Chris Hedges's Blog, page 117

Amazon Spends Big to Remake Seattle’s City Council

SEATTLE—Brian Sweeney has a long list of complaints about Amazon, from the way it treats warehouse workers to the low taxes it pays and its effort to win concessions from cities to bring in jobs. So when he learned the online retail giant had poured $1 million into remaking the Seattle City Council with more business-friendly candidates, he pulled out his wallet.

The New York resident sent $15 to socialist council member Kshama Sawant, a target of the online retail giant. While that doesn’t compare to Amazon’s unprecedented spending Oct. 14, about 1,900 others also have donated to Sawant since then, her campaign says. It’s a dramatic rise in support and a reflection of the risk Amazon is taking as it splashes into the politics of its liberal hometown.

Many in Seattle aren’t happy with the council, but they also don’t like a company headed by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, trying to influence their vote. As historic income inequality fuels homelessness and soaring housing prices, progressives elsewhere don’t like it either.

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“Amazon could do this in hundreds of places around the country with all the money they’re not paying in taxes,” said Sweeney, a 28-year-old software engineer turned carpenter in Valley Stream, New York.

With seven of the nine Seattle council seats in play Nov. 5, business interests see an opportunity to shift city leadership closer to the political center and away from a bent to potentially tax big companies to fund homeless services or improve public transit.

The council is officially nonpartisan, but Republicans stand little chance of getting elected in Seattle, and many of the business-backed candidates are moderate to progressive Democrats. The race will decide whether the council is dominated by socialists and extremely liberal Democrats or more centrist ones.

“We are contributing to this election because we care deeply about the future of Seattle,” Amazon spokesman Aaron Toso said in a statement. “We believe it is critical that our hometown has a City Council that is focused on pragmatic solutions to our shared challenges in transportation, homelessness, climate change and public safety.”

Progressive Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are among those accusing Amazon of trying to buy the council.

The elections come a year after a political debacle that damaged the council’s popularity. The leaders unanimously passed the “Amazon tax,” designed to make lucrative companies contribute more to affordable housing for the homeless.

It repealed the tax after a revolt from Amazon, which would have had to pay around $11 million a year and threatened to halt its growth in the city. The company said Seattle didn’t need more money and that it was “highly uncertain whether the City Council’s anti-business positions or its spending inefficiency will change for the better.”

The debate helped cement Amazon’s awakening to local politics as the council’s popularity slipped, especially over its handling of homelessness. Four council members decided not to seek re-election.

There’s been little progress in the four years since the city declared a homelessness crisis. Many business interests support “sweeps” of homeless camps accompanied by teams to help people get services.

Liberal council members, including Sawant, say the sweeps are inhumane and don’t work. She wants money for tiny-house villages.

Meanwhile, some in Sawant’s district say she’s more interested in building a national socialist movement than responding to their concerns. A large portion of her donations come from out of state.

Sawant, who frequently says people must choose sides in “class warfare,” has warned that a win by Amazon in the election would embolden corporate interests to fight efforts to make the rich pay more in taxes or spread progressive policies like tenants’ rights and paid sick leave laws.

The two liberal, vocally pro-union council members who are not up for re-election, Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena Gonzáles, didn’t endorse Sawant in the primary.

But after Amazon weighed in, both enthusiastically endorsed her last week. She’s running against Egan Orion, director of an annual gay pride festival in Seattle.

Gonzáles said Amazon’s support might swing Orion’s positions.

“When there’s that much money being offered, there will be a quid-pro-quo expectation,” she said. “Amazon has plenty of access to the council already. What they want is elected officials who are going to bend to their will.”

At a recent debate, Orion pointed to his work in the LGBTQ community and with small businesses, saying, “That narrative does not match the person that I am or the way I am running this campaign.”

He describes himself as a progressive but says more can be accomplished by negotiating with business leaders than by demonizing them.

Amazon gave $1 million this month to the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee, bringing its total contributions to the PAC this year to $1.5 million — a huge amount for a local election. Starbucks, Expedia and a development company started by late Microsoft founder Paul Allen also have contributed.

“Generally, folks have seen a council that talks a lot about progress on homelessness, on reducing traffic, on helping with our increasingly unaffordable housing stock, and they really just haven’t seen progress,” PAC executive director Markham McIntyre said. “With taxes going up year after year, they get frustrated when they’re not seeing results.”

So far, independent spending in the council races has reached more than $3.5 million.

Labor groups also are spending heavily, including Civic Alliance for a Progressive Economy, which is backed by progressive Amazon investor Nick Hanauer and has raised nearly $500,000. The PAC of the hotel workers union Unite Here has raised even more.

State Sen. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat, said he didn’t know what effect Amazon’s spending will have on the election but that he understood its desire to “rebalance” the council.

“They’re showing that they care a lot about their hometown, just as labor cares a lot and social justice activists care a lot,” Carlyle said.

Federal Judge Blocks Alabama’s Near-Total Abortion Ban

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Alabama’s near-total abortion ban from taking effect next month, saying the law, part of a wave of new abortion restrictions by conservative states, is clearly unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued an expected preliminary injunction temporarily blocking Alabama from enforcing the law that would make performing an abortion a felony in almost all cases. The ruling came after abortion providers sued to block the law from taking effect Nov. 15. The injunction will remain in place until Thompson decides the full case.

“Alabama’s abortion ban contravenes clear Supreme Case Court precedent,” Thompson wrote in an accompanying opinion. “It violates the right of an individual to privacy, to make choices central to personal dignity and autonomy. It diminishes the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions. It defies the United States Constitution.”

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Energized by new conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, Alabama and other conservative states have attempted to enact new restrictions on abortion in the hopes of getting Supreme Court justices to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

A number of states attempted to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. The Alabama law went further by attempting to ban almost all abortions with no exceptions for cases of rape and incest.

Passed by the Republican-led legislature, the 2019 Alabama Human Life Protection Act would make performing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy a felony punishable by up to 99 years or life in prison for the abortion provider. The only exceptions would be when there is a serious health risk to the mother or the fetus has a lethal anomaly that would cause it to die shortly after birth.

None of the state bans has taken effect. Some have already been blocked, and elsewhere courts are considering requests to put them on hold while legal challenges play out.

“This is not only a victory for the people of Alabama — it’s a victory for the entire nation. We said it from the start: this ban is blatantly unconstitutional and we will fight it every step of the way,” said Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast. Planned Parenthood was one of the groups that sued to block the law.

Randall Marshall, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama said the decision was expected.

“Abortion remains legal in Alabama. The state’s repeated attempts to push abortion out of reach by enacting unconstitutional laws restricting abortions has already cost taxpayers nearly 2 ½ million dollars,” Marshall said. “This ill-advised law will cost taxpayers more money.”

