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Today, pundits are pretending that Bob Dole, who died this past weekend, was a patron saint of compromise and decency. But for virtually his whole career, Dole was an unscrupulous partisan warrior who did big favors for wealthy donors and pushed a radical anti-government agenda.
It happened with John McCain. It happened with Colin Powell. It happened with George H. W. Bush. Hell, it happened with Bush’s son, and he’s not even dead yet. And sure as the sun comes up, it’s happening again with former Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who died this past Sunday at age ninety-eight.
Here’s an obituary from his native Kansas, mourning his “spirit of compromise,” and his “legacy” of “tireless effort to find common ground with political opponents.” Here’s Dole as a symbol of “a better path not taken,” a man we should remember for how he “took governing seriously.” He “led to get things done,” the Washington Post editorial board tells us, spurred by his death to “wish there really was a bridge to the past.” He “came to epitomize a kinder day in an increasingly partisan Washington.” He “reminds us of an era in which the two parties were willing to work together.” His “faith in the possibility of collaboration and compromise seems all too rare now.” Even the New Republic got in on this tedious act, lamenting that Dole’s “pragmatism” made him “out of step with a changing GOP.”
It’s certainly possible to make this case — all it takes is glossing over or omitting every defining element of Dole’s career. An alternative account, one that accurately reflects Dole’s contributions to the endless political crises the United States finds itself in today, would have made it harder to portray him as Generic Moderate Republican #34.
No, Dole wasn’t the worst Republican official of his time, or of this one, and to that extent, he does represent an older, post–New Deal GOP establishment that no longer exists (something you could just as easily say about his pal Richard Nixon, whose return few would pine for today).
But he was as craven, corrupt, and vicious a politician as any of his era, and had he been born some decades later, he clearly would have comfortably adjusted himself to the pathologies of today’s GOP. In fact, he very much did. And for all the tributes to his pragmatism and bipartisanship, Dole’s greatest legacy is the casual Senate obstructionism Republicans have used for over a decade now to make the country practically ungovernable.
“To the Right of Genghis Khan”
“I’m a conservative, not right-wing,” Dole would later say.
In practice, the distinction was meaningless. When Dole first entered Congress in the 1960s, he opposed virtually the entire suite of Great Society programs put forward by Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats that would prove vital to American well-being in the decades ahead: Medicare, Medicaid, fair housing, food stamps, and federal aid to education, to name a few. Contrary to the emerging myth about Dole’s bipartisanship, he voted against the first three despite the fact they were backed by most other House Republicans.
From start to bitter end, Dole backed the disastrous war in Vietnam, and didn’t care how low he sank to do it. He excoriated the media for its supposed bias in covering the war critically, alleging an “attempted media sabotage” that “could cost the lives” of US troops, and was “encouraging to every damn crook in the country.” He did the same to his colleagues critical of Nixon’s war effort, calling them “the new Chamberlains” and worse.
George McGovern would later complain about Dole’s suggestions that he and other critics were “personally disloyal or unpatriotic or even hostile to the best interests of American troops.” Even decades later, when he’d spent years out of power, Dole kept this up, joining the GOP smears on John Kerry’s war record in the 2004 election, saying he had “never bled that he knew of,” and questioning whether he should’ve received Purple Hearts for “superficial wounds.”
There were two exceptions to this utterly conventional set of right-wing positions. Dole’s horrific war injuries gave him empathy for the disabled, and would both vote for disability aid in the 1960s and help shepherd the Americans With Disabilities Act to passage later in 1990. He also voted for both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, though anyone wowed by this act of bare minimum moral decency should be aware both bills passed in the House with huge Republican majorities hovering around 80 percent: 138-34 and 112-23, respectively. Otherwise, he was considered a hard-liner, one colleague calling his politics “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”
What proved most critical for Dole’s ascent was his relationship with Nixon. For the president, Dole was a useful “hatchet man,” as a fellow Nixon loyalist would complain, becoming the soon-to-be-disgraced president’s attack dog and apologist all in one. Nixon made him chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1971 because he could “say things which the President himself cannot.” For example, Dole charged that Edmund Muskie was trying to “destroy public confidence in law enforcement” by criticizing the FBI. (Unfortunately for Dole, his adoration of Nixon was a one way street, with the president largely keeping him out of his inner circle, and eventually unceremoniously shunting him from the RNC position).
But Dole really earned his stripes over Watergate, which he assured the president was “not nearly as big an issue outside Washington.” He accused the Washington Post of attempting a “rescue operation” for McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 presidential election, and charged the paper had “set up housekeeping with the McGovern campaign.”
He attacked Walter Cronkite over his coverage, prompting even fellow party members to ask him to tone it down. At one point, he even authored a resolution to end live TV coverage of the hearings, to “move the Watergate investigation from the living rooms of America and put it where it belongs — behind the closed doors of the committee room and before the judge and jury in the courtroom.” When a constituent wrote him a letter objecting to this, Dole told him: “You write like an anti-Nixon Democrat.”
So it was that by the mid-1970s Dole had solidified a reputation among his colleagues as a nasty partisan: he was a “a hungry Doberman Pinscher,” “a real gut fighter,” or, in Barry Goldwater’s words, “the first man we’ve had around here in a long time who will grab the other side by the hair and drag them down the hill.”
On this flip side, this kind of behavior also made Dole’s reelection in 1974 so tough. Down in the polls for months, Dole saved his political career by launching what one of his own campaign workers called a “vicious” set of attacks on his “abortioner” opponent, suddenly calling for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution to overturn Roe v. Wade. (“Go back and look at the record,” he boasted years later. “And you’ll find that when abortion first became a national issue was at my reelection in 1974.”)
Reagan’s Right-Hand Enabler
Dole’s team-up with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is, ironically, often pointed to as a leading example of his moderation. He seemed to break from Reagan’s program of inflaming racist resentment, and both worked to create the national holiday in Martin Luther King, Jr’s honor, and hammered out the compromise that extended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 — though one of his own aides admitted the latter was motivated by concern over the party’s hemorrhaging of black support.
But it was his work as chair of the Senate finance committee that turned out his most far-reaching socioeconomic legacy. Dole generally gets points for sponsoring the various tax increases Reagan signed through the 1980s to make up for the deficit-increasing effects of his massive cuts to high earners and the wealthy. Dole was a deficit hawk, after all, and overwhelmingly concerned with ensuring the government spent only as much as it took in, to the point of calling for an across-the-board spending freeze.
