HOW OHIO’S CHAMBER OF COMMERCE KILLED AN ANTI-POLLUTION BILL OF RIGHTS

H. Claire Brown

August 29 2019, 7:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/29/lake-erie-bill-of-rights-ohio/

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, environmental activists in Ohio were alarmed by the passage of a mysterious state budget amendment that would close a new avenue for residents to sue polluters. The provision invalidated a landmark anti-pollution initiative passed by Toledo voters just a few months before. Now, emails obtained in a public records request reveal that the Ohio Chamber of Commerce secured the cooperation of a key Republican lawmaker in a successful effort to slip the amendment into an appropriations bill at the eleventh hour.

The emails depict the chamber’s environmental policy director requesting a last-minute meeting with state Rep. Jim Hoops to discuss the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the newly minted ballot initiative allowing citizens to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie. A legislative aide responded quickly, scheduling a same-day meeting. Despite the chamber director’s admission that his proposal would need to be submitted after the legislature’s deadline, the aide produced draft amendment language to share with him three weeks later. The chamber’s subsequent revisions made their way into the final bill, effectively nullifying the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“This shows the influence of the Chamber of Commerce writing our laws and undermining the democracy of the people of Toledo,” said Bill Lyons, a board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network, an environmental advocacy organization. After the May vote, Lyons filed a series of public records requests to try to figure out which lawmaker introduced the amendment. The emails were provided to The Intercept and The New Food Economy by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, an affiliate of the Ohio Community Rights Network.

IN FEBRUARY, MORE than 60 percent of participants in a special election in Toledo voted to establish a Bill of Rights for Lake Erie. It was a unique ballot question that would grant Lake Erie the right to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.” The intent was to give Lake Erie and its human allies legal standing to file lawsuits against polluters.

Organizers in Ohio launched their efforts to pass the initiative after a toxic algal bloom — caused by fertilizer and manure runoff from upstream farms — rendered Toledo’s water undrinkable and largely unusable (some residents were advised not to shower) for a few days in 2014. Tish O’Dell, a state organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, said residents spent two years trying to persuade the state government to take action to prevent future issues.

In Ohio, however, the farm runoff largely responsible for polluting Lake Erie is minimally regulated. Farmers in the state also benefit from key legal protections that limit their vulnerability to pollution-related lawsuits. Ohio has a so-called right-to-farm law, which dramatically limits neighbors’ ability to win lawsuits alleging that farm pollution unfairly impacts their quality of life. (Hoops appears to have introduced another amendment that expands the definition of farmland protected under the state’s right-to-farm law; that amendment passed this summer as well, further narrowing the legal pathways advocates might use to limit agricultural runoff.) And at the federal level, the Clean Water Act has long exempted most agricultural operations from robust regulation.

For all these reasons, advocates came to believe that existing legal frameworks would never sufficiently protect the lake and those who live near it. By 2016, they were ready to try something new. After O’Dell and her colleague Thomas Linzey gave a presentation on so-called rights-of-nature laws at Bowling Green University, Toledo activists approached them about devising a plan for Lake Erie. The group headed to a nearby pub.

“That’s actually how the Lake Erie Bill of Rights hatched,” O’Dell said. “It was on a cocktail napkin at the bar.”

After its passage, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights was immediately challenged in federal court. The next day, the Drewes Farm Partnership had filed a 24-page lawsuit arguing that protections for the lake could mean financial ruin for the farm’s business. That lawsuit is ongoing. Then, in May, the eleventh-hour amendment invalidating the lake’s rights found its way into the House version of the state’s budget.

It all started with an email from the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The chamber’s director of energy and environmental policy, Zack Frymier, wrote to request a meeting with Hoops, the state House representative, on April 11, a few weeks before the vote. (Hoops is chair of the Ohio House Finance Subcommittee on Agriculture, Development, and Natural Resources.)

“I’m hoping to find some time (like everyone else) to run something by Chairman Hoops regarding the Lake Erie Bill of Rights that passed in Toledo in February,” Frymier wrote. “We have some language that we’d request to be considered for the budget. Though obviously it would have to be submitted after tomorrow’s deadline we’d still like to have a conversation.”

A legislative aide replied promptly, arranging a meeting with Hoops for 4:00 p.m. that day. Despite the short notice — it was already nearly 3:00 p.m. — Frymier quickly and enthusiastically responded that he’d be there.

A few weeks later, the aide got back to Frymier with draft text of the amendment, asking if the wording made sense to him. Frymier then asked for the addition of text that would more directly refute the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“Language in this amendment stating that [nature and ecosystems] do not have standing is essential to what we’re trying to accomplish,” Frymier wrote on May 2.

The amendment’s final text includes the additional statement Frymier asked for: “Nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate in or bring an action in any court of common pleas.”

The amendment was reported by local media on May 8. The next day, the state House passed its version of the bill. Lyons, the Community Rights Network board member, later testified in front of the state Senate, asking legislators to strike the amendment from the final budget. His efforts were unsuccessful and, after a few weeks of negotiation, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the measure into law.

