21 September 21
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The next few weeks will see some of the most important political jockeying in half a century.
With the administration’s $3.5 trillion vehicle careening toward a September 27 deadline, conservative Democrats have been at work trying to derail the White House’s ambitious agenda. First, they cobbled together a small, corporate-friendly bipartisan infrastructure package that they hoped would take the steam out of the larger effort. When that didn’t work, the conservative bloc pushed to shrink its size down from $6 trillion to $3.5 trillion, then pushed to decouple the two efforts. They are now threatening to destroy it altogether.
Last week, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., reentered the fray, telling Biden that if the infrastructure bill wasn’t passed on schedule, she would vote no on the crucial reconciliation package, as Politico Playbook reported this morning. Over the weekend, Axios reported that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was advocating yet again for a “strategic pause” to the spending, this time until 2022.
Their maneuvers risk — or are intended to cause — a complete sabotage of the Democrats’ once-in-a-generation chance to address pressing climate, health care, and immigration issues. The media, meanwhile, struggles to narrate the byzantine parliamentary moves required to push legislation through the Senate with a simple majority, making the entire fight difficult for a weary public to follow.
As the Democrats press forward with their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, the confusion has led to multiple cycles of coverage suggesting that this or that Democratic priority had been killed, or this or that provision had been approved. But in reality, the bill is still being written, and its ultimate authors are still picking from among the various pieces of text to pass through committees, ditching some elements and adding others that never went through the process. Its destination is the House Budget Committee and, most importantly, the House floor.
Democratic Reps. Kathleen Rice of New York, Scott Peters of California, and Kurt Schrader of Oregon were the focus of significant (and well-earned) ire last week for blocking a measure in the Energy and Commerce Committee that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. There are few policy priorities that Democratic candidates have spent as much time promising voters they’d accomplish if given the opportunity.
But the trio’s theatrical votes against the provision by no means doom it. Party leadership can reinsert it through a so-called manager’s amendment in the Budget Committee, meaning that those three members’ opinions on drug pricing are only worth caring about if they are strong enough to drive them to vote the whole package down. And if a member is opposed to the bill entirely — as Schrader has suggested that he is — then what they think of an individual provision is meaningless. Only their vote on the House floor matters.
On the floor, Democrats can afford to lose just three votes, and both Schrader and Stephanie Murphy of Florida are expected to be nays. Maine Rep. Jared Golden is always a tough vote for Democrats to get. But one formerly reliable no vote, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was knocked into retirement in 2020, thanks to a progressive primary challenge by the seat’s current incumbent, Marie Newman; she’s expected to vote yes.
Both Peters and Rice, for their part, are expected to vote to approve the final package on the House floor, having made their stand on behalf of Big Pharma in committee. So why did they make a show of voting against it there? The industry has flooded Peters with nearly $90,000 this year and has been steadily airing ads thanking him for his support in his district. Rice’s reasoning is a bit more obscure. Big Pharma has given her just over $6,000 in the same time frame, but the industry’s stakeholders are some of the New York Democrat’s biggest donors. An executive at Novo Nordisk’s largest shareholder, hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and his relatives have collectively given Rice Victory Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the congresswoman, more than $100,000 in the past three election cycles. And, a former Nassau County prosecutor, Rice ran for New York attorney general in 2010 and heavily weighed a second bid in 2018 before bowing out. She’s considered a likely candidate the next time the position opens up, and given the higher ambitions of Attorney General Letitia James, that might not be long.
The Budget Committee, whose members will be the ultimate writers of the reconciliation bill that makes to the House floor, is generally more progressive than the more powerful committees like Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce. This is because of the structural corruption on which Washington’s political economy is built. It comes down to fundraising: The latter committees have jurisdiction over the economy’s major power centers, so those industries shower members of those committees with campaign donations. Like a host shaping itself synergistically with a parasite, members of Congress who are most eager for corporate contributions tend to fight for spots on the committees, and leadership tends to award them. The concentration of more corporate-friendly members on powerful committees means that less powerful committees — Budget; Education and Labor; Judiciary — wind up being stacked with progressives.
Under regular order, the power imbalance works out well for corporate lobbyists. But a reconciliation process empowers the Budget Committee, making it a less effective defense against the landmark piece of legislation.
Peters sits on the Budget Committee, where he can again register his objection. But this objection will likely be harmless, because the rest of the committee — which is chaired by Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky and includes progressives such as Barbara Lee of California, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois — is broadly supportive of the drug-pricing effort. One member who does have a centrist voting record, Jim Cooper of Tennessee, is facing a serious primary challenge from the left back in his district. The threat ought to help keep him on board.
The rising importance of the typically obscure panel was underscored this weekend when Yarmuth was invited to appear on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Yarmuth suggested that the floor vote for the final package would slip past the September 27 deadline and into early October, but he expressed little doubt that the prescription drug provision would make its way back in.
“I’m not sure there are very many in the Democratic caucus on either side of the building that actually are opposed to negotiation on prices of prescription drugs, I just think it’s the methodology used,” Yarmuth said, adding that his committee would pull from other proposals being kicked around in other House committees and in the Senate.
The Senate, however, brings in another complication to the process. Many House Democrats are loath to vote on a large tax-and-spending bill that then dies in the Senate, creating pressure for what’s known as “pre-conferencing”: effectively a deal between the two chambers that is arrived at before the conference committee where they meet. Because of this, holdouts like Sinema and Manchin may actually have more influence over the Budget Committee and a potential manager’s amendment than any of the House members we heard from last week.