But the tax cuts of 1981 (cutting the top marginal rate from 70 to 50 percent) and 1986 (slashing the rate further to 28 percent) were never really undone. Wealth inequality ballooned, the country’s richest used the windfall to amplify their political power, and for all the “revenue enhancements” Dole engineered over the decade to keep the budget deficit from spiraling, top tax rates have never even come close to returning to where they were pre-Reagan — in fact, the very idea of doing so became a political nonstarter.
Dole’s work here served another purpose too: doing a favor for his single biggest donor, ethanol titan Dwayne O. Andreas, whose industry more or less only existed by the grace of federal loans, protectionism, and subsidies Dole had successfully pushed since the 1970s. Through his perch on the finance committee, Dole saved the ethanol subsidy in 1982, and he later extended it for another eleven years in 1989 through an amendment, ensuring he would get to keep flying around on Andreas’s company jets.
Dole made sure to take care of other favored businesses, too, using a deficit-reduction bill to reinsert a tax credit for a donor who was planning a trucking plant that had been eliminated by his 1986 tax bill. No wonder he’d voted against establishing the Federal Election Commission in 1974.
Return of the Hatchet Man
As the 1990s opened, Dole played a leading role in creating another intractable problem that plagues us today. Bent on grinding the newly elected Bill Clinton’s presidency to a halt, Dole pioneered the relentlessly obstructionist use of the Senate filibuster that’s become de rigueur today, filibustering everything from Clinton’s initial stimulus package, his attempt at health care reform, and his judicial nominees to campaign finance reform, restrictions on lobbyists, and lifting a ban on homosexuals in the military, earning himself the nickname “Mr Gridlock.”
In the first two years of Clinton’s presidency, Dole had used the filibuster more times than in all the years between 1917 and 1970. “In the Dole era, the filibuster is more pernicious and more common,” labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan wrote in the Post at the time. “Bob Dole has expanded its use with impunity.”
“We’re thrilled that he’s an obstructionist,” said the hard-right direct-mail campaigner Richard Viguerie. “We don’t want the socialism of Bill and Hillary.”
After briefly moving somewhat to the center in the late 1970s, working with McGovern on improvements to the food stamp program, Dole now duly signed on to the right-wing, anti-government program of Newt Gingrich. Dole worked to try pass it all and shred the post–New Deal order that had helped ensure American prosperity and economic security, from eviscerating welfare (“It’s not compassionate to lead people into a life of drugs, dependency, and despair,” he said. “Americans have lost patience with the Great Society”) to backing the perma-austerity of the mercifully unsuccessful Balanced Budget Amendment.
As in the 1980s, Dole’s legislative work doubled as a windfall for his campaign coffers and proof he could hang with the likes of Gingrich, and he put forward the most stringent deregulatory bill of all his colleagues. “Dole was smart enough to sense that there was a movement out there that wanted government to be smaller and smarter,” said a Texaco lobbyist backing the bill. Dole then dipped into one of the firms lobbying on the bill, Humon and Williams, to hire an aide to oversee its passage, an aide who had just paid his unsuccessful congressional campaign’s debts by raising thousands of dollars from the very business interests calling for less regulations. The effort was only stopped, ironically, thanks to a Democratic filibuster.
All of this had nothing to do with political conviction, which Dole insiders insisted he didn’t really have. “Living by his reflexes, lacking a clear compass of principle, he is in danger of becoming dependent on the agenda of others,” his former speechwriter had told Life. As Dole himself had told his own biographer: “It’s not an agenda. I’m just gonna serve my country.” Times had changed, and Dole, planning another tilt at the White House and well-practiced at serving as someone’s poodle for the sake of being close to power, was happy to say and do whatever the establishment right wanted from him, no matter how extreme.
“If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan,” Dole had told a meeting of the RNC in 1995. And sure enough, until he lost the 1996 election to Clinton and then retired from politics, Dole proceeded to do his best Reagan impression. He endorsed and campaigned for convicted felon and extremist Oliver North, went after sex and violence in Hollywood, and ran on a platform of absurd tax cuts: fifteen points across the board for every American (thereby handing, once again, the biggest gains to the very richest), halving the capital gains tax, and repealing a 1993 tax increase on the wealthiest Social Security beneficiaries.
Dole closed out his career the partisan attack-dog he started as. Only two years after using a filibuster to gut independent investigations of the executive branch, he now demanded a special prosecutor to investigate the Whitewater scandal. He attacked Clinton for refusing to rule out pardons for his former Whitewater business partners, despite having been “the foremost advocate” for Bush Sr’s outrageous pre-trial pardon of Iran-Contra defendants, the prosecutor in that case said, adding he’d lost all respect for Dole over it.
Most brazenly, he publicly likened the matter and Clinton’s handling of it to Watergate and Nixon: the scandal he’d made his name insisting was no big deal, and the president whose image he’d worked to rehabilitate, even visiting and praising him a few months earlier after he’d secured the Republican nomination.
This time, relentless attacks weren’t enough. Dole went into the election with a near-record-low approval rating of 43 percent, lower than Michael Dukakis during his 1988 defeat, and a little better than Bush Sr when he had lost in 1992. His years-long attempt to ram through a hard-right agenda strangling the government’s ability to protect its citizens turned out to have made him and his party fairly unpopular. Dole was easily beaten and, having resigned from his beloved Senate to run for president, quit politics altogether.
As is Washington tradition, he and Clinton later reconciled and Dole was rehabilitated himself, transformed into a reasonable, moderate statesman right around the time the Tea Party–dominated GOP began regularly resorting to brinkmanship over the debt ceiling and other issues. Now safely unable to actually do anything about it, Dole became one of the most vocal voices for filibuster reform. Conveniently, he raised his voice on killing the judicial filibuster only when Republican nominees were being held up, and the GOP took his advice in 2017, nuking it to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
These were all sidebars to Dole’s real work over the past twenty-five years: cashing in. Until the day he died, Dole was a registered agent for various foreign governments, including Armenia, Kosovo, and Taiwan, and a corporate lobbyist at Alston … Bird, representing virtually every malign corporate interest you can imagine: Big Pharma, finance, real estate, for-profit health care, oligarch and Vladimir Putin ally Oleg Deripaska (later a player in the Trump-Russia scandal), a for-profit college under sweeping investigation by various federal and state officials, and even a Chinese-owned chemical company.