Lyons said he was surprised by the degree of collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce and Hoops’s subcommittee. “The fact that they would run that language specifically by them — I mean, who else gets that opportunity?” he said. (Neither the Ohio Chamber of Commerce nor Hoops’s office responded to requests for comment.)

Business advocates — primarily the fossil fuel giant BP, which has fracking interests in the state — spent more than $300,000 to campaign against the Lake Erie Bill of Rights prior to its passage in Toledo. The coalition advocating in its favor, Toledoans for Safe Water, spent less than $6,000, according to Great Lakes Now.

Municipalities around the nation have been slowly adopting rights-of-nature ordinances for more than a decade. Pittsburgh banned fracking using this legal framework in 2010. More recently, a county in Oregon voted to ban aerial pesticide spraying the same way.

Rights-of-nature laws likely face a long road ahead. If the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is any indication, many may be tied up in lawsuits for years to come.

For O’Dell, the Ohio organizer, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is already a win regardless of its fate. “The people kept fighting to get it on the ballot. They defeated big corporate money. They won, and they’re still fighting,” she said. “So I don’t care what happens — they have ignited interest all around the world.”

Update: August 29, 2019, 4:55 p.m. ET
This piece has been updated to clarify the level of spending in favor of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and to include Thomas Linzey as a co-presenter of O’Dell’s presentation promoting rights of nature.

DAVID KOCH’S MOST SIGNIFICANT LEGACY IS THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP

Lee Fang

August 26 2019, 12:15 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/26/david-koch-donald-trump/

DAVID KOCH, the fossil fuel industry billionaire who passed away on August 23 at the age of 79, spent the second half of his life building a political power structure alongside his brother Charles that radically reshaped society and set the conditions for the rise of President Donald Trump.

Many obituaries published in recent days examine Koch’s history of polluting the environment and political system, how the donor network he helped lead mobilized opposition to addressing climate change, transformed our election laws to allow unlimited secret spending by the very rich, and systematically fought any regulation, labor reform, or tax viewed as a threat to the corporate power elite.

Yet Koch’s most visible accomplishment is the current occupant of the White House — a legacy largely unrecognized, and one that goes well beyond any other single triumph in his life.

The nexus is not readily clear to most, especially given that the two clashed publicly; Trump, for instance, has taken to gleefully ridiculing Koch and his brother as “globalists.” But in his scorched-earth quest for unparalleled influence, Koch, perhaps unwittingly, laid the path for Trump.

First, there were obvious efforts made by Koch, though largely ignored by the mainstream press, that directly elected Trump. In 2016, Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’s primary vehicle for influence that operates as a privately run political party, hired over 650 staffers, deploying many to battleground states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, to turn out Republican voters. The field staff filled in the gaps left by Trump’s chaotic field operation. In Wisconsin alone, Americans for Prosperity staff, equipped with state-of-the-art voter contact technology, made 1.5 million phone calls and knocked on nearly 30,000 doors.

Late in the campaign, the Koch money flowed to television advertisements in the Rust Belt, including the crucial states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that hammered Hillary Clinton. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has persuasively argued that the spending blitz by Republican billionaires, including Koch, in late October and early November, was the decisive factor in Clinton’s defeat. Koch groups spent $4.3 million in Wisconsin, eclipsing the $3 million spent by the Clinton campaign, with television ads that sought to simultaneously tear down Democrat Russ Feingold and Clinton, a pattern repeated in other crucial swing states.

What’s more, over the previous eight years, the Koch network had plowed tens of millions of dollars into the region, with a focus on Wisconsin, to transform the state, once a progressive bastion, into a laboratory for the radical right. The network focused carefully on political investments designed to change the power alignment throughout the upper Midwest: new barriers to voting, dramatic restrictions on labor unions, and investments in a localized conservative voter mobilization apparatus. The states that produced the Electoral College victory over Clinton had been primed for electing a future GOP presidential nominee, and Trump was simply the beneficiary.

MORE IMPORTANT, however, are the structural investments and vindictive political style nurtured by Koch. Though he wielded power largely behind closed doors, in the shadows of a complex web of dark-money lobby groups and think tanks, there were public glimpses of the Koch fiefdom. The most revealing of these can be seen in the the archived footage, preserved on C-SPAN, of the 2009 Americans for Prosperity annual gala.

The event space was transformed into a miniature presidential convention hall, complete with vertical placards among the rows to represent the various states of the union. But these were not elected delegates convened to nominate an American president. These were the assorted paid operatives and talking heads that had taken a wrecking ball to progressive society. They were there to thank their benefactor in an Orwellian four-hour tribute. A parade of prominent Republican politicians and pundits took the microphone, followed by staff of Americans for Prosperity, to sing praises to Koch, who stood before the hall. As each operative stood to explain what they had accomplished on his behalf, they dutifully addressed the billionaire as “Mr. Chairman.”