Supporters of the Alabama law have also said they anticipated the action but hope to eventually convince the U.S. Supreme Court to roll back abortion rights. Alabama Republican Rep. Terri Collins, who sponsored the ban, said the ruling “is merely the first of many steps on that legal journey.”

“As we have stated before, the state’s objective is to advance our case to the U.S. Supreme Court where we intend to submit evidence that supports our argument that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that the Constitution does not prohibit states from protecting unborn children from abortion,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in statement.

In a measured statement, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said the ban reflects Alabamians beliefs, but that she also supports the “rule of law.”

“This legislation passed with overwhelming support in the Alabama Legislature and was signed into law as a testament to Alabamians’ longstanding belief that every human life is sacred. We must continue doing all we can to protect life,” Ivey said.

The Annihilation of Julian Assange

“In Defense of Julian Assange,” edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler, is now available for OR Books.

I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.

Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated aging. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

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But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

Until yesterday I had always been quietly skeptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and skeptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport. She actually told him that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. The question of why a man who, by the very charges against him, was acknowledged to be highly intelligent and competent, had been reduced by the state to somebody incapable of following court proceedings, gave her not a millisecond of concern.

The charge against Julian is very specific; conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables. The charges are nothing to do with Sweden, nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the 2016 US election; a simple clarification the mainstream media appears incapable of understanding.

The purpose of yesterday’s hearing was case management; to determine the timetable for the extradition proceedings. The key points at issue were that Julian’s defense was requesting more time to prepare their evidence; and arguing that political offenses were specifically excluded from the extradition treaty. There should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all.

The reasons given by Assange’s defense team for more time to prepare were both compelling and startling. They had very limited access to their client in jail and had not been permitted to hand him any documents about the case until one week ago. He had also only just been given limited computer access, and all his relevant records and materials had been seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy by the US Government; he had no access to his own materials for the purpose of preparing his defence.

Furthermore, the defense argued, they were in touch with the Spanish courts about a very important and relevant legal case in Madrid which would provide vital evidence. It showed that the CIA had been directly ordering spying on Julian in the Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide security there. Crucially this included spying on privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers discussing his defense against these extradition proceedings, which had been in train in the USA since 2010. In any normal process, that fact would in itself be sufficient to have the extradition proceedings dismissed. Incidentally I learnt on Sunday that the Spanish material produced in court, which had been commissioned by the CIA, specifically includes high resolution video coverage of Julian and I discussing various matters.

The evidence to the Spanish court also included a CIA plot to kidnap Assange, which went to the US authorities’ attitude to lawfulness in his case and the treatment he might expect in the United States. Julian’s team explained that the Spanish legal process was happening now and the evidence from it would be extremely important, but it might not be finished and thus the evidence not fully validated and available in time for the current proposed timetable for the Assange extradition hearings.

For the prosecution, James Lewis QC stated that the government strongly opposed any delay being given for the defense to prepare, and strongly opposed any separate consideration of the question of whether the charge was a political offense excluded by the extradition treaty. Baraitser took her cue from Lewis and stated categorically that the date for the extradition hearing, 25 February, could not be changed. She was open to changes in dates for submission of evidence and responses before this, and called a ten minute recess for the prosecution and defense to agree these steps.

What happened next was very instructive. There were five representatives of the US government present (initially three, and two more arrived in the course of the hearing), seated at desks behind the lawyers in court. The prosecution lawyers immediately went into huddle with the US representatives, then went outside the courtroom with them, to decide how to respond on the dates.

After the recess the defense team stated they could not, in their professional opinion, adequately prepare if the hearing date were kept to February, but within Baraitser’s instruction to do so they nevertheless outlined a proposed timetable on delivery of evidence. In responding to this, Lewis’ junior counsel scurried to the back of the court to consult the Americans again while Lewis actually told the judge he was “taking instructions from those behind”. It is important to note that as he said this, it was not the UK Attorney-General’s office who were being consulted but the US Embassy. Lewis received his American instructions and agreed that the defense might have two months to prepare their evidence (they had said they needed an absolute minimum of three) but the February hearing date may not be moved. Baraitser gave a ruling agreeing everything Lewis had said.

At this stage it was unclear why we were sitting through this farce. The US government was dictating its instructions to Lewis, who was relaying those instructions to Baraitser, who was ruling them as her legal decision. The charade might as well have been cut and the US government simply sat on the bench to control the whole process. Nobody could sit there and believe they were in any part of a genuine legal process or that Baraitser was giving a moment’s consideration to the arguments of the defense. Her facial expressions on the few occasions she looked at the defense ranged from contempt through boredom to sarcasm. When she looked at Lewis she was attentive, open and warm.

The extradition is plainly being rushed through in accordance with a Washington dictated timetable. Apart from a desire to pre-empt the Spanish court providing evidence on CIA activity in sabotaging the defense, what makes the February date so important to the USA? I would welcome any thoughts.

Baraitser dismissed the defense’s request for a separate prior hearing to consider whether the extradition treaty applied at all, without bothering to give any reason why (possibly she had not properly memorized what Lewis had been instructing her to agree with). Yet this is Article 4 of the UK/US Extradition Treaty 2007 in full:

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On the face of it, what Assange is accused of is the very definition of a political offense – if this is not, then what is? It is not covered by any of the exceptions from that listed. There is every reason to consider whether this charge is excluded by the extradition treaty, and to do so before the long and very costly process of considering all the evidence should the treaty apply. But Baraitser simply dismissed the argument out of hand.

Just in case anybody was left in any doubt as to what was happening here, Lewis then stood up and suggested that the defense should not be allowed to waste the court’s time with a lot of arguments. All arguments for the substantive hearing should be given in writing in advance and a “guillotine should be applied” (his exact words) to arguments and witnesses in court, perhaps of five hours for the defense. The defense had suggested they would need more than the scheduled five days to present their case. Lewis countered that the entire hearing should be over in two days. Baraitser said this was not procedurally the correct moment to agree this but she will consider it once she had received the evidence bundles.

(SPOILER: Baraitser is going to do as Lewis instructs and cut the substantive hearing short).

Baraitser then capped it all by saying the February hearing will be held, not at the comparatively open and accessible Westminster Magistrates Court where we were, but at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, the grim high security facility used for preliminary legal processing of terrorists, attached to the maximum security prison where Assange is being held. There are only six seats for the public in even the largest court at Belmarsh, and the object is plainly to evade public scrutiny and make sure that Baraitser is not exposed in public again to a genuine account of her proceedings, like this one you are reading. I will probably be unable to get in to the substantive hearing at Belmarsh.