A Trumpian Legacy
It’s hard to square any of these elementary facts about Dole’s career with the media portrayal of him that has emerged seemingly overnight. Dole fails on virtually every metric by which today’s liberal establishment hates Trump: hostility to the press, disregard for the rule of law, scurrilous violations of political decorum, corruption, petty partisanship and gridlock — even literally working for the guy reporters claimed was Trump’s link to Putin. Yet rather than being remembered as one of the many “mainstream” conservatives who prefigured and enabled Trumpism, Dole has now somehow been canonized by the liberal press as the Last Decent Republican before the reality show star took over the party.
That Dole was, for most of his career, marginally less extreme than today’s Republicans was a function of the times he had to operate in, having served the first half of his career during the post–New Deal era, when the political center of gravity was markedly more to the left.
In the Senate until he was seventy-three, Dole eagerly and without trouble conformed to the new, more radical GOP that emerged after Reagan, and had things been different, he would’ve done the same to the one that’s emerged under Barack Obama and Trump. Anyone who doubts this only needs to look at how Dole, at first a Trump critic, soon became one of the only establishment Republicans to publicly get behind him once nominated, and remained a vocal supporter of the former president until he died this past Sunday.
Commentators rewrite the history of figures like Dole because they want to sell the public on a history that never happened, of a moderate, decent Republican Party gone tragically astray when Trump and a gaggle of radicals took it over. They’d do better to ask what it means that “moderate” conservatives like Dole were on the wrong side of history on almost everything, and why, if Trump was the antithesis of everything they stood for, they were so easily won over by him.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James speaks at press conference, Nov. 19, 2019. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
James has requested to take his testimony on Jan. 7 at her New York office as part of a civil investigation into whether Trump’s company committed financial fraud in the valuations of properties to different entities, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is ongoing.
One of the people familiar with the investigation said James is examining whether widespread fraud “permeated the Trump Organization.”
In a statement, the Trump Organization decried the move as politically motivated.
“This is another political witch-hunt,” the statement said. “The only focus of the New York AG is to investigate Trump, all for her own political ambitions ... This political prosecution is illegal, unethical and is a travesty to our great state and legal system.”
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for James, declined to comment. Ronald Fischetti, an attorney who has been representing Trump in investigations into his New York financial practices, also did not respond.
The deposition marks an escalation in the probe of the former president’s company and a critical moment for James. While the attorney general had declared a run for governor, she said on Thursday that she’s suspending her campaign.
Both the attorney general and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office are scrutinizing whether Trump’s company broke the law by providing low values to property tax officers, while using high ones to garner tax breaks or impress lenders, as The Washington Post previously reported.
James has said she is considering filing a lawsuit over the matter, and Manhattan prosecutors have convened a new grand jury to consider potential criminal charges related to the company’s financial practices, according to the people familiar with the investigations.
Trump has not been personally accused of wrongdoing. He has previously attacked James and her probe into his businesses as a “witch hunt” being driven by a prominent New York Democrat who has promised to use her perch to investigate him and his company.
Privately, the former president has regularly expressed frustration about the investigation, according to people close to him.
If Trump refuses to appear for the deposition, James and her office could take him to court and try to force him to comply.
Last year, James’s investigators subpoenaed the former president’s son, Eric Trump — a longtime executive at the Trump Organization — seeking to depose him as part of the same investigation. Eric Trump initially refused to comply, with his lawyers citing “those rights afforded to every individual under the Constitution,” according to a legal filing from James’s office.
He later agreed to comply and was questioned in October 2020.
Earlier this fall, the former president sat for a 4½ -hour deposition in another case. In that lawsuit, he was questioned by lawyers for a group of protesters who have sued him, alleging that Trump’s security guards assaulted them in 2015.
Before taking office, Trump sat for numerous depositions as part of civil litigation, at times forced to acknowledged facts that he had previously denied.
“He can’t be scripted, and he’s injudicious, and he often doesn’t understand that the process is about events and facts, rather than being performance art,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer who battled him in a lawsuit. In the 2007 deposition taken for that suit, Trump was confronted by O’Brien’s lawyers with 30 false statements or misstatements.
In their inquiries, New York prosecutors are examining financial statements related to several of Trump’s properties, including his California golf club, for which he valued the same parcel of land at $900,000 and $25 million depending on the intended audience, and an estate in suburban New York, for which Trump’s valuations ranged from $56 million to $291 million. The valuations were all given in the five years before Trump won the presidency.
Appraisers have said it is highly unusual for a company to provide such widely different valuations of the same properties at the same time.
Prosecutors appear to have dug deeply into these properties, according to court papers and people familiar with the investigation. They have compiled reams of emails, planning documents and financial data, even seeking the initiation fees Trump charged golf club members as far back as a decade ago. In Los Angeles, they have asked for geology reports on the rock layers under Trump’s course, where the value was affected by a history of landslides.
Earlier this year, in a joint investigation with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., James charged Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, and two Trump corporate entities with tax crimes.
In that case, prosecutors alleged that Weisselberg had hidden some of his own compensation — and the compensation of other Trump executives — from tax authorities to lower the taxes they owed. Prosecutors alleged that Weisselberg had avoided paying more than $900,000 over 15 years.
Weisselberg and the Trump companies all pleaded not guilty. The former president was not accused of any wrongdoing in that case.
Paul Prescod is a socialist, teacher, and longtime Jacobin contributor who is running for Pennsylvania state senate. (photo: Paul Prescod)
Paul Prescod is a socialist, teacher, and longtime Jacobin contributor who is running for Pennsylvania state senate. In an interview, Prescod discusses his roots in labor, an agenda for Pennsylvania left elected officials, and why he plans to be an “organizer-in-chief.”
Prescod’s campaign is in its early stages, but he has already earned endorsements from Teamsters Local 623, Teamsters Brotherhood of Maintenance Way Employees, AFT Local 2026, Temple Association of University Professionals, and the Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Peter Lucas spoke with him about his roots as the son of immigrant and labor activists, his experience with organized labor in Philadelphia, and what left elected officials can do to organize while in office.
PL: How did you first become politically active?
PP: My father is an immigrant from Barbados, and many of my family members there have been active with the Barbados Labour Party. My mom’s side has a history of trade union activism, including my grandfather who was a union teacher in New York City public schools. So before I identified as an activist, my family history had shaped my politics.
But my real beginning in organizing came as a student in Temple University in North Philadelphia, when Temple hospital nurses struck for patient safety and safe staffing ratios. I got involved in a strike support committee for that struggle. It was a successful strike. Not only did it win and make a material difference in that community, but it was also my first experience of working people actually standing up to corporate power and winning. That inspired me to get more involved in the labor movement.