The cutthroat tactics that would define Koch’s anything-goes approach, and the men who would later serve as the lieutenants in Trump’s remarking of the country, were also on full display.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Corey Lewandowski, then the New Hampshire state leader for Americans for Prosperity, before boasting that he had organized right-wing rallies so raucous that when President Barack Obama visited the state, they had “forc[ed] him to change his motorcade route to avoid the angry mob.” Koch can be seen in the front of the room, clapping in approval.

Other officials took turns at the microphone to blast the policies of Obama and his administration. One speaker bragged that he had forced the resignation of former White House official Van Jones by appearing on the Glenn Beck program to accuse Jones of being a secret communist. Another promised to work to repeal the estate tax, euphemistically referred to as the “death tax.” And many others discussed the coast-to-coast tea party rallies they mobilized, focused on preventing action on climate change and health care reform.

Over the years, Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated nonprofits continued to battle Obama as the Koch network poured billions into election advocacy and lobbying. Their political rhetoric rarely matched Koch’s idealized form of libertarianism about limited government. Money flowed freely to anti-abortion groups as well as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremists. But principled laissez-faire activism was never a criterion for receiving Koch money.

The assembled speakers at the 2009 convention were quick to form the basis of Trump’s inner circle. Newt Gingrich, who helped open the event, was the first major figure from the GOP establishment to endorse Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination. Larry Kudlow, another speaker at the event, is now in the executive office shaping Trump’s economic policies. Trump himself appeared at Americans for Prosperity events as early as 2014.

The permanent political machine gainfully employed by Koch to fan the flames of the tea party movement seamlessly transitioned into Trump’s orbit. Lewandowski would later serve as Trump’s presidential campaign manager. Alan Cobb, the vice president of Americans for Prosperity, became a senior adviser to the Trump election effort. Marc Short, who later became Trump’s liaison to Congress, previously worked as president of Freedom Partners, Koch’s central clearing house for doling out political grants. Donald McGahn, Koch’s campaign operation lawyer, became Trump’s campaign and White House attorney. And Mark Block, a key Americans for Prosperity official in Wisconsin, seen in the C-SPAN video reporting out the success of his growing chapter in mobilizing anti-Obama demonstrations, was the first to introduce Cambridge Analytica’s services to Steve Bannon, according to a whistleblower account.

No wonder, then, that much of Trump’s administration has been hyper-focused on the policy goals of the Koch network: deregulation, tax cuts, and business-friendly judges. A memo circulated to the Koch donor network last year compiled the laundry list of environmental and judicial victories scored through the administration, including leaving the Paris climate agreement and the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

I BECAME ACUTELY familiar with the Koch network early in my career while traveling across the country in 2009 and 2010 to cover the emerging tea party protests. I was the first to report on Koch’s hidden hand in helping to orchestrate the tea party movement and harness its anger for his own political agenda, and interviewed him about climate change.

Lee Fang

✔@lhfang

At the congressional swearing in ceremony for the Tea Party wave, I saw David Koch leaving the building and got a short interview. Every other political interview Koch ever gave was carefully screened. This one wasn't.

9,070

11:49 AM - Aug 23, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

3,120 people are talking about this

The tactics were often covert. During a town hall hosted by then-congressman Tom Perriello, a Democrat from rural Virginia, angry citizens took turns screaming into the mic, accusing the lawmaker of “ignoring the law of the Constitution that requires Obama to prove that he is a natural born citizen.” I witnessed Americans for Prosperity staff in the back, videotaping the confrontations to create viral moments of constituent unrest. Several of the loudest protesters told me after the event that they had met with Americans for Prosperity staff, who had provided talking points and advice for confronting Democratic lawmakers.

Later, in the midterm elections, an avalanche of television advertisements, many of which were funded by Koch, accused Perriello of abandoning his constituents by voting for health reform and the cap-and-trade bill in Congress.

In Washington, D.C., as the vote on the Affordable Care Act neared, Americans for Prosperity provided free buses, food, and other arrangements for thousands of demonstrators to storm Capitol Hill. When lawmakers saw hundreds of rowdy protesters storm the halls in opposition to the vote, few were aware that a single billionaire had paid their way.

In other instances, the propaganda techniques bordered on comical. One television advertisement featured an actor who played “Carleton the eco-hypocrite,” who sought action on global warming only to enrich himself and cause “massive unemployment.” Another Americans for Prosperity campaign depicted the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate policies represented as a Big Brother-style power grab, falsely claiming that “carbon cops” would arrest Americans and regulate churches under the guise of combating global warming. The campaign toured throughout the country with free food and an inflatable bounce house for children shaped as a giant green police car to illustrate the point.

Other advocacy efforts worked to grow the dark underbelly of American paranoia. American Future Fund was one of several groups that received over $10 million in 2010 from a Koch-financed nonprofit to run attack ads, including spots that spread the bigoted lie that a victory mosque was planned near the former World Trade Center.

In the end, media attention did little to dim Koch’s prospects for power. In the midterm elections that year, Koch’s advocacy machine helped deliver 63 seats in the House of Representatives, including Perriello’s seat, the entire state government in Wisconsin, and hundreds of other elections across the country into Republican hands in one of the greatest election routs in American history. The move to extremism was rewarded with raw power, with Koch as the kingmaker.