Plainly the authorities were disconcerted by the hundreds of good people who had turned up to support Julian. They hope that far fewer will get to the much less accessible Belmarsh. I am fairly certain (and recall I had a long career as a diplomat) that the two extra American government officials who arrived halfway through proceedings were armed security personnel, brought in because of alarm at the number of protestors around a hearing in which were present senior US officials. The move to Belmarsh may be an American initiative.

Assange’s defense team objected strenuously to the move to Belmarsh, in particular on the grounds that there are no conference rooms available there to consult their client and they have very inadequate access to him in the jail. Baraitser dismissed their objection offhand and with a very definite smirk.

Finally, Baraitser turned to Julian and ordered him to stand, and asked him if he had understood the proceedings. He replied in the negative, said that he could not think, and gave every appearance of disorientation. Then he seemed to find an inner strength, drew himself up a little, and said:

I do not understand how this process is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t even access my writings. It is very difficult, where I am, to do anything. These people have unlimited resources.

The effort then seemed to become too much, his voice dropped and he became increasingly confused and incoherent. He spoke of whistleblowers and publishers being labeled enemies of the people, then spoke about his children’s DNA being stolen and of being spied on in his meetings with his psychologist. I am not suggesting at all that Julian was wrong about these points, but he could not properly frame nor articulate them. He was plainly not himself, very ill and it was just horribly painful to watch. Baraitser showed neither sympathy nor the least concern. She tartly observed that if he could not understand what had happened, his lawyers could explain it to him, and she swept out of court.

The whole experience was profoundly upsetting. It was very plain that there was no genuine process of legal consideration happening here. What we had was a naked demonstration of the power of the state, and a naked dictation of proceedings by the Americans. Julian was in a box behind bulletproof glass, and I and the thirty odd other members of the public who had squeezed in were in a different box behind more bulletproof glass. I do not know if he could see me or his other friends in the court, or if he was capable of recognizing anybody. He gave no indication that he did.

In Belmarsh he is kept in complete isolation for 23 hours a day. He is permitted 45 minutes exercise. If he has to be moved, they clear the corridors before he walks down them and they lock all cell doors to ensure he has no contact with any other prisoner outside the short and strictly supervised exercise period. There is no possible justification for this inhuman regime, used on major terrorists, being imposed on a publisher who is a remand prisoner.

I have been both cataloguing and protesting for years the increasingly authoritarian powers of the UK state, but that the most gross abuse could be so open and undisguised is still a shock. The campaign of demonization and dehumanization against Julian, based on government and media lie after government and media lie, has led to a situation where he can be slowly killed in public sight, and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing, while receiving no assistance from “liberal” society.

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?

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White House Official to Offer ‘Damning’ Impeachment Testimony

A White House National Security Council official who listened to President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader plans to tell House impeachment investigators in a sworn deposition Tuesday that he was so alarmed by the conversation that he reported it to his superiors and the NSC’s top lawyer.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an active-duty Army officer and the NSC’s top Ukraine expert, will be the first White House official to testify as part of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump. Vindman will also be the first official who heard Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to testify before the committees leading the impeachment probe.

“I was concerned about the call,” Vindman plans to say, according to a copy of his opening statement (pdf) obtained by Politico.

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“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Vindman will say, referring to Trump’s request that Ukraine launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. “This would all undermine U.S. national security.”

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Vindman’s “damning testimony… reinforces the fact that the president of the United States sought to have Ukraine provide dirt” on Biden.

“His efforts were not for the people of the United States, not for the safety and security of Ukraine, but for simply and purely selfish reasons to win a presidential election,” said Jackson Lee. “The facts are damning. The facts must be followed, and the law. And the committees must do their work and the Congress must do its constitutional duty.”

In addition to corroborating the details of the whistleblower complaint prompted by Trump’s call with Zelensky, Vindman’s opening remarks also appear to contradict the sworn testimony of Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.

Vindman plans to say he told Sondland that Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden was “inappropriate.”

Earlier this month, Sondland told House impeachment investigators that no one on NSC staff “ever expressed any concerns to me about our efforts.”

Sondland testimony directly contradicted by Vindman.

According to Vindman, after Sondland told the Ukrainians that it was important they launch Biden/Burisma investigations, Fiona Hill “entered the room and asserted to Amb. Sondland that his statements were inappropriate.” https://t.co/xw0IQJk1nw

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 29, 2019

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tweeted that the evidence suggests Sondland is guilty of a crime.

“Based on all the testimony so far,” said Castro, “I believe that Ambassador Gordon Sondland committed perjury.”

No American Should Stand for the Way We Wage War

Think back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email? Or when you accidentally cc’d (instead of bcc’d) everyone? Maybe you just had a really, really long day and that one last little misstep pushed you over the edge.

In my case, I cry at work — often quite profusely — about once every two weeks. And that’s if I’m lucky. The past couple of months? More times than I can count. And not over a nasty email, a rude response, or a mean coworker (of which, I’m proud to say, I have none). No, I’m crying for a simple enough reason: because my job in communications breaks my heart. It does so over and over again. And yet I stay. I keep doing it, tears and all, because I want to make a difference, because I just hate the world I’m trying to change and how cruelly it treats so many people. And I cry because some days (most days, perhaps) I’m not sure I can make a difference at all.

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Reckoning With Failure in the War on Terror



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So, what could cause this public relations professional to get that upset? Well, I think it has something to do with what I work on, day in and day out. Most so-called PR flacks I know have portfolios that include things like consumer goods, public health campaigns, or corporations in crisis. Not me. My focus at work is on America’s wars and how they are being waged.

As for the crying, it could have something to do with the uplifting — I’m kidding, of course (if you can kid about such things) — Google alerts I receive every single morning, afternoon, and evening. They arrive like clockwork in my inbox just waiting for me to open them and scan the headlines for mentions of drone strikes, airstrikes, or civilian casualties.

On a good day, those headlines in my inbox are, if not uplifting, at least irrelevant to the work I’m doing, which is always a relief: stock market updates or, say, the results of a Jamaican race horse someone thought to name Drone Strike.

But on bad days… On bad days, the e-newsletter I write is filled with weddings that were turned into funerals, civilian death counts that only continue to rise, government denials of wrongdoing, and angry questions like “How could they do this to us?” I wish I could tell you those bad days are rare, but given America’s wars that would be a lie. In all honesty, I don’t recall a single week since I started working on the issue of drones in March 2017 that they haven’t poured in.

