Israel’s prime minister in waiting wants zero tolerance toward Jewish terrorism. Whether he can bring his own coalition on board with that stance is an open question.
Yair Lapid will become Israel’s prime minister on August 27, 2023, if things go according to plan—which, in Israeli politics, they almost never do. But when Lapid—the architect of Israel’s current coalition, its foreign minister, and the leader of its largest party—speaks, it matters. Most of the time, his job is to serve as the adult in the room, a sensible spokesperson for the country’s fractious and Frankensteinian government, which spans from secular leftists to settler rightists to Arab Islamists. But on occasion, he breaks from the script on a point of principle. This story is about one of those moments.
Earlier this month, I interviewed Lapid for my Atlantic newsletter, asking him about Israeli democracy, Arab equality, and other core challenges facing the Jewish state. But one thing Lapid told me deserves special mention, because it speaks directly to a controversy that has recently exploded into public view and rattled the Israeli government: settler violence against Palestinians.
According to researchers, media reports, and eyewitness testimony, violence perpetrated by residents of far-flung Jewish outposts in the West Bank—many of them illegal under Israel’s own laws—has surged over the past year. These attacks range from individual assaults to the ransacking of villages. As The Times of Israelreported, “Security officials say that this year has seen a drastic spike in violence by Jewish extremists in the West Bank. In 2020, the Shin Bet registered 272 violent incidents in the disputed territory; so far in 2021, the domestic security agency has recorded 397, with two weeks still to go before year’s end.” To date, most of those behind these acts of nationalist terror against Palestinians have gone unpunished.
Lapid has voiced his concern about this problem for some time. When he first became the leader of Israel’s opposition, in May 2020, he told me, “Yes, there are within the supporters and even some of the Knesset members of the Joint Arab List, people who are supporting terror … But you also have within the Israeli extreme right people who support terror and you cannot accept this either.”
Not everyone in the current Israeli coalition agrees with this framing, however, a split that became apparent this week in a very public way. Earlier this week, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland visited Israel and met with Omer Bar-Lev, the country’s left-wing public-security minister. Bar-Lev posted a positive tweet about their conversation, noting that they had discussed “settler violence and how to reduce tensions in the area.”
This did not go over well with the Israeliright—or with Bar-Lev’s own settler coalitionpartners. “It’s sad to see a security man of such experience and years accept such a false and distorted narrative,” the right-wing minister Matan Kahana wrote on Twitter. “The settlers in Judea and Samaria are not violent but pioneers.” This rare open feud among members of the coalition quickly escalated, and soon Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—Lapid’s partner in this shotgun marriage of an anti-Netanyahu coalition—was compelled to weigh in. Without mentioning Bar-Lev by name, he responded to him, tweeting: “Settlers in Judea and Samaria have suffered violence and terror, daily, for decades. They are a protective wall for all of us, and we must strengthen and support them, in words and deeds. There are marginal elements in every community, and they must be dealt with using all means, but we cannot generalize about an entire community.”
Bar-Lev, however, did not back down. “I understand that it is truly difficult for some of you to have a mirror held up to your face,” he tweeted yesterday, “and to understand that extremist settler violence is sweeping the world and that foreign governments are interested in the issue. I recommend that those who have this difficulty drink a glass of water. I will continue to fight Palestinian terrorism as if there is no extremist settler violence and extremist settler violence as if there is no Palestinian terrorism.”
So where does Lapid stand on the question of extremist violence? In our conversation before this controversy broke out, he made it quite clear: “It’s a stain on Israel.”
“Whoever attacks innocent people is a hooligan and a criminal and is going to be treated as such,” he said. “There’s going to be zero tolerance toward this issue. I had a long conversation with our minister of defense [Benny Gantz], who is now creating his own task force to make sure this will be stopped.” He acknowledged that no country can stop all such bad actors, but insisted that this is a priority for him.
“I refuse to discuss this as a political issue, because this flatters” the perpetrators, he said. “This is not a political stand. These are violent hooligans who are trying to give a political spin to the fact that they are just that. We’re speaking about criminals for whom ‘ideology’ and ‘politics’ is just an excuse.”
Though secular himself, Lapid was careful to distinguish these extremist acts from the Jewish religion and Israel’s religious community. “I remember once that I read an interview with Malala Yousafzai,” he recalled, “and she was asked about religious people who shot her in the head for religious reasons. And she said, ‘They were not shooting at me for religious reasons. These were people who wanted to shoot other people and used religion as an excuse.’ This is the same. These are criminals and should be treated as such. There should be zero tolerance toward them and there will be zero tolerance toward them from the Israeli government.”
He ended by noting that “this is something I’m not just saying in English; I said this in Hebrew in a press conference a couple of weeks ago.”
This controversy goes to the heart of the current Israeli coalition’s contradictions—and may foretell its fate. Although this unlikely alliance of unlike parties was able to pull Israeli democracy back from the brink following Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption scandals, and successfully passed the country’s first budget in three and a half years, it’s an open question whether it has the ability to govern on more contentious issues. The parties came together in opposition to Netanyahu, but the government sometimes seems united by little else.
The issue of settler violence has pitted Lapid, Gantz, and the government’s left-wing and Arab parties against its right-wing and settler flanks. Is this split a harbinger of an inevitable crack-up, or an exception that will soon be resolved?
Whether the government survives long enough to give Lapid his turn in the prime minister’s chair may hinge on the answer.
There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable and listen to Indigenous communities.
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In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
COP26: Will Humanity’s ‘Last and Best Chance’ to Save Earth’s Climate Succeed?
There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable
and listen to Indigenous communities.
It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot riding on COP26, the international climate talks currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland. Officially, the gathering marks the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the third meeting of the parties to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, preferably limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Since 1995, the countries that have signed onto the UNFCCC have met every single year (except in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis. But still, every year, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up. And for a fortnight that started on October 31, world leaders will try to come up with an action plan yet again. More than 100 heads of government and some 30,000 delegates are now gathered and deliberating in Glasgow in the most recent international attempt to implement the Paris agreement goals. CNBC called the summit “humanity’s last and best chance to secure a livable future amid dramatic climate change.”
“We face a stark choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the start of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26. “It’s time to say ‘enough.’ Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves… We need maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts to make Glasgow a success.”
The summit comes just a few months after the August release of a grim report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, and that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming. The report’s authors—a group of the world’s top climate scientists convened by the United Nations—predict that by 2040, average global temperatures will be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. Guterres called the bleak findings a “code red for humanity.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the summit, likened the race to stop climate change to a spy thriller, warning that “a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.” He added, “The tragedy is this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.”
The dire assessment of the state of the planet’s climate was not lost on U.S. President Joe Biden, who called on world leaders to take aggressive action immediately to stave off the climate crisis in his remarks at the summit’s opening day. “There’s no more time to hang back or sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves,” he said. “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, the existential threat to human existence as we know it. And every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases.”
But despite all the troubling data and dire warnings, the summit has had a fairly inauspicious start. On October 30, the day before COP26 opened, leaders of the G20 nations—19 countries and the European Union, which together are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s emissions—sought to bolster international leadership on climate change as they concluded their own meeting in Rome just before the summit in Glasgow. But their deliberations ended with a whimper: a mere reaffirmation of the Paris agreement goals. During the G20 summit, Johnson said that all the world leaders’ pledges without action were “starting to sound hollow,” and he criticized the commitments as “drops in a rapidly warming ocean.” Adding to the disappointment was the fact that the summit was not attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as both Russia and China “are among the world’s biggest polluters”: Russia and China are respectively responsible for 5 percent and 28 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, respectively. Those two nations have pushed the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 ahead to 2060.
