Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Police Unions Wield Massive Power in American Politics — For Now
The barriers to reform police unions erected over the years will pose an enormous obstacle to establishing a new, more accountable kind of policing in the United States.
Sam Blum ROLLING STONE
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/police-unions-wield-massive-power-american-politics-now
When he was fired, arrested, and charged with the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin belonged to a union. Officer Brett Hankison still enjoys union membership, despite being terminated by the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department over the killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Unlike other public sector unions tasked with establishing collective bargaining rights for its members, police unions have sought to protect employees who have killed people on the job.
When he was fired, arrested, and charged with the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin belonged to a union. Officer Brett Hankison still enjoys union membership, despite being terminated by the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department over the killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Unlike other public sector unions tasked with establishing collective bargaining rights for its members, police unions have sought to protect employees who have killed people on the job.
Though Chauvin’s termination won’t be contested by the Minneapolis Police Federation, his criminal legal defense will be covered by another labor outfit, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association. Hankison appealed his termination to the LMPD’s Merit Board through lawyers employed by his union, the River City Fraternal Order of Police. The RCFOP didn’t return a request for comment by Rolling Stone, and the MPF’s website and social media pages have been taken offline. The FBI and the Kentucky State Attorney General’s office are investigating Taylor’s death.
Neither officer is an anomaly. Chauvin had a professional history littered with at least 17 misconduct complaints, while Hankison, who had sat on the LMPD Merit Board, later faced allegations of using his position to sexually proposition and assault at least two women. Both men have become a focal point of the national ire currently focused on America’s cops. They are just a symptom of the systemic rot that plagues American policing.
In a time of dwindling union membership in the United States, police unions have only grown in sheer size and power. Over decades of savvy political alliances, lobbying, advertising blitzes, and contract negotiations with obliging city officials, the unions have engineered an environment where accountability is fleeting, and where numerous hurdles make it exceedingly difficult to punish officers who abuse their power.
“You have really politically powerful police unions that lobby, that are organized, that donate and give to major political candidates,” says Stephen Rushin, an associate law professor at Loyola Chicago University.
As calls to “defund the police” grew across the country, prominent police union leaders exercised their clout by speaking out. Bob Kroll, president of Minneapolis Police Federation and the subject of 10 misconduct complaints of his own since 2013,responded to the unrest by calling Black Lives Matter “a terrorist organization.” (One of the complaints remains open, and none of the others against Kroll have resulted in discipline, according to published reports.) Pat Lynch, president of the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, spoke of being abandoned by elected officials, saying the protests put the NYPD “under assault.”
But those union leaders’ histrionics could signal a changing of the tide. With a national wave of protest fueled by the public’s contempt for police brutality and unaccountability, some advocates and experts believe we could be nearing a moment of reckoning that achieves systemic change. “This could be a watershed moment where policing is radically restructured and we understand public safety in a fundamentally different way,” says Goff. “Or it could look like every other time that black communities have been calling for the same things with different words” that failed to change the situation.
Police unions are on the movement’s radar, but the barriers to reform they’ve erected over the years will pose an enormous obstacle to establishing a new, more accountable kind of policing in the United States.
DESPITE THEIR INFLUENCE and present-day power, police unions had to fight for decades to gain a foothold within the labor movement. They eventually sought and gained union recognition, but America’s police departments ironically came to prominence as forces used to quash labor agitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“If you go back to the period before the New Deal, unions were more or less considered illegitimate,” says Sam Mitrani, a labor historian at the College of Dupage. “Every time there was an organizing drive or a strike, the police were sent in to smash it.”
The development of industry in U.S. cities led to widespread work stoppages, such as the Pullman Strike of 1894 and Chicago’s Haymarket Square Massacre in 1877. Cities responded to the unrest by bolstering police forces. “The police were largely built in reaction to the labor movement,” Mitrani says.
Before and after the New Deal won historic concessions for workers, police forces clamored for acceptance within the broader labor movement with little success. The establishment of fraternal organizations — many of which still exist today — allowed police to advocate for better pay and pensions, but didn’t maintain the might and bargaining power of unions under the umbrella of the American Federation of Labor. Fraternal organizations “start out as pressure groups and advocates for police. … They’re not actually formal unions,” explains Max Felker-Kantor, a labor historian at Ball State University.
By the 1950s, a professionalization movement within police forces was born with an aim of instilling bureaucratic efficiency and control within departments. This only created more tension between police officers and their reform-minded leaders, who viewed collective bargaining as an impediment to their aims. According to Felker-Kantor, the leaders of the professionalization movement, such as former Chicago police chief O.W. Wilson, thought unions made it more difficult “to enhance discipline, to increase the education you might need to become a police officer.’”