THE U.S. BORDER PATROL AND AN ISRAELI MILITARY CONTRACTOR ARE PUTTING A NATIVE AMERICAN RESERVATION UNDER “PERSISTENT SURVEILLANCE”

Will Parrish

August 25 2019, 10:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/

ON THE SOUTHWESTERN END of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, roughly 1 mile from a barbed-wire barricade marking Arizona’s border with the Mexican state of Sonora, Ofelia Rivas leads me to the base of a hill overlooking her home. A U.S. Border Patrol truck is parked roughly 200 yards upslope. A small black mast mounted with cameras and sensors is positioned on a trailer hitched to the truck. For Rivas, the Border Patrol’s monitoring of the reservation has been a grim aspect of everyday life. And that surveillance is about to become far more intrusive.

The vehicle is parked where U.S. Customs and Border Protection will soon construct a 160-foot surveillance tower capable of continuously monitoring every person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles. The tower will be outfitted with high-definition cameras with night vision, thermal sensors, and ground-sweeping radar, all of which will feed real-time data to Border Patrol agents at a central operating station in Ajo, Arizona. The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as “wide-area persistent surveillance.”

CBP plans 10 of these towers across the Tohono O’odham reservation, which spans an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Two will be located near residential areas, including Rivas’s neighborhood, which is home to about 50 people. To build them, CBP has entered a $26 million contract with the U.S. division of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company.

Tohono O’odham people used to move freely across these lands, Rivas says, but following years of harassment by Border Patrol agents, many are afraid to venture far from their homes.

“Now we won’t be able to go anywhere near here without the big U.S.-Israeli eyes monitoring us, watching our every move,” she says.

Fueled by the growing demonization of migrants, as well as ongoing fears of foreign terrorism, the U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control. Firsthand reporting, interviews, and a review of documents for this story provide a window into the high-tech surveillance apparatus CBP is building in the name of deterring illicit migration — and highlight how these same systems often end up targeting other marginalized populations as well as political dissidents.

The U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control.

The towers on Tohono O’odham land are part of a surge in wide-area persistent surveillance systems across the borderlands. Elbit Systems of America has already built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona, which company executives say cover 200 linear miles. According to information provided by a CBP spokesperson, the agency has also deployed 368 smaller surveillance towers, known as RVSS towers, in areas ranging from south of San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, as well as along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border.

Civil liberties advocates and academics have pointed out the heightened abuses and increased migrant suffering that have resulted from the new state-of-the-art surveillance gear. According to Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,” he said.

In February, Congress allocated $100 million for integrated fixed towers and mobile surveillance systems, a sign that the towers may soon expand to new locations.

According to Bobby Brown, senior director of Customs and Border Protection at Elbit Systems of America, the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,” Brown said in an interview with The Intercept. “There’s a lot to be done.”

Building the Virtual Wall

Long before President Donald Trump called for the construction of a “big, beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border, there was the idea of a “virtual wall.” In 2006, Congress authorized the construction of 700 miles of fencing to be accompanied by a vast buildup of surveillance equipment and border guards in more remote terrain.

A key component of that effort, known as SBINet, was canceled after five years and more than $1 billion in expenditures. In the wake of that failure, CBP turned to Elbit, based in Haifa, Israel, awarding it a $145 million contract in 2014 to develop the integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona. In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense.

The surveillance has had an acute impact on borderland communities, including on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Drones fly overhead, and motion sensors track foot traffic. CBP checkpoints monitor people traveling between the reservation and cities such as Tucson and Phoenix. Vehicle barriers, surveillance cameras, and trucks have appeared near burial grounds and on hilltops amid ancient saguaro forests, which are sacred to people on the reservation.

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii-Manoa geography professor who studies borders and migration.

“The build-up started in the 1990s, but particularly after the declaration of the war on terror, funding began flowing into the border security sector in all these different places around the world,” Jones says. The number of fortified borders worldwide soared from 15 to 70 between 2000 and 2015, he added.

This militarization has, in turn, created new profit opportunities for technology and defense firms. In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands.

Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians. The company built surveillance sensors for Israel’s separation barrier through the West Bank, which has been deemed illegal under international law, as well as around the Gaza Strip and on the northern border with Lebanon and Syria.

Elbit is also one of the main contractors on a new kind of underground wall, still under construction, around the blockaded Gaza Strip. Elbit’s drones patrol the Mediterranean Sea as part of the European Union’s bid to seal off access to migrants from North Africa, and it has provided its technologies to militaries in Australia, Africa, Asia, Central America, and South America.

Elbit’s contract to deploy IFTs on the Tohono O’odham reservation, which the company announced on June 26, follows several years of contentious debate within the tribal nation, with those living near tower construction sites voicing strident opposition. Two years ago, CBP released a study claiming that integrated fixed tower construction wouldn’t cause archaeological, environmental, or community harm. The agency also decreased the number of proposed towers and redesigned their bases so they wouldn’t extend underground. The Tohono O’odham legislative council unanimously approved the towers on March 22, citing the importance of helping Border Patrol agents stem cross-border drug trafficking.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,” Jose said. A Border Patrol spokesperson told the newspaper, however, that the IFTs did not eliminate the need for a wall.