There are just days to go until the self-imposed infrastructure deadline and a possible government shutdown, and weeks from default if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling. Because the bicameral, multicommittee process is one of the party’s only shots to enact its agenda without grappling with the filibuster, everything is getting thrown into it — including immigration and labor reform. That structure is now reaching a breaking point. Over the weekend, the Senate parliamentarian, a staffer who serves in an advisory role that Democrats treat like a magistrate, warned that their version of immigration reform ran afoul of reconciliation rules. Democrats are able to move forward against her guidance if they wish but would again need buy-in from Manchin and Sinema to do so. Something’s gotta give.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent on horseback tries to stop a Haitian migrant in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19. (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
News cameras and photographers recorded scenes Sunday along the Rio Grande where horse-mounted Border Patrol agents attempted to grab migrants and used their animals to push them back toward Mexico. One agent is heard on video shouting an obscenity as a child jumps out of the horse’s path.
Mayorkas told reporters in Del Rio that DHS would look into the incident. By Monday evening, as criticism mounted, the department released a statement announcing more formal inquiries, which it said Mayorkas had directed after watching the videos.
“The Department of Homeland Security does not tolerate the abuse of migrants in our custody and we take these allegations very seriously,” the DHS statement read. “The footage is extremely troubling and the facts learned from the full investigation, which will be conducted swiftly, will define the appropriate disciplinary actions to be taken.”
The statement said Mayorkas has directed DHS’s internal oversight office to send personnel to the camp and oversee agents’ conduct “full-time.”
“We are committed to processing migrants in a safe, orderly, and humane way,” it said. “We can and must do this in a way that ensures the safety and dignity of migrants.”
Several Democratic lawmakers condemned the agents’ actions shown in the footage. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, denounced the agents’ behavior in a statement Monday.
“Video and photos coming out of Del Rio showing U.S. Border Patrol’s mistreatment of Haitian migrants along the border are horrific and disturbing,” Thompson said.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described the scenes as “a stain on our country.”
“It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants,” she wrote on Twitter. “Immigration should not be a crime.”
Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz, who addressed reporters in Del Rio alongside Mayorkas, said he made the decision to deploy the horse patrol agents to “find out if we had any individuals in distress, and be able to provide information and intelligence as to what the smuggling organizations were doing in and around the river.”
The Border Patrol typically uses horse-mounted officers to access difficult or roadless terrain, and at times as a crowd-control tool, not unlike other law enforcement organizations.
Contrary to some reports, the agents in the images were not carrying whips but were seen swinging their horses’ reins. They did not appear to strike anyone. Ortiz said that he was confident the agents were “trying to control” their animals but that officials would “look into the matter to make sure that we do not have any activity that could be construed” as misconduct.
In one video by Al Jazeera English that circulated widely on social media, an agent yells “This is why your country’s s---, because you use your women for this!” at a group emerging from the river. His horse charges, attempting to cut off a family’s path to the camp, as a young girl in a green dress jumps out of the way.
Tensions at the camp have been building after thousands of migrants were crossing the river daily last week, overwhelming U.S. capacity. Authorities have closed off the main crossing point used by migrants to enter the United States and return to Mexico for supplies, but migrants in the camp say that has worsened food shortages.
One agent stationed under the highway bridge said conditions improved significantly Monday as Mayorkas arrived, along with hundreds of additional agents and other personnel to increase staffing and security. Mayorkas said thousands would be relocated away from Del Rio to other Border Patrol sectors with more capacity to process them.
The Biden administration also continued sending Haitians back to their home country Monday, with two flights from Texas to Port-au-Prince. Mayorkas told reporters the Biden administration would continue sending up to three flights of returnees per day back to Haiti, a country struggling with rampant gang violence, the assassination of its president in July and a 7.2-magnitude earthquake last month.
Many of the nearly 15,000 who have crossed the Rio Grande to reach the camp are Haitians who were living in Chile and other South American nations, telling reporters they decided to make the journey north this year after hearing the Biden administration would allow them to enter.
Mayorkas said they were misled.
“We are very concerned that Haitians who are taking this irregular migration path are receiving false information that the border is open or that temporary protected status is available,” he said, referring to protections the Biden administration extended to Haitians who were present in the United States before July 29.
“This administration is committed to developing safe, orderly and humane pathways for migration,” he said. “But this is not the way to do it.”
The United States sent two flights carrying returnees back to Haiti on Monday, including 128 parents and children who arrived as part of a family group, according to U.S. officials.
Most of the passengers are not being sent back through the formal deportation process. They are being “expelled” from the United States under an emergency provision of the U.S. public health code known as Title 42.
A federal judge ordered the Biden administration last week to stop using Title 42 to return family groups, but he stayed the order until the end of September. The Biden administration has appealed the ruling.
Of the roughly 11,000 migrants who remained in the Del Rio camp, about 8,000 were part of family groups, according to one U.S. agent stationed at the site.
Mayorkas said the administration had sent 600 additional U.S. agents and other personnel to Del Rio to increase staffing and security, allowing authorities to increase the number of migrants they are transferring to other Border Patrol sectors for processing.
Caravans of buses were visible Monday lining up at the camp, according to two people at the site who were not authorized to speak to reporters.
As the White House came under intense criticism from members of the president’s party over the treatment of the migrants, the Biden administration announced it would raise the refugee admissions cap for the next fiscal year to 125,000.
The announcement comes as the United States plans to resettle tens of thousands of evacuees from Afghanistan, most of whom have arrived with a tenuous legal status as “humanitarian parolees.” The administration is also expanding resettlement programs for Central Americans and Myanmar dissidents.
The 125,000 number has long been the aspirational figure that the Biden administration set for fiscal 2022, which begins Oct. 1.
The White House angered refugee advocates and immigration activists earlier this year when Biden hesitated to boost refugee admissions, which remain on pace for their lowest levels on record.
Biden in May raised this year’s cap to 62,500 from the record low of 15,000 set by the Trump administration, but the latest figures show only 7,637 refugees have arrived over the past 11 months. Biden officials have blamed the pandemic for crippling consular services and refugee processing abroad.