For example, in just one week this September, news outlets reported that:

* a US drone strike killed at least 30 farmers harvesting pine-nuts in Afghanistan;

* a US-backed strike in a different region of Afghanistan hit a wedding party killing upwards of 40 civilians;

* a BBC report alleged that, on average, more than a dozen civilians died every day in Afghanistan;

* a TRT World investigation presented evidence that in the span of three months this year, U.S. air strikes killed 21 civilians in Somalia;

* an Afghan airstrike killed two civilians, instead of the Taliban militants it was meant for.

And that was only the worst of that week.

Unfortunately, when it comes to America’s forever wars, such stories are just a drop in the bucket. Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office more than 1,000 days ago, the U.S. has only expanded its war on terror, increasing both the number of countries we’re bombing and the number of people we’re killing. In the Trump administration’s quest for “annihilation,” the president has, in that period, prioritized might over right, letting the military loosen the rules designed to protect civilians in its war zones and then classify the results, which makes it likely that we’ll never know just how many innocent men, women, and children we’ve actually killed.

At first, I tried to keep a spreadsheet on every strike I saw recorded in the news, separating as best I could civilian deaths from those of combatants and unidentified parties. Unfortunately, the task quickly became so overwhelming that I had to let it fall by the wayside, hoping that others were already on the job.

There’s a lot about our wars that we don’t know, however, what we do know isn’t encouraging. A report from the U.N. found that, for the first time since it started tracking the conflict in Afghanistan 10 years ago, U.S. and Afghan government forces had killed more civilians than the Taliban and other militant groups. In Somalia, human rights organizations have accused the U.S. military of recently killing between 17 and 21 civilians (of whom, it has admitted to just two). While in Syria, the city of Raqqa largely remains rubble two years after thousands of American airstrikes left more than 1,600 civilians dead and the entire city in ruins. To this day, Washington has admitted to just 10% of that number and only after Amnesty International and the civilian-harm-monitoring group Airwars spent almost two years compiling “the most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict.”

At the most basic level, my job is to show the world how the U.S. wages war, who it hurts, and why we should care. How do I do that? By tracking all the developments I can in our wars, especially ones involving drones. I particularly focus on stories about and from those most affected by Washington’s policies, working with journalists to make sure that the American public knows what is being done in our name thousands of miles away — the (rarely) good, (mostly) bad, and (usually) ugly.

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

When people think of public relations, they generally associate it with mindless press-release blasts, unconvincing or irrelevant sales pitches, and an inability to take no for an answer. On the industry’s worst days, that may be all too true. When national security reporters get emails asking them to cover a documentary on flip-flop injuries or anyone gets a holiday season pitch in August, it makes sense to get annoyed — especially given that there are now more than six PR professionals for every journalist in this country. And I would totally get hating every one of us, if that’s what we all did.  But it’s not.

Journalists despise it when people lump them together.  There are tens of thousands of them making millions of individual decisions about how the world is to be characterized and they’re regularly all categorized under the behemoth label of “the media.” Yet many of them do the same thing to communications professionals daily. This one-size-fits-all view of us is inherently frustrating for someone like me because it represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of what I — and others in the peace and security universe — do everyday. But more important, this kind of attitude breeds a constant cascade of indifference and cynicism towards our attempts to highlight matters of life and death — and that’s enough to make even the most passionate communications person feel like she’s screaming into the void.

Let me be clear: there are an incredible number of journalists who care deeply about how the U.S. uses force abroad, but for whatever reason that often doesn’t translate into their coverage. Airwars recently conducted a survey of U.S. journalists who report on such issues and while most of them believed that civilian-harm reporting was critical to news coverage about war-making — particularly when alleged against the U.S. military — the actual news simply doesn’t reflect that attitude. Airwars’ survey found, for instance, that news reporting on civilian casualties from international and U.S. actions was largely absent during key periods of the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Worse yet, in the Trump era, an already exhausting news cycle has become supersonic and focused largely on you-know-who, making it even harder for issues like civilian casualties in Afghanistan to garner media attention or break through to readers. Trump news is the wave that never ceases to break on all our shores and we’re starting to drown in it. A 2018 Pew survey found nearly seven in ten Americans felt “worn out” by the news cycles of this moment, resulting in what it termed “news avoidance.”

As someone constantly immersed in the news about the costs of war, I’m disappointed by such willful disengagement, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. I’ve often finished the news of the week, only to find myself unable to shake the horrors that I’d read about. Sometimes they even make their way into my dreams. For a while last year, I had a recurring dream that the plan to end the war in Syria was under my pillow, but every time I woke up, it was gone.

The irony is not lost on me that a lot of my job revolves around trying to make others feel like they have the power to change how America engages with the world and yet here I am, regularly overcome by a sense of helplessness.

The Pervasiveness of Vicarious Trauma Today

After Reuters reported that a U.S. drone strike that was meant to hit an Islamic State target killed 30 pine-nut farmers in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Just hours after those farmers, laborers, and children had finished their day’s work of plucking pine nuts in a heavily forested area and lit bonfires near their tents, a U.S. drone hit the site, killing 30 civilians and injuring 40 others.

I sat stunned, staring at my computer screen, unable to comprehend how my own country could repeat the same mistakes over and over again, never thinking to stop and reassess. The rest of my day was a blur of flagging that particular nightmare for anyone and everyone who might be able to bring it to the awareness of the public. In the end, while the strike did garner some outrage from a few political pundits like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, most ignored it. By the next day, of course, the world — our world, at least, if not the Afghan one — had moved on.

The silence was so deafening that I did what any self-respecting millennial media professional would do in such a situation: I complained on Twitter. Ab Qadir Sediqi, the Afghan-based Reuters journalist who broke the story, responded that, unfortunately, no, there wouldn’t be any outrage because, “Afghan li[f]e doesn’t matter to the world, the world forgot Afghanistan, if it wasn’t so, we wouldn’t have been suffering since decades.” Reading those words, I felt overwhelmed by the desire to help and then immediately paralyzed by the soul-crushing knowledge that I had next to no power to do so.

I knew, of course, that anyone on the front lines of conflict, from soldiers to civilians to journalists, was regularly exposed to trauma of many sorts and that what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, could result. What I had never really thought about was how those of us separated from such conflict by vast distances but, in another sense, only a computer screen away might be affected.

I should have, though, because my tearful reactions were obvious evidence that repeatedly seeing images of, and learning about, violence and trauma takes its own toll. According to a 2017 report from Eyewitness Media Hub, if you are exposed to distressing experiences, even when not physically present, your brain has the capacity to produce symptoms of distress similar to those you would feel if you had indeed been there. This is sometimes called vicarious trauma, which is acquired through working with people who have experienced trauma, hearing their stories, and becoming a witness to the pain and suffering that they continue to endure.