As a result, officers rebelled. A wave of police protests in the 1960s and 1970s saw cops attempt to cash in on the public sector union movement, which had increased in size and strength in prior decades without them. The union push was won after a wave of civil disobedience in Baltimore, San Francisco, New York and, other cities, with cops using protest tactics that they had been instrumental in suppressing in previous generations. The social upheaval of the late Sixties helped police unions win over broad segments of the white working-class public, who viewed the country’s simmering racial tension with alarm. “Nearly every large-city police department had been unionized by the early 1970s,” Gary Potter, a criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University, wrote in a 2013 paper.
The Great Migration reshaped U.S. cities demographically, with an influx of African Americans moving their families to the cities of the north. By the early 1960s, police departments saw their budgets increase and swarms of new white officers join the force, largely as a way of policing these new black populations, Ellora Derenoncourt, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, wrote in a paper last year.
The combination of strong union protections and a culture of racial animosity might partly explain how American policing laid its current foundation. Today, policing has a “foundation that I believe, and many believe, is fundamentally racist in its impact,” Seattle City Councilman Girmay Zahilay tells Rolling Stone.
That sentiment is nothing new to broad swaths of people of color in America, though it’s now gaining traction among white people. “Our history has not fully accounted for how we’ve managed race in this country, and that’s what you’re seeing on the streets,” says Goff.
IT TOOK DECADES for police unions to gain recognition within the labor movement, but they are now an entrenched power-player across the country. Their influence is cemented in pervasive ways. With protesters flooding the streets in defiance of widely decried police killings, the public is finally waking up to this reality.
Police union power begins with their contracts — governing documents that establish officer salaries, vacation packages, and a multitude of other provisions related to employment. Though they’re always agreed via a bilateral process involving union representatives and city officials, these contracts have enabled departments to amass enormous budgets and ironclad job security for officers — even if they beat, choke, and sometimes kill non-violent people in the line of duty.
Though it’s not an outlier in terms of the benefits afforded to its officers, the RCFOP’s contract includes several clauses that demonstrate just how hard it is to fire problematic officers like Hankison. One of those clauses is a “requirement to erase documentation” of misconduct charges after a year, Samuel Sinyangwe, the co-founder of the police reform organization Campaign Zero, explained to Rolling Stone. The issue extends a lot further than Louisville.
Stephen Rushin, the Loyola Chicago law professor, has gone to great lengths to correlate stronger police union contracts with upticks in officer misconduct. Through an examination of 834 contracts across two studies, Rushin highlighted how unions have orchestrated a system of non-accountability spanning the nation. He determined that contracts stymie oversight, with policies that “limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prevent anonymous civilian complaints, indemnify officers in the event of civil suits, and limit the length of internal investigations,” one paper says.
Speaking of his experience trying to reform the Seattle Police Department after they recently used pepper spray and flash bangs to disperse protestors, Zahilay explains: “The only types of oversight that we can implement over our sheriff’s department, are the types of oversight the sheriff’s department agrees to. You can imagine how much of a conflict of interest that is.”
Given the seeming impunity afforded to police via their contracts, it’s easy to understand how the recent Black Lives Matter protests quickly turned so violent. Though many officers acted with restraint while sporadic looting and violence gripped American cities, the internet was soon consumed by a bloody highlight reel of police brutality. In Austin, Texas, police struck a pregnant woman with a beanbag projectile. In Buffalo, New York, 75-year-old activist Martin Gugino was shoved to the pavement by members of a riot squad, smashing his head open on the sidewalk. (Two officers were eventually charged with felony assault in the incident, though all 57 officers on the BPD Emergency Response Unit quit their positions in that unit protest). Journalists covering the unrest were sometimes deliberately targeted by police forces, in over 470 incidents of aggressions counted against reporters by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Many cops may not have feared consequences from brutalizing protestors simply because it’s so difficult to fire unionized police officers. This is because fired cops often earn reduced punishments through various layers of appeal. Often, they’re granted reduced punishments after a closed-door hearing with an arbitrator. “That arbitrator is usually selected with at least some significant input from the police union or from the officer who’s filing the grievance,” says Rushin. Arbitrators are usually “repeat players” who seek good working relationships with police unions due to monetary incentives. They aren’t afraid of brokering compromise between unions and department leadership to get more work down the line.
“Compromise is OK in other ways,” Rushin says, “but it’s not always an acceptable outcome when it means putting a dangerous person back on the street with a badge or a gun.”