An ultrasound machine sits next to an exam table in an examination room at Whole Woman's Health of South Bend in Indiana. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Those who want to end a pregnancy are doing their best to travel beyond state borders in the aftermath of a strict anti-abortion law
In Oklahoma City, Trust Women, which provides abortions and other forms of reproductive care, saw 80 abortion patients the week of 6 September – about double what the clinic would normally be seeing in this time, said the clinic communications director, Zachary Gingrich-Gaylord. Close to two-thirds of those patients were from Texas.
Trust Women’s other clinic, in Wichita, Kansas, saw 70 abortion patients that same week, with half from Texas. Larger shares of Oklahomans are also traveling to the Kansas clinic, Gingrich-Gaylord said, because the surge in Texan patients means they are no longer able to book an abortion appointment in their home state.
“We wouldn’t have to do anything more than turn our lights on, and the phone would be ringing off the hook,” he said.
The Oklahoma City clinic is already booked solid through the end of September, he added, and the volume of patient calls has increased tenfold. Patients are calling from Houston and Dallas to make appointments.
The numbers illustrate a pattern that experts predicted well before the Texas ban took into effect. Those who want to end a pregnancy are doing their best to travel beyond the state borders. Some are succeeding. Many are not.
“Patients from Texas are traveling sometimes five to eight hours each way to get to a health center in Oklahoma,” according to a briefing filed earlier this week by the Department of Justice.
Much like at Trust Women, abortions in Planned Parenthood’s Oklahoma clinics are now mostly being booked for Texas-based patients, per the DOJ briefing. Between 50% and 75% of appointments at those clinics have been booked by people traveling from Texas for an abortion.
Meanwhile, the journey from Texas – whose surface area is almost 270,000 square miles – to other states poses its own challenge. For many, the trip will be impossible. For others, it will be harrowing.
The barriers include money, time and logistics. Immigration checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley may deter some people from traveling north for an abortion. Those with children need to find childcare, and those with jobs may not have paid time off to travel several days for an abortion. Then there is gas money, and the cost of the abortion itself – which can cost hundreds of dollars, at a minimum. The Texas abortion ban includes no exception for rape or incest.
“One minor, who was raped by a family member, traveled eight hours from Galveston to Oklahoma to get an abortion,” according to the DOJ briefing. “Another patient facing violence at the hands of her husband is ‘discreetly attempting to leave Texas without her husband finding out,’ and is ‘desperate’ and ‘selling personal items’ to scrape together the funds needed for an out-of-state abortion.”
Typically, more than 55,000 abortions take place in the state of Texas each year. Close to 4,000 of those usually take place in September, per state health department data. Already, the surges in neighboring states appear unlikely to account for all the patients who would typically be getting abortions this month.
If the ban stays in effect longer, clinics in neighboring states will not be able to absorb all of those new patients, health care providers have said.
The Justice Department is seeking an injunction to halt the Texas law’s enforcement. But a hearing on the issue is not scheduled until 1 October. If an injunction is granted, Texas is expected to appeal the decision and seek its reversal.
Currently, Trust Women is expanding the number of days it provides abortions, going from two days a week to three. But meeting the new demand will also mean hiring more doctors who are licensed to provide abortions in state and have the proper insurance – a process that can take months.
Both of its clinics are also working to hire more support staff. But Oklahoma and Kansas are in the midst of powerful Covid-19 surges, exacerbated by the highly transmissive Delta variant, and hiring new staff right now is particularly difficult, Gingrich-Gaylord said.
“The displacement and forced movement of people in an ongoing pandemic is stunning, and on a scale that will have radiating effects across the region for as long as SB 8 continues to stand,” he added.
Charlottesville in 2017. (photo: Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
A lawsuit brought by the victims of violence at Charlotteville’s hate rally has exposed how white supremacists paid for their activities.
In August 2017, a coalition of far-right figures marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, during “Unite The Right,” a two-day fascist festival. The event ended in catastrophe when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, murdering one and injuring others. Survivors of the attack filed a sweeping lawsuit (Sines v. Kessler) against Unite The Right’s organizers, who have attempted to distance themselves from the event’s bloodshed. But a tranche of more than new 3,000 exhibits, entered by plaintiffs last week, suggest that Unite The Right’s organizers collaborated closely on the event, even running their own “nonprofit” groups for funding.
Sines v. Kessler is scheduled to go to trial next month. An exhibit list filed last week includes descriptions of documents, but not the full text of the evidence. The list includes more than 3,000 exhibits, including text messages between white supremacist leaders, legal documents from far-right groups, and medical documents from car attack victims (following the deadly attack, figures on the right launched conspiracy theories about the victims’ injuries). Integrity First for America, the nonprofit group leading the lawsuit, declined to comment on the exhibits.
Defendants in the suit have previously attempted to downplay their culpability in Unite The Right’s chaos, describing the rally as loosely organized and not intentionally violent. But text messages to and from defendant Elliott Kline, a key Unite The Right organizer, suggest significant coordination and funding.
In one text message, Kline appears to describe a breakup that resulted from his involvement with white supremacist groups. In the message, he describes an upcoming, well-paid job with the white supremacist group Identity Evropa.
“I’m about to double down in the movement harder than i already have,” Kline wrote. “I asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She was excited. And now she wants out. It’s too late for me to turn it down now. Half the reason I took the opportunity was because I knew I'd be able to support her with it. It’s secret but I'm taking over IE [Identity Evropa] from nathan and I'm going to be paid from private donors some good money.”
Although the preview of the exhibit does not include a timestamp, the conversation appears to have taken place before, or in the days immediately following Unite The Right. Kline (who went by the pseudonym “Eli Mosely” at the time of Unite The Right), took over Identity Evropa from its founder, Nathan Damigo, two weeks after the deadly rally.