A failure in Glasgow could have grave, cascading consequences. On October 26, the UN Environment Program released a worrying report warning that with “climate change intensifying… humanity is running out of time” due to the climate promises that have been made but have not yet been delivered. Failure to stem the climate crisis “would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security. It would leave a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa. “It would mean a lot of sources of instability… [t]he catastrophic scenario would indicate that we would have massive flows of displaced people.”
“We’re really talking about preserving the stability of countries, preserving the institutions that we have built over so many years, preserving the best goals that our countries have put together,” said Espinosa, who took on the UN climate role in 2016. A former minister of foreign affairs of Mexico, Espinosa shares responsibility for the talks with UK cabinet minister Alok Sharma, who serves as the COP26 president. “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition,” Espinosa said.
In a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology, a group of international scientists found that if the world continues “business-as-usual” emissions, the impacts of the climate crisis could triple across 45 different “life zones”—distinct regions representing broad ecosystem types—across the planet. “The likely future changes in the world’s life zones is likely to have a substantial impact on [people’s] livelihoods and biodiversity,” said Dr. Paul Elsen, a climate adaptation scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and lead author of the study. “Large areas of the world are getting hotter and drier and this is already impacting the earth’s life zones,” added Elsen. The researchers predict that more than 42 percent of the planet’s land area will ultimately be affected if emissions are not significantly reduced. Dr. Hedley Grantham, director of conservation planning at WCS and a co-author of the study, said, “COP26 is our best chance of countries committing to reducing emissions and putting us on a better future pathway for climate change and its impacts.”
There have, however, been a few bright spots in the early days of the summit. On November 2, world leaders announced new plans to reduce the emissions of methane, a powerful global warming gas that “has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.” President Biden welcomed the methane agreement, calling it a “game-changing commitment,” while also announcing that for the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was going to enforce limits on the methane “released by existing oil and gas rigs across the United States.”
The Biden administration said that the government’s vast spending bill would mark the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” But with this critical climate legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, Biden’s aggressive target of reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by about half of its 2005 levels by the end of this decade will likely have to be pursued through executive actions such as regulations.
And on November 2, more than 100 nations, which together are responsible for about 85 percent of the world’s forests, agreed to a landmark $19 billion plan to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Prime Minister Johnson said that it is critical for the success of COP26 “that we act now and we end the role of humanity as nature’s conqueror, and instead become nature’s custodian,” adding that “[w]e have to stop the devastating loss of our forests, these great teeming ecosystems—three-trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature—that are the lungs of our planet.”
In other welcome news, 14 nations including the United States, working on the sidelines of COP26, backed a Denmark-led initiative to reduce global maritime emissions to zero by 2050. “With around 90 percent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly 3 percent of global CO2 emissions,” according to Reuters.
Indeed, non-state actors, i.e., businesses, are key participants in the world’s climate goals. UN chief Guterres said that the private sector has a critical role to play in this fight—and the UN will judge the performance of businesses’ pledges to achieve net-zero emissions. “I will establish a group of experts to propose clear standards to measure and analyze net-zero commitments from non-state actors,” which will go beyond mechanisms that have been established by the Paris climate accord, he said.
In the U.S., businesses are trying to influence Biden’s massive spending plan. “Across industries, business groups successfully pushed lawmakers to make significant changes to key sections of the original $3.5 trillion bill. Their lobbying efforts revolved around Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who ultimately sided with the business community on several issues… The White House plan does not raise tax rates on corporations—keeping a central part of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts intact—in a stunning win for business interests,” stated an article in the Hill.
“This growing call for action can’t be underestimated,” writes EFL contributor Patti Lynn, executive director of Corporate Accountability, a consumer advocacy group, in Truthout, referring to the surge in climate activism across the world in recent years. But she also offered a caveat: “We need great social and economic change to fully and justly solve the climate crisis, and no change on this scale happens without public engagement fueling the political will to create such changes. But we also must be clear-eyed about what stands in the way of achieving such transformative change.” She added that for the world to move “from visions to actual policies that are just and effective, we must address the largest obstacle that lies between today’s status quo and a livable future for all: the influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate policy.”
Rainforest Action Network, a nonprofit environmental group, also trained their sights on the private sector, tweeting, “World leaders… must meet the climate crisis by holding brands and banks accountable to end fossil fuel expansion and deforestation.” But the COP26 homepage suggests a different story: Unilever, Scottish Power, Sainsbury’s, National Grid, Microsoft, Hitachi and GSK are some of the many corporations that COP26 thanks as “principal partners.”
And while many private firms, including several of the COP26 partners, have made significant climate commitments, they are often met with criticisms of “greenwashing”—appearing that they are climate-friendly when in fact, the promises are often not regulated by governments and actually not making a dent. “Businesses are the big polluters,” said Kristian Ronn, CEO and co-founder of Normative, a Swedish startup that has launched a carbon emissions tracker that he says can help end corporate greenwashing. The private sector is “responsible for two-thirds of the total emissions,” he said. “So they need to account for the footprint and mitigate that footprint, because essentially what gets measured gets managed.” He added, “There are no mechanisms in place to ensure the completeness of the information.”
COP26 partner Microsoft, for example, has formed Transform to Net Zero, a new initiative with several other companies, including Nike and Starbucks, to help the private sector achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But as Emily Pontecorvo reports in Grist, “There’s one gaping hole that persists in Microsoft’s climate action, one that the company has been repeatedly criticized for: How can it expect to pull more carbon out of the air than it puts in if it’s actively helping fossil fuel companies find and pull more oil and gas out of the ground?”
As world leaders attempt to hammer out a path to achieve the Paris climate accord goals, they would do well to listen to the world’s Indigenous people, who have been successful caretakers of their ecosystems for many generations—including 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, though they represent just 5 percent of the global population—but who are suffering on the front lines of the climate fights, from deforestation to rising seas.
Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance, and an EFL contributor, wrote an open letter to world leaders in 2020 that is even more important today. “When you say that the oil companies have marvelous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills,” writes Nenquimo, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. “When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land.”
Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, CounterPunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
COP 26: Can a Singing, Dancing Rebellion Save the World?
Like Greta’s School Strike for the Climate, the climate movement in the streets of Glasgow is informed by the recognition that the science is clear and the solutions to the climate crisis are readily available. It is only political will that is lacking. This must be supplied by ordinary people, from all walks of life, through creative, dramatic action and mass mobilization, to demand the political and economic transformation we so desperately need.
Murder, Rape, and Torture: Fortress Conservation on Trial
On October 26, a Natural Resources subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing titled, “Protecting Human
Rights in International Conservation.” Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA) chaired the session. The nearly two-hour-long hearing, excruciating to watch, put “fortress conservation” on trial. The atrocities discussed during that hearing were, in the eyes of Fiore Longo of Survival International, conservation industry’s “Abu Ghraib scandal,” a moment from which the industry “will never recover.” But you likely don’t know anything about this because the hearing was not reported in the U.S. mainstream press. Silence from The New York Times. Crickets from the Washington Post.
On November 1, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres opened his remarks at the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, with these words: “The six years, since the Paris Climate Agreement, have been the six hottest years on record. Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: either we stop it, or it stops us. And it’s time to say, enough. Enough of brutalizing biodiversity…!”
It was not the first time that Secretary General Guterres had acknowledged the biodiversity crisis gripping our planet in such a prominent manner. In September, during his address to the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he used similar language to deplore the “shocking biodiversity loss.”
For many years now I have been urging policy makers and the public to recognize that the intensifying biodiversity crisis is just as significant and consequential as the climate crisis. To hear the UN Secretary General, begin his remarks at COP26 with a reference to devastating biodiversity loss was reassuring. Such public acknowledgements of the current crisis are desperately needed to convince people that the time to act is now.
With that preamble, let me now accompany you to an unprecedented congressional hearing that took place just last week in the United States, a hearing that clarified to me that the “brutalizing” of biodiversity has many faces and takes many forms.