Common signs of vicarious trauma include experiencing lingering feelings of anger, rage, and sadness. In some more extreme cases, intense exposure to such subject matter can lead to anxiety, stress, burnout, and PTSD. A recent survey of 346 human rights advocates found that 19% of them indeed did appear to have PTSD, or at least symptoms long associated with that syndrome; 15% seemed to be experiencing depression; and 19% reported burnout. Curiously enough, such rates are comparable to those found among first responders and even combat veterans. Additionally, perfectionists who viewed their efforts, no matter how fervent, as ineffective exhibited even more severe symptoms of depression.

I know I’m just one person working on issues that affect millions of people across the world so much more deeply and immediately than me. I also know that many others, including local residents, aid workers, and soldiers experience the brunt of the trauma in such situations. Still, a majority of my day is spent bearing witness to the pain, fear, and terror that America’s actions have been causing across the Greater Middle East and North Africa. I know perfectly well that I can’t necessarily change any of the outcomes there, since I’m not the one directing those strikes or making the rules. However, I also know how important it is to hear directly from those impacted, so I’ll continue to do whatever I can to make sure the stories of the victims of America’s seemingly endless wars are told.

Or at least I can try (and cry).

The Problem Threatening the Entire American Middle Class

Americans are more aware than ever that America has a race problem — and, more specifically, a racial wealth divide problem. As researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies and I found earlier this year, median white families are 41 times wealthier than median Black families in the United States.

As our country becomes more diverse, this shocking racial wealth divide is no longer a challenge for disenfranchised minorities alone. It’s a threat to the entire American middle class.

Let me show you how.

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The Numbers Behind America's Appalling Wealth Gap



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What's Behind America's Racial Wealth Gap?



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Closing the 'Death Gap' Between the Rich and Poor



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Since the early 1980s, median wealth among Black and Latino families has been stuck at less than $10,000, while median white wealth has grown to $140,000. Yet in spite of this growing white wealth, this huge divide means that national median wealth has actually declined.

The racial wealth divide, in short, is weakening our country as a whole.

Contributing to this divide is ongoing racial inequality in the two largest assets in most Americans’ portfolios: business ownership and homeownership.

For the last 40 years, Black and Latino homeownership rates have stayed below 50 percent, while white homeownership has remained steady at about 70 percent.

And although 13 percent of the U.S. population is Black, only 2 percent of U.S. businesses employing more than one person are Black-owned. Hispanics are 17 percent of the population but own just 6 percent of these businesses.

How do we fix this? By making smart investments.

The white middle class was built by major investments promoting education and homeownership, among other things, after World War II. But African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans were almost entirely left out of these programs. Now these groups deserve significant investments of their own.

What could that mean, exactly? This year, my colleagues and I presented several options in another report called Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide.

One of our ideas is to create Baby Bonds — that is, government-seeded investment accounts —  for every child born in this country. Senator Cory Booker offered a similar proposal in a 2018 bill called the American Opportunity Accounts Act.

We also call for significant investments in affordable housing and homeownership. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s American Housing and Economic Mobility Act and Senator Bernie Sander’s “Housing for All” plan would both be a good start.

We also believe that Congress should finally establish a commission to study reparations, and that all government agencies should improve their data collection on race and wealth.

For another thing, we could start enforcing laws already on the books.

My organization, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, advocates requiring the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to collect and disclose better data on loans made to minority, women-owned, and small businesses. Under the Dodd-Frank Act, it’s already supposed to do that.

For centuries, America has turned its back on struggling families of color. This year, it’s time we turned our back on the racial wealth divide. We need stronger data, better monitoring, and bold policy proposals across the board.

The data is right there: By bridging the racial wealth divide, we can reduce the economic inequality that’s holding down our entire country.

Trump Reveals Plans for Nationwide Crackdown and More Militarized Police

President Donald Trump on Monday said the Justice Department is preparing to launch a sweeping crackdown on crime that he named “the surge,” a term commonly associated with the George W. Bush administration’s decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq in 2007.

“In coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent crime—which I think is so important—targeting gangs and drug traffickers in high crime cities and dangerous rural areas,” Trump said during the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago. “Let’s call it the surge.”

The president did not provide any details on the plan but said it is going to be “very dramatic.”

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The Military Industrial Complex Has Won



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“And you’re going to see tremendous results very quickly,” Trump added.

As if to emphasize his view of America’s cities as war zones, Trump went on to tout his administration’s success in putting military equipment into the hands of U.S. police officers and claimed “Afghanistan is a safe place” compared to Chicago.

“To help keep you safe, I’ve made $600 million-worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement,” Trump told the audience of police chiefs. “If you remember, the previous administration didn’t want to do that… They didn’t want to make you look so tough. They didn’t want to make you look like you’re a threat.”

Watch Trump’s remarks:

Trump’s visit to Chicago, the first of his presidency, was met with massive protests led by Indivisible Chicago and other progressive advocacy groups. Striking Chicago public school teachers also cleared their Monday afternoon schedule to take part in demonstrations against the president.

“We have heard that President Donald Trump might be in town,” leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union wrote in an email to members late Sunday. “If any members were inclined to show up outside his fundraiser in red, that would qualify as productive, in our view.”

Thousands of protesters gathered and marched outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower in downtown Chicago, where the president attended a big-money campaign fundraiser after the law enforcement conference:

Chants of “this is what democracy looks like,” and “vote Trump out now” as protesters walk north on Michigan Avenue. They’ve been marching all over downtown after leaving Wacker Drive across from Trump Tower. pic.twitter.com/RKjfAzzpCb

— CBS Chicago (@cbschicago) October 28, 2019

Thousands of people out here in the streets to protest this guy.

Hey, Chicago! Come out and join us!#ChicagoTrumpProtest #ChicaGoAwayTrump #NotChicagosPresident #ChiBye45 #LockHimUp pic.twitter.com/qIfenhUKut

— Indivisible IL9 – Andersonville-Edgewater (@indivisible9IL) October 28, 2019

Teachers and supporters turn out against Trump#ChiBye45 #BooTrump #ChicagoTrumpProtest pic.twitter.com/oXtAasMUC7

— Indivisible Chicago-South Side (@IndivChi_South) October 28, 2019

“We’re angry,” Marj Halperin of Indivisible Chicago told The Guardian. “He is taking pleasure in the misery of our city. He doesn’t know us. He’s coming to our city to raise money, largely from people who don’t live in this city, without ever having addressed, supported, listened to the people who really need help.”