An attorney for Damigo and the now-defunct Identity Evropa did not return a request for comment. Kline did not return a request for comment, and does not appear to have an attorney after his lawyers dropped him in 2020 for his “non-responsive silence” with them.
Other texts to and from Kline in the exhibit list suggest a flow of money into the white supremacist movement, particularly through Identity Evropa.
During a conversation that appeared to take place while Unite The Right was in its planning stages, Damigo texted Kline that “I am going to move forward tomorrow to get you on the payroll.”
In one message that appeared to take place in a conversation after Unite The Right, Kline claimed that “Nathan Damigo is currently living in upstate New York illegally jumping the border to visit his GF parents and GF. The parents are scared they'd get doxed because they are supporters and help fund IE from Canada.”
Identity Evropa was, at the time, a registered nonprofit in California. (The group is now defunct and the incorporation is dissolved.) In chat logs previously leaked by the media group Unicorn Riot, Identity Evropa members were seen using that nonprofit to solicit donations for their legal fund to combat lawsuits like Sines v. Kessler. Exhibits in Sines v. Kessler also suggest the group attempted to prevent leaks with at least one mutual nondisclosure agreement, between Kline and Damigo. (Damigo did not return requests for comment.)
Other exhibits suggest the pay structure was broader than Identity Evropa. During a conversation that appeared to take place before the rally, white supremacist Richard Spencer told Kline that “also, we’re going to pay you.” (Spencer did not return a request for comment.)
During the rally planning process, Kline also texted the event’s main organizer, Jason Kessler that “You and I should get used to speaking daily now. Now that this is my full time job I’ll be much more available to you.” Reached for comment, Kessler did not comment on specific text messages included in the exhibits, but instead accused counter-demonstrators of violence.
Though rally organizers have claimed no personal familiarity with James Fields, the neo-Nazi who murdered a woman with a car, photographs from the rally show Fields standing alongside other prominent extremists, including Kline. The Sines v. Kessler exhibits also include an Instagram post in which someone advocates killing protesters with a car. Although the post’s context is unclear from the exhibit list, it is listed in the middle of a series of documents obtained from or related to Fields.
Kessler, for his part, appeared to privately acknowledge before Unite The Right that the event would largely attract neo-Nazis.
While discussing a statement from a member of the far-right group the Proud Boys, Kessler told Kline that “I think it’s alright except he kind of backs himself in the corner by pretending some of our guys aren’t nazis.
“I think he needs more wiggle room just in case there are salutes.”
American soldiers wait to board helicopters at Kandahar airbase ahead of an operation in Afghanistan on 19 May, 2003. (photo: AFP)
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yes, I know you’re already aware of what I’m about to ask here, since I’ve done it many times before. But remember, it’s how I keep this website going. It’s how I’ve made it possible for Pentagon expert William Hartung and so many other writers to follow this country’s disastrous wars (among other crucial subjects) all these disastrous years in a fashion you’re unlikely to see in the mainstream media. And since this site has no paywall, I regularly find myself asking you, the readers of TomDispatch, to go to our donation page and think about keeping us alive in a world that only seems to grow more perilous by the second. So read Bill Hartung’s latest piece and then, if you feel the urge, do just that. I’ll be eternally grateful! Tom]
Was the Afghan War a disaster?
Well, don’t ask Afghans, including the seven children who died in the final U.S. drone strike of that war, how they’re doing, or those about to go hungry as that land suffers a devastating drought while food prices soar, or the possible one million of them who might even starve to death before 2021 ends amid the chaos of the Taliban takeover, poverty, and joblessness. And don’t ask the many American veterans of that war, who returned home with “moral injuries” or far worse, how they’re doing either. You know the answer to that one, too.
But the generals who oversaw America’s disastrous 20 years of war there (and regularly lied about how it was going)? Well, that’s another story. As Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported recently, “The eight generals who commanded American forces in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2018 have gone on to serve on more than 20 corporate boards.”
Hey, since retiring, General Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw the Obama-era troop surge there, has served as a board member or adviser for at least 10 companies, making millions of dollars off them. Last year, typically enough, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., the Afghan commander in 2013 and 2014, joined the board of Lockheed Martin, the biggest Pentagon contractor. Oh, and let’s not forget Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who, at one point in his military career, was the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversaw both the Afghan and Iraq wars. He later joined the board of weapons giant, Raytheon, making up to $1.7 million in the process.
And yet, as Pentagon specialist and TomDispatch regular William Hartung notes today, none of that adds up to a hill of beans compared to how the industrial part of the military-congressional-industrial complex profited off this country’s disastrous forever wars. Today, based on a report he did on the subject for the Center for International Policy and Brown University’s Costs of War Project, he offers a vision of wartime “success” that may be unparalleled amid the catastrophe of this country’s endlessly losing wars. Who woulda thunk it? Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Profits of War
How Corporate America Cashed in on the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge
Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
“The Purse is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts
The political climate created by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as Bush administration officials quickly dubbed it, set the stage for humongous increases in the Pentagon budget. In the first year after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, defense spending rose by more than 10% and that was just the beginning. It would, in fact, increase annually for the next decade, which was unprecedented in American history. The Pentagon budget peaked in 2010 at the highest level since World War II — over $800 billion, substantially more than the country spent on its forces at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or during President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s.
And in the new political climate sparked by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, those increases reached well beyond expenditures specifically tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Harry Stonecipher, then vice president of Boeing, told the Wall Street Journal in an October 2001 interview, “The purse is now open… [A]ny member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.”
Stonecipher’s prophesy of rapidly rising Pentagon budgets proved correct. And it’s never ended. The Biden administration is anything but an exception. Its latest proposal for spending on the Pentagon and related defense work like nuclear warhead development at the Department of Energy topped $753 billion for FY2022. And not to be outdone, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to add roughly $24 billion to that staggering sum.
Who Benefitted?