While contracts and arbitration have made it more difficult to punish dangerous or otherwise unfit officers, police unions have embedded their machinery deeply within the political system in other ways. Because of their swelling, dues-paying rank and file, police unions “have access to very, very large sums of money” and use it “to influence the political system,” says George Gascón, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and current candidate for Los Angeles District Attorney. Police unions “are almost intoxicated with that power of the money,” he says.
Their lobbying efforts are robust. In response to Democrats’ recent efforts to establish new federal policing restrictions, Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, told the New York Times, “We’re going to come out swinging. We’re not going to back down.”
Police unions have a history of banding together to kill legislation around jail sentencing reform, and many other initiatives they might deem detrimental to their interests. In Wisconsin, where police were exempted from controversial right to work policies enacted by former governor Scott Walker, police unions have spent around $2.3 million in the last decade on lobbying and elections, Urban Milwaukee reported this month. Across the country, police union lobbying efforts have reached a total of $87 million spent in major cities over the last 20 years, according to an analysis from the Guardian. Police union and political action committee money has flowed to a bipartisan faction of Congressional leaders for decades. Out of the top 10 recipients of police money in both the House and Senate since 1994, six are current Democrats, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), an analysis by Open Secrets found.
The unions “have been successful in getting lots of very deferential legislation passed like officer bills of rights,” says Rushin. “One the one hand, that looks problematic, but they don’t have some sort of magical power, they have the power we give them.”
THE PROTEST MOVEMENT has been a force this summer, with demonstrations cropping up in small towns and major cities alike. The sustained momentum from multiple sectors of activists, politicians and labor leaders may provide an indication that a structural upheaval could, finally, be around the corner.
Much of the recent backlash against police unions has come from within the labor movement itself. The president of the Service Employees International Union, Mary Kay Henry, recently said the labor movement has to consider expelling police unions. The Kings County Labor Council, the largest labor union in Seattle, expelled the Seattle Police Officers Guild from its organization early this month, while the Writers Guild of America, East, unanimously passed a resolution calling for the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with the International Union of Police Associations. (The AFL-CIO so far has said it won’t expel the IUPA).
Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association president Larry Cosme, however, sees no difference between police unions and their comrades in organized labor.
“We do not ask why teachers should have a role in setting education policy or why workers should have a role in policies surrounding workplace safety,” comments Cosme via a written statement to Rolling Stone. “These organizations deserve a seat at the table when policies impacting their safety, wages, and benefits are set because they represent the voices of the rank and file employees who serve as a vital check on management. Police labor organizations serve the same important function.”
Rather, Cosme asserted that elected officials and police department leadership are a more deserving target of national scorn than rank-and-file officers. “Perhaps there also needs to be a better mechanism for holding those individuals accountable for failures in or a complete lack of leadership on these issues rather than a focus on rank and file law enforcement and the groups who represent them,” he says.
Legislators across the country are siding with the growing movement for police accountability. In New York on June 12th, Governor Andrew Cuomo repealed 50-A, a controversial law that allowed police departments to shield officer misconduct records from public view. In Colorado, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill that ended qualified immunity, enabling the public to bring lawsuits against individual officers over civil rights complaints. The Minneapolis City Council voted to dismantle its police department following the mass demonstrations, while Louisville officials voted to ban the kind of no-knock warrant used in the killing of Breonna Taylor.
The progress has heartened activists. “I’m more hopeful now than ever,” Samuel Sinyangwe, of Campaign Zero, says. “I think there’s a political consciousness among legislators that’s increasing now that [supporting police unions] is not OK.”
Gascón has made the campaign promise of not accepting any donations from police unions. “We’re going to try to make police money toxic, just like fossil fuel money or tobacco money,” he tells Rolling Stone.
Advocates like Phillip Atiba Goff are imploring people to keep the pressure on their elected leaders. “Who is your police chief or sheriff or superintendent? Who can hire and fire them? Is there a civilian review board? Who’s the head of your union and how long have they been there?” he asks.
What’s different about this moment, is the multitude of factors driving a multiracial coalition of activists into the streets to demand change. The collision of a pandemic with mass unemployment and racial unrest stoked by the gruesome murders of Floyd, Taylor and others has finally elevated the Black Lives Matter movement to a position of international prominence.
“2020 has been a year where generations of unjust and unsustainable systems have played out in a way you can clearly see,” Seattle City Councilman Girmay Zahilay says.
Goff sees a parallel between the police reform movement and the toppling of Confederate monuments around the country, which have become a new focus of protests against systemic racism. “In these moments, policing isn’t at the center of this, racism is,” he says. “And it’s the long history of racism. The reason that we slid so effortlessly from Minneapolis to confederate statues, is because they are the same thing.”