The Tohono O’odham Nation’s current chair and vice chair did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

In a statement to The Intercept, CBP spokesperson Meredith Mingledorff said Elbit’s integrated fixed towers enhance Border Patrol agents’ safety at a low cost. “IFTs are a ‘force multiplier’ that enables one agent to monitor various different sites remotely from a secure location,” she said. “They are low cost of maintenance and allow for greater efficiency of law enforcement operations, as we can better deploy resources depending on the type of incursion that is detected by the technology.”

Elbit’s Showcase

On a sweltering afternoon in early April, Elbit Systems of America executives showcased their latest border surveillance products at a company testing facility in Marana, Arizona, roughly 20 miles northwest of downtown Tucson. The event centered around a live demonstration of the IFT command and control system, known as TORCH. The system, which Elbit originally developed for the Israel Defense Forces, is used to monitor people’s movements along Israel’s border and separation walls. Now, it is also used by the Border Patrol at command centers across southern Arizona.

The event also served as a showcase for Elbit’s high-level political support. U.S. Sen. Martha McSally’s deputy state director was on hand, as was Ron Colburn, a former national deputy chief of the Border Patrol and current Elbit adviser. Colburn is perhaps best known for an appearance on Fox News last November defending the Border Patrol’s use of tear gas and pepper spray on migrant caravan participants near Tijuana, who had attempted to cross into the United States. Pepper spray “is natural,” Colburn said, before adding, “You could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.”

Joel Friederich, Elbit Systems of America’s vice president of public safety and homeland security, stood near a wall-sized monitor flanked by a pair of Elbit engineers as reporters and invited guests looked on. On the screen, a satellite map was populated with clusters of yellow and pink dots. Several smaller surrounding images displayed live feeds from the various video cameras and radar sensors adorning a demonstration tower on site. “This can be zoomed in for many, many miles,” Friederich explained.

An engineer clicked on one of the yellow dots, zooming in on one of the video feeds. Suddenly, several cars inching across U.S. Interstate 10 came distinctly into view. He zoomed in further, and the screen settled on a patch of shrubs adjacent to a roadway, close enough that the bright green, swaying tips of the creosote bushes were visible, though they were well over a mile away. The operating system uses artificial intelligence to assign an icon representing a human, vehicle, or animal, allowing Border Patrol agents to determine if something moving across the desert is a potential “item of interest,” Friederich noted. That item could include “anyone carrying a weapon or a backpack, or anyone in a large group.”

For Elbit, the holy grail of border surveillance is to ensure that no person can escape TORCH’s ability to track them across time and space in a given area. If one of the “items” ducks into a bush, the system can track them using a long-range infrared camera. For night operations, the towers have laser illuminators. A pick-up truck that can be remotely operated with a surveillance tower and 6-mile camera range is also able to feed data to TORCH in case someone ducks behind a mountain or into a ravine. The company is currently marketing the truck to CBP.

In 2016, Israel became the first country to deploy autonomous vehicles in a border area, which were also created by Elbit.

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January.

But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

Maren Mantovani, international relations coordinator of Stop the Wall, a Palestinian coalition that opposes Israel’s walls in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere, has tracked Elbit’s activities for nearly two decades. The company’s business success reflects the central role borders are playing in an emerging global surveillance society, she says. “Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

At the 13th annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas, two weeks prior to the event in Arizona, Friederich said in an interview with The Intercept that Elbit was preparing to bid on a contract to build integrated fixed towers on the U.S.-Canadian border and was eying opportunities in the Rio Grande Valley.

According to Brown, the Elbit senior director, the company’s border surveillance work will proceed indefinitely regardless of the construction of Trump’s border wall. “Border security has always been a three-legged stool — manpower, infrastructure, and technology,” he said. “Infrastructure being the wall. Technology being the towers, the mobile systems, the ground detection such as sensors. We’re going to keep busy no matter what.”

Mission Creep

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation.

The agency has received considerable criticism for its often-brutal treatment of migrants. But a large percentage of its operations involve routine police work. Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens. Yet not as much attention has been paid to how the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement.

In 2017, as companies built prototypes for Trump’s border wall in San Diego, CBP stationed one of its RVSS towers nearby to monitor political opposition, citing the “emerging threat of demonstrations,” records show. The tower deployment lasted for eight months beginning in September 2017, according to a federal contract tender posted online. The only significant demonstration to occur was a peaceful rally that greeted Trump in March 2018 as he conducted a photo-op tour of the wall prototypes.

Making use of the border surveillance tower to monitor political protests was a seamless transition, according to the contract tender. “CBP concluded that the RVSS relocatable tower solution was a logical choice since placement of this RVSS tower was essentially an extension of the existing RVSS system in place along the border in San Diego, and the tower would also provide surveillance of two areas at one time,” it stated.