The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been distributed in a highly concentrated fashion. More than one-third of all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Those five received more than $166 billion in such contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone. To put such a figure in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin that year was significantly more than one and one-half times the entire 2020 budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, which together totaled $44 billion.
While it’s true that the biggest financial beneficiaries of the post-9/11 military spending surge were those five weapons contractors, they were anything but the only ones to cash in. Companies benefiting from the buildup of the past 20 years also included logistics and construction firms like Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel, as well as armed private security contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in FY2020 the spending for contractors of all kinds had grown to $420 billion, or well over half of the total Pentagon budget. Companies in all three categories noted above took advantage of “wartime” conditions — in which both speed of delivery and less rigorous oversight came to be considered the norms — to overcharge the government or even engage in outright fraud.
The best-known reconstruction and logistics contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan was Halliburton, through its KBR subsidiary. At the start of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Halliburton was the recipient of the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts. Those open-ended arrangements involved coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including setting up military bases, maintaining equipment, and providing food and laundry services. By 2008, the company had received more than $30 billion for such work.
Halliburton’s role would prove controversial indeed, reeking as it did of self-dealing and blatant corruption. The notion of privatizing military-support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and Halliburton got the contract to figure out how to do it. I suspect you won’t be surprised to learn that Cheney then went on to serve as the CEO of Halliburton until he became vice president under George W. Bush in 2001. His journey was a (if not the) classic case of that revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry, now used by so many government officials and generals or admirals, with all the obvious conflicts-of-interest it entails.
Once it secured its billions for work in Iraq, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shoddy work that put U.S. troops at risk — and it would prove to be anything but alone in such activities.
Starting in 2004, a year into the Iraq War, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a congressionally mandated body designed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, along with Congressional watchdogs like Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), exposed scores of examples of overcharging, faulty construction, and outright theft by contractors engaged in the “rebuilding” of that country. Again, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to find out that relatively few companies suffered significant financial or criminal consequences for what can only be described as striking war profiteering. The congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that, as of 2011, waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones had already totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.
A case in point was the International Oil Trading Company, which received contracts worth $2.7 billion from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to provide fuel for U.S. operations in Iraq. An investigation by Congressman Waxman, chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, found that the firm had routinely overcharged the Pentagon for the fuel it shipped into Iraq, making more than $200 million in profits on oil sales of $1.4 billion during the period from 2004 to 2008. More than a third of those funds went to its owner, Harry Sargeant III, who also served as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Waxman summarized the situation this way: “The documents show that Mr. Sargeant’s company took advantage of U.S. taxpayers. His company had the only license to transport fuel through Jordan, so he could get away with charging exorbitant prices. I’ve never seen another situation like this.”
A particularly egregious case of shoddy work with tragic human consequences involved the electrocution of at least 18 military personnel at several bases in Iraq from 2004 on. This happened thanks to faulty electrical installations, some done by KBR and its subcontractors. An investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found that commanders in the field had “failed to ensure that renovations… had been properly done, the Army did not set standards for jobs or contractors, and KBR did not ground electrical equipment it installed at the facility.”
The Afghan “reconstruction” process was similarly replete with examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. These included a U.S.-appointed economic task force that spent $43 million constructing a gas station essentially in the middle of nowhere that would never be used, another $150 million on lavish living quarters for U.S. economic advisors, and $3 million for Afghan police patrol boats that would prove similarly useless.
Perhaps most disturbingly, a congressional investigation found that a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to U.S. and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.
A Two-Decade Explosion of Corporate Profits
A second stream of revenue for corporations tied to those wars went to private security contractors, some of which guarded U.S. facilities or critical infrastructure like Iraqi oil pipelines.
The most notorious of them was, of course, Blackwater, a number of whose employees were involved in a 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. They opened fire on civilians at a crowded intersection while guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy. The attack prompted ongoing legal and civil cases that continued into the Trump era, when several perpetrators of the massacre were pardoned by the president.
In the wake of those killings, Blackwater was rebranded several times, first as XE Services and then as Academii, before eventually merging with Triple Canopy, another private contracting firm. Blackwater founder Erik Prince then separated from the company, but he has since recruited private mercenaries on behalf of the United Arab Emirates for deployment to the civil war in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Prince also unsuccessfully proposed to the Trump administration that he recruit a force of private contractors meant to be the backbone of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
Another task taken up by private firms Titan and CACI International was the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Both companies had interrogators and translators on the ground at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a site where such prisoners were brutally tortured.
The number of personnel deployed and the revenues received by security and reconstruction contractors grew dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on. The Congressional Research Service estimated that by March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan put the figure even higher, stating that “contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times employing more than a quarter-million people.”
While an armed contractor who had served in the Marines could earn as much as $200,000 annually in Iraq, about three-quarters of the contractor work force there was made up of people from countries like Nepal or the Philippines, or Iraqi citizens. Poorly paid, at times they received as little as $3,000 per year. A 2017 analysis by the Costs of War project documented “abysmal labor conditions” and major human rights abuses inflicted on foreign nationals working on U.S.-funded projects in Afghanistan, including false imprisonment, theft of wages, and deaths and injuries in areas of conflict.
With the U.S. military in Iraq reduced to a relatively modest number of armed “advisors” and no American forces left in Afghanistan, such contractors are now seeking foreign clients. For example, a U.S. firm — Tier 1 Group, which was founded by a former employee of Blackwater — trained four of the Saudi operatives involved in the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, an effort funded by the Saudi government. As the New York Times noted when it broke that story, “Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.”
Add in one more factor to the two-decade “war on terror” explosion of corporate profits. Overseas arms sales also rose sharply in this era. The biggest and most controversial market for U.S. weaponry in recent years has been the Middle East, particularly sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involved in a devastating war in Yemen, as well as fueling conflicts elsewhere in the region.