'Historic Day' for Standing Rock as Pipeline Company Told to Shut Down, Remove Oil
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
Kolby KickingWoman
INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/historic-day-standing-rock-pipeline-company-told-shut-down-remove-oil
A federal judge has ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down and remove all oil within 30 days, a huge win for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the other plaintiffs.
In a 24-page order, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that he was "mindful of the disruption" that shutting down the pipeline would cause, but that it must be done within 30 days. The order comes after Boasberg said in April that a more extensive review was necessary than what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already conducted and that he would consider whether the pipeline would have to be shuttered during the new assessment.
“Following multiple twists and turns in this long-running litigation, this Court recently found that Defendant U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it granted an easement to Defendant-Intervenor Dakota Access, LLC to construct and operate a segment of that crude-oil pipeline running beneath the lake,” said the opinion from Boasberg.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court handed another blow to the disputed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada by keeping in place a lower court ruling that blocked a key permit for the project.
Monday's order also put on hold an earlier court ruling out of Montana as it pertains to other oil and gas pipelines across the nation.
That’s a sliver of good news for an industry that just suffered two other blows — Sunday's cancellation of the $8 billion Atlantic Coast gas pipeline in the Southeast and the ruling that shut down the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
"The Court does not reach its decision with blithe disregard for the lives it will affect," Boasberg wrote in Monday's Dakota Access ruling. "It readily acknowledges that, even with the currently low demand for oil, shutting down the pipeline will cause significant disruption to DAPL, the North Dakota oil industry, and potentially other states.
This doesn’t appear to be the first time Boasberg has reversed or rescinded a previous judgment.
According to BallotPedia, since 2018 the judge has ruled against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining asylum seekers more than seven days and also stopped states from implementing work requirements for Medicaid programs.
Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, called the ruling "shocking" and noted that the pipeline is moving 570,000 barrels of Bakken oil a day.
"I think there's a lot of questions about the authority of this liberal district court judge to make such a significant ruling," Ness said of Boasberg, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. "There is no doubt that the lawyers are all gearing up and looking at every possibility of a stay or an appeal or something."
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
“There are many problems with the information ETP (Energy Transfer Partner) submitted to the Corps of Engineers on DAPL. ETP estimates that 12,500 barrels of oil would be the worst-case scenario, but that is based on a nine-minute shutdown time. By looking at prior spills, we know that the true shutdown time is hours, and can even take days. Now, the fight continues, but it is in federal court.” —Chairman Mike Faith of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Photo courtesy of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Facebook 2018)
“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” Faith said. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”
The pipeline extends more than 1,000 miles from North Dakota to Illinois – but the issue is the portion of the project that is buried under the Missouri River. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe said a leak will contaminate their drinking water and sacred lands.
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation sit next to the Standing Rock Sioux and Missouri River. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier celebrates the decision.
"I applaud the actions of the US District Court in finding what we knew all along, that this pipeline, like many other actions taken by the US government, is in fact illegally operating," read the statement. "The fact that this operation had been operating illegally for three years before this conclusion was finally made shows you the power that money holds on the American government."
Late in the Obama administration the Corps of Army Engineers announced it would suspend approval of the project while an Environmental Impact Statement was prepared. “A few months later, however, following the change of administration in January 2017 and a presidential memorandum urging acceleration of the project, the Corps again reconsidered and decided to move forward,” the opinion said. “It granted the sought permit, construction was completed, and oil commenced flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. “
This the court found was a substantial error and a violation of the National Environmental Environmental Policy Act.
The bottom line: “The Corps had not been able to substantiate its decision to publish” only an Environmental Assessment and not an Environmental Impact Statement.
Bernie Sanders: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and millions of others who fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline showed us the power of standing together against injustice. We can create a future where a clean environment and indigenous rights matter more than Big Oil’s profits.
Energy Transfer last year proposed increasing the pipeline's capacity to as much as 1.1 million barrels to meet growing demand for oil from North Dakota, without the need for additional pipelines or rail shipments.
Before the coronavirus pandemic devastated the U.S. oil industry, daily oil production in North Dakota - the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas - was at a near-record 1.45 million barrels daily. The state's output slipped to below 1 million barrels daily in May amid low energy prices and sparse demand.
Permits for the project were originally rejected by the Obama administration, and the Army Corps of Engineers prepared to conduct a full environmental review. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the Corps scrapped the review and granted permits, concluding that running the pipeline under the Missouri River posed no significant environmental issues.
The Corps said that opinion was validated after an additional year of review, as ordered by Boasberg in 2017.
Boasberg had ruled then that the Corps "largely complied" with environmental law when permitting the pipeline but ordered more review because he said the agency did not adequately consider how an oil spill under the Missouri River might affect the Standing Rock Sioux's fishing and hunting rights, or whether it might disproportionately affect the tribal community.