On October 26, a Natural Resources subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing titled, “Protecting Human Rights in International Conservation.” Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA) chaired the session. The nearly two-hour-long hearing, excruciating to watch, put “fortress conservation” on trial. The atrocities discussed during that hearing were, in the eyes of Fiore Longo of Survival International, conservation industry’s “Abu Ghraib scandal,” a moment from which the industry “will never recover.” But you likely don’t know anything about this because the hearing was not reported in the U.S. mainstream press. Silence from The New York Times. Crickets from the Washington Post.
Before I discuss the hearing, a few words about fortress conservation may prove helpful.
The Dawn of “Fortress Conservation”
Fortress conservation originated in the United States with the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872. In his very readable book, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001), grounded in meticulous scholarship, historian Karl Jacoby relates the origin story of the Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world. Five tribes—the Crow, Bannock, Shoshone, Blackfeet, and Nez Perce—actively used the Yellowstone Plateau for subsistence hunting and gathering. Undeterred, supporters of the park idea “persisted in describing the region as existing in ‘primeval solitude,’ filled with countless locations that ‘have never been trodden by human footsteps.’” And thus began the ignominious era of conservation colonialism. “Drawing upon a familiar vocabulary of discovery and exploration, the authors of the early accounts of the Yellowstone region literally wrote Indians out of the landscape, erasing Indian claims by reclassifying inhabited territory as empty wilderness,” writes Jacoby. Subsistence hunters were denounced as “poachers,” inhabitants ridiculed as “squatters,” and subsistence gatherers branded as “thieves,” charges that criminalized the age-old cultural activities of the land’s original inhabitants.
Yellowstone National Park was the first and the most iconic example of fortress conservation. The idea is straightforward: establish a fortress, drawing a hard boundary around an area deemed worthy of conservation; evict the original human inhabitants; and declare their traditional practices illegal.
After displacing Indigenous peoples in the United States, fortress conservation continued its colonial march through Asia and Africa. In his influential, combative essay “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” first published in Environmental Ethics in 1989, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha wrote this: “The initial impetus for setting up parks for the tiger and other large mammals such as the rhinoceros and elephant came from two social groups, first, a class of ex-hunters turned conservationists belonging mostly to the declining Indian feudal elite and second, representatives of international agencies, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), seeking to transplant the American system of national parks onto Indian soil. In no case have the needs of the local population been taken into account, and as in many parts of Africa, the designated wildlands are managed primarily for the benefit of rich tourists.”
In the thirty-two years since Guha penned those words, fortress conservation has only expanded its tentacular grasp, reaching deep into the hearts and pockets of the global South. The brutality of that reach was laid bare during last week’s House hearing.
Investigative Reports Spark Congressional Hearing
In 2019, BuzzFeed News published a series of investigative reports that exposed the mistreatment of Indigenous and local peoples in and around parks managed or co-managed by the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. “Murder. Gruesome torture. Dozens of reports of rape. Burning a village. Killing men, women, and children. Conducting night raids and terrifying local community members.” These charges rang out during the opening remarks of Rep. Huffman, who added: “When I saw these articles, I immediately asked the (House Natural Resources) Committee to start an investigation.”
Warning the attendees that the incidents to be discussed were graphic, the Congressman provided representative examples, each one more chilling than the last. “In one report, a park ranger in Salonga National Park (in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC) whipped and raped four women carrying fish by a river. Two of the women were pregnant, one later had a miscarriage. In another case, a 52-year-old woman said she was arbitrarily detained and raped for two consecutive days and her husband had to pay a fine to secure her release. Another victim alleged that he and several other men were detained while fishing, and were tortured by rangers beating them, tying their penises with fishing line, hanging them by the branch of a tree. In another case, victims were tortured and killed by rangers through beating and stabbings. And these were not isolated incidents. WWF’s review found 21 accusations of murder in this one park alone.” Fiore Longo’s comparison between these atrocities and the Abu Ghraib scandal was not far-fetched.
Let’s make an important distinction at this juncture. Thanks to the important work of Global Witness, the extrajudicial killings of “environmental defenders” (as they are traditionally called) are widely known and have been reported in the press. Most of those killings are committed by corporations and nation states who aim to expand destructive drilling, mining, and other capitalist projects into territories inhabited by Indigenous and other local peoples. But the murder, rape, and torture that were discussed in the House hearing are of a different nature. Here the victims are not environmental defenders but local people who live in or around protected parks. And the perpetrators are the good guys, or so one would think: the park rangers, known as “ecoguards” in central Africa, whose salaries are paid for by WWF.
A key aim of the hearing was to find out if WWF would take responsibility for the atrocities. Sadly, the answer, as the hearing revealed, was a resounding NO!
“To be perfectly blunt, I and others on this Committee have been extremely frustrated with how WWF handled the situation,” Rep. Huffman pointed out, referring to the time that had passed since the BuzzFeed revelations. The hearing, as it turned out, did little to alleviate his frustration. “Unfortunately, WWF’s President and CEO Carter Roberts declined to testify,” Rep. Huffman said. In Roberts’ place, Ginette Hemley, Senior Vice President for Conservation at WWF, appeared. She boldly went where her bosses had feared to tread. They would have been proud of her: Hemley refused to give straight yes or no answers when asked and her remarks were evasive and misleading, including, in several instances, blatant lies.
Murder. Rape. Torture.
Among the witnesses who testified at the hearing was Professor John Knox of the Wake Forest University School of Law, who is a former and the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment. In 2019 and 2020, following the allegations reported in BuzzFeed News, he participated in an independent expert panel which, in his words, “conducted an in-depth investigation of WWF’s involvement in alleged human rights abuses in six countries, four in central Africa and two in south Asia.” His 30-page written testimony provides shocking details about those abuses. Here is one example, in Knox’s painstaking reconstruction delivered during the hearing:
“WWF has co-managed Salonga National Park in the DRC since 2015. WWF appoints the Park Director and pays the park rangers. Salonga is an example of fortress conservation. When the park was created the government expelled the communities who used to live there; they now live around the outskirts of the park, and it’s illegal for them to return to their ancestral homes. In 2016, a WWF staff member reported that Salonga park rangers were regularly accused of abuses against the local communities. The WWF country Director and park Director decided not to investigate because they wanted to avoid conflicts with the government. Only after NGOs made public allegations of abuse in the park the WWF commissioned an independent investigation which finally took place in 2019, nearly three years after the staff member first raised the alarm. The investigators went to only a few of the hundreds of villages around the park but they found multiple credible allegations of murder, rape, and torture. In fact, they concluded that rangers used torture and other cruel integrating treatment as a regular part of their operations. WWF has never published this report. WWF continues to provide financial and material support to the park. The surrounding communities still don’t have access to the park, and there is no reason to believe that the abuses have magically stopped.”
Professor Knox didn’t mince words about the WWF’s stonewalling at the hearing: “WWF’s statement to this subcommittee shows that WWF’s leadership is still in a state of denial about its own role in fortress conservation and human rights abuses.”
After Knox’s remarks, Rep. Huffman engaged Ms. Hemley of WWF in a back and forth that was, to put it mildly, exasperating.
Rep. Huffman takes on the WWF
Rather than giving Ms. Hemley another opportunity to air her falsehoods and obfuscations, I want to share some of the more memorable rejoinders by Rep. Huffman. The tenor of Ms. Hemley’s non-answers, devoid of further substance, can be deduced from Rep. Huffman’s insistent prodding.