Donald Trump made the most noise about Middle East arms sales and their benefits to the U.S. economy. However, the giant weapons-producing corporations actually sold more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, on average, during the Obama administration, including three major offers in 2010 that totaled more than $60 billion for combat aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles, bombs, missiles, and guns — virtually an entire arsenal. Many of those systems were used by the Saudis in their intervention in Yemen, which has involved the killing of thousands of civilians in indiscriminate air strikes and the imposition of a blockade that has contributed substantially to the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people to date.
Forever War Profiteering?
Reining in the excess profits of weapons contractors and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse by private firms involved in supporting U.S. military operations will ultimately require reduced spending on war and on preparations for war. So far, unfortunately, Pentagon budgets only continue to rise and yet more money flows to the big five weapons firms.
To alter this remarkably unvarying pattern, a new strategy is needed, one that increases the role of American diplomacy, while focusing on emerging and persistent non-military security challenges. “National security” needs to be redefined not in terms of a new “cold war” with China, but to forefront crucial issues like pandemics and climate change.
It’s time to put a halt to the direct and indirect foreign military interventions the United States has carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and so many other places in this century. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of more war profiteering by weapons contractors reaping massive profits with impunity.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Oscar Eyraud Adams, a Mexican activist and indigenous leader who was killed on Sept. 24, 2020, in Tecate, Baja California. (photo: Mexicali Resists/NBC News)
“You never think that defending our right to water and life will lead to death,” an activist in Mexico says as a Global Witness report details the killings of environmental defenders.
“He had just made a post on Facebook at 6 p.m. to participate in an activity and a bit later, the tragedy came on the news," Aranguren, a teacher and environmental activist, said about the death of Oscar Eyraud Adams, an Indigenous Mexican activist and leader who was killed on Sept. 24, 2020, in Tecate, Baja California.
Eyraud Adams fought for the water rights of the Indigenous Kumiai, who have been affected by the excessive use of the region’s aquifers by large beer and wine companies.
His social media post, which were the last words he wrote, was a call for an event called “Looking for rain in the desert.”
A group of armed men entered his residence and shot him dead; the only thing they took was his cellphone and a notebook with his notes. At least 13 bullet casings, of different calibers, were found by authorities at the crime scene.
The case of Eyraud Adams, and many others, are chronicled in “Last Line of Defence: The industries causing the climate crisis and attacks against land and environmental defenders,” the latest report from Global Witness, an environmental rights organization which is calling out the increase in attacks against activists.
“You never think that defending our right to water and life will lead to death,” Aranguren said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “In Mexico, the people who defend their territory and natural resources are being killed, they make us disappear and they criminalize us.”
In 2020, there were 227 deadly attacks, an increase in the historical figures since 2019, the deadliest year for environmental activists, with 212 murders.
The most chilling data is in Latin America, where 165 deaths took place — three-quarters of the attacks.
Almost 3 out of 4 attacks occurred in the region, which includes 7 of the 10 deadliest countries.
Colombia, with 65 deaths, and Mexico, with 30, lead the world ranking of murders of land and environmental defenders. Other countries with worrying figures are Brazil and Honduras, with 20 and 17 murders, respectively.
Killed 'for defending our planet'
At least 30 percent of the attacks are related to the exploitation of resources in activities such as logging, the construction of hydroelectric dams, mining projects and large-scale agribusiness.
“The people who are killed every year for defending their local populations were also defending the planet we share. In particular, our climate. Activities that flood our atmosphere with carbon, such as fossil fuel extraction and deforestation, are at the center of many of these murders,” environmentalist and author Bill McKibben wrote in Spanish in the report's foreword.
The logging and deforestation industry is linked to the highest number of murders in 2020, with 23 cases recorded in countries such as Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru and the Philippines.
Global Witness claims its data doesn't reflect “the true dimension of the problem” because restrictions on press freedom and coercive tactics such as death threats, illegal surveillance, intimidation, sexual violence and criminalization can contribute to an underreporting of assaults.
Colombia and Mexico lead in killings
According to the organization, since the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015, an average of four environmental defenders have been killed each week.
For the second consecutive year, Colombia registered the highest number of activists killed, totaling 65 executions. The attacks occurred in “the context of generalized attacks against human rights defenders and community leaders," the report stated. "In many of the most remote areas, paramilitary and criminal groups increased their control through the exercise of violence.”
Almost half of the country's homicides were against people engaged in small-scale agriculture and a third of the activists were Indigenous or Afro-Colombians.
Countries used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to implement repressive methods against their populations — “an opportunity to take drastic measures against civil society while companies advanced with destructive projects," the researchers state.
The closures and quarantines made it easier to locate activists, "and that is why many of the homicides were perpetrated in their homes or in their surroundings,” Lourdes Castro, coordinator of the Somos Defensores program, said in an interview with Mongabay Latam.
“Paradoxically, the violent people had the possibility to walk freely through the territories," Castro said.
Another worrying case is the situation for Mexican activists. Global Witness registered 30 lethal attacks in Mexico, which represents an increase of 67 percent compared to 2019 when 18 deaths were counted.
“Forest exploitation was linked to almost a third of these attacks and half of all attacks in the country were directed against Indigenous communities,” the researchers said. Moreover, most of them go unpunished, since 95 percent of murders in the country don't result in a legal case.
Gabriela Carreón, human rights manager of the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda), said 2020 was the most violent year for environmental activists during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
As of July, Cemda has registered 14 murders against environmental activists. That same month, the Mexican Ministry of the Interior acknowledged that at least 68 human rights defenders and 43 journalists have been assassinated so far during López Obrador's tenure.
Fighting the hellish heat in Baja California
Heat kills in the Mexican state of Baja California. In 2019, at least eight heat-related deaths were recorded in Mexicali, the state's capital; in 2020 they were 83.