“Yet, given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease,” Boasberg’s ruling stated.
In a statement, the Indigenous Environmental Network is celebrating all the prayers and support the #NoDAPL movement has received over the years. While Boasberg’s opinion clearly states the flow of oil must stop, the organization is prepared to fight to see that through.
“The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes have shown the world that treaty rights and environmental justice are not token concepts without merit, but rather tangible arguments that inherently protect the sacredness of mother earth. We will continue to fight until DAPL is stopped completely,” the statement said.
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/historic-day-standing-rock-pipeline-company-told-shut-down-remove-oil
A federal judge has ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down and remove all oil within 30 days, a huge win for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the other plaintiffs.
In a 24-page order, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that he was "mindful of the disruption" that shutting down the pipeline would cause, but that it must be done within 30 days. The order comes after Boasberg said in April that a more extensive review was necessary than what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already conducted and that he would consider whether the pipeline would have to be shuttered during the new assessment.
“Following multiple twists and turns in this long-running litigation, this Court recently found that Defendant U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it granted an easement to Defendant-Intervenor Dakota Access, LLC to construct and operate a segment of that crude-oil pipeline running beneath the lake,” said the opinion from Boasberg.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court handed another blow to the disputed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada by keeping in place a lower court ruling that blocked a key permit for the project.
Monday's order also put on hold an earlier court ruling out of Montana as it pertains to other oil and gas pipelines across the nation.
That’s a sliver of good news for an industry that just suffered two other blows — Sunday's cancellation of the $8 billion Atlantic Coast gas pipeline in the Southeast and the ruling that shut down the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
"The Court does not reach its decision with blithe disregard for the lives it will affect," Boasberg wrote in Monday's Dakota Access ruling. "It readily acknowledges that, even with the currently low demand for oil, shutting down the pipeline will cause significant disruption to DAPL, the North Dakota oil industry, and potentially other states.
This doesn’t appear to be the first time Boasberg has reversed or rescinded a previous judgment.
According to BallotPedia, since 2018 the judge has ruled against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining asylum seekers more than seven days and also stopped states from implementing work requirements for Medicaid programs.
Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, called the ruling "shocking" and noted that the pipeline is moving 570,000 barrels of Bakken oil a day.
"I think there's a lot of questions about the authority of this liberal district court judge to make such a significant ruling," Ness said of Boasberg, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. "There is no doubt that the lawyers are all gearing up and looking at every possibility of a stay or an appeal or something."
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
“There are many problems with the information ETP (Energy Transfer Partner) submitted to the Corps of Engineers on DAPL. ETP estimates that 12,500 barrels of oil would be the worst-case scenario, but that is based on a nine-minute shutdown time. By looking at prior spills, we know that the true shutdown time is hours, and can even take days. Now, the fight continues, but it is in federal court.” —Chairman Mike Faith of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Photo courtesy of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Facebook 2018)
“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” Faith said. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”
The pipeline extends more than 1,000 miles from North Dakota to Illinois – but the issue is the portion of the project that is buried under the Missouri River. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe said a leak will contaminate their drinking water and sacred lands.
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation sit next to the Standing Rock Sioux and Missouri River. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier celebrates the decision.
"I applaud the actions of the US District Court in finding what we knew all along, that this pipeline, like many other actions taken by the US government, is in fact illegally operating," read the statement. "The fact that this operation had been operating illegally for three years before this conclusion was finally made shows you the power that money holds on the American government."
Late in the Obama administration the Corps of Army Engineers announced it would suspend approval of the project while an Environmental Impact Statement was prepared. “A few months later, however, following the change of administration in January 2017 and a presidential memorandum urging acceleration of the project, the Corps again reconsidered and decided to move forward,” the opinion said. “It granted the sought permit, construction was completed, and oil commenced flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. “
This the court found was a substantial error and a violation of the National Environmental Environmental Policy Act.
The bottom line: “The Corps had not been able to substantiate its decision to publish” only an Environmental Assessment and not an Environmental Impact Statement.
Bernie Sanders: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and millions of others who fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline showed us the power of standing together against injustice. We can create a future where a clean environment and indigenous rights matter more than Big Oil’s profits.
Energy Transfer last year proposed increasing the pipeline's capacity to as much as 1.1 million barrels to meet growing demand for oil from North Dakota, without the need for additional pipelines or rail shipments.
Before the coronavirus pandemic devastated the U.S. oil industry, daily oil production in North Dakota - the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas - was at a near-record 1.45 million barrels daily. The state's output slipped to below 1 million barrels daily in May amid low energy prices and sparse demand.