That same year, in 2010, I went to my first Labor Notes conference, which opened up my eyes to the potential power of the labor movement at the national level, to what a labor movement with teeth could actually look like. I spent the rest of my time in school on student labor solidarity, getting to know local unions and building meaningful relationships. During Occupy Wall Street, I got involved in a broad coalition around public education in Philadelphia, so I looked into teaching. I began teaching in the district in 2015, and got heavily involved in my own union, the PFT.
This is also the same time I joined Philly DSA, giving me a foot firmly in the world of the progressive left and organized labor. A lot of my work with DSA has been chairing our labor branch for the last four years and building ties between labor and Philly DSA and similar types of left organizations.
PL: Given your background in the labor movement, what prompted your crossover into electoral politics?
PP: It’s ironic, because I wasn’t very inspired by electoral politics until Bernie Sanders came along and showed what’s possible. What became clear to me is that the movement is important, but without running for and winning elected office, there are limits to what any movement can accomplish — whether it’s because of restrictive labor laws or structural barriers to democracy. We need both things working at once: a robust movement that’s also reflected in the legislature.
Something inspiring about Bernie’s campaign was this idea of him being an “organizer-in-chief.” He wasn’t just asking his volunteer base for money or to knock on doors; he was letting them know when there was a picket line that they could get involved in. We need more elected officials who are not just going to put their names on the right bills, but actively help build a movement.
If there’s a strike in a representative’s district, don’t just put out some words of support. Find a way to materially support that struggle, to tip the scale in favor of the workers. That is something we’re missing in electoral politics: more candidates who are aggressively pro-labor and see their role as actively helping to advance the labor movement.
Labor law is not a magic bullet that’s going to solve all our problems. Because if the movement is not strong, you can’t take advantage of it. Having said that, we’ve seen with so many recent fights, like at Amazon, that labor law is set up to disadvantage workers. And making improvements on those laws for workers can actually make a huge difference in helping the movement grow.
PL: What value do you see in electing someone from a working-class background?
PP: While electing someone who comes from a working-class background does not automatically mean that they’re going to be fighting for working-class interests, it’s important to have public officials that are representative of the constituents they are serving. On a basic level, they are more likely to actually be in touch with the problems other working people face, and thus can better speak to those problems when addressing them.
As a public school teacher, for example, I know what teachers in our city are going through, as well as their students and their families. I know so many families who are struggling with housing issues, with food insecurity, with transportation issues; many parents with children in Philadelphia schools are working two or three jobs, making it near impossible to be more involved in their child’s education as they’d like.
The hope is that these kinds of candidates can actually connect more with voters. We have a huge problem in this country with low voter turnout and especially among working-class people of color. People don’t feel inspired by or represented in politics.
PL: One of the ideas that the Sanders campaigns embraced (but largely failed to deliver on) was expanding the electorate. Is that part of your campaign’s aim?
PP: The real answer is that you can’t pull that off in just one election cycle, but you can begin the process of bringing people who have been disenfranchised, left behind, or checked out back into the political arena. This is a long-term project that will involve electoral politics and other kinds of movement work.
One way we are trying to do this is with labor support. Most left-leaning insurgent challengers usually don’t get much labor support because unions often want to back who they feel is going to win. My campaign is starting in a unique position where we already have four union endorsements, and are seeking and anticipating more.
This is crucial — not just on principle because the labor labor movement is important to me, but as a concrete part of the strategy to mobilize nontraditional voters. To give one example, I have a strong relationship with Teamsters Local 623, which represents UPS workers. Many of their rank-and-file members in Southwest Philly, which is in my district, do not typically vote. Now they are being mobilized to canvass by the union, and they recognize me from their picket lines and meetings. They see a candidate their leadership is genuinely enthusiastic about.
That’s also going to be a big part of the equation of how we build a progressive labor coalition. We’re going to have canvasses with union members, DSA members, and members of other progressive organizations. From there, it’s simple: we’re going to have in-person conversations over a long period of time to try to galvanize as many people as possible.
PL: You’re running in a majority black district in an election that’s not two years removed from the Black Lives Matter uprisings. What’s your vision for an anti-racist campaign?
PP: Obviously the issues raised during the uprisings are very relevant to people of color in Philadelphia. But I think we need to do a better job connecting them to our broader vision for a better world. So many people in our district are struggling with underfunded public education, low-wage jobs, poor infrastructure, and local environmental issues — all of which disproportionately hurt communities of color. We also have to figure out a way to talk about gun violence, which is a huge problem in Philadelphia and especially in my district. It’s very visceral as I’m talking to people on the doors and is usually the first thing that comes up.
The approach needs to connect this idea of anti-racism to real material policy that will improve people’s lives. We have to connect our theory of anti-racism to investment in public programs that will address the problems people are facing day-to-day.
PL: How do you see your campaign incorporating the message of class struggle?
PP: Identifying a clear enemy is such a key part of class struggle, and our campaign has a great opportunity to do that. Pennsylvania has huge issues with tax evasion from some of the wealthiest corporations in this country. We have so many companies that set up fake headquarters outside of the state to avoid paying taxes. We are one of the largest producers of natural gas in the country, and our natural gas companies do not pay any taxes to our state. The rich need to start paying. This is something voters understand intuitively, because when they don’t, the working class gets the short end of the stick.
The revenue never comes back to our schools or our infrastructure or our neighborhoods. It’s important to clearly name the enemy and say, “this is who is getting in the way of the future that we deserve and we really need.”
It’s important that we concretize it, too. A big thing we are talking about on the campaign is creating green jobs to retrofit our public school buildings and expand public transit — creating tens of thousands of union jobs in the process.
PL: There are several DSA-endorsed and progressive elected officials throughout Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia. Is there any plan to cohere a bloc working with these other officials to build working-class power in concert?
PP: One thing that gave me hope and encouraged me to run was knowing that, if I were elected, I would not be the sole left elected in an establishment institution. There’s clearly a growing portion of progressives at the state level in Pennsylvania, but at the moment, the legislature is still Republican-dominated.
I’m looking at this, and the other electeds are as well, as a protracted fight. But the progressives there have already made a difference. Hopefully we can act as a bloc over the long term to push more ambitious policies while using our political power to help other insurgents get elected and to keep growing this base throughout the state.
PL: Other socialists have had electoral success competing in blue-dominated areas, but the Pennsylvania state legislature is still a Republican majority, as you just mentioned. What do you think the fight is going to be like when you’re not only going up against conservative Democrats, but also the Republican Party?