Huffman: I noted, Ms. Hemley that, you are very careful in how you describe these park rangers. Every time you mention them, you call them, government park rangers. You might just as well mention that these are WWF trained and supported rangers driving around, often in WWF-branded vehicles, in parks managed and funded by WWF. The first things you mentioned were the fact that the rangers accused of abuse were employed and managed by governments, not WWF. There are a number of damning—damning facts in [the panel’s findings] and yet, we’d never know it from listening to your testimony here today. So, let me just ask you: Do you believe WWF bears any responsibility for the abuses that happened in any of the parks that it manages or co-manages?
Huffman: Just yes or no, Ms. Hemley. It’s a simple question: Does WWF bear any responsibility for abuses at the parks you manage?
Huffman: You are declining to answer yes or no, whether you bear any responsibility.
Huffman: I’m not going to give up all my time for you to deflect and dissemble, ma’am, with all due respect. To our knowledge, not a single person in the leadership at WWF has lost their job or resigned over any of these incidents, including the people that that panel found received allegations of human rights abuse and chose not to act on them. So not a single person within the WWF network lost their job. Is that correct?
Huffman: It’s a yes or no question, ma’am.
Huffman: No. No. No. No. You hear my question. It’s a yes or no.
Huffman: There you go again, ma’am. I’m asking, did anyone lose their job? Yes or no.
Huffman: I can only take that as a “NO” and, that itself is just as remarkable.
Rep. Huffman’s frustration brings to mind another, more high profile, congressional hearing that also happened last week, during which the heads of four oil companies (BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell Oil) and two trade groups (American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), collectively known as the “Slippery Six,” testified before members of the U.S. Congress. The hearing was chaired by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).
In a tweet, Rep. Maloney wrote: “I demanded that Big Oil Execs pledge to simply no longer spend ANY MONEY to oppose emission reductions and climate action. Unsurprisingly, none took the pledge.” At the end of the hearing, she stated her intent to issue subpoenas to BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute for documents they have withheld from the congressional committee’s investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s climate disinformation campaign. “We need to get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas, we will,” Rep. Maloney said.
Will Rep. Huffman also try to “get to the bottom” of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the WWF? Given that Carter Roberts, the CEO of WWF, declined to appear at Rep. Huffman’s congressional hearing and that the testimony of his proxy Ginette Hemley was marked by evasions and lies, will Rep. Huffman also issue a subpoena to WWF, and possibly other large conservation NGOs, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, who are also implicated in human rights abuses in the global South?
International Conservation Funding
The U.S. Department of Interior channels millions of dollars into the coffers of the WWF and other large U.S.-based conservation organizations in support of their international work. The House subcommittee’s “bi-partisan investigation into WWF’s practices and the Department of Interior’s oversight of international conservation funding” has yielded clear and unambiguous evidence that crimes were committed by the WWF. It would seem obvious what needs to happen now. Professor Knox predicted that “organizations like WWF will not change their behavior until the United States and other donor governments force them to do so by withholding grants until they make the necessary changes.” And he went on to offer three concrete steps: “First, WWF needs to apologize for its past human rights abuses; take responsibility for its failures; and be open and honest going forward. A good starting point would be, for WWF to commit, here, today, to publish all of its internal reports on human rights abuses. It should never again be the case that the U.S. government finds out about these abuses in parks that it supports only after they are reported in the press. Second, there should be clear red lines. Parks should not receive support unless they have demonstrated respect for Indigenous rights, effective training, and oversight for park rangers, and access to complaint mechanisms for local communities. Finally, to receive funding for any purpose, WWF and other conservation organizations should demonstrate that they have expertise on Indigenous peoples and human rights compliance at every level of the organization, including at the top.”
Now, consider this sinister scenario: what if WWF, which operates in more than 100 countries, suddenly stops taking money from the U.S. government but continues its current practice of fortress conservation and human rights abuses? Will the U.S. government still be able to hold WWF accountable for human rights violations that result from the organization’s operations outside of the United States? Likely not. And that scenario is not as unrealistic as it sounds. For it seems entirely possible that WWF may no longer need U.S. government money; the shortfall could be met by private funding.
In September, nine U.S.-based foundations and NGOs collectively pledged five billion dollars for conservation; a significant chunk of that could certainly go to WWF. Although there is enormous need for conservation funding in the United States, as numerous species are in peril here, not a single one of those nine organizations has expressed major interest in supporting conservation in the U.S. Instead, from what we know so far, their funds are headed for the global South. In a recent opinion piece, I characterized the pledge as “billions for biodiversity boondoggle” and brought attention to the potential colonial violence that the boondoggle might unleash on the global South. In that piece, I focused my analysis on one of the smaller institutions, Rainforest Trust, and the largest, the Bezos Earth Fund. Both of those entities have explicitly expressed their intention to provide support for conservation in the Congo Basin. This was the main region discussed in the House hearing where unimaginable human rights abuses have occurred in the name of conservation, including in and around the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in Messok Dja, a forested area on the northern border of the Republic of the Congo.
In light of the “billions for biodiversity boondoggle,” I’m not so sure that Professor Knox’s action plan will provide the remedy that is needed.
Where I Find Hope
“Going forward, we will see legislation in response to these matters that we have been discussing today,” Rep. Huffman said at the closing of the hearing. I’m cautiously hopeful.
On October 26, the day the hearing was held, the Princeton University Press published a significant and beautifully produced book, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective, edited by Dr. Karl Kusserow of the Princeton University Art Museum. The back cover of the book features a humble photograph I took in 2002. It shows my friend Charlie Swaney, from Arctic Village, Alaska, in his hunting camp along the East Fork of the Chandalar River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, scanning the landscape for animals.
That photograph acquired its own history. During 2001-2002, I traveled to Washington, DC several times to take part in various activist campaigns. During one of those visits, upon seeing my photograph, a young environmental activist demanded to know, with honest bewilderment, “How could there be a hunting camp in a pristine wilderness?” That day, I didn’t have a good answer. But that young activist’s question, more than anything else, prompted me to learn more and think deeply about the history of American conservation.
More than sixty years ago, the Arctic Refuge was established without consulting the Indigenous peoples who have lived there for thousands of years. Having been involved in protecting the refuge over the last two decades, I can confidently state that the Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the conservation campaign to protect the refuge from industrial development. In this campaign, Gwich’in and Iñupiat peoples collaborate with each other as part of a larger coalition of conscience that includes environmental NGOs, religious organizations, human rights groups, and more. The unlikely alliances that have emerged from these collaborations are the subject of historian Finis Dunaway’s recent and revelatory book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (2021).
Biodiversity conservation does not need to look like a horror movie that we witnessed at the House hearing. It can be just. It can be inclusive. It can protect our nonhuman relatives. It can support the needs of Indigenous and other ecosystem peoples. It can protect the relations those people have built with their nonhuman kin.
I do strongly believe that we are living through a significant turning point in the history of biodiversity conservation. Moving forward, rights-based approaches should shape global conservation policy. I hope that fortress conservation will fade away as a historic, racist relic.
Subhankar Banerjee is editor of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point and co-editor of Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. He is the Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair and a professor of Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico where he serves as the founding director of both the UNM Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities and the Species in Peril project.
As the Planet Wants to Go Green, France Has a Nuclear Habit It Just Cannot Kick
Throughout his tenure as president, Macron has said that the key to an “ecological future depends on nuclear power.” A few days before the opening of the 26th United Nations Climate
Change Conference in Glasgow, Macron was asked to reflect on Europe’s crisis over rising natural gas prices (mostly sourced from Russia’s Gazprom). “It’s not about whether we are too dependent on a company or not,” Macron replied. “It’s about how to create alternatives. The only alternatives are to have European renewable energies and, of course, European nuclear power.”
Words without Action: The West’s Role in Israel’s Illegal Settlement Expansion
The international uproar in response to Israel’s approval of a massive expansion of its illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian West Bank may give the impression that such a reaction could, in theory, force Israel to abandon its plans. Alas, it will not, because the statements of ‘concern,’ ‘regrets’, ‘disappointment’ and even outright condemnation are
rarely followed by meaningful action.
