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Chevron is accused of polluting the Amazon for 26 years. The only people who’ve paid the price are a human rights lawyer and those whose land was poisoned
What if I told you that a multinational oil company allegedly polluted the Amazon for almost three decades? And that the oil company has spent even more years refusing to accept liability? Or that a US attorney who agreed to represent thousands of Ecuadorian villagers in a lawsuit against that oil company has lost his law license, income, spent hundreds of days under house arrest in New York, and in 2021 was sentenced to six months in prison?
From 1964 to 1990, Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, allegedly spilled more than 16m gallons of crude oil – “80 times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster”, according to Gizmodo – and 18bn gallons of polluted wastewater in the Amazon rainforest. The pollution allegedly contaminated the ground and waterways with toxic chemicals that the plaintiffs – mostly Indigenous people and poor farmers – say has caused cancer, miscarriages, skin conditions and birth defects. (Chevron has said that Texaco’s operations were “completely in line with the standards of the day” and told the New Yorker, in 2012, that “there is no corroborating evidence” for the health allegations.)
In 1993, Steven Donziger, a recent Harvard law school graduate and human rights attorney, began working on an environmental case on behalf of Ecuadorians allegedly affected by Texaco’s drilling. The case eventually became a 30,000-person class action lawsuit against Texaco in New York federal court.
Texaco/Chevron did not dispute that pollution occurred, and “freely admits that large sludge pits still dot the Amazon”, the New Yorker reported. The company argued that the Ecuadorian government released it from liability after paying for an earlier cleanup, and that Ecuador’s state oil company, Petroecuador, was responsible for the remaining damage. The plaintiffs argued that the earlier cleanup was woefully insufficient; that Texaco, not Petroecuador, directed actual operations in the area; and that Chevron’s earlier agreement with the government of Ecuador did not bar lawsuits by individuals. (The government of Ecuador also disagrees with Chevron’s claims.)
A jury trial in the US might have put Texaco under an embarrassing and costly spotlight, so, perhaps for that reason, the company lobbied to move the legal proceedings back to Ecuador, which has no jury trials and is heavily dependent on the oil industry. Texaco argued that Ecuador had a fair and competent legal system. A US judge agreed to relocate the case on the condition that Texaco accept the verdict of the Ecuadorian system.
Texaco’s maneuver backfired: In 2011, Donziger and the plaintiffs won the case there. An Ecuadorian court ruled that Texaco, which had been bought by Chevron at this point, was “responsible for vast contamination”, according to the New Yorker, and “ordered it to pay $18bn in damages – the largest judgment ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit”.
Both parties appealed the decision: Chevron said it was “illegitimate and unenforceable” and accused the plaintiffs of having ghostwritten an expert environmental opinion; the plaintiffs denied that the opinion was fraudulent and said that, if anything, the monetary judgment was too low given the scale of pollution.
Chevron’s accusation that the judgment was illegitimate relied heavily on testimony by an Ecuadorian judge, Alberto Guerra, whom Chevron relocated to the US and, as of 2015, paid a $12,000 monthly salary. Guerra testified that the plaintiffs had bribed him to sway the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron. Guerra later recanted much of his claim – admitting, Vice News reported in 2015, that “there is no evidence to corroborate allegations of a bribe or a ghostwritten judgment, and that large parts of his sworn testimony … were exaggerated and, in other cases, simply not true”.
(Chevron disputes the significance of Guerra’s change in testimony, telling Vice News, in 2015, that trial “transcripts make clear that Chevron proved its case before the international arbitration tribunal”.)
Part of the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was a fine for not apologizing for the pollution; in 2013, Ecuador’s national court of justice determined that “there had been no legal basis to sanction Chevron for not apologizing,” according to Reuters, and reduced the judgment to $9.5bn, but otherwise affirmed the original decision.
Instead of accepting the legal outcome and the responsibilities that come when you acquire a company (see Dupont-now-Chemours or Monsanto-now-Bayer), Chevron “made clear that it would not be paying the judgment”, according to the Intercept, and “moved its assets out of the country”. The company went from claiming Ecuador’s legal system was fair to claiming it was too corrupt to trust.
“We’re going to fight this until hell freezes over, and then we’ll fight it on the ice,” a Chevron attorney vowed – “a remark that became a watchword at the company”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Chevron has more than made good on that promise. It has pursued a years-long campaign against the plaintiffs, their lawyers, and even the entire country of Ecuador.