CBP also frequently “shares” its aircraft, including surveillance drones, with other U.S. law enforcement agencies. According to flight logs The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, between July 2016 and August 2017, CBP conducted 15 drone flights for state and local police spanning 90.2 hours and an additional 53 flights for federal police agencies covering more than 200 hours. The logs provided by CBP failed to specify the locations of these flights, but additional documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests.

In a statement to The Intercept, a CBP spokesperson confirmed that North Dakota law enforcement used the agency’s drone at Standing Rock, claiming that it helped protect local police equipment from threats. “The Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) provided a video feed to the local command center, giving the sheriff’s department and state police situational awareness of the protest while minimizing the threat to their aviation personnel and assets,” the spokesperson wrote.

During the Standing Rock protests, police and private security personnel regularly justified surveillance by casting pipeline opponents as instigators of violence.

For its part, Elbit has also marketed its surveillance equipment for use against protesters on at least one occasion, according to records The Intercept obtained via freedom of information requests. In November 2016, a company representative offered a system of wide-area persistent surveillance sensors to police monitoring Dakota Access pipeline opponents. Elbit’s description of its product, known as GroundEye, touted it as “a paradigm shift in defense and security surveillance,” owing to its “ability to move ‘Back-In-Time,’ to simultaneously track and trace the movements of one or more objects.”

A spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services said the agency ultimately opted against purchasing the GroundEye system, though she declined to state a reason.

The ACLU’s Jay Stanley says that CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

That potential is further underscored by a March 2018 email exchange, obtained via open records requests, that shows a high-ranking Border Patrol officer referring to political opposition to Trump border policies as a “threat.” Border Patrol Agent in Charge Christopher M. Seiler, of the agency’s Rio Grande Valley sector, emailed more than 30 other supervisory agents to invite them to a “Large Scale Protest Response Seminar.” The leader of the seminar was Paul Laney, the former sheriff of Cass County, North Dakota, who served as the leading architect of the militarized police response at Standing Rock.

“The current political climate, uptick in demonstrations and social media campaigns, along with the immigration debate almost ensure that RGV will have large scale protests,” Seiler wrote. “These protests pose a significant threat to the border, law enforcement, and our communities.”

Tohono O’odham Under Occupation

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care.

But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants.

“It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Nellie Jo David says the constant surveillance has profoundly disrupted the cultural fabric of the Tohono O’odham people, alongside other federal government intrusions like the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, built adjacent to the reservation in the 1940s.

“The towers are just one more target on our culture and way of life,” David says. “We can’t really have the same ceremonies if there are going to be eyes on us, coming from an operational control room with likely a white male agent looking into what it is to be O’odham.”

Although the Tohono O’odham tribal council has supported the integrated fixed towers, the majority of people living near future construction sites have vocally opposed them. Two of the towers are slated for the district of Gu-Vo, or “Big Pond,” where Rivas resides, the westernmost of 11 districts on the reservation. The Gu-Vo governing council passed a resolution against the towers in 2017, citing firm opposition to residents placed under persistent surveillance and a desire to protect sacred burial sites, ceremonial areas, and harvesting grounds.

In the process of opposing the towers, Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems.

“I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

Profits From OxyContin sales

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NBb21yMgnE

A Revolutionary Writer for Our Darkest Days

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

AUG 30, 2019 | TD ORIGINALS

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-revolutionary-writer-for-our-darkest-days/

After the 2016 EU referendum that changed the United Kingdom’s political trajectory for years to come, novelist Ali Smith had a revolutionary idea: writing a series of novels set in Brexit Britain, to be written and published in time to mirror the drama unfolding in her home country. What’s known as the “Seasonal Quartet,” due to each novel carrying the name of a season, is a breathtakingly beautiful series that has been showered with accolades from the moment the first book, “Autumn,” was published. 

Each volume, while fiction, captures many of the issues facing Brits in this brave new Brexit world, as just across the Atlantic, Donald Trump rules the U.S. with the same disdain for facts that many argue was behind the campaign that led the British public to vote for leaving the European Union. And yet, despite grim circumstances, Smith uses her considerable writing talents to uncover hope for a better future, often in the form of radical ideas and activism that shake characters and readers from complacency. In “Winter,” the second book in the series, the Scottish author tackles xenophobia and family divisions over politics by placing four incredibly different characters in one imagined Cornish household, where the all-too-human interactions among them become a catalyst for healing. “Spring,” the latest installment in the “Seasonal Quartet,” depicts a crossroads between strangers that are all changed in meaningful ways by their encounter with a young girl, not too unlike the real-life teen activist Greta Thunberg. That meeting forces them to question the dark, seemingly thoughtless paths they and the United Kingdom are barreling down.  

In a discussion about everything from refugees to Shakespeare, I caught up with Smith via email. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.

NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA: Why have you chosen seasons to title your novels set in Brexit Britain? What have you gained from structuring your “Seasonal Quartet” using this specific measure of time? Have you lost anything, or had moments when you wished you hadn’t chosen this framework? Did climate change and its impact on the seasons as we once knew them play a part in this creative choice?