The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised

It’s all kicking off everywhere in 2019. Haitians are revolting against a corrupt political system and their President Jovenel Moïse, who many see as a kleptocratic US puppet. In Ecuador, huge public manifestations managed to force President Lenín Moreno to backtrack on his IMF-backed neoliberal package that would have sharply cut government spending and increased transport prices (FAIR.org, 10/23/19).

Meanwhile, popular Chilean frustration at the conservative Piñera administration boiled over into massive protests that were immediately met with force. “We are at war,” announced President Sebastián Piñera, echoing the infamous catchphrase of former fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. Piñera claimed that those responsible for violently resisting him were “going to pay for their deeds” as he ordered tanks through Santiago. (See FAIR.org, 10/23/19.)

Huge, ongoing anti-government demonstrations are also engulfing Lebanon, Catalonia and the United Kingdom.

PBS NewsHour (10/5/19)

Yet the actions that have by far received the most attention in corporate media are those in Hong Kong, where demonstrations erupted in response to a proposed extradition agreement with the Chinese central government that opponents felt would undermine civil liberties and Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status. A search for “Hong Kong protests” on October 25, 2019, elicits 282 responses in the last month in the New York Times, for example, compared to 20 for “Chile protests,” 43 for Ecuador and 16 for Haiti. The unequal coverage is even more pronounced on Fox News, where there were 70 results for Hong Kong over the same period and four, two and three for Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, respectively.

This disparity cannot be explained due to the protests’ size or significance, the number of casualties or the response from the authorities. Eighteen people have died during the ongoing protests in Haiti, 19 (and rising) in Chile, while in Ecuador, protesters themselves captured over 50 soldiers who had been sent in as Moreno effectively declared martial law. In contrast, no one has been killed in Hong Kong, nor has the army been called in, with Beijing expressing full confidence in local authorities to handle proceedings. The Chilean government announced it had arrested over 5,400 people in only a week of protests, a figure more than double the number arrested in months of Hong Kong demonstrations (Bloomberg, 10/4/19). Furthermore, social media have been awash with images and videos of the suppression of the protests worldwide.

One way of understanding why the media is fixated on Hong Kong and less interested in the others is to look at who is protesting, and why.

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

New York Times(8/14/19)

Over 30 years ago, in their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky developed their theory of worthy vs. unworthy victims to explain why corporate media cover certain stories and why others are dropped. They compared the media coverage of a single murdered priest in an enemy state (Communist Poland) to that of over 100 religious martyrs, including some US citizens, murdered in Central American client states over a period of two decades. They found that not only did theNew York Times, Time, Newsweek and CBS News dedicate more coverage to the single priest’s assassination, the tone of coverage was markedly different: In covering the killing of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, media expressed indignation, demanding justice and condemning the barbarism of Communism. The killings of religious figures in Central America by pro-US government groups, on the other hand, were reported in a matter-of-fact manner, with little rhetorical outrage.

In other words, when official enemies can be presented as evil and allies as sympathetic victims, corporate media will be very interested in a story. In contrast, they will show far less enthusiasm for a story when the “wrong” people are the villains or the victims.

On Hong Kong, the New York Times published three editorials (6/10/19, 8/14/19, 10/1/19), each lauding the “democracy-minded people” fighting to limit “the repressive rule of the Chinese Communists,” condemning the Communist response as evidence of the backward, “brutal paternalism of that system,” in which China “equates greatness with power and dissent with treachery.” Hong Kong, on the other hand, thanks to the blessing of being a former British colony, had acquired “a Western political culture of democracy, human rights, free speech and independent thought.” (The Times has not elected to publish any editorials on the other protests.)

The Times also ridiculed the idea that “foreign forces” (i.e., the US government) could be influencing the protests, calling it a “shopworn canard” used by the Communist government. Yet the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has officially poured  into “identifying new avenues for democracy and political reform in Hong Kong” or China since 2014. The Times editorials did not mention this funding as possibly complicating their dismissal of foreign involvement in the Hong Kong protests as a “canard.”

Guardian (10/8/19)

However, media (e.g., Voice of America, 10/11/19; Miami Herald, 10/9/19; Reuters, 10/9/19) are taking seriously the accusation that the Ecuadorian protests are, in fact, masterminded abroad, by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, with the Guardian (10/8/19) going so far to describe the Ecuadorians not as “democracy-minded people,” but “rioters”—a label not appearing in connection with Hong Kong, except as an accusation by Chinese officials (e.g., Time, 10/2/19;CNN, 10/22/19), are almost universally condemned in coverage as part of a “repressive” (e.g., Vox, 8/29/19;Guardian, 10/19/19) “dictatorship” (New York Times, 8/29/19).

In the cases of the less-covered protests, the “wrong” people are protesting and the “wrong” governments are doing the repressing. As the Washington Post (10/14/19) noted on Haiti,

One factor keeping Moïse in power is support from the United States. US officials have been limited in their public comments about the protests.

On Ecuador, the State Department has been more forthcoming, issuing a full endorsement of Moreno’s neoliberal austerity package:

The United States supports President Moreno and the Government of Ecuador’s efforts to institutionalize democratic practices and implement needed economic reforms…. We will continue to work in partnership with President Moreno in support of democracy, prosperity, and security.

In other words, don’t expect any angry editorials denouncing US client states like Haiti or Ecuador, or arguing that the Chilean government’s repression of its protest movement shows the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. Indeed, corporate media (e.g., Guardian, 10/8/19; CNN, 10/8/19; USA Today, 10/10/19) emphasized the violence of the Ecuadorian protestors while downplaying Hong Kong’s—the New York Times (6/30/19) even inventing the phrase “aggressive nonviolence” to describe the Hong Kong protesters’ actions, so eager was it to frame the demonstrations against China as unquestionably laudable.

Which protest movements interest corporate media has little to do with their righteousness or popularity, and much more to do with whom they are protesting against. If you’re fighting against corporate power or corruption in a US-client state, don’t expect many TV cameras to show up; that revolution is rarely televised.

So What Happens When Trump Is Impeached?

The impeachment of Donald John Trump by the House of Representatives is all but inevitable. The House is slated to hold a formal vote on Thursday to authorize the impeachment inquiry, and in the coming weeks, it is expected to shift from closed-door investigatory sessions to public hearings designed to reveal the “high crimes and misdemeanors” committed by our 45th commander in chief.

If expectations hold, the public hearings will be followed by the introduction of formal articles of impeachment. The only unresolved questions at that point will be the number and scope of the impeachment articles, and the margins by which they will be adopted when the full chamber votes on them.