Chevron’s legal strategy is masterminded by Gibson Dunn, a notoriously aggressive corporate law firm that the Montana supreme court rebuked in 2007, in a different case, for “legal thuggery” and “actual malice”. Randy Mastro, a former federal prosecutor and aide to New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, leads the firm’s Chevron file. A “merciless litigator”, according to the New Yorker, Mastro was once described as “the only person in the Giuliani administration who made the mayor seem like a nice guy”.
Here’s the thing: a massive multinational corporation such as Chevron can afford to pay millions of dollars in legal fees, indefinitely – and doing so will almost always be cheaper than paying a fine or settling. Chevron “insists that delay is not its object”, Vanity Fair reported in 2007, but the plaintiffs and their attorneys “are persuaded that it is.”
“Take $6bn as a figure,” Donziger explained to Vanity Fair’s William Langewiesche. “Simply by sticking the money into a savings account Chevron could make $300m for every year it doesn’t pay. That sum multiplied by the four years of the trial so far would amount to $1.2bn, which is far more than, say, $50m spent on legal fees, even if Chevron now loses the case. And what if Chevron wins – what would the calculation be then?”
Corporations can also sue plaintiffs back – crushing any opposition under, to use Chevron’s words, “an avalanche of paper”. This is part of a disturbing legal playbook sometimes known as Slapp – strategic lawsuit against public participation. Massive corporations can fund endless litigation against activists or critics. They don’t even need to win in court, because they can intimidate or bankrupt their opponents in legal fees. (Chevron disputes that it engages in Slapp tactics, though an anti-Slapp organization twice named Chevron “corporate bully of the year” and in 2021 bestowed a “lifetime achievement award” on the company.)
After Chevron “successfully defeated a lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting deaths of protesters on an offshore oil platform in Nigeria”, it even tried, unsuccessfully, “to compel the impoverished Nigerian plaintiffs, some of whom were widows or children, to reimburse its attorneys’ fees”, the New Yorker reported in 2012.
“That’s how they litigate,” Bert Voorhees, an attorney who represented the Nigerian plaintiffs, told the New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe. “The point is to scare off the next community that might try to assert its human rights.”
In 2018, an international tribunal ruled that Chevron had been previously released from liability for pollution in the Amazon and ordered Ecuador not to enforce the $9.5bn judgment. Ecuador continues to maintain that the judgment is legitimate.
In retaliation, “the giant US oil company objected last June when Washington proposed allowing duty-free rose imports from the world’s poorest countries, including Ecuador”, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021. “Letting Ecuador save money on flowers after blatant ‘acts of defiance’ would tell the world the US rewards bad behavior, the oil company said.”
Chevron has also asked the international tribunal to order that “nearly $800m of Chevron’s legal costs [be] paid by Ecuador, a country whose gross domestic product is about half of Chevron’s stock-market value”.
Then there’s Donziger. PR advisers for Chevron promised to “demonize” Donziger in the public eye. The oil company “hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication” which smeared him, and “put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him”, the Intercept reported in 2020.
Donziger has spent years of his life fighting seemingly endless litigation. In 2011, Chevron sued Donziger and members of the lawsuit in a US court for $60m in damages, accusing them of extortion and invoking a sweeping and controversial statute originally created to fight the Mafia. Chevron’s case rested in large part on Guerra’s since-recanted corruption claims; Donziger and his codefendants denied the charges.
“The approach of accusing victims’ attorneys of being fraudsters has been honed with particular energy by [the] law firm Gibson Dunn,” Bloomberg noted in 2014. Shortly before the suit went to trial, Chevron dropped the demand for monetary damages, thus denying Donziger the right to a jury trial.
During the suit, which Chevron won, the company demanded that Donziger turn over his phone and computer to their legal team. After Donziger refused, arguing that doing so would violate attorney-client privilege, the judge in the case charged him with criminal contempt of court.
The US attorney’s office declined to prosecute Donziger for contempt, so the judge in the case made the extraordinary move of appointing a private law firm to represent the government in prosecuting Donziger – a development that two US senators have called “highly unusual” and “concerning”. The senators also noted that the firm appointed to prosecute Donziger previously represented Chevron.
Because he was deemed a “flight risk”, Donziger spent more than 800 days under house detention, with an electronic ankle bracelet, while awaiting the outcome of the trial. In 2020, according to the Intercept’s Sharon Lerner, Donziger’s “bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment, faces exorbitant fines, and has been prohibited from earning money. As of August [2019], a court has seized his passport and put him on house arrest. Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $228bn, has the funds to continue targeting Donziger for as long as it chooses.”