PP: Despite these structural and political barriers at the state level, there’s a lot we could do in our own district. If there is a union strike or a housing fight taking place in my district, you don’t need to pass a law at the state level to support those fights.
But at the state level, it is going to be complicated, because on the one hand, there will be pressure on the Left to close the ranks with others in the party to fight the right wing. There will be times where that is appropriate. But we also have to be willing to push our own party further.
We will use our weight as a block of progressives to help other people like ourselves get elected across the state. And we’ll hammer the bread-and-butter issues. Because so many of the things we are fighting for are universally popular, even in districts that are represented by Republicans.
In Philadelphia, we have a huge issue with underfunded public schools, but rural communities across Pennsylvania face the same problem. It’s the same situation with health care, jobs, and housing. We need to highlight those issues as much as possible, and try to build coalitions among voters in these places.
PL: If elected, how do you plan to use your office to go beyond simply passing bills?
PP: I’m going to actively support movements in my district and throughout the state by providing material support to unions that are striking, or to housing activists that are fighting against skyrocketing rents. Also by maintaining a very close working relationship with groups, such as DSA, to work on organizing infrastructure that we can maintain and build upon over time.
Elected officials have a unique opportunity to pull together strong coalitions that can fight for bold proposals. Not only introducing green jobs legislation, but also helping convene both labor and environmental activists. I want to organize with the people I represent.
Yoshunda Jones, a local activist who protested the elimination of Sunday voting, holds up a sign in Spalding County. (photo: Reuters)
But this was an entirely different five-member board than had overseen the last election. The Democratic majority of three Black women was gone. So was the Black elections supervisor.
Now a faction of three white Republicans controlled the board – thanks to a bill passed by the Republican-led Georgia legislature earlier this year. The Spalding board’s new chairman has endorsed former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims on social media.
The panel in Spalding, a rural patch south of Atlanta, is one of six county boards that Republicans have quietly reorganized in recent months through similar county-specific state legislation. The changes expanded the party’s power over choosing members of local election boards ahead of the crucial midterm Congressional elections in November 2022.
The unusual rash of restructurings follows the state's passage of Senate Bill 202, which restricted ballot access statewide and allowed the Republican-controlled State Election Board to assume control of county boards it deems underperforming. The board immediately launched a performance review of the Democratic-leaning Fulton County board, which oversees part of Atlanta.
The Georgia restructurings are part of a national Republican effort to expand control over election administration in the wake of Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona have enacted new curbs on voter access this year. Backers of Trump’s false stolen-election claims are running campaigns for secretary of state - the top election official - in battleground states. And some Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to eliminate the state’s bipartisan election commission and threatening its members with prosecution.
The stakes are high in Georgia, which last year backed a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992. Its first-term Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock will be up for reelection in 2022, a contest that could prove pivotal to which party controls Congress. The governor’s race next year pits incumbent Republican Brian Kemp against Trump-endorsed candidate David Perdue in a primary. The winner will likely face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a voting rights advocate. Both Warnock and Abrams are Black.
The county board restructurings and statewide voting restrictions, Democrats and voting-rights groups say, represent the most sweeping changes in decades to Georgia’s electoral system. Until 2013, Georgia elections operated under federal oversight to ensure fair participation for Black voters in this once-segregated Southern state.
Democrats say Republicans are trying to expand their control over election administration functions that should be nonpartisan. That could result in suppression of votes, they said, and could give Republicans control over certification of results, along with recounts and audits of contested elections.
“We are talking about a normalization of Republican takeovers of local functions,” says Saira Draper, director of voter protection for the Georgia Democratic Party.
Republicans say the changes aim to restore public trust in elections after many problems during the 2020 elections.
"What we want to make sure is that we have election integrity,” said Butch Miller, the No. 2 Republican in the Georgia Senate, a leading advocate for Senate Bill 202 and a sponsor of the bill to reconstitute the Lincoln County election board.
In five of the Georgia counties that restructured election boards - Troup, Morgan, Pickens, Stephens and Lincoln - the legislature shifted the power to appoint some or all election board members to local county commissions, all of which are currently controlled by Republicans. Previously, the appointments had been split evenly between the local Democratic and Republican parties, sometimes with other local entities controlling some appointments. The intent of the old system: To ensure a politically balanced or nonpartisan board.
In the sixth county, Spalding, the parties still choose two members each, but the fifth member is now chosen by local judges. (It used to be decided by a coin flip.) Those judges tend to be politically conservative; they appointed a white Republican to replace a Black Democrat on the election board, giving Republicans a 3-2 majority.
In Morgan County, the majority-Republican county commission reconstituted its election board, ousting two outspoken Black Democrats. In Troup County, a Black Democratic member claims the board shake-up was aimed at ousting her after she fought to increase voting access.
Reuters could not determine the exact split of Democrats and Republicans in the five counties that handed control to county commissions before and after their restructurings. That’s because board members’ party affiliation is not public information in Georgia, and board representatives declined to identify their allegiances.
RESTRICTING ACCESS
The county election boards have broad authority over voter access, such as polling locations and early-voting procedures. They also have considerable sway over post-election provisional-ballot tallies, audits and recounts.
Reconstituted boards in two of the six counties have already moved to restrict voting access. In addition to Spalding’s termination of Sunday voting, Lincoln County has proposed consolidating its seven precincts into one voting center, which critics say would discourage voting by people traveling from remote areas. Proponents say it would make voting more efficient and secure. The proposal is set for a vote on Thursday.
In Lincoln County, the new law removes appointments by political parties and gives the Republican-led county commission discretion to appoint the board's three-member majority. County Republicans say the changes are meant to comply with a 2018 state Supreme Court ruling, which dictated that private entities cannot appoint members to government bodies. That decision, however, involved boards of ethics, not elections, and many other Georgia counties continue to allow political-party appointments to election boards.
The changes come in the wake of Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Trump won Spalding County with 60% of the 2020 vote. But his margin of victory declined by 4 percentage points from 2016 as turnout among Black voters jumped 20% in a county where the population is 35% black.
Trump supporters rifled through the dumpsters behind Spalding’s election office, looking for tossed ballots. None were found. Others demanded to watch the vote-counting. Sheriff’s deputies had to escort election workers to their cars. In Georgia and nationwide, some Trump supporters have threatened election officials with violence.