Cultivating Resistance: Food, Dependency and Dispossession
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The United Nations is currently sanctioning groups in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Libya, Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Mali. Sanctions in Non-African countries include Iraq, Yemen, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
Lebanon, and North Korea. The Security Council states that “since 1966, the Security Council has established 30 sanctions regimes, in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia (2), Haiti, Iraq (2), Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Eritrea, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Liberia (3), DRC, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Lebanon, DPRK, Iran, Libya (2), Guinea-Bissau, CAR, Yemen, South Sudan and Mali, as well as against ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida and the Taliban.” None of the sanctioned countries are developed countries to begin with – sanctions devastate their capacities for future development.
The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel’s Philosophy
Although painted with a broad stroke, the history of the greatest minds in Europe has been one which sniffs at the activities for which their abstract mind games depended on. However, can labor
be thought of as something done for purposes not limited to those of consumption? Can labor be fruitful and meaningful in itself? In Georg Hegel, for the first time in a prominent western theorist, the response is YES! In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right one can see what I have elsewhere called a “world-historic shift” in how labor is conceived: from labor as an unfortunate necessity, towards labor as a valuable expression of creative activity which constitutes a moment of liberation
Pornography: Doing the Worst to Women, Bringing out the Worst in Men
It has been almost 60 years now—sixty years and 10 presidential administrations—since John F. Kennedy was murdered in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. In all that time, certain things have hardened into concrete certainty. First, opinion polls have shown that a majority of the American people do not believe important elements of the official story arising from the Warren Commission’s investigation. In other words, a majority of the American people believe that the President of the United States got iced in the middle of the day, and that at least some people other than those currently in the record were involved in the crime. And we’ve all learned to live with that belief. If people are angry at Condoleezza Rice for talking about “moving on” from the events of January 6—and we shall deal with that later in the blogging day—then what do we make of how we steadily “moved on” despite the commonly held belief that some people got away with killing the president?
The other consistent phenomenon in the long aftermath of this crime is that, given a chance to dispel some of the suspicion and doubt attending the assassination, the United States government will dance enthusiastically on its own dick. The more conspiratorially minded of our fellow citizens conclude from this that the government is clumsily trying to dodge its own complicity. This has remained true even as the fight to release government records has ground out significant victories over the past two decades. Nevertheless, every bungle from every administration, Republican or Democratic, only deepens the suspicions. And now, the Biden Administration has joined its predecessors in adding to all that. From the New York Times:
The White House statement, signed by President Biden, did not make clear exactly how the coronavirus had delayed the release of the records, which must be released to comply with a 1992 congressional act, but said that the national archivist reported that the pandemic had a “significant impact on the agencies” that need to be consulted on redactions…The White House statement said that the National Archives required additional time to conduct research and work with the agencies, which include the Defense, Justice and State departments.
OK, so the pandemic is an all-purpose alibi for everything, but the official White House statement has a passage containing a dog that hasn’t hunted at least since the House Select Committee on Assassinations wrapped things up in 1978.
In the White House statement on Friday, President Biden said he agreed with the archivist’s recommendation that records be withheld from public disclosure until December 2022. “Temporary continued postponement,” he said, “is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”
It was 58 goddamn years ago. Most of the principals, known and unknown, are likely really, most sincerely, dead. Many of the countries with which we had “foreign relations” in 1963, and many of the countries against which we were defending ourselves, don’t even exist anymore. I suspect the vole in the turnips here lies somewhere between “intelligence operations” and “law enforcement.” Still, anyone who might be made uncomfortable even in that regard likely has gone off to the great stakeout in the sky.
My guess? The “intelligence community” is still covering up what it covered up in 1963. That would include what they knew about Oswald prior to the assassination and, probably, a helluva lot more about what was going on with the plot against Castro. Were there any documentary evidence concerning American involvement with the crime itself, I’m assuming that went into the shredder—or up James Jesus Angleton’s chimney—decades ago. But the Biden administration’s pale excuse for delaying the release of the records has been so thinned through the years that you can see right through it.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially said the House would not take up the infrastructure plan until after the broader bill had passed, but in recent days she has effectively decoupled the bills. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/NYT)
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House progressives are headed toward a major clash over the strategy to implement President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, replaying a debate from earlier this fall over the sequencing of key votes and threatening to torpedo a sweeping infrastructure bill in the process.
Top Democrats insist that a framework deal on Biden's social safety net package should be enough for members to vote for a separate $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, but progressives say that is not sufficient to secure their support for the infrastructure bill.
Pelosi and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal emerged from a meeting on Tuesday at odds. Asked by CNN to respond to comments from Jayapal that a framework would not be adequate to vote for the infrastructure bill, Pelosi said defiantly, "I think it is."
Leading up to the meeting, top congressional Democrats had been forecasting that a deal on the larger package would be enough to get progressives on board with a vote on the bipartisan measure this week before key highway funding runs out on October 31.
But Jayapal squashed those hopes Tuesday afternoon. "There are some people who just want us to vote (the infrastructure bill) out on a framework," the Washington state Democrat said. "And I explained why our members don't want to do that."
The differing opinions between Pelosi and Jayapal over the kind of security a framework on the larger spending bill provides raise questions over whether Democrats can realistically bring the infrastructure bill to the floor this week. If Pelosi moves forward on the infrastructure bill with just a framework on the larger spending package -- which is a long way away from bill text and a floor vote -- she would be taking a gamble that progressives will abandon their long-held position that they want both bills to move together.
"It's not enough for me," progressive Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri tweeted Tuesday, responding to Pelosi's comments that a framework on the social safety net package was enough to move forward. "And there are more of us."
Earlier in the day, Pelosi had said she believed an agreement stating that the House and Senate would have to pass the same social safety net bill, with the Senate not being allowed to add any amendments, would unlock the standstill Democrats are in.
"Without an agreement, we don't even have a discussion," Pelosi said ahead of the meeting.
Progressive Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin suggested that Biden could provide progressives with the assurances they need, even though his preference would still be to have a vote in both chambers.
"If the President tells us the votes are there," Pocan said, with the promise of no last-minute votes added in the Senate to change the contents of the bill, "I trust the President, and that would probably match the assurances that we've asked for."
The meeting between Jayapal and Pelosi was one of several high-profile Democratic meetings on Tuesday, a sign that negotiators are quickly searching for an agreement with time running out.
Leaders from five critical House Democratic caucuses traveled to the White House to meet with senior staff on Biden's climate and economic package, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Senate Democratic leaders hope to get a deal on a framework by the end of the day Wednesday, senators told CNN Tuesday afternoon.
Progressives push for Medicare expansion, drug price negotiation and paid leave
Aside from the process and vote sequencing issues, progressives are warning that their priorities must not be left behind as Democratic leaders race to finalize a deal on the social safety net plan and push for a House vote on infrastructure.
Moderate Democrats, such as Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been influential in scaling back the overall size and ambition of what will be included in the larger package, much to the dismay of progressives. But if progressives withhold their votes for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the House will not be able to pass it -- a scenario that played out once before at the end of September.
"I'm pissed off, man," progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York told CNN, about how Manchin has had an outsized role in scaling back the social safety net bill. "It's just unacceptable to me that one person from one state can have all this power."
While Pelosi told reporters after a closed door meeting Tuesday morning with Democrats that the social safety net bill is 90% written, major sticking points remain unresolved, including how much it will cost and how to pay for it.
Policy issues ranging from paid family leave provisions to an expansion of Medicare and prescription drug price negotiation have also become flashpoints that have divided progressives and moderates with no clear resolution.