Donziger eventually lost the contempt case, which he called a “charade”. As a consequence of the charges against him, he also lost his law license – against the recommendation of the judicial officer who refereed the professional conduct hearing. The officer, a former federal prosecutor, described Donziger as a stubborn gadfly who is “often his own worst enemy” but called the move to disbar him unjustified, and decried the “extent of his pursuit by Chevron” as “extravagant, unnecessary and punitive.”
In October, Donziger reported to a federal prison to begin a six-month contempt sentence. (In December he was returned to home detention as part of a Covid-related early-release program.) He still cannot make a living as a lawyer, cannot collect any legal fees from the Ecuador judgment, and had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet until last weekend.
In November, nine members of US Congress signed a letter calling Donziger’s treatment “unprecedented and unjust imprisonment”. International judicial monitors, lawyers’ associations, members of European parliament, and Amnesty International have also criticized the charges against Donziger as excessive and punitive, and 29 Nobel laureates from around the world signed an open letter arguing that Donziger is a victim of “judicial harassment”.
I’ve dealt with similar cases myself, with different companies. In 1993, I was part of a team that filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 650 plaintiffs against PG&E, alleging that the California utility company knew that harmful chemicals, particularly hexavalent chromium, were seeping into groundwater in Hinkley, California, and contaminating the town’s water supply. That case ultimately resulted in the largest medical settlement lawsuit in history at that time and changed my life.
After Hinkley, we discovered other towns nearby in California where hexavalent chromium was causing health problems and wreaking havoc on lives. In 2006, PG&E agreed to pay another $295m to settle a series of lawsuits over contaminated water affecting another 1,100 people.
Imagine if instead of a movie telling my story, I’d gone to jail. That’s essentially what has happened to Steve Donziger. And, since this litigation started in 1993, Chevron has not paid a cent or performed any cleanup. So far the only people who have paid for Chevron’s alleged behavior are Donziger and those affected by the contamination – the poor and indigenous Ecuadorians who continue to live every day with the pollution’s effects.
Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
On January 24, a unanimous three-judge court blocked Alabama’s newly drawn congressional map, ordering the state Legislature to draft a new congressional map that complies with the Voting Rights Act by including two districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
The Supreme Court’s action temporarily blocks the ruling from taking effect as the case is litigated. Chief Justice Roberts dissented from the stay, as did Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer.
The lawsuit challenging the map was brought by Evan Milligan, Khadidah Stone, Letitia Jackson, Shalela Dowdy, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, who are represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Alabama, Hogan Lovells LLP, and Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher & Goldfarb.
The following is reaction to today’s Supreme Court ruling:
Plaintiff Evan Milligan: “We are disappointed by today's decision. The fight for fair representation for Black voters in Alabama has been a winding road, generations long. However, during a month set aside to honor Black American history, we are reminded of the strength and dignity displayed by our ancestors who routinely confronted a wide variety of disappointments. We won't dishonor their legacy by putting down the torch they have handed to us. We will continue striving to ensure that our Legislature honors the Voting Rights Act and that Black Alabamians have an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. We will continue working so that Black children feel safe making informed choices about who they want to be, and that most Alabamians embrace the connection of their own personal liberties to the fullest freedom of those Black children."
Deuel Ross, LDF senior counsel: “The Supreme Court's decision to intervene is disheartening, but the facts are clear: Alabama’s current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act. The litigation will continue, and we are confident that Black Alabamians will eventually have the congressional map they deserve — one that fairly represents all voters.”
Tish Gotell Faulks, legal director, ACLU of Alabama: “The people of Alabama shouldn’t have to vote on a map in 2022 that we know is unfair, but we look forward to vindicating our claims at trial as the case continues in federal court.”
Davin Rosborough, senior staff attorney, ACLU’s Voting Rights Project: “This ruling is just a temporary step. Our challenge to Alabama’s racially discriminatory congressional map will continue as we fight to ensure Black Alabamians have fair opportunities to elect candidates of their choosing.”
Jessica Ellsworth, partner, Hogan Lovell LLP: “We are disappointed about the Supreme court’s ruling. The three-judge panel meticulously applied existing Supreme Court precedent dating back decades to determine that Alabama’s hastily enacted plan was likely infirm. This litigation remains far from over, and we will continue our efforts to ensure that Alabama complies with the Voting Rights Act and does not disenfranchise Black voters.”
Protesters march during a rally over the police killing of Amir Locke, outside the Hennepin county government center in Minneapolis, on Saturday. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
Body camera footage shows a SWAT team entering an apartment just before 7 a.m. Wednesday without knocking. Instead, officers used a key and shouted "police search warrant."