With conservative judges now choosing the county election board’s fifth member, the previous fifth member, Vera McIntosh, a Black Democrat, has been ousted. She was replaced by James Newland, who is also vice-chair of the county Republican Party. In September, he voted to end Sunday voting.
The board’s new chair is Ben Johnson, a former official of the county Republican party. Johnson declined to comment on his social media posts endorsing Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. He would not answer questions about whether he acknowledged that Biden won the 2020 election fairly.
McIntosh, the ousted Democrat, called the changes a “power grab” by local Republicans who wanted to “go back and prove the ‘Big Lie’ was real,” referring to Trump’s election-fraud claims.
“They wanted control,” she said. “They got control.”
The law restructuring Spalding’s board also required the elections supervisor to live in the county, a change that forced out the incumbent supervisor, Marcia Ridley. Two other Black Democrats on the board quit: Margaret Bentley and Glenda Henley, who cited objections to the law and harassment from Trump supporters.
Henley said the board’s meetings were increasingly attended by Trump supporters crying fraud. She called the tensions “exhausting” and said: “I have never been afraid in this town, but I am now.”
The restructured board still includes two Democrats, one of whom is Black.
Republican state representative David Knight from Spalding, who co-sponsored a bill to reconstitute the board, said the changes had nothing to do with race or partisanship. They aimed, he said, "to restore the integrity of our election board and voter confidence."
On Election Day in 2020, voting machines malfunctioned in all 18 precincts, resulting in long waits. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called for Ridley’s resignation, and the Republican-controlled State Election Board referred her handling of the problems to the state attorney general, who has to date not taken any action.
Ridley denies any mismanagement, saying her staff “worked hard to ensure that no voter got disenfranchised and all were able to vote.”
FREE AND FAIR?
In western Georgia’s Troup County, the Republican-controlled county commission now appoints all election board members, a power previously shared by three cities and the two political parties.
Lonnie Hollis, one of two Black female members, will leave the board at year-end. Hollis, who has served since 2013, said the restructuring was aimed at unseating her because she fought to increase voter access. Her efforts included advocating for the first voting location in a predominantly Black church in the county, which she said has multiple precincts in predominantly white churches.
Patrick Crews, the Republican chairman of Troup County commissioners, denied Hollis was targeted for removal.
“Our goal is to be inclusive and appoint members who are concerned about having fair and honest elections,” Crews said.
In Morgan County, two Black Democrats on the board, Helen Butler and Avery Jackson, were removed after the new law eliminated political-party appointments and handed appointment power to the Republican-dominated commission. Butler and Jackson sought reappointments but were denied.
The commission chair, Philipp von Hanstein, did not respond to a comment request.
Butler has long advocated for voting rights and social justice. Testifying before a special U.S. Senate subcommittee in July, she said she was ousted for fighting the closure of polling locations and advocating for ballot drop boxes.
Butler warned that the restructurings could “enable members of the majority party to overturn election results they do not like."
Arizona will ask highest court to bar two death row inmates from presenting evidence that could prove their innocence. (photo: AP)
Arizona will ask highest court to bar two death row inmates from presenting evidence that could prove their innocence
State officials in Arizona are asking the nation’s highest court to bar the two condemned prisoners – one with a strong claim of innocence, the other with a history of intellectual disability and family abuse – from presenting evidence in federal court that could save their lives.
The Arizona officials argue the prisoners should not be allowed to put forward the evidence because they failed to do so in state court at an earlier stage in their legal proceedings.
But the prisoners protest they had no chance of seeking redress at state level because the lawyers they were assigned by Arizona were so woefully incompetent at trial that they failed to uncover crucial evidence that could have spared them from death row. After conviction, they were assigned a second set of lawyers who were equally ineffective and who as a result made no challenge to the gross mishandling of their defense at trial.
Death penalty experts warn that if the country’s highest court sides with Arizona it would erect new hurdles that could impede all convicted prisoners, including death row inmates, from seeking redress in federal court for possible miscarriages of justice. At its most stark, individuals who should have been exonerated or who should never have been put on death row because of their intellectual disabilities would face increased risk of being unjustly executed.
“An adverse resolution in this case could present crippling obstacles to wrongfully convicted prisoners in proving their innocence and winning their freedom,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Almost 3,000 prisoners have been exonerated in the US since 1989 – including 186 innocent people who were condemned to death. Christina Swarns, executive director of the Innocence Project, estimates that between them they spent more than 25,000 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.
Swarns said that if Arizona prevails, “untold thousands of wrongfully convicted innocent people will be left in the nightmarish situation of having no court to whom they can turn for justice.”
At its most visceral, the Arizona case, Shinn v Ramirez and Jones, is a matter of life and death. But the hearing is also being seen as profoundly important by close observers of the supreme court as a litmus test of how radical the new court is intending to be.
The supreme court is in the first full term with its new six to three conservative majority seated. That rightwing composition is the product of Donald Trump having remolded the court by appointing three new justices under highly contentious circumstances.
“This is a bellwether case for how extreme this supreme court might be,” said Leah Litman, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Michigan law school.
Last week the court sent jitters across America when it heard arguments in a case that could overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established the constitutional right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability. Conservative justices indicated that they are contemplating restricting or even abolishing abortion rights.
Critics have warned that if the new supreme court curtailed abortion it could severely damage the legitimacy of the court by giving the appearance that it is swayed by partisan politics – in the abortion case from extremist Republicans in Mississippi.
The Arizona death penalty case carries similar dangers for the standing of the court and with it the state of American democracy. Were the conservative justices to rule in Arizona’s favor they would be backing a radical partisan move by Republican state lawmakers.
In 2012 the supreme court ruled in Martinez v Ryan that prisoners should be allowed to present claims in federal court that they had ineffective lawyers at trial and post-conviction stages of their cases. That precedent has never been questioned by an appeals court or by any justice on the supreme court.
Now Arizona Republicans are trying to impose a new impediment. Prisoners can present claims that their lawyers were ineffective as Martinez requires, but they can’t produce any evidence to back up those claims.
“Obviously, presenting a claim with no evidence at all isn’t much of a claim,” Litman said.
She added: “It is important to understand that the antics in this case are the same antics that are happening elsewhere on the court’s docket this term, asking for extreme aggressive maneuvers that threaten the court’s institutional integrity.”
Barry Jones, one of the two death row inmates at the centre of Wednesday’s arguments, has always claimed his innocence. He was sentenced to death for the May 1994 killing of his girlfriend’s daughter, aged four, in Tucson, Arizona.