“In the last 70 years, the temperature in Mexico has a clear and conclusive increasing trend," Jorge Zavala Hidalgo, general coordinator of the National Meteorological Service, told Noticias Telemundo. "In the last decade it has increased very rapidly and that rise is even higher than the average for the planet."
The slain environmental activist, Eyraud Adams, had lived through the region's searing temperatures and lack of water.
In 2017, he had opposed the installation of the Constellation Brands brewery, which according to the company would use about 1.8 billion gallons a year for their production.
“Big companies have access to water much easier. This is not fair because we need water to survive,” Eyraud Adams had said, his comments quoted in the report. He promoted solutions to guarantee the preservation of water resources for the Kumiai and avoid the exodus of young people from the region.
“He helped us make what is happening in Baja California visible, but he paid for it with his life," said his friend Aranguren, who is part of Mexicali Resiste, an environmental rights organization.
"It is sad because these murders take away our children's future security," she said.
“We feel great fear because we have to keep fighting. There are still megaprojects in this area that take away our water," Aranguren said. "But if we don’t protest, no one will come to help us."
A volunteer hands out water to residents in Benton Harbor this month. (photo: Jim Vondruska/Guardian UK)
Activists in Benton Harbor say it’s been an uphill battle getting the city, county and state to take action
The water at her Benton Harbor, Michigan, home had started coming out of the tap looking “bubbly and whitish”. When she filled a glass with it, she could see matter floating around inside. “I became very concerned,” she recalled in a recent interview.
She wasn’t alone. For years, residents of this small, struggling city in south-west Michigan had been having similar problems. When Carmela Patton turned on her sink to make coffee, the water came out brown. When Emma Kinnard ran hers, it came out the color of tea and “sizzling like Alka-Seltzer”. Rasta Smith said his water looked normal, but had a “horrible” taste and a smell that reminded him of rotting sewage. “It’s bad, man,” he said. “It’s real bad.”
Some immediately began buying bottled water and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Others would continue to use the tap water for years and, in many cases, still do. When residents raised questions and concerns, they said, officials in the city and county were unresponsive.
Finally, in 2018, they found out what was going on: tap water samples tested that summer revealed lead levels of 22 parts per billion – well over the federal lead action level of 15 parts per billion and higher, even, than the 20 parts per billion nearby Flint averaged at the height of the crisis that made that city a national symbol of environmental injustice.
But for the last three years, neither the city of Benton Harbor, the county, nor the state have taken sufficient action, according to an emergency appeal filed recently by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The petition, which calls on the US Environmental Protection Agency to address the crisis and assist residents in the meantime, states that lead levels have consistently tested well above the federal action limit, with recordings as high in some samples as 889 parts per billion – nearly 60 times the action limit.
The health risks posed to the residents of this mostly Black, poverty-stricken city –which also happens to be the corporate headquarters of Whirlpool – are extraordinary. Children with lead poisoning tend to have lower IQs, high rates of attention deficit disorder, poor memory and a lack of impulse control. As they become adults, they are also at higher risk for kidney disease, stroke and hypertension. Studies have also connected lead exposure to incarceration for violent crime.
“It’s like they don’t care,” Clay said of the government inaction. “It feels crazy.”
Local activists, led by the Rev Edward Pinkney, president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, have mobilized to fill the gaps they say have been left by institutions and local officials, working to raise awareness of the crisis among the city’s 10,000 residents, to advocate on their behalf and to ensure access to bottled water and filters.
In the absence of government solutions, Pinkney believes the work he and others are doing are just “bandages” on the problem. “You’re still gonna bleed,” he told the Guardian. “The lead is still gonna be there.”
There is no level of lead that is considered safe for human consumption. Pinkney’s advocacy did help secure a rare win: Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer this month proposed $20m to replace the city’s century-old lead pipes, provide water filters to families and make infrastructure improvements in the community. “Every Michigander deserves access to safe drinking water,” Whitmer said in a statement, “and every community deserves lead-free pipes.”
But Pinkney questioned whether Whitmer, a Democrat, could deliver on the proposal with a Republican-controlled legislature, and said in a press conference with the NRDC and other groups petitioning the EPA that even more significant – and urgent – action would be needed to address the city’s water emergency in full.
“We need safe water now,” Pinkney said. “We cannot wait.”
‘Where do you begin?’
The story of Benton Harbor is a story of political dysfunction, institutional abandonment and systemic inequalities that have been amplified to near cartoonish levels.
Situated along the coast of Lake Michigan, the city sits just north of Harbor Country, a collection of bucolic towns popular among vacationing Chicagoans. Neighboring St Joseph, with its quaint downtown, bills itself as the “Riviera of the Midwest”, and is the home town of the influential Upton family, owner of the Whirlpool Corporation.
The twin cities are practically photo-negatives of one another: Benton Harbor is 85% Black; St Joseph is about 85% white. In Benton Harbor, more than 45% of residents live below the poverty line; cross the bridge into St Joseph and the poverty rate is just 7%, well below the state average. And while Benton Harbor has struggled for years with lead-contaminated water, those problems have not appeared to plague its neighbor.
“All the cities around us got good clean water and we don’t,” said Clay, who recalled her children marveling about the water in St Joseph after she picked them up from classes there once. “They say, ‘Momma, this water here is so good,’ and I’m like, ‘This is crazy.’”
“It’s devastating to see that,” she added.
Among residents, there is a prevailing sense that the problems that have been allowed to persist in impoverished, predominantly Black Benton Harbor would have been solved immediately if they were taking place in whiter, wealthier St Joseph.
“If it were St Joe, it would be getting done,” said Mary Alice Adams, a Benton Harbor city commissioner. “And it would be getting done damn fast.”
That it hasn’t in Benton Harbor, despite lead contamination far higher than the level set by the EPA, is due to the demographics of the city, some activists say. “Our health conditions are due to racism,” said the Rev Dr Don Tynes, a community activist and chief medical officer at the Benton Harbor Health Center, where he says he has seen the effects of lead contamination in his patients. “We need immediate relief.”