In the video, police approach a couch where Locke appears to be asleep under a blanket, then Locke can be seen stirring under the blanket and holding a gun. Police open fire, about nine seconds after they entered the apartment, Minnesota Public Radio reports.
Authorities say Locke was not the subject of the search warrant, which was tied to a St. Paul homicide investigation. Locke's family says he was a food delivery driver and had a permit to carry the gun.
"Amir Locke's life mattered," Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement to NPR. "He was only 22 years old and had his whole life ahead of him." Ellison says his office is working with the county attorney's office to review if criminal charges will be brought in the case against officers.
The killing has caused outrage nationwide and especially in Minneapolis, where the police murder of George Floyd less than two years ago exposed deep distrust between the community and law enforcement.
Over the weekend, protesters marched through downtown Minneapolis to call for justice for Locke.
On Monday, demonstrators arrived at City Hall and demanded accountability for those involved; NBC News reports the group included many Black mothers and women. Activists are calling for the firing or resignation of interim Minneapolis Police Chief Amelia Huffman and officer Mark Hanneman, who activists say shot and killed Locke.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has instituted a moratorium on no-knock warrants while the city reviews the department's policies regarding the controversial law enforcement tool.
In an announcement, the mayor's office said Minneapolis police officers will only be able to execute warrants after they knock, announce their presence and wait a reasonable amount of time before entering. Executing a no-knock warrant under the moratorium requires "an imminent threat of harm to an individual or the public and then the warrant must be approved by the Chief."
In March 2020, emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor was killed by police during a no-knock warrant in Louisville, Ky., drawing national attention to the practice and other killings of Black people by white people. Kentucky convened a task force to study the use of search warrants, which unveiled a series of recommended reforms at the end of last year. No-knock warrants have been banned by Louisville's Metro Council. Despite nationwide outrage and demonstrations, no officer has been charged in Taylor's death.
Of the $222.9 billion in revenue UnitedHealth's health plan division took in last year, 72 percent came from taxpayer dollars and the additional premiums many Medicare beneficiaries pay the company to cover their out-of-pocket expenses. (photo: Diverse Stock Photos/Flickr)
A new analysis finds that private insurance giant UnitedHealth has taken in hundreds of billions in public money over the last decade — all while insuring fewer people.
“Personal freedom vs. costly government bureaucracy”, it should be said, is a rhetorically effective framing — among the many reasons that America’s sprawling, private health insurance racket has been able to beat back so many attempts at reform. Spend any real time investigating what the landscape of American health care looks like, however, and you’ll quickly see that it’s bunk: the market model is in fact a complicated and at times totally inscrutable morass of profit-seeking, underwritten, no less, by the very public dollars its proponents claim to be saving.
It’s a point made forcefully by author and reform advocate Wendell Potter in a series of recent posts on his Substack detailing the profit breakdowns of insurance giants like UnitedHealth and Anthem. Potter, himself a former executive at Cigna turned whistleblower, notes that UnitedHealth boasted more profits last year than any health insurer has ever made for its shareholders — citing a chirpy company release that also boasted of 10.5 million new “members” using its health plans since 2011.
Beneath these profits and this growth, however, Potter reveals an altogether murkier and less sunny picture of how UnitedHealth’s business model actually works. The company, it turns out, is actually insuring over a million fewer people through its commercial risk division (through which it is itself the direct provider) than it did in 2011. The number of plans it now administers on behalf of employers and other groups, however, has surged over the past decade. As Potter explains:
United and its competitors do not insure people enrolled in these group plans. They make money by charging their employer (and in some cases union) customers (who are the actual insurers) a hefty fee to administer their workers’ health plan benefits.
The kicker is that 94 percent of the company’s total membership growth since 2011 has actually come through government programs. The upshot?
When you do just a little more math, you’ll discover that 72 percent of the $222.9 billion in revenue United’s health plan division took in last year came from you and me through the taxes we fork over to our Uncle Sam and the additional premiums many Medicare beneficiaries pay the company to cover their out-of-pocket expenses. Considering all of that, it’s neither accurate nor appropriate to refer to United and its peers as insurers, or, for that matter, as “payers” (except in the sense that they use our employers’ and our Uncle Sam’s money to pay doctors and hospitals for treating us).
In short, ordinary Americans are underwriting the health insurance industry’s growing profits, all while paying far more for their plans than they used to. It’s yet another reminder that what is generally called America’s “health care system” is in practice a series of elaborate mechanisms for transferring money upward to shareholders — and for ensuring that a basic human need remains subordinate to private profit.