The case will then shift to the Senate for what promises to be an event of epochal political gravity. Given the Republicans’ shameful embrace of Trump as their party leader, it remains unlikely that the Senate will convict the president on any articles of impeachment, no matter how egregious they are. Nonetheless, the Constitution requires the Senate to conduct an impeachment trial, and how the Senate fulfills that responsibility could be as important to the future of American democracy as the result itself.

Unfortunately, the Constitution provides little in the way of specific procedural guidance. Article I, Section 3, which addresses the Senate’s role in impeachment, states only that:

“The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

“Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

The uncertainty surrounding Trump’s impending Senate trial is compounded by the fact there have been only two presidential impeachment trials in our history—those involving Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99. Separated by 130 years, the two trials offer distinctly different models for the current Senate to emulate, modify or reject.

The House passed 11 articles of impeachment by overwhelming margins against Johnson, a Democrat reviled for his opposition to Republican-led Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment, based largely on his firing Abraham Lincoln’s last secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. His impeachment trial was conducted before the full Senate, which then consisted of 54 members. The trial lasted 11 weeks and featured live testimony from 25 prosecution and 16 defense witnesses. Among other determinations, the Senate voted 35-19 to affirm three articles, falling one vote shy of the required two-thirds majority for conviction.

Clinton, by contrast, was cited in just two articles for lying under oath and obstruction of justice about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. For Clinton, the task of gathering evidence was farmed out to a subcommittee, which took the depositions of key witnesses, including Lewinsky. The depositions were videotaped and transcribed, and later presented to the entire Senate. Clinton, too, was acquitted, by a tally of 45-55 on the article of perjury, and 50-50 on obstruction.

Richard Nixon, the third president to face a serious House impeachment investigation, never had a Senate trial. He resigned before the full House voted on three articles of impeachment passed by that body’s judiciary committee.

So how will Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his 52 Republican colleagues approach Trump’s impeachment? On Oct. 16, McConnell announced that the GOP would “do our constitutional duty.” McConnell reportedly told his party’s caucus to prepare for a trial that could last from six to eight weeks.

McConnell, however, is a master of parliamentary evasion and obfuscation. The last thing he wants is to stage a full, public evidentiary airing of Trump’s malfeasance.

Thankfully, there are limitations to McConnell’s resourcefulness. No matter how he bobs and weaves, McConnell will be bound by the Senate’s internal rules on impeachment, which were last amended in 1986. Unless McConnell can muster 60 filibuster-proof votes to amend the rules, he’s stuck with them, and will have to work within them to shield and protect the president.

Under the rules, once the House selects its team of “managers” (whose duty will be to prosecute the case against the president) and delivers the articles of impeachment, the Senate will issue a summons to Trump, informing him of the due date for his answer to the articles. Trump will then have the choice of appearing before the Senate in person to submit his answer or doing so through retained counsel. It seems a foregone conclusion he will opt for the latter, but like a common defendant in a criminal trial, he has the right to plead guilty or not guilty to the articles.

In addition, and perhaps more significantly, Trump will have another alternative that some commentators suggest he could deploy with the backing of McConnell, lodging what is called a “demurrer” to the articles of impeachment. This would allow him to claim that the charges against him do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses, even if they are true. Should a majority of the Senate vote to grant Trump’s demurrer, the impeachment proceedings would be stopped in their tracks, ending before a single witness is examined or a solitary document introduced.

At first glance, the demurrer avenue appears to offer Trump a get-out-of-impeachment-free card. For a variety of reasons, it won’t.

The first reason has to do with Chief Justice John Roberts. Under both the Constitution and the Senate’s rules, Roberts will preside over the impeachment trial. It will be his job to rule on questions of evidence and procedure, including any demurrer.

Roberts is a life-long Republican, but as I and many other legal observers have noted, he is also an institutionalist concerned with preserving judicial independence, a subject about which he has openly feuded with Trump. If the articles of impeachment brought against Trump are well pleaded and backed up by credible allegations of misconduct—whether regarding the Ukraine scandal, financial self-dealing, or obstruction of justice—Roberts is unlikely to grant a Trump demurrer. He will insist instead that evidence be taken and heard. And while the Senate’s rules empower a majority to overturn any ruling made by Roberts, it is not at all clear that a majority would dare to challenge the chief justice, especially before the presentation of evidence.

Granting a demurrer would also trigger substantial political risks for the GOP in the 2020 elections, opening Republican candidates to charges of covering up Trump’s crimes and conniving to hide the truth from the American people. No one wants to be accused of violating the Constitution, but especially such vulnerable senators as Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Corey Gardner of Colorado, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr of North Carolina, or Martha McSally of Arizona.

In all likelihood, McConnell and the GOP will grudgingly allow the evidence to be heard, albeit channeled through a sub-committee, adhering to the Clinton template. The Republicans thereafter may vote to dismiss the case against Trump. Alternatively, they may allow roll-call guilty or not guilty votes to be taken on the merits of each article of impeachment.

Whatever procedural path the GOP follows, each senator will have to follow his or her conscience. No specific standard of proof—either the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt test that applies in criminal cases or the preponderance-of-evidence test that applies in civil litigation—will govern the balloting. Each senator will vote independently and will thus be held independently accountable.

No matter the ultimate outcome, the American people will have the opportunity to assess the evidence against Trump. That in and of itself will be a victory worth celebrating.

How Things Got So Fracking Bad in Ohio

Hydraulic fracturing, savior or sin? That depends on who you ask.

The fossil fuel industry and its proponents tout fracking’s economic benefits as this oil and gas extraction technique has led the march toward the nation’s energy independence. But as our understanding of the technique grows, so too does our knowledge of its many drawbacks. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in Ohio, at the vanguard of the nation’s fracking boom thanks to the Utica and Marcellus shale reserves to the east of the state, which have sparked something of a fossil fuel industry feeding frenzy over the past decade.

The amount of natural gas Ohio produces annually ballooned from 78 billion cubic feet in 2010 to nearly 1.8 trillion cubic feet in 2017—an increase of more than 2,200 percent—according to federal figures. And what kind of impact has this had? Between 2007 and 2016, employment in Ohio’s shale industries grew 62 percent. A new ethane cracker plant is reported to bring hundreds more full-time jobs to Ohio’s Belmont County. When Vice President Mike Pence trumpeted to the assembled crowd at the Oil and Gas Association’s annual meeting earlier this year in Columbus that the energy industry was “strengthening the foundation under families here in Ohio and all across this nation,” he was met with warm applause.

Ten years on though, tough questions are being asked not just of the industry’s economic impact in Ohio’s poor Appalachian heartland, but also of the damage it’s causing to the environment, the climate and human health.