The social safety net package aims to address key Democratic agenda items from health care to climate change to aid for families, but she said all outstanding decisions have to largely be made by the end of the day.
"There's not much more time," Pelosi said. "We have to have decisions largely today. A little bit into tomorrow. So, we can proceed."
Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters Tuesday that how the massive social spending bill handles both climate and health care will be "determinative."
"I think there are some areas where we feel good about," the New York Democrat said. "For me, the major outstanding pieces are on climate, and on health care, particularly Medicare and prescription drug prices. That's really where I think a lot of us are waiting to hear back on. And it's going to be quite determinative."
Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Tuesday that the bill must include "real" authority for Medicare to negotiate drug prices -- something that has caused major issues with moderates, and that the bill must expand Medicare to include dental, hearing, vision coverage, another sticking point with moderates.
"Any serious reconciliation bill must include real Medicare negotiation to the pharmaceutical industry to lower the cost of prescription drugs. ... Any serious reconciliation bill must include expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing aids and eyeglasses," Sanders said.
He would not respond when asked by CNN if it was a red line.
Democrats are aiming to pass the social safety net package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to pass it in the Senate without any GOP votes. That maneuver, however, means that Democrats cannot afford to lose any Democratic votes in the Senate.
Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said on Tuesday that she's not giving up on trying to get paid family leave into the bill, another thorny issue that has caused conflict within the party.
"I'm going to continue to push," DeLauro, a close ally of Pelosi, told reporters on Tuesday. "I take it a day at a time, my friends. It's not over until it's over."
DeLauro, a longtime advocate for both the child tax credit and paid family leave, said she hadn't heard much discussion about work requirements or means testing for the child tax credit.
Jayapal cautioned against drawing red lines on whether any particular provision being stripped out would change her opinion of the overall package, and said lawmakers need to wait for the package to be done.
"We just have to look at the whole thing. But obviously, some of the big priorities that we've had are all still on the table."
As much as progressives are fighting to get more of their priorities included in the package, many feel that without their pushing in the first place to keep the infrastructure bill linked to the social safety net bill, none of this extra spending would happen.
"I'll just remind everyone we would have had an infrastructure bill one week and probably have none of this had it not been for a few of us being willing to vote against the infrastructure bill," Pocan said. "And within a week, we've gone from $0 to $1.5 to $2 trillion in the second bill. So you know, we're going to look at it in that context."
Details on billionaire's tax expected Tuesday night
On top of there being uncertainty about whether certain programs are going to make it into the final package, there are still questions over how Democrats solidify how they pay for it.
Sinema opposed increasing the corporate tax rate and the top marginal rate on individuals, which sent Democrats back to the drawing board. In the race to find alternative ways to pay for their massive social spending and climate change package, Democrats are now targeting the wealth of the richest Americans. The problem is most still have not seen the details of the billionaire tax that is being floated.
Pelosi told members in the closed door meeting Tuesday morning that Democrats are still waiting for the language around the proposed billionaire tax from the Senate, according to a source in the room.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters that he still had not seen the language of the billionaire tax.
"I haven't seen it on paper. As a matter of fact, it's not on paper yet," Hoyer said.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden told reporters later in the afternoon that there will be details and paper released Tuesday night on the billionaire's tax proposal.
White House senior officials Steve Ricchetti and Brian Deese met with Sinema on Capitol Hill earlier Tuesday, according to a source familiar.
Separately, Sinema is in talks with Senate Democrats, including Wyden, on both the billionaires' tax and a corporate minimum tax, respectively, and is close to agreement on both issues
Prominent moderate says 'we still have work to do'
At the same time, moderate Democrats are also working to assert leverage over the process.
Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who has been part of the moderate group of members pushing for the bipartisan infrastructure bill to get a standalone vote, told reporters after the Democratic caucus meeting that it's time for members to start selling what's in the social safety net bill, and not focus on what might not make it into the final version.
"There's a lot of good things. Don't look at things that were not included," Cuellar said. "We've got to start selling and there's so much to sell."
Cuellar said Pelosi made her pitch to members in the room, including progressives, that the goal is to focus on the end result of the process.
"I think she was teaching Government 101. Just telling the members, 'Hey, this is the way the process works. It's not what you want. It's what you can get out of the process.' She did an excellent job," Cuellar said.
Cuellar said he was sitting next to a progressive in the meeting who was unsure about voting for the infrastructure bill because of where things stood with the social safety net package and Cuellar relayed to reporters that he told that member, "'Hey, listen, we all went through that. We all go through that, but that's legislation. I mean, that's what you do when you legislate. You look at things and you compromise, not only among ourselves, but with the Senate also."
Leaving a meeting in Pelosi's office on Tuesday, Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said, "We still have work to do" on the social safety net proposal. The meeting was held with members from New Jersey and Virginia -- two states holding elections next week -- to stress the importance of passing the infrastructure bill as well as the larger social safety net package.
"We were talking about the areas where we need to keep moving the ball," Gottheimer said, though he declined to name them. "We're slowly getting there."
"We were all talking about the importance of getting this done now, and that we can't wait any longer," he said.
The U.S. State Department on Tuesday said it was “deeply concerned” about an Israeli government plan to advance thousands of settlement units in the West Bank on Wednesday.
Spokesman Ned Price also said the U.S. was concerned about another 1300 tenders sought for West Bank settlements this past weekend.
“We strongly oppose the expansion of settlements, which is completely inconsistent with efforts to lower tensions and to ensure calm,” Price said, adding it “damages the prospects for a two state solution.”
Meanwhile, Israel is sending an envoy to Washington amid a deepening rift with the Biden administration over six outlawed Palestinian rights groups, a Foreign Ministry official said Tuesday.
Israel last week designated the prominent Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations, sparking international criticism and repeated assertions by Israel’s top strategic partner, the United States, that there had been no advance warning of the move.
Israel’s decision marked what critics say was a major escalation of its decades-long crackdown on political activism in the occupied territories. The U.S. State Department has said it would seek more information on the decision.
Joshua Zarka, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official, told Israeli Army Radio the envoy would “give them all the details and to present them all the intelligence” during his visit in the coming days.
The rights groups decision is emerging as a test of the relationship between the Biden administration and Israel’s new government, which was formed in June by eight politically disparate parties. The coalition ended the 12-year rule of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the U.N.’s Resolution on Chinese representation, Price reiterated that the U.S supports “Taiwan’s ability to participate meaningfully at the U.N. and to contribute its valuable expertise to address many of the global challenges we face.”
The State Department confirmed in a weekend statement that U.S. and Taiwanese officials had met virtually for a “discussion focused on supporting Taiwan’s ability to participate meaningfully at the UN.”
Wealthy donors rushed funds to conservative Democrats after they threatened to torpedo the Build Back Better plan.
The mid-August uprising against President Joe Biden’s agenda was rewarded with an avalanche of campaign contributions from some of the country’s wealthiest donors, many of them with shared connections to the dark-money group No Labels, a review of federal campaign disclosure records finds.
On August 12, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic head of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and eight colleagues sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter demanding she put a corporate-backed infrastructure plan on the House floor immediately. They wanted Pelosi to abandon the two-track strategy to tie the bipartisan infrastructure deal to the reconciliation deal. By doing so, Pelosi would have let go of major leverage she had over conservative Democrats to commit to finishing the reconciliation process.
On August 13, the day after sending the letter to Pelosi, three of Gottheimer’s co-signers had their single best fundraising days of the year until that point. Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, got $99,000, more than he raised in the entire first half of this year and twice what he got in the prior six weeks, while Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Jim Costa, D-Calif., collected $131,000 and $106,000, respectively. Schrader was one of three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who joined Republicans last month to vote down a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices so it could afford to include vision, hearing, and dental benefits. The proposal is now on the chopping block from the reconciliation package.