ALI SMITH: I didn’t choose it—it just happened. In 2014 I handed in a manuscript to my publisher here in the U.K., Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin, a book called “How to Be Both.” I’d missed its promised publishing deadline by a year or so, and I apologized to him. He laughed and said, “You haven’t missed the deadline, we can still bring the book out to time.”

I was amazed. “How to Be Both” is a novel with an ostensibly complex structure, one that exists in two forms that look on the surface exactly the same and are then randomly mixed in the print run, so that, depending on coincidence, when you pick up this book you might get one half at the beginning, or you might get the other half first instead. Sure enough, even given all the usual copy editing and proofing and printing schedule constraint, AND with this randomized structural print-mix thrown in, six weeks later I held the physical finished novel, in both its forms, in my hands. Not just that, it was a physical object of real care and beauty.

So then I began to wonder why the publishing process habitually takes so long, usually at least nine months, from handing in a manuscript to the finished thing. Since I began writing fiction, since roughly 1993, I’d been thinking about writing a series of books named after the seasons, and I’d always had them at the back of my head as a possibility maybe for when I was older.  This fast turnaround brought these books into focus for me in a new way. Because—what if you could write novels about time, but to time, so that you published them as close to their being written as possible and so that they held something truly contemporary somewhere in them, which would then be naturally offset by them tapping into the ever-cycling cycle of the changes and repetitions of season. And wouldn’t that be akin to what the novel actually means as a form—to when the Victorians published novels, when the novel still meant what it’s named for, something new, novel, the latest thing?

I asked Simon would it be possible—because I knew it would be asking a great deal of the publishing schedule team, who’d have to be generously on board for it or it wouldn’t work. He asked everyone who’d be working on the books. They all said enthusiastic yesses. The revelation of expertise, teamwork and galvanized spirit has been one of the most lovely and satisfying things about writing these books and bringing them to birth so succinctly—and frankly also so very beautifully—I very much love the U.S. editions too, but the U.K. editions are really something special in terms of design.

I started work on the first book, “Autumn,” at the end of 2015. 2016 brought the most unpredictable changes, all across the country here, then all across the Western world. It was another revelation to me of the way that the books we write choose their own time to come.

I couldn’t ever have planned this. But it’s right. The seasons are all about what changes and what, regardless of extreme change, stays the same. The novel is a revolutionary form too. It rolls forward, gathers its mosses.

Also, you can’t get away from the effect of global warming—let’s give it its real and alarming name—when you’re working with the seasons and watching the usual changes warp in real-time immediacy.

So the consciousness you’re asking about in your question—it’s not that I set out consciously in quite that way. But the writing of the books has been all about consciousness, about articulating what’s happening right now, in social and environmental terms and also increasingly in terms of the shifts and changes in the use of language in the public realm even just over the last couple of years, language, along with notions of time and social structure, being the physical material of any novel.

NHK: As I was reading “Spring,” I couldn’t help but see the 12-year-old protagonist Florence, who boldly enters spaces and scenarios many of her elders would not dare to in order to demand change, as a Greta Thunberg-like character. Why did you choose a child as a catalyst for change? Was Florence in some way modeled after the Swedish teen environmentalist who’s stood up to political leaders the world over? 

AS: “Spring” thieves some of its narrative from Shakespeare’s “Pericles.” Each of these novels has been as if befriended by one of Shakespeare’s late plays, the plays where, quite miraculously, he makes brand new form, one that always conjures impossible rebirth, out of a shredding and re-melding of elements of tragedy, history and comedy, the material of his earlier plays. (“Spring” is also befriended by a lot of other written and visual forms, but the workings of Shakespeare’s “Pericles” through it deliver the almost sardonic and quite blatantly impossible sense of hope.)

So Florence was already written, already a new drawn form of Shakespeare’s Marina, when I first encountered, in the news, in January this year, the brilliant shining Greta Thunberg speaking at Davos.

Marina is a child so good that Shakespeare can winkingly drop her feet first into the nastiest, seamiest of places and watch as she illuminates and scours clean those places. “Pericles” is about good and bad governance, how important the first is and how cataclysmic and catastrophic the latter—but above all it’s about an incorruptible goodness. Also, when you’re faced with what looks like an unshiftable dilemma, ask a child. Thunberg has articulated the future to us, because the future is hers and her generations’ inheritance. Her presence is the appearance on the world stage of the possible future—one of frankness and goodness and unselfishness up against the conglomerate business mindset that thinks right now that it owns and can use both us and the world. That’s the choice we face. As Thunberg says, the real power belongs to the people. I’m not surprised to see the whole world turn to listen. 

My Marina character, Florence, gets almost nothing changed. Yet what change she does achieve is downright impossible, unless we choose to change. Greta Thunberg is timely. She’s a threshold, a door open out of the dark.