Memphis activist Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years and one day in prison this week. Moses, who was convicted of trying to illegally register to vote, was told by officials in 2019 that she had regained her voting rights. They later acknowledged that they had made a mistake. (photo: YouTube/WREG)
Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Democratic mayoral candidate in Memphis, had an extensive record of felony convictions, including a conviction for tampering with evidence that caused her to permanently lose her voting rights in the state. To restore rights that she says she didn’t know she had lost when she pleaded guilty, the corrections department and county election commission both signed off on Moses’s voter registration application in 2019 certifying that her probation had ended, granting her full voting privileges once again.
But there was a problem: The officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged they made an error in saying her probation was over, meaning her voting rights had not been restored. So when the 44-year-old Black woman submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote.
After she was convicted of the voting error last November, Moses was sentenced this week to six years and one day in prison.
“I relied on the election commission because those are the people who are supposed to know what you’re supposed to do,” she told WREG before her sentencing. “And I found out that they didn’t know.”
Her sentencing Monday has been decried by critics as a much harsher penalty than those in other recent voting fraud cases involving conservative White men. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund tweeted that the case captured how “there are two criminal justice systems in America.”
“This case is one about the disparity in sentencing and punishment — and one that shouldn’t have happened,” Bede Anyanwu, her attorney, told The Washington Post on Friday. Anyanwu, who said Moses plans to appeal, added, “It’s all very, very disturbing.”
Moses has maintained that she thought her voting rights were restored when she received a letter saying as much, noting in court, “I did not falsify anything.” Her defense only angered Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward, who said she had intentionally deceived probation officials to restore her voting rights.
“You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation,” Ward said in court.
Neither Ward nor a spokesperson with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Moses’s case, immediately responded to requests for comment Friday. Ward said he would consider placing Moses on probation after nine months of her sentence if she maintains good behavior and completes programs while in prison, reported WHBQ.
The Tennessee case is expected to add to rising national tensions surrounding voter suppression and disenfranchisement, Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told MSNBC. Moses has been likened to Black people such as Hervis Rogers and Crystal Mason, who’ve faced years in prison over mistakes about their voting eligibility.
“It points to everything that is wrong in our democracy,” Nelson, who is not involved in the Moses case, told host Rachel Maddow. “It’s a confluence of racial discrimination and voter suppression.”
Moses’s sentencing comes weeks after the year-long Democratic push for federal voting rights legislation died in the Senate, as Republicans blocked an elections bill for the fifth time in six months and Democrats failed to unite their caucus behind a plan to rewrite the Senate’s rules and pass it anyway. The push from Democrats would have restored portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down in recent years by the Supreme Court, and would have established new national standards for federal elections, including minimum requirements for early voting, mail-in voting and other methods making it easier to cast ballots.
As former president Donald Trump and his allies have continued to make baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, several notable instances of voter fraud among White male Republican voters from the 2020 presidential election have emerged. Las Vegas GOP voter Donald Kirk Hartle was charged and convicted last year for forging his late wife’s name to vote with her ballot, after he alleged that someone else had stolen her ballot. Hartle was sentenced to probation.
Similar instances happened in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where GOP officials and voters admitted to casting ballots for their dead parents — cases in which the men received probation and no more than three days in jail.
The voting case involving Moses, however, was different and complicated, in more ways than one. Moses had 16 previous felony convictions, according to a news release from Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich (R).
Anyanwu said some of the counts against Moses came decades earlier, when she was in her 20s, and he said she was forced to plead guilty in some of the cases “given the fact that she is a lady of limited resources.”
“She, like some of my clients, plead guilty because they don’t have the money to fight these battles,” he said.
One of the most serious incidents was when Moses pleaded guilty in 2015 to a 10-count indictment, including perjury and tampering with evidence. She allegedly stalked and harassed a Shelby County judge between February and March 2014 by impersonating a lawyer and notary public in an effort to file a complaint against the judge, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Moses was given an eight-year suspended sentence, and the judge in that case ordered that she serve the time on probation.
Although the charge of tampering with evidence is one of the few felonies in Tennessee that causes someone to permanently lose their voting rights in the state, she told the Guardian last year that no one explained to her that pleading guilty meant she’d be ineligible to vote.
“They never mentioned anything about voting,” she told the outlet. “They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote … none of that.”
Moses went on to found a local Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis and eventually launched a long-shot bid to become the city’s mayor in 2019. But it wasn’t until she found out she couldn’t be on the ballot that she realized she was still on probation and ineligible to vote. After the court confirmed that she was still on probation, Circuit Court Judge Felicia Corbin Johnson said she was “going to allow the criminal court to make an official determination of whether or not Ms. Moses’s sentence has been completed and expired,” according to WATN.