Locals describe a twofold problem in getting that relief: the county has “failed the community”, in the words of Pinkney, while the city government, which made national headlines a decade ago when the state-appointed emergency manager suspended the powers of elected officials, is beset by dysfunction. (Emergency management, which Adams describes as “the great takeover” of Benton Harbor, ended in 2016.)
The mayor of Benton Harbor, Marcus Muhammad, city manager, Ellis Mitchell and water superintendent, Michael O’Malley, did not return the Guardian’s request for comment for this story. The EPA also did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s hurtful,” said Carmela Patton, who has been a resident for 43 years but has come to believe that the only way to give her children a “fair chance” is to move. “You can’t talk to your city officials. You can’t talk to your mayor. It’s like, where do you begin? … Me personally, I’m ready to go. I’m ready to leave now.”
‘Make it make sense’
To some residents here, that’s exactly the point.
Concerns about gentrification in Benton Harbor have accelerated over the last decade, with the opening in 2010 of Harbor Shores – the Jack Niklaus-designed lakefront golf club that has hosted the Senior PGA Tour Championship four times – and of the shiny new office campus for the appliance giant Whirlpool on the St Joseph River in 2012.
Founded by Louis Upton, patriarch of the family that includes the model Kate Upton and Republican congressman Fred Upton, Whirlpool is a controversial presence in Benton Harbor.
Some here have viewed the jobs it has provided and the investments it has made in the city as essential to revitalizing the community. But to others, including Pinkney, who has been waging a bitter battle against the corporation for nearly two decades, Whirlpool is turning Benton Harbor into something of a company town, while the Black population that has been here since the Great Migration is being forced out. “It’s coming,” Pinkney said of gentrification, as he drove through a development of large, lakeside homes near the golf course. “It’s just a matter of time.”
That golf course, built on land that had been part of one of the oldest public parks in the state, and the Whirlpool campus can seem a world away from the vacant lots, dilapidated homes and housing projects that dominate the rest of this city. But all of it is packed into the same four-square-mile tract of land – an uncanny juxtaposition that, for longtime residents, can seem to intensify the feelings of institutional abandonment.
“It’s sad,” said Adams, the commissioner, who believes that lead-contaminated water exacerbated her late daughter’s seizures. “This is America. We’ve already been deprived and red-lined out of the American dream. Is fresh drinking water, the thing that’s life, too much to ask? Make it make sense.”
‘No end in sight’
Dean Scott, a spokesperson for Michigan’s department of environment, Great Lakes, and energy, said in a statement that the state was working with the city to bring it into compliance with the state’s clean water laws and to “minimize any potential health impacts” on residents in the meantime. Scott said there had been progress: the city has been installing corrosion control treatment technology, “begun the process” of replacing 6,000 service lines, and is now “sampling twice as many homes as it did previously and has increased the testing frequency to every six months instead of every three years”.
Residents, community leaders and environmental groups say more needs to be done – both to address the existing crisis in Benton Harbor and to prevent future water emergencies nationwide.
The NRDC estimates that as many as 12.8m lead pipes and service lines still connect homes to water in all 50 states. While contamination can often be held at bay by treating water with chemicals to keep lead from leaching out of pipes, environmentalists worry that this stopgap measure could become less effective as the country’s infrastructure continues to age. “Drinking water won’t be safe until the country pulls the millions of lead pipes out of the ground found in every state,” Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the NRDC, told the Guardian in July.
Making lead pipes a thing of the past could stave off future crises – but the harm in Benton Harbor has already been felt. Attorney Nick Leonard of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which worked with the NRDC to draft the emergency appeal to the EPA, said in a press conference with Pinkney on 9 September that, based on what the city has done, “it could be several more years” before the problem is fixed.
“There’s seemingly no end in sight,” Leonard said, noting that delays in Benton Harbor are especially disturbing because it is an environmental justice community where residents may be exposed to other pollutants and have poor access to healthcare.
In the EPA petition, the NRDC, the Benton Harbor Community Water Council and 18 other groups said the water in Benton Harbor posed an “imminent and substantial endangerment to public health” and called on the EPA to act now to resolve it. The petition also demanded federal intervention – including through education, technical assistance and an “immediate source of safe drinking water”. Referring to the NRDC’s demands on federal resources, Leonard said at the 9 September press conference: “that is what we expect.”
In the meantime, community activists continue to work toward solutions themselves.
The day after filing the emergency appeal, Pinkney hosted a bi-monthly water giveaway in the parking lot of his church – a proud, dark-brick building overlooking the neighborhood on Pipestone Street.
It was a warm September afternoon, and the seemingly inexhaustible reverend was in good spirits, shouting greetings through the windows of residents’ cars as volunteers loaded jugs of Glacier Mist water into their trunks. By the end of the day, he and his volunteers had distributed 500 gallons to residents, along with gift bags that included Nalgene water bottles adorned with a logo designed by Rasta Smith, a Benton Harbor graphic artist who says he has been working to raise awareness of water contamination in the city for the last eight years.
“I’m just excited to be able to do this,” Pinkney said during a pause in the procession, smiling behind his Black Voters Matter mask. “It’s a beautiful feeling.”
Inside the church, Bobbie Clay’s 19-year-old son, Shon, took a short break.
He serves as vice-president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council. He’s also a student at Lake Michigan College who studies art. The smell of the water in this town he was born and raised in, he said, reminds him of the oil paints he uses sometimes.
“It’s absolutely terrible,” he said.
He and others in the community are doing their best to help, but “it is frustrating,” he acknowledged: without action from those in power, his group could only do so much.
“We feel like we’re on our own … like we have to fix the problem ourselves,” Clay said. “It’s gonna take more than what we’re doing outside, for sure.”
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