In 2017, a federal judge ruled that there had been a “rush to judgment” in prosecuting Jones. Prosecutors had relied on junk science, telling the jury that the victim’s injuries could scientifically be shown to have been inflicted a day before her death when she was in the sole care of Jones.
Jones’s trial lawyer did not challenge that testimony at trial, which in effect amounted to an admission of the defendant’s guilt. But in the federal hearing in 2017 the court was told by a medical expert who had reviewed the forensics that the girl’s injuries “could not possibly have been inflicted on the day prior to her death”.
The judge ordered that Jones be released or have a new trial. But Arizona is so determined to execute its prisoner that the state has appealed all the way to the supreme court.
Cary Sandman, one of Jones’s legal team, said that his client had spent “over 25 years on death row despite never having got a fair trial. Arizona is now arguing that Jones must suffer that wrongful conviction without recourse to federal courts.”
President Biden may soon approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, which ramps up spending to counter China and Russia. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden may soon vote to approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, with a 5% increase over last year’s military spending bill. The $768 billion military budget is $24 billion higher than what Biden requested despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The package includes funds aimed at countering China’s power and to build Ukraine’s military strength. It also includes nearly $28 billion in nuclear weapons funding.
The bill is headed to the Senate, then to President Biden, after the House approved the bill late Tuesday night with more Republicans than Democrats voting for it. Among those who voted no was progressive New York Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, who tweeted, quote, “It is astounding how quickly Congress moves weapons but we can’t ensure housing, care, and justice for our veterans, nor invest in robust jobs programs for districts like mine.” Bowman also criticized how the compromise bill strips funding that would have established an office for countering extremism in the Pentagon, saying the bill, quote, “must also protect the Black men and women who are disproportionately the target of extremism and a biased military justice system,” unquote.
Also absent from the bill is a provision to require women to register for the draft.
Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen.
For more, we’re joined by Bill Hartung, director of Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, author of a new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden,” his latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Bill Hartung, welcome back to Democracy Now! First of all, if you can just respond to the House passage of the largest weapons spending bill in U.S. history since World War II?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think it’s an outrage, if you look at what we really need. You know, in the roundup, you talked about the need to spend on pandemic preparedness. The world is on fire with the impacts of climate change. We’ve got deep problems of racial and economic injustice in this country. We’ve got an insurrection and violence trying to undermine our democracy. So the last thing we need to do is be throwing more money at the Pentagon. And it’s a huge amount. It’s more than we spent in Vietnam, the Korean War, the Reagan buildup of the ’80s, all throughout the Cold War. And as you said, even at the time as Biden has pulled out U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget keeps going up and up.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Bill Hartung, could respond specifically to the fact that the budget is $24 billion more than what was requested? Is it common to have such a huge difference in terms of the amount requested and the amount granted, $24 billion?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Congress often adds money for pet projects — Boeing aircraft in Missouri, attack submarines in Connecticut and Virginia — but nothing at this level. You know, $24 billion is the biggest congressional add-on that I can think of in recent memory. So it’s kind of extraordinary, especially, as we said, when the endless wars should be winding down.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you talk about some of the key figures in Congress who have been pushing for an increase?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you’ve got people like James Inhofe, who’s the Republican lead on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who’s basically said we need to spend 3 to 5% more per year in perpetuity, which would push the budget over a trillion dollars within five to six years. He is always touting a report called the National Defense Strategy Commission report, which was put together primarily by people who were from the arms industry, from think tanks funded by the arms industry. Basically, it was a kind of a special interest collection that were pushing this.
And then you have Mike Rogers from Alabama, who’s the key player on House Armed Services. He’s got Huntsville in his state, and Huntsville is sort of the missile capital of America — Army missiles, missile defense systems. He also gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the weapons industry for his reelection. So, there’s a strong kind of pork barrel special interest push by the military-industrial complex that help bring about this result.
AMY GOODMAN: The Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt the $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, this amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen. I want to play a clip of Senators Paul and Sanders addressing the Senate Tuesday.
SEN. RAND PAUL: The U.S. should end all arms sales to the Saudis until they end their blockade of Yemen. President Biden said he would change the Trump policy of supporting Saudi’s war in Yemen, but it’s not all that apparent that policy has changed. … We commission these weapons, and we should not give them to countries who are starving children and are committing, essentially, genocide in Yemen.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: President, I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable and unusual position of agreeing with Senator Paul.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Senator Sanders and Paul. Bill Hartung, you’re the author of the new report headlined “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Can you talk about the significance of this, what was voted down?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, these missiles are air-to-air missiles, which can be used to enforce the air blockade that’s been put over Yemen. So, the Saudis have bombed the Sana’a airport runways. They’ve tried to keep ships from coming in with fuel. And as a result, costs of medical supplies now are out of the reach of the average person of Yemen. People haven’t been able to leave the country for medical treatment. Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE say 32,000 people have probably died just for lack of being able to leave the country for that specialized care. Four hundred thousand children are at risk, according to the World Food Programme, of starvation because of the blockade. Millions of Yemenis need humanitarian aid just to survive, and the Saudi blockade is making it increasingly difficult to get that aid or to get commercial goods that they need.
So, basically, this is a criminal enterprise run by Mohammed bin Salman. And Joe Biden said, when he was a candidate, Saudi Arabia, we’d treat it like an pariah; he wouldn’t arm them. In his first foreign policy speech, he said the U.S. should stop support for offensive operations in Yemen. And yet he’s approved a contract for maintenance of Saudi planes and attack helicopters, and now this deal for the missiles. So he’s basically gone back on his pledge to forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia and to use U.S. leverage to end the blockade and the war itself.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bill, before we conclude, just to go back to the military budget, could you comment specifically on the $28 billion earmarked for nuclear weapons?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, unfortunately, this bill doubles down on the Pentagon’s buildup of a new generation of nuclear weapons, a new generation of nuclear warheads, which is, of course, the last thing we need at a time of global tensions. You know, in particular, there was even a provision that said it’s not allowed to reduce the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are the most dangerous weapons in the world because they could easily be used by accident if there were a false alarm of attack, because the president has only minutes to decide whether to use these things. So, I think that’s one of the biggest stains on this bill, is basically continuing to stoke the nuclear arms race, not only at great cost but at great risk to the future of the planet.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the China and Russia being used as justification for weapons sales and increased military budget, can you compare the U.S. military budget to theirs?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the U.S. spends about 10 times what Russia spends, about three times what China spends. It has 13 times as many active nuclear warheads in its stockpile as China does. We’ve got 11 aircraft carriers of a type that China doesn’t have. We’ve got 800 U.S. military bases around the globe, while China has three. So this whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget. And so far, unfortunately, at least in the halls of Congress and the Biden administration, that’s been successful.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. We’ll link to your new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Hartung’s latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Next up, calls are growing for President Biden to extend the moratorium on student debt payments as millions face a debt crisis during the pandemic. We’ll speak with the Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor about her new animated film, Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset. Stay with us.