On August 19, the day after he appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to advocate an immediate floor vote on the infrastructure bill, Gottheimer had his best fundraising day of the third quarter, taking in more than $124,000. His co-signers Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux, D-Ga.; Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas; and Jared Golden, D-Maine, also raised more on August 19 than any other day throughout the third quarter, all receiving at least $109,000.
The rush of donations appears to have come from an organized campaign or joint fundraiser: Nearly every single one of Case’s roughly 70 donors on August 13 — many of whom were financiers and consultants — also gave to Schrader and Costa that day. The three lawmakers’ average donation sizes on August 13 were more than $1,100, and none of Case or Schrader’s scores of donors that day live in their respective states.
Some of their shared donors are linked to No Labels, whose high-income members face greater taxes under Build Back Better, which would roll back some of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. The maximum $5,800 arrived from insurance industry veteran James Stanard, real estate developer Steven Fifield, and banker David Roscoe — all of whom joined a June phone call hosted by the group where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., urged callers to use their influence to defend the filibuster, which is blocking Democrats’ voting rights legislation and other reforms.
The overwhelming majority of Case, Schrader, and Costa’s August 13 donors also gave to Gottheimer, Gonzalez, and Golden on August 19, including Fifield and Roscoe. Nearly every one of Gottheimer’s 118 contributors on August 19 donated to Gonzalez and Golden that day. Meanwhile, most of Bourdeaux’s donors during that rush in fundraising are not identifiable, as $150,000 of her $173,000 daily total came from shielded individuals with the No Labels Problem Solvers Caucus PAC, a political action committee linked with the Problem Solvers Caucus. Bourdeaux is by far the PAC’s largest recipient of campaign contributions this year, followed by South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
Gottheimer and his letter co-signers — together known as the Unbreakable Nine — held their ground after demanding that Pelosi let go of her leverage over them, driving the House speaker on August 24 to agree to call a floor vote on the infrastructure bill in late September. Massive checks continued to arrive from people linked to No Labels and other wealthy donors. Between August 13 and 27, a few days after Pelosi made the deal, Gottheimer and his colleagues collectively raised more than $3.1 million.
In that 15-day period, Bourdeaux gained the most among the group of obstructionists: $635,000, or the bulk of the $704,000 she raised in the whole third quarter. Schrader and Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, also got more than half a million dollars, or the majority of their quarterly donations. The others — Gottheimer, Case, Costa, Gonzalez, and Golden — all raised at least $240,000. (The ninth, Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Texas, is not running for reelection in 2022 and has hardly done any fundraising this year.)
Also in August, as The Intercept reported, No Labels dangled $200,000 before two co-signers of the Gottheimer letter, Bourdeaux and Gonzalez, in exchange for canceling an August 21 fundraiser with Pelosi. Gonzalez ultimately did not attend; in the five days that followed, he took in more than $110,000 cashing checks from billionaires like hedge fund manager Louis Bacon and insurance firm founder William R. Berkley, both active contributors to Problem Solvers Caucus members. In September, he raised another $365,000.
Other Democrats who belong to the Problem Solvers Caucus but didn’t sign onto Gottheimer’s letter to Pelosi did not receive the same rush of money. For example, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., raised close to $91,000 between August 13 and 27 — a more modest amount, apace with the roughly $830,000 she took in during the third quarter. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., raised $123,000, and $716,000 for the quarter. Slotkin’s average donation size during the 15-day period was about $175 and Luria’s was roughly $355. (For comparison, Gottheimer’s, Bourdeaux’s, and Cuellar’s all hovered around $1,000.)
More ultra-rich individuals on the dark-money group’s June call with Manchin would go on to donate to Gottheimer and his allies. Billionaire investor Howard Marks, private equity investor Kenneth Schiciano, and real estate developer W. James Tozer Jr. all donated to some or all of the eight conservative dissidents who were raising funds between August 13 and 27. None gave to Slotkin or Luria. Slotkin and Luria also notably did not receive donations from the No Labels-tied contributors Stanard, Fifield, and Roscoe.
The members of the Gottheimer’s crew also received funds from John McDonnell, founder of former aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing; Paul Haaga, former chair of financial services giant Capital Research and Management; Peter Gottsegen, founder of private equity firm CAI Managers; and Craig Duchossois, chair of private investment firm Duchossois Group. McDonnell and Duchossois, major contributors to Republican causes, have also donated thousands of dollars to the No Labels Problem Solvers PAC.
In a major upset for the conservative Democrats, Pelosi called off her deal to hold a floor vote on the infrastructure bill in late September and has returned to the original strategy of hinging it to passage of the Build Back Better Act. Still, conservative Democrats have plenty to celebrate since Democratic leaders have had to temper the size and scope of the more ambitious bill, thanks to pressure from Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who are also propped up by many of the same donors. Now, the budget reconciliation bill is facing significant cuts, such as expanded Medicare coverage and paid family leave, which conservative Democrats have sought to roll back.
Prosecutors in the criminal trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot and killed two protesters last year in Kenosha, Wis., will not be able to refer to the people he shot as "victims," a judge has ruled, while defense attorneys may be able to call them "arsonists" or "looters."
In a proceeding about the ground rules for the upcoming trial, prosecutors and defense lawyers debated whether certain language, witnesses or evidence would be allowed. The trial begins next week.
"The word 'victim' is a loaded, loaded word. And I think 'alleged victim' is a cousin to it," Judge Bruce Schroeder said on Monday, asking prosecutors to instead use the terms "complaining witness" or "decedent" to refer to those shot by Rittenhouse. (Though not universal, it is not unheard of for judges to feel that the word "victim" presupposes the defendant's guilt.)
Meanwhile, the defense will be allowed to refer to the three people Rittenhouse shot as "arsonists," "looters" or "rioters" so long as they took part in those activities, Schroeder ruled — a decision prosecutor Thomas Binger called "a double standard."
"Let the evidence show what the evidence shows," Schroeder said. "And if the evidence shows that any or more than one of these people were engaged in arson, rioting, or looting — then I'm not going to tell the defense they can't call them that."
Jury selection begins Monday in the trial. Rittenhouse faces multiple felony charges of homicide and recklessly endangering the safety of others, along with one misdemeanor count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His lawyers have argued that the shootings were in self-defense.
His case began during a tumultuous week in Kenosha, Wis., after police there shot and injured a Black man named Jacob Blake as he was attempting to enter his car. Blake survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.
The Blake shooting, which took place less than three months after the death of George Floyd, ignited protests around Kenosha that turned destructive. Over several nights, protesters destroyed police cars, damaged storefronts and burned down a used-car dealership, a furniture store and a state parole office.
On Aug. 25, the third night of protests, Rittenhouse, then 17, made the short trip from his home in Illinois across the state line, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, in response to a call from a Kenosha-based militia group saying it hoped to protect businesses from protesters.
That night, in a set of chaotic confrontations with protesters, Rittenhouse shot several people, killing two, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and wounding a third, Gaige Grosskreutz.
Monday's two-hour-long hearing effectively provided a preview of the arguments each side will make in the trial and what evidence will be crucial.
Rittenhouse was being "chased," "attacked by the mob," "kicked in the face" and beaten with a skateboard, defense attorney Corey Chirafisi said.
Chirafisi argued the teenager acted in self-defense when he did fire his weapon, while showing restraint and "firearm discipline" in deciding at other times not to shoot.
Prosecutors, for their part, focused on shrinking the jurors' view of the night to a narrow view of Rittenhouse's actions and whether they were reasonable.
Binger asked the judge to disallow a video that was shared widely on social media showing police encountering Rittenhouse roughly 15 minutes before the shootings, tossing him a bottle of water and saying, "We appreciate you guys."
But Chirafisi convinced the judge that the video is relevant to understanding Rittenhouse's state of mind, which is relevant to several of the charges he faces.