What happened next changed Moses’s life. On Sept. 3, 2019, Tennessee Department of Correction officials filled out an application for Moses to have her rights restored — and it was approved. Staff members from the Shelby County Election Commission also signed off on the application.
Then, the next day, the Department of Correction wrote a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission noting that it had made a mistake in restoring voting rights to Moses. Officials did not offer an explanation for the mistake.
“This attestation was made in error,” wrote Lisa Helton, then the acting assistant commissioner for the department.
The Shelby County Election Commission acknowledged the error in an August 2020 letter from Joe Young, the chief deputy administrator of elections, in which officials said Moses was notified that she remained permanently ineligible.
“Very little of this has made any sense whatsoever,” Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips told WREG last year. “The fact is she was convicted of a felony which has permanently terminated her right to vote.”
But Moses has maintained that no one ever told her that the good news she received in September 2019 was reversed the next day. She refused to take a plea deal for the charges this time because she thought she had done nothing wrong, Anyanwu said. Yet she ended up being convicted last year.
At her sentencing hearing in December, Ward, a 2004 appointee of then-Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), criticized Moses, saying she had “voted six times as a convicted felon” after her 2015 conviction. Character witnesses supporting Moses remarked that “it would be a shame to waste her good traits which can be so beneficial to her family and her community by being in a jail,” according to local media.
Anyanwu said Moses was floored when she found out about the six-year sentence. But she remains hopeful that the sentencing could be overturned on appeal, the attorney said. He is hoping her case can return to court by June. Until then, she remains optimistic that her fight isn’t done, he said.
“She believes the sentencing was beyond the evidence that was presented,” he said.
People look at a cracked windscreen with bullet holes at the scene where three Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Nablus in the occupied West Bank. (photo: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
Palestinian Authority condemns the assassination of three Palestinians in occupied West Bank calling it a ‘heinous crime’.
“Three citizens were martyred as a result of direct shooting by Israeli forces in the city of Nablus,” the ministry said in a statement. It identified the victims as Ashraf Mubaslat, Adham Mabrouka, and Mohammad Dakhil, according to the Palestinian Wafa news agency.
Wafa, quoting witnesses, reported Israeli soldiers opened fire at the car in the northern city. The car was riddled with bullet holes, according to the footage shared by the agency.
Witnesses told Anadolu Agency that the incident involved a member of Israel’s special forces in a civilian vehicle storming the city’s al-Makhfieh neighbourhood, and opening fire at a Palestinian car.
The PA’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called for an international investigation into the killings while the PA cabinet described it as a “heinous crime”.
The foreign ministry held the Israeli government and Prime Minister Neftali Bennett “fully and directly responsible for this crime”.
“The silence of the international community to Israeli violations and crimes provides a cover to these criminal acts and encourages the Israeli occupier to continue in its open warfare against the Palestinians,” it said in a statement.
Israel, on its part, said the three men were Palestinian “militants” who were responsible for recent shooting attacks.
The Shin Bet internal security agency said the three were in a vehicle and were killed in a clash with security forces. No Israelis were killed or wounded in the shooting, it added.
Palestinian and international rights groups have long condemned what they see as a policy of shoot to kill and excessive use of force.
B’Tselem, the Israeli rights body, said it had recorded 77 Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli security forces in the West Bank last year. More than half of those killed were not implicated in any attacks, it added.
Settler attacks
Late last year, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian man during a raid in the Ras al-Ain area in Nablus, West Bank.
In December 2021, Israeli troops had killed a Palestinian man in the village of Beita, West Bank, during a protest against illegal settlements. Israeli forces killed a Palestinian minor after an alleged car-ramming at a military checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
Palestinians have also been bracing for rising violent attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
During the same period, an ultraorthodox Jew was injured after being stabbed allegedly by a Palestinian attacker outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.
A week earlier, a Hamas member allegedly opened fire in the Old City, killing an Israeli man. Both suspects were killed by Israeli forces.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Amnesty International said in a new report that Israel was carrying out “the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” and must be held accountable for treating them as “an inferior racial group”.
Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war. The territories are now home to more than 700,000 Jewish settlers living in 164 settlements and 116 outposts, which Palestinians seek as parts of their future independent state.
Under international law, all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories are considered illegal.
Palestinians, along with most of the international community, consider settlements to be a major obstacle to peace.