Permits for the project were originally rejected by the Obama administration, and the Army Corps of Engineers prepared to conduct a full environmental review. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the Corps scrapped the review and granted permits, concluding that running the pipeline under the Missouri River posed no significant environmental issues.
The Corps said that opinion was validated after an additional year of review, as ordered by Boasberg in 2017.
Boasberg had ruled then that the Corps "largely complied" with environmental law when permitting the pipeline but ordered more review because he said the agency did not adequately consider how an oil spill under the Missouri River might affect the Standing Rock Sioux's fishing and hunting rights, or whether it might disproportionately affect the tribal community.
“Yet, given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease,” Boasberg’s ruling stated.
In a statement, the Indigenous Environmental Network is celebrating all the prayers and support the #NoDAPL movement has received over the years. While Boasberg’s opinion clearly states the flow of oil must stop, the organization is prepared to fight to see that through.
“The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes have shown the world that treaty rights and environmental justice are not token concepts without merit, but rather tangible arguments that inherently protect the sacredness of mother earth. We will continue to fight until DAPL is stopped completely,” the statement said.
The “Camden Model” Is Not a Model. It’s an Obstacle to Real Change.
In response to radical demands to defund and disband the police, liberal reformers are pushing the “Camden model.” Don’t fall for it. Camden relies on mass surveillance to pacify its population — all to benefit business interests.
Brendan McQuade JACOBIN
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/camden-model-not-model-its-obstacle-real-change
They’re doing it again.
In 2015, President Obama used Camden, New Jersey as a prop to announce the findings of the President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing, a package of procedural reforms to address the post-Ferguson crisis of police legitimacy. In 2012, Camden suffered the highest crime rate in the country and a murder rate 560 times higher than the national average. In 2013, the city disbanded its police force, launched the new Camden County Police Department, and embraced community policing. Violent crime dropped dramatically. As of 2018, it’s down 38 percent from 2013.
Scratch the surface of this feel-good story of crime reduction and community policing, and you’ll find a “surveillance city.” Camden is under constant monitoring: cameras, ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, automated license plate readers, a mobile observation tower. The much-praised police-citizen interactions that make up the work of “community policing” also double as moments of intelligence collection. It’s not just one-off interactions either. Police also develop relationships with neighborhood sentinels — “mothers with children, postal delivery workers, people who are engaged in local groups” — to gather intelligence. They organize residents to monitor their neighbors, report activity to police, and otherwise bolster police programs.
The data streams from these surveillance systems and the “human intelligence” from the “field contact cards” that officers fill out for every civilian encounter all flow back to Camden’s very own “fusion center,” the Real Time Tactical Operations Intelligence Center. There, analysts watch the city in real time and take direct control of a sequence of cameras in “virtual patrols.” Data-crunching algorithms target police deployments and direct analysts to focus on particular cameras.
In Camden, this “counterinsurgency surveillance” was inseparable from the imposition of austerity and the scandalous plunder that passed for urban renewal. Together, they formed a comprehensive pacification project, carried out to benefit business interests.
For exactly this reason, Camden has become the liberal establishment’s answer to the radical demands erupting from the country’s tear gas–choked streets. Ever since the Minneapolis City Council announced they’re disbanding the police department and shifting to community-based strategies, Camden is all over the media. Leading organizations on the ground in Minneapolis like Black Visions, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150 have explicitly rejected the Camden model — and for good reason. The current Camden fetish is an attempt to avoid any real reckoning with the failures of police and capital. It’s an attempt to recalibrate state violence in the guise of progressive reform. Camden is not a model. It’s an obstacle to real change.
The current focus on the Camden model also carries greater historical significance because it represents something much larger than the failures of liberal reform in the face of popular rebellion. Camden is a glimpse of a nightmare future of mass supervision — the next potential mutation of the various “peculiar institutions” of racial control and class domination that have shaped capitalism in the United States.
Slavery, the first and most brutal, was integral to the formation of the capitalist system. Karl Marx called it the “pedestal” upon which “the veiled slavery of wage-earners” rested. W. E. B. Du Bois described it as “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.” It took waves of slave revolts, a civil war, and a general strike of black workers to end slavery in the United States. The Jim Crow order that eventually emerged from the wreckage — following the counterrevolutionary destruction of Reconstruction — combined formal apartheid with vigilante and police terror. Black workers were prevented from entering high-paying industries and locked into what James Boggs called the “scavenger role,” creating a hyper-exploitable pool of “common labor” that formed “a ceiling for blacks and a floor for whites.”