First-degree reckless endangerment of safety, for instance, requires prosecutors to demonstrate that Rittenhouse acted with "utter disregard for human life."
"If ... police tell him, 'It's a good thing you people are here,' given the state of lawlessness that's existing, is that something that's influencing the defendant and emboldening him in his behavior?" the judge said. "[That] would seem to me to be an argument for relevance."
The protests today, Tuesday October 26, are expected to be the largest since Guillermo Lasso took office in May.
The first clashes between police officers and citizens who came out to demonstrate on Tuesday were recorded in at least three country points, as part of the National Strike called to protest against the Government of Guillermo Lasso.
In Imbabura, in the canton of Peguche, repression was reported by what is believed to be members of the security forces, who threw tear gas to disperse the citizens who gathered in this sector.
The incident was recorded in videos circulating on social media, and the Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights denounced the Armed Forces' actions.
Similarly, social and indigenous organizations, workers' unions and labor unions of Ecuador began in the early hours of Tuesday a new round of protests against the economic policies of President Guillermo Lasso.
The demonstrations, called by the United Workers Front (FUT), the Popular Front (FP) and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), were joined by organizations such as the Federation of University Students of Ecuador and the National Confederation of Peasant, Black and Indigenous Organizations, among others.
"PAMELA MORANTE IS ASSAULTED BY THE @PoliciaEcuador ‼️ Here, recorded live, the actions of a Police officer while reporting the #ParoNacional, in Daule, Guayas province.
According to the convening organizations, the day of protests demands fair economic and social policies for both workers and lower-income sectors, as well as the freezing of fuel prices and the support to the draft Labor Code recently presented to the Legislative by the FUT and the rejection of the proposed Law for the Creation of Opportunities.
Given the rejection of the increase in fuel cost last Friday, Lasso froze the new prices and suspended the monthly increases; however, he could not reduce the popular discontent.
The protests occurred under a 60-day state of emergency decreed a week ago to support the police fighting against crime.
Meanwhile, the spokesman of the Presidency, Carlos Jijón, announced Tuesday afternoon that 18 people had been arrested so far for disrupting communications by closing roads, indicating that the Government will respect protests but will also prioritize people who want to work.
"The citizens were detained in flagrant offense. The Government has proceeded to capture the people at that moment, but the judges will decide the guilt of those people," said the governmental official.
The research leaves little doubt: California is facing massive groundwater contamination.
Chevron has long dominated oil production in Lost Hills, a massive fossil fuel reserve in Central California that was accidentally discovered by water drillers more than a century ago. The company routinely pumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of water mixed with a special concoction of chemicals into the ground at high pressure to shake up shale deposits and release oil and gas. The process — called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — produces thousands of barrels of oil every day. But it also leaves the company saddled with millions of gallons of wastewater laced with toxic chemicals, salts, and heavy metals.
Between the late 1950s and 2008, Chevron disposed much of the slurry produced in Lost Hills in eight cavernous impoundments at its Section 29 facility. Euphemistically called “ponds,” the impoundments have a combined surface area of 26 acres and do not have synthetic liners to prevent leaking. That meant that over time, salts and chemicals in the wastewater could leak into the ground and nearby water sources like the California Aqueduct, a network of canals that delivers water to farms in the Central Valley and cities like Los Angeles.
And that’s exactly what happened, according to new research published in the academic journal Environmental Science … Technology this month. Carcinogenic chemicals like benzene and toluene as well as other hydrocarbons have been detected within a half a kilometer of the facility. About 1.7 kilometers northwest of the facility, chloride and salt levels are more than six times and four times greater than background levels, respectively. The research leaves little doubt: The contaminants are migrating toward the aqueduct.
“Clearly, there’s impact to groundwater resources there,” said Dominic DiGiulio, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the nonprofit Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy. “At the section 29 facility, you have to go 1.8 kilometers away from the facility to find background water quality. That’s pretty far.”
The facility shuttered in 2008, and it no longer accepts wastewater. Chevron has continued to monitor the contaminant plume and submits yearly water quality reports to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, a local groundwater quality regulator. In a 2019 report, the company claimed it would cost more $800,000 to monitor the plume and report to the regulator for the next 30 years.
Jonathan Harshman, a spokesperson for Chevron, said the company was reviewing the study and that it “has complied and will continue to comply with” the Central Valley Water Board’s requirements for maintaining and monitoring leaks at the Section 29 facility.
The Section 29 facility isn’t an isolated case. Between 1977 and 2017, over 16 billion barrels of oilfield wastewater was disposed in unlined ponds in California. The vast majority of these are located outside of Bakersfield in the state’s Central Valley: According to DiGiulio’s research, there are at least 1,850 wastewater ponds in the San Joaquin Valley’s Tulare Basin. Of those, 85 percent are unlined and about one-fourth are active, like the Section 29 facility. However, despite not being operational, many of them may be leaking into the ground. Wells that monitor groundwater quality are few and far between, so it’s difficult to know the exact scope of the pollution. But DiGiulio warns that the ponds constitute “a potential wide-scale legacy groundwater contamination issue.”
This month’s study is the first to quantify the number of unlined pits in California and analyze their effects on groundwater. The findings bolster 2015 research by California Council on Science … Technology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which concluded that unlined wastewater pits posed a threat to groundwater sources and called for investigations into whether contaminants have leaked from disposal ponds. Research conducted by the United States Geological Survey for the Central Valley Water Board has also found evidence of oil and gas wastewater contaminating groundwater.
Disposal of oil and gas wastewater is a national problem. Companies use anywhere between 1.5 million and 16 million gallons of water to frack a single well, and they have struggled to find economical and environmentally safe ways to dispose of the toxic fluid. The vast majority of the wastewater — both in California and nationally — is injected underground into porous rock formations, but companies also recycle and reuse the water to grow crops, de-ice roads, and suppress dust. California appears to be the only state that permits operators to store the waste in unlined pits, according to DiGiulio.
Patrick Pulupa, an executive officer with the Central Valley water board, defended the practice and noted that the wastewater ponds are only allowed in areas where the groundwater has been deemed too salty for irrigation or household use. In cases where the contamination has threatened usable water, he said, the Board has cracked down with cease-and-desist and investigative orders. “Board staff continue to look in detail at whether additional produced water discharges are a threat to usable groundwater and will continue to issue enforcement orders where appropriate,” he added.
The definition of groundwater that is “too salty” for use varies across California. Federal regulations consider water with less than 10,000 milligrams of dissolved solids per liter of water as protected for potential irrigation, industrial, and household use. As a result, companies are typically not allowed to dispose of wastewater in underground formations if it threatens groundwater that is below the 10,000 mg/L threshold — unless they secure an exemption from the state.
For unlined wastewater pits, however, that threshold has been set at 3,000 mg/L. The inconsistency allows oil and gas companies to pollute potential sources of groundwater, according to DiGiulio, and “appears to be the major driver for this continued disposal practice.”
“The fundamental problem is that the condition under which California groundwater is to be protected is not sufficiently stringent,” he said, adding that the state water board has the authority to increase the threshold to better protect groundwater near wastewater pits and should do so.
From Pulupa’s perspective, the 3,000 mg/L threshold is not dissimilar to the standard for disposal into underground formations in practice. Though federal regulations set the limit at 10,000 mg/L, companies are routinely granted exemptions if they can demonstrate that the groundwater is not expected to be used as a source of drinking water. The exemptions apply if the water has a dissolved solids concentration between 3,000 and 10,000 mg/L, and the controversial practice has allowed oil and gas companies to pump wastewater into hundreds of aquifers across the country. As a result, the “protective standards are relatively similar,” and the Central Valley Water Board is “unaware of any effort” to modify the definition of protected groundwater near wastewater pits, he said.