New York's Central Park. (photo: Getty Images)
To build a sea wall, you first have to build community trust.
The city of New York has a plan to transform the park over five years into a protective buffer between rising seas and lower Manhattan as part of its $1.45 billion East Side Coastal Resilience project, a flooding protection development that, once completed, will stretch from East 25th Street southward to the Lower East Side. Using federal and city funds, New York City plans to fully demolish the old park, which it began doing in December, and build a new park on top of it. Once completed, the entire 2.4-mile project will serve as a barrier between rising seas and the 110,000 residents who live near the water. But the city has faced fierce opposition from a small, organized group of community members who say the plan will temporarily eliminate an important community resource, change East River Park for the worse, and have negligible impact on storm surge and flooding.
On its face, it doesn’t make much sense for a community to oppose a project aimed at saving it from sea-level rise. But the East River Park controversy highlights what can happen when a city fails to adequately seek community input. As more cash flows to states and cities to fund climate resilience, thanks to the Biden administration’s environmental justice agenda and money earmarked in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year, public officials are at risk of repeating New York City’s blunder. Experts told Grist that when officials fail to consult the communities they serve ahead of a project like East River Park, that project is destined to falter, fail, or wind up inadequately addressing the threat it’s meant to allay.
“I think in 30 years we’re going to look back and what we’re going to see is the communities that were most successful were the ones that had the courage to engage their community members very early on about the problems they’re facing,” Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If you want to wait until you’re in the middle of a disaster recovery operation to figure out your plan, you’ve already lost.”
The hullabaloo over the new East River Park stems from an unexpected change of plans. In 2018, six years after Sandy, the city finalized a plan, with community input, to make a part of the park into an “undulating berm” — an elevated piece of land covered in plants and trees that would serve as a barrier between the river and the rest of the park. The park itself would act as a flood plain, turning into a large sponge when a Sandy-like event rolled through and protecting nearby residents from flooding.
But then the city brought in a group of engineers who determined that the original plan wasn’t feasible. The berm was to be built on high-voltage power lines owned by Consolidated Edison, the largest investor-owned utility in the United States, which would require the company to build a tunnel around its lines. Plus, the New York City Parks Department would have to maintain a park that doubled as a wetland — try keeping a public space clean and accessible when it’s covered in a foot of water — and the Department of Transportation would have to arrange the closure of a highway lane for construction to proceed. The clock was ticking: A significant portion of the $335 million the federal government was kicking in for the construction of the project was set to expire in 2022. (The deadline has since been extended to 2023.)
In March 2018, just a few months after the city had finalized its original plan, it announced that the old plan had been scrapped and a new effort was underway: The park would be buried under eight feet of landfill, and a new park would be built on top — effectively turning the park into a sea wall high enough to protect inland areas from storm surge.
“They switched the plan after four years of consulting the community and actually co-designing a real resilience plan,” Harriet Hirshorn, a documentary filmmaker who has lived a few blocks from East River Park for 40 years, told Grist. She’s a member of a group called East River Park Action that has been fighting the city over the project since 2018. “That whole action of having a meeting behind closed doors and completing changing a plan, erasing the community input by doing so, just fomented incredible mistrust.”
Changing course isn’t inherently a bad thing, Deborah Morris, the former executive director of resiliency planning for NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told Grist. But the city “did a terrible job communicating about it,” she said.
The community was blindsided. The original plan, the one they had had the opportunity to weigh in on, was cheaper than the new plan and would have kept most of East River Park intact by installing berms and flood barriers along the highway. The new plan got rid of the old park entirely. Hirshorn and other community members also questioned the city’s decision not to turn the park into a flood plain when the threat of flash downpours is on the rise — particularly after the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought unprecedented flash flooding to the city last fall.
Community opposition to the new project sprang up just as quickly as the city had changed its mind about which plan to pursue. In early 2021, East River Park Action sued the city to stop it from uprooting the existing park. The group managed to delay elements of the construction process until this past December, when a judge denied the activists’ appeal and dismissed the case.
“The approach that the city took is a case study in how not to do things,” Karen Imas, vice president of programs at the New York-based nonprofit the Waterfront Alliance told Grist. “When you need to revisit a project or revisit designs, you really need to make sure that the community is a partner and that they really understand why certain decisions are being made.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office of New York City declined to provide comment for this story.
East River Park is not an outlier in the world of flood control projects. Similar sagas have played out across the country in recent years. In South Carolina, a plan to ring downtown Charleston with concrete sea walls is facing opposition from community members who want more input in the planning process. The plan has been delayed more than a year due, in part, to community backlash. In Miami, Florida, a similar plan to construct a sea wall rising 20 feet in some places across Biscayne Bay is sputtering thanks to pushback from community members who argue that the plan leans too heavily on metal and concrete infrastructure in lieu of green solutions and will be detrimental to quality of life in downtown Miami.
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between communities asking in good faith for more input on climate resilience projects and those attempting to derail initiatives that would benefit the common good. Wealthy owners of coastal properties in New York state opposed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new flood maps aimed at better representing the true flood risk because it raised insurance rates for higher-cost homes. In California, the San Diego town of Del Mar rejected a plan that would have helped residents safely retreat from encroaching sea water because homeowners, many of them wealthy, didn’t want to leave their homes.
Even the East River Park controversy fits in this category to some extent. Much of the vitriol against the city’s revised plan came from a particularly vocal group of middle- and upper-class white residents who had a sentimental attachment to the park. Tenant leaders from the neighborhood’s public housing initially opposed the new park plan but quickly reversed course and threw their support behind the project.
Resiliency is messy. It requires a lot of concrete, a lot of construction, a lot of noise. It might require old buildings to come down and new, stronger ones to be built in their place. It’ll require Western states to thin their forests so that wildfires don’t explode out of control and Gulf Coast states to dismantle infrastructure that accelerates erosion. And, ultimately, it means a lot of people will need to leave their homes in coastal and disaster-prone areas. None of that is particularly fun and, oftentimes, it is incredibly divisive and painful.
Experts say the projects that have been able to move forward, the initiatives that were most successful in uniting the disparate factions of a neighborhood or town, have one thing in common: Local public officials reached out to their constituents early and often.
Just a few blocks south of where the East Side Coastal Resilience Project ends, New York City is planning to create a flood barrier that stretches from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge to the southernmost tip of the borough, in order to protect the Financial District and Seaport neighborhoods from rising seas. The city’s plan is to elevate one mile of shoreline while keeping the historical and recreational value of the waterfront intact.
It won’t be easy, but the plan hasn’t received the vitriol the East River Park project faced. That’s partly because the project doesn’t involve closing a large, beloved green space for half a decade; the one-mile waterfront between Brooklyn Bridge and Battery Park is more commercial than the area near the East Side Coastal Resilience Project. But it’s also because the city launched a two-year public planning process in 2019 that brought the many disparate factions of the community together, not to weigh in on an existing plan, but to actually create it and guide the project into fruition. The plan the community worked on is the plan the city is sticking with. “There was a lot of feedback and a lot of changes to the design that were born out of community feedback,” Imas said. “It wasn’t just marginally tweaking at the edges but real, substantive change based on what they heard from the community.”
Building out channels of communication between communities and public officials has never been more important. Last year, climate disasters in the U.S. claimed nearly 700 lives and inflicted more than $145 billion in damage. If every town in America had elected officials who knew what specific climate-related threats their constituents faced and worked preemptively to make communities more resilient to those threats, the number of people who die in disasters and the staggering amount of money spent on recovery would both go down.
“We need to build capacity,” Moore, from NRDC, said. Disaster recovery experts agree that every community in the U.S. needs an emergency manager whose job it is to prepare for disasters and recover from them. They also say states need to provide resources to those managers and make sure there’s someone in state government whose job it is to apply for federal funding for resilience work. And, when that funding comes through, experts say emergency managers and other local officials must look to their communities for input early and often. Not just the community members who pay the most in taxes, but the whole community. “The most vulnerable should be the first ones to have an opportunity to engage in these planning processes,” Imas said.
Harriet Festing, co-founder and director of Anthropocene Alliance, a Florida-based network of frontline communities who advocate for climate justice, agrees that building out capacity at the local level is imperative to achieving climate resilience. Much of her work focuses on educating communities and local officials about climate change, empowering them to advocate for the solutions they want, and then connecting them to the resources that will help them put those solutions into motion. She worries that the federal government doesn’t understand the barriers between municipalities and the climate adaptation projects they so badly need. “They’re so far away from even being able to start to put in an application,” she said. “They’re just in crisis mode and they don’t have a project to apply for, and they can’t have the staff to think about a project to apply for.”
Meanwhile, the battle over East River Park continues. In January, Christopher Marte, a Democratic member of the New York City Council, sent an open letter to the commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction, on behalf of residents of the Lower East Side. He requested that the city test the construction site of the new East River Park for air pollutants, provide daily air quality reports to the public, and, lastly, “establish a clear channel to hear community feedback.” The community is still fighting to be heard.
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