Decades of civil rights organizing in the United States — overlapping and interacting with anticolonial struggles the world over — climaxed in 1968, with a generalized global revolt. Systems of formal racial domination collapsed. While integration (and decolonization) yielded “black faces in high places,” it failed to undo persistent racial inequalities. Instead, the United States became a global leader in imprisonment, caging the disproportionately (though not exclusively) black and brown surplus workers no longer needed in a lean “information economy.” Though distinct forms of domination and violence, all three of these indelibly shaped the various permutations of American capitalism.
Today, we find ourselves in another singular moment of struggle and change. After decades of organizing against mass incarceration and police violence and years of escalating struggle from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America and beyond, the United States, beset by a global pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is in revolt. And this revolt, like the earlier struggles that helped bring down the “peculiar institutions” of their times, is abolitionist. They are struggles for the collective freedom to flourish — not just campaigns to end injustices.
Abolition predated and is intertwined with the struggle for socialism because abolition always raises socialist questions: How will we care for each other? How we will share labor to meet our shared needs? Abolition is not a thing that can be won if we use the proper strategies. It is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. Abolition — and socialism for that matter — are horizons of struggle. To paraphrase the famous line from Marx, we make our own history, but not as we please; we struggle to change existing circumstances, given and transmitted from the past, and create new ones. In this moment, as with earlier turning points, we have before us exhilarating possibilities to build a new world and real potential for crushing defeat and reversals.
Elites are looking to Camden for a history they can mobilize to quell this radical upsurge, a blueprint for “reform,” a lesson in changing everything so it may all stay the same.
They’re doing it again.
Why Camden?
Mass supervision is most visible in Camden because the city suffers certain contradictions in an exaggerated form. Camden never recovered from deindustrialization. In the mid-twentieth century, Camden was home to 365 different industries that employed 51,000 people. By the early 1980s, the city had lost nearly 32,000 jobs, including 28,700 in manufacturing. The population collapsed, dropping 40 percent from its 1950 peak of 125,000. By the 2010 census, this beleaguered city of 77,000 was 48 percent black and 47 percent Hispanic. Over a third of residents lived below the poverty line. If one of the characteristics of the financialized global economy is the mass expulsion of once-included workers from the formal economy and social order more generally, then Camden is ahead of the curve.
Camden is ahead of the curve in other ways, too. Mass incarceration has been unraveling since at least the Great Recession. Nationwide, state and federal prison populations are down 9 percent, from some 1.61 million in 2010 to 1.46 million in 2018. New Jersey is one of the leaders of decarceration: the state prison population has dropped by over a third since its 1999 peak. The growing fiscal costs of mass incarceration, especially after the 2008 crash, and changing drug laws are two of the principal reasons.
Camden sits at the intersection of the fiscal crisis of the state on the one hand, and the violence of the drug economy and the policing of it on the other. For decades, the city has relied on state aid to maintain basic services in the face of long-term economic decline and a dwindling tax base. For just as long, the drug trade has filled the economic vacuum. The drug trade in Camden is estimated at $250 million. According to the state troopers and intelligence analysts I interviewed at the New Jersey State Police’s intelligence center, the city has some of the purest heroin in the Northeast and is the “starting point, or one of the starting points, for the heroin trade.” It’s hard to get a decent job in Camden but, according to police and intelligence analysts, a drug set can make easily $20,000 in a day.
Under these conditions, it is easy to appreciate why Camden is a harbinger for a new peculiar institution: mass supervision. Ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing now manage a surplus population that is too costly to cage. But it’s not just these acute social problems that have transformed Camden into an open-air prison. It’s the political situation that produced them. A poor, almost exclusively black and brown, high-crime city is an easy target for victimization and vilification. And that’s exactly what happened.
The Pacification of Camden
Over several years, the New Jersey state government imposed a new social order on Camden. It happened through a corrupt series of devil’s bargains and backroom deals between New Jersey governor Chris Christie (2010–18), South Jersey political boss George Norcross III, Camden mayor Dana Redd (2010–18), and police chief Scott Thompson. The specifics are scandalous but the structural effect is more important than the dirty details of its execution. Camden was pacified. These elites and their corporate allies mobilized the whole government in a proactive, organized, and systematic police war to fabricate a social order conducive to capital accumulation.
The stage was set by crushing austerity. Almost as soon as he became governor, Christie declared that “the taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going to pay anymore for Camden’s excesses” and slashed $445 million in aid. Christie, Norcross, and Redd worked together to bring economic shock therapy to Camden. They cooperated to delay the long-promised construction of a new school in Lanning, at the site of a decaying nineteenth-century building. Eventually, they developed a plan to build five new charter schools in Camden that will all carry the Norcross name.