“It’s impacting people locally,” Ned Ketyer, a medical adviser with the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit Environmental Health Project, told the Independent Media Institute. “It’s impacting their health. It’s impacting regional health. It’s impacting local and regional economies in a negative way. And ultimately, it’s affecting the climate system in a way that’s completely contrary to any kind of urgent climate solutions that we need to embrace right now.”

Environmental Effects

The growing literature surrounding the environmental impacts from fracking is already pretty broad. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own years-long study concluded that fracking operations have contaminated drinking water resources and have led to inadequately treated wastewater being dumped into surface water sources. Scientific and government research links fracking with an increased likelihood of earthquakes.

Then there’s the issue of the industry’s climate footprint at a time when a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to avoid some of the worst impacts from global warming. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration found last year that emissions from the oil and gas industry were a major contributor to growing atmospheric levels of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. A new study out of Cornell University came to the same conclusion, linking a global spike in methane emissions to the fracking of shale gas.

In Ohio, some of the localized environmental impacts make for stark reading. A recent article in StateImpact Pennsylvania (part of an excellent series looking at the industry’s environmental footprint in Ohio and Pennsylvania) details complaints among residents living in close proximity to fracking infrastructure of things like gas leaks, drinking water contamination and discoloration, as well as fish kills.

Fish aren’t the only kind of wildlife at risk. Cornell University found a possible link between exposure to gas drilling operations and cases of illness, death and reproductive issues in cows, horses, goats, llamas, chickens, dogs and cats in fracking states like Ohio.

“We know the industry doesn’t pay for its harm and the environmental damage that it causes,” Amy Mall, a senior advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Independent Media Institute. She added that federal regulatory “loopholes” are a large part of the problem.

For example, if oil and gas wastewater were subject to federal hazardous waste rules rather than generic standards that apply to all non-hazardous solid waste, “it would be regulated very differently at the state level,” Mall pointed out. This, at a time when nearby states transport huge quantities of wastewater to Ohio for disposal.

“By not being held accountable for their pollution, the industry is shifting a lot of the economic responsibilities to general society,” she said.

‘Ohio Wasn’t as Well Researched’

There’s increasing awareness, too, surrounding the possible human health toll from living too close to fracking infrastructure—issues like cancer, preterm births, low-birthweight babies and asthma. The Physicians for Social Responsibility’s latest compendium on fracking’s health impacts comprises more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies.

Elise Elliott, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, participated in a community-based study in Ohio looking at proximity to oil and gas wells and the impact that might have on human health and water contamination. The researchers found that the closer Ohioans live to these wells, the more likely they are to suffer general health problems like stress and fatigue. Likewise, proximity to wells was associated with higher concentrations of contaminants in the water.

Nevertheless, there’s still a dearth of hard data, say experts, when it comes to understanding exactly how the fracking boom might be impacting the health of Ohioans. Agencies charged with overseeing the industry report how residents only rarely file official health complaints (though they have submitted thousands of much broader complaints). “We were noticing in the literature that Ohio wasn’t as well researched as some other regions in the U.S.,” said Elliott, explaining why that state was chosen for the community health study.

It also helps explain why Elliott urges caution when it comes to directly linking health issues with exposure to some of the contaminants—air pollutants like benzene, hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde—typically found around fracking sites, at least right now. “Our knowledge on this is definitely growing,” she said, “[but] we’re not quite there yet to say definitively what it does.” She urged continued research in the field, such as the potential link between fracking and childhood leukemia.

Economic Impact

On the flip side, proponents of the fracking boom argue that the economic benefit to Ohio outweighs any deleterious effects. “It’s a very, very sizeable industry,” said Gilbert Michaud, an adjunct assistant professor of economics at Ohio University who has studied the impact the fossil fuel industry has had on the state’s economy. According to his own calculations, the shale industry’s direct and indirect impact on the state in 2015—including that through employment, wages, and the multiplier effect—amounted to more than $22 billion. But how widely felt is this impact?

The nonprofit Ohio Education Policy Institute finds how fracking-generated tax revenue has helped to bridge the wealth gap between school districts, particularly in eastern Ohio. But a deeper look reveals a more complex picture. For example, broad underfunding for elementary education means the statewide wealth disparity still exists between rich and poor school districts. And in his 2018 study, Michaud warned of the “less-desirable vestiges” of fracking in the poor rural areas of Appalachian Ohio. “The shale industry may be another case of resource extraction with a failure to capture and retain local value,” he wrote.

Michaud told the Independent Media Institute how the largest employing sector of Ohio’s shale industry is pipeline construction, which typically offers a short window of employment. “Once the infrastructure is in place, then those occupations aren’t really needed,” he said, adding that these jobs typically go to out-of-state workers anyway.

On top of that, those sectors that provide more stable, long-term employment to Ohioans, like jobs at the well pad itself, generally pay the industry’s smaller wages, said Michaud. “That’s not really the secret sauce for future prosperity, right?”

Then there’s the issue of too little of the fiscal windfall trickling down into poor rural communities that constitute the industry’s heartland, he said. This leaves already underfunded local services stretched to breaking point as they grapple with fracking’s residual environmental and health problems. “A lot of these impacts aren’t being retained in these communities that desperately need positive economic development and jobs,” said Michaud. “This is your quintessential Appalachian curse—your resource extraction boom and bust cycle.”

‘Petrochemical Cluster-Frack’

Describing the shale industry in Ohio as a “petrochemical cluster-frack,” Environmental Health Project’s Ned Ketyer agrees with Michaud’s assessment. “Any job that directly threatens the health of me or my family or my patients—I’m a pediatrician—or that threatens the health of every child, even children who haven’t been born, by accelerating climate change, those jobs are not worth supporting,” he said, adding that, “essentially in the Ohio River Valley, we’re fracking for plastic, which is one thing nature doesn’t need any more of.”

The pathway toward renewables is a complicated one in Ohio, however. In 2014, for example, the state imposed a two-year freeze on its renewable and energy-efficiency standards, and currently is in second-to-last place in the country in terms of total electricity production from renewable sources, just ahead of Delaware. According to Ketyer, other reasons for an expedited switch to renewables exist in plain sight.

“It really is an eye-opening thing to take a drive through the Ohio River Valley. This is an area that should not have such high levels of air pollution—some of the worst air pollution in the country. Shouldn’t have such high levels of ozone,” said Ketyer, describing scenes of rural poverty, dilapidated roads and crumbling buildings, interspersed with oil and gas industry infrastructure. “When you go through the Ohio valley, you see an area that should be achingly beautiful.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Daniel Ross is a journalist whose work has appeared in Truthout, the Guardian, FairWarning, Newsweek, YES! Magazine, Salon, AlterNet, Vice and a number of other publications. He is based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @1danross.