IFAW, WWF and wildlife trade monitor TRAFFIC launched the coalition in 2018. Since then, it has blocked or removed more than 11.6 million posts and ads. (photo: Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online)
The internet and social media weren’t nearly as sophisticated or scrutinized as they are today. Kessler saw endless footstools made from severed elephant feet, along with ivory items for sale. For her, this was an opportunity to start working with online companies to remove these postings from their platforms.
The problem with the online wildlife trade is that “it covers so many species, so many different products, so many different platforms,” says Kessler, who is today the U.S. director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
The wildlife trade is a threat to global biodiversity, and the internet has only exacerbated the challenge. As conversations about internet regulations and online crimes emerge, IFAW, WWF and wildlife trade monitor TRAFFIC responded by launching the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online in 2018. Online companies that pledged to be a part of the coalition monitor and remove ads for prohibited wildlife. In its latest progress report, the coalition shared its successes in getting the trade canceled.
Since 2018, more than 11.6 million ads were removed or blocked from online platforms.
“It’s not always a deliberate trafficker,” Kessler says. “It might just be somebody that inherited a piece of ivory from their grandmother, and they decided to put it on their eBay site. A lot of the work of the coalition too is user education and awareness.”
The coalition
Today, the coalition is made up of 47 companies that include Facebook, Google, Etsy, Microsoft, Poshmark and longtime partner eBay. TikTok also recently jumped on board in 2021. Other Chinese companies in the coalition include Tencent, Alibaba and Weibo.
Combined, these companies have 11 billion user accounts. Each platform addresses the issue in a way that’s specific to their users and ads, which is a part of the industry-led approach, Kessler says.
Since the 2020 progress report that was published 18 months prior, the coalition companies have removed 8.3 million listings. In just five months, Facebook and TRAFFIC removed nearly 2,000 Facebook groups linked to wildlife trafficking in the Philippines and Indonesia, two hotspots for the illegal trade.
Although reports show the demand for elephant ivory is declining, a significant amount of the trade still takes place online. In a recent report by IFAW, which looked at a subset of online postings, 44% of the ads they found were for elephant ivory. They also found that nearly 20% were for live exotic pets.
Pangolins are also frequent victims of online wildlife trafficking. Their scales are used in traditional medicine and for leather goods, like purses, belts and boots. Sea turtle leather goods are also common. And sea turtles and birds are a big part of the exotic pet trade.
Although the wildlife trade is a global problem, it’s more prolific in some areas than others, and the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t helped. That’s why the coalition is trying to target platforms that serve places like the U.S. and China, Kessler says.
In China, there’s been a shift in the illegal wildlife trade from online marketplaces to social media, says Chenyue Ma, the program manager overseeing IFAW China’s wildlife crime prevention, Asian elephant protection and Beijing Raptor Rescue Center programs.
“It’s not just affecting elephants and rhinos overseas. It’s also affecting animals here,” Kessler says, adding that the U.S. is one of the biggest traders in wildlife, both legal and illegal.
She notes that when they started putting together their progress report earlier this year, they found a lot of black bear parts and products on the internet.
An online game of whack-a-mole
If you eliminate wildlife trafficking on one platform, traffickers will just jump to another one, Kessler says. That’s why the coalition takes an industry-led approach.
Illegal online wildlife trade has a lot of similarities to other forms of trafficking that happen online, like human, drug and arms trafficking, Kessler says. One key difference is that there’s a vast gray area when it comes to the wildlife trade. The laws on what is legal to trade are complex and vary from country to country and even by state or city in the U.S.
Many government agencies don’t have the capacity or the resources to monitor all physical shipments that come in as well as everything happening online, Kessler says.
Protections also vary based on species. With the live animal trade, it can be hard to identify a species from a photo, if the correct photo is even used at all, she says. Wildlife experts, who serve as cyber spotters, help identify the correct species and what the protection status is. They type in keywords to see if they can spot illegal trade, then send over the results to the coalition members to get them removed. Those keywords are then fed into algorithms so they can be identified again.
Some companies use pop-up ads to deter purchases, so if a user searches for a keyword that might trigger the pop-up ad, like “ivory,” the user will see what protections and prohibitions are in place.
So far, it’s mostly ads, but some forums have elevated this to law enforcement, says Kessler.
Cancel or conviction?
There are many jurisdictional challenges when it comes to prosecuting online crime, like knowing who and where the criminal is as well as differentiating between legal and illegal trade.
Through the Lacey Act, the U.S. can prosecute based on violations of foreign laws when there is a connection to the U.S. And there are examples of successful investigations and prosecutions. In December 2020, the Department of Justice extradited a Chinese citizen from Malaysia to the U.S. for allegedly financing a turtle-trafficking ring that smuggled 1,500 protected turtles out of the U.S.
And earlier this year, a Texas man was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for his role in an international smuggling ring of protected wildlife that used Facebook to connect suppliers and customers.
The internet is so vast and law enforcement does not have enough resources to follow up and investigate every advertisement, Kessler says, which is why private sector collaboration is so important.
Ongoing challenges
Kessler says she hopes to get more tech companies on board, and that they’ll be able to create more automated methods to find these posts and feed online algorithms with new keywords. For instance, IFAW and Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, created an artificial intelligence tool that identifies wildlife products online.
But the biggest challenge for the coalition is to stay ahead of the ever-evolving keywords and identifying problematic posts. The traffickers are also becoming savvier about getting around regulations. They’re figuring out how to exploit loopholes and what to write in their posts to make sure they stay in “the gray area,” Kessler says.
And international cooperation on wildlife trafficking is not nearly enough, says Ma.
“In many cases, we only see arrest of traffickers, but [rarely] see international cooperation to apprehend behind-the-scenes leaders of the syndicates,” she says.
She adds that wildlife conservation should not be politicized, and that singling out China is not a solution. Online wildlife trafficking in other places like the U.S. and Japan doesn’t get as much attention, she says.
“The coming 10 years could be the last window period for countries to act together,” Ma says.
“If we continue to let political differences triumph our shared interest and destiny, we may lose the battle completely.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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