NHZ: You carried out interviews with refugees and detainees at the United Kingdom Immigration Removal Centre for your latest novel. Are there stories you heard that impacted you but couldn’t quite make it onto the page in one form or another? 

AS: I had a great deal of help with information and knowledge I’d been trusted with by people who’ve been or are being illegally detained, and I also read and searched out what people who’ve been detained (the most invisible of people right now in the world, human beings rendered invisible by an industrialized system of detention) have been able to publish and voice against all the silencing odds about their time in detention. I also asked anonymous sources who work in the system to tell me about it as it is. But there’s more. There’s so much endlessly more, every day more. One man I spoke to, a man who’d been trafficked since the age of 4, and had arrived in the U.K. looking for help only to be trafficked again, until he’d escaped, and gone to the Home Office for help, and been arrested and incarcerated, said to me, “You have to tell people. People don’t know. They think it’s like the government tells them. You have to tell them what it’s like.“ So I have and I am.

NHZ: Some of the events you mention in your series, such as the Windrush scandal and London’s Grenfell Tower fire, are fresh out of the newspapers of the past several years. Is there ever a point when writing about contemporary events that it feels too recent to truly dissect or glean meaning from in writing? Or does the recentness help lend urgency to your work?

AS: The thing is, nothing’s really new. Windrush and Grenfell are just the latest age-old governmental selfishnesses. And one of the interesting things about the attempt at articulation of what’s happening around us right now is the sense of the metamorphic thing that can happen in the imaginative space the arts always create, personally, psychologically, socially, nationally, internationally, metaphysically—all these are of course umbilically connected. The novel genre frames reality, all our realities, brand new, ancient, in a way that asks of the imagination.

Also, I’m feeling well equipped—I’ve recently been rereading Muriel Spark; I reread everything she wrote last year around the centenary of her birth. Spark can write quite specifically about, say, Watergate, like she does in the novel called “The Abbess of Crewe,” and it can be about all the centuries of surveillance, powerplay and dodgy governmental dealings, as well as very much the specifics of a couple of years in the 1970s. Spark, merry about apocalypse, facing the 20th century’s own stormy times of rising fascism and emotional mass manipulation, always gestures toward the thinking mind, the reason we’ve a skull beneath the skin at all, as she might (given her great love of the metaphysical poets) have put it.

NHZ: While the series is set in a post-EU-Referendum U.K., I find it remarkable that you’re able to portray in detail the uncertainty of the moment without predicting what will come of the vote in terms of the U.K.’s as-of-yet undefined separation from the European Union. Do you have any predictions as to how Brexit will play out as a new autumn deadline looms and British politics remain in disarray? Do you have an ideal scenario in mind? 

AS: No. I think the current quite blatantly expedient political use of division and emotion locally and internationally has ripped a chasm and sown a neurosis and a reactive fury through almost everything—and was meant to. A small number of people have made a lot of money out of such volcanic political canyon-ing across the world.

But. We’ll sort it. We’re multifarious, and we’re astonishing. And division is a kind of lie to us, in our human multifacetedness. We won’t stand for it for long. I hope.

NHZ: There’s a layering of histories that occurs in “Spring.” For example, Culloden, the setting of the final brutal battle of the 1745 Jacobite rising, becomes the setting of a new, very different opportunity for a form of freedom. What did you hope your readers would come to understand about the time we live in with these collage-like moments?

AS: I didn’t set out to hope for anything, I just told it as it asked to be told and went with what the historic cycles provided.

But here’s an anecdote—I’d originally thought I’d maybe be writing this book partly about Switzerland, maybe based around the place where the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the great short story writer Katherine Mansfield (who grace the book fleetingly) had lived so close to one another one year in the 1920s without having ever met each other, and I’d planned a trip to see the place, Sierre, just for a couple of days. But then, on the morning before the day we were meant to leave, I put my head and shoulders inside a massive renaissance wooden chest that’s been in my partner’s family for something like four hundred years, it’s where we now keep the photo albums, I was in there looking for a photo of something I thought might be a help to the book, and that’s when history hit me hard on the head—the lid of the box came down and thumped me on the forehead and my forehead was too gashed open to allow air travel, so the planned Swiss trip was canceled. OK. We moved the dates. Then a dear friend died.  Her funeral was taking place on the new Swiss dates and there was no way we’d not be there at her service. At that service one of the pieces of music she’d chosen was a tune close to my heart, a tune called Highland Cathedral, a traditional Scottish bagpipe tune of great beauty.

With the closer-to-home mountains and sound of the Scottish highlands in my head, I sat on the floor in our front room a few days later and laughed out loud at how I’d sort of known all along that this book was meant to be set in the north of Scotland, which is a place that really feels, right now, like a quite different country is still possible, if we want it to be, both in the U.K. or out of it.

NHK: Despite the despair common in our times, and that several of your characters, such as Richard, experience, your novels still find ways to offer glimpses of radical hope. Where do you find reasons to be hopeful in today’s turbulent political and environmental context?

AS: We’re human. We’ll work it out. But we’d better get on to it. We have to move fast. Time—it’s not just of the essence. It is the essence.