 or 8 vaquitas left.”
Without local support and enforcement, environmentalists say it will be even more difficult to pull the species back from the brink, especially now that time is running out.
“The reason it really is not working is there isn’t the governance to enforce another way of fishing and to support and compensate fishers who fish in a way that would allow vaquita to survive,” says Francis Gulland, Commissioner at the US Marine Mammal Commission, who added that working to get buy-in from the community is a far more effective strategy than attempting to enforce top-down bans. It’s a lesson she hopes can be learned in time to spare other species, which could soon also be subject to precipitous decline.
“We tend to not pay attention until we are in total crisis mode,” she says, noting that conservation efforts didn’t really start until there were just a few hundred vaquitas left. When the population fell further, advocates attempted to catch vaquitas to relocate them to protected areas, but the program was promptly stopped after it resulted in one vaquita’s death. “If there had been 10 thousand animals we would have time to learn what to do to improve the techniques,” Gulland said. “They could have been moved to a protected area but it was all too late.”
There is still time to save the vaquita, she says, but not much. “If we can prevent them from being caught in nets,” she says, “they will survive.”
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