In addition to pushing for school privatization, Christie, Norcross, and Redd also worked to bring new investment into the city, doling out $1.6 billion tax breaks. An investigation by WNYC and ProPublica found that “at least $1.1 billion went to Norcross’s own insurance brokerage, his business partnerships and charitable affiliations, and clients of the law and lobbying firms of his brother Philip.”
This plundering of the public coffers took place in a larger context shaped by a terrible spike in violence and the reformation of the police department. After Christie imposed austerity in 2010, Camden laid off 168 of its 368 police officers. The remaining cops responded with sickouts. At times just a dozen officers patrolled the city. Crime surged. By 2012, Camden had the highest murder rate in the country.
But even as Camden bled, the city spent $77,000 on overtime to provide security at the Susquehanna Bank Center, a concert venue and one of the main anchors of the small middle-class enclave between Rutgers-Camden and the waterfront. Scott Thomson, the much–celebrated chief of both the disbanded Camden Police and the reformed Camden County Police, made this “deployment decision” to provide security for large capital investment and those who came to Camden as consumers. Activists and community leaders I interviewed in 2016 suspected these events were intentional acts to trigger a crime spike, grab headlines, and create the conditions to impose further changes in the city.
Regardless of these alleged machinations, the changes came. In May 2013, the city disbanded the municipal police and replaced them with the reformed Camden County Police. Everything about the move was an affront to democracy. Camden residents petitioned to have a ballot initiative to stop the dissolution of the police department, but Mayor Redd successfully sued to block her own constituents from voting on the decision. Even though the new department carries the name Camden County, the force only has jurisdiction over the city — and the Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders, not the Camden City Council, has authority over it.
When the dust settled, the new Camden County Police was better funded and staffed by more officers, both younger and whiter, than the disbanded police department. They came out in force. Aggressive enforcement of minor infractions lurked beneath media-friendly optics of community policing. Use of force complaints skyrocketed. The situation reached its breaking point in the summer of 2014, after a series of police encounters inflamed the city, including the arrest of Xavier Ingraham, in which police broke Ingraham’s neck and left him paralyzed (predictably, the police contest the twenty-year-old’s account). Under pressure from the community and, especially, the local NAACP chapter, the Camden County Police instituted a now highly regarded de-escalation training program.
The situation settled. Excessive force complaints have nose-dived 95 percent since 2014. Crime dropped, too, and everyone — local media, national media, President Obama — attributed it to police practice, even though, as Rutgers-Camden professor Stephen Danley notes, the crime spike and decrease was mirrored in other New Jersey cities that also suffered through Christie’s austerity.
The economy also finally started to pick up. In October 2018, the unemployment rate had declined to 6.8 percent, the lowest since 1990 (although it did increase to 8 percent in subsequent months). The recovering job market has not translated, however, into rising living standards. As of July 2019, the Census Bureau estimates that 37 percent of the city still lives in poverty. But the continuing immiseration of Camden is beside the point for those controlling the city’s fate. From their perspective, the Camden model worked.
It worked for them personally. Police chief Scott Thompson, for example, rode his newfound celebrity to professional success and personal profit. From 2015 to 2019, he served as president of the Police Executive Research Forum, a powerful police professional association dedicated to “police professionalization.” In October 2019, he retired and became the executive director for global security for Holtec International, an energy company that counts George Norcross III among its board of directors and that, in 2014, received a $260 million tax break, the second-largest in the state’s history, to open a “Technology Center” in Camden.
The Camden model also worked for reasons beyond the transparent corruption of South Jersey’s venal elite. Camden is now thoroughly pacified and, as such, open for business. Violent crime, while still high by national standards, is in check. The city is stable enough to garner large capital investments. The community policing measures have won the police some legitimacy. Although the protests sweeping the nation have made their way to Camden, they have not been very large or disruptive. Instead, the police marched with protesters, leading local and international media to highlight Camden as proof that community policing can facilitate peaceful protest. No wonder that the Camden model is attracting so much attention.
No wonder that they’re doing it again.
Mass Supervision or Abolition?
The Camden model may well be the most dangerous idea circulating in liberal elite circles at the moment. Camden did not “abolish” or even “reimagine” policing. Camden reformed policing, which is to say it gave its cops more technology, training, and hires in the aftermath of a crisis. Minneapolis will likely do something similar, absent sustained popular pressure in support of a real alternative.
The Minneapolis case represents perhaps the first critical fight, but there are others and will be more. Decarceration will continue. The Trump administration’s law-and-order politics haven’t put a brake on the drop in state and federal prison populations. What’s more, the pandemic has made the epidemiological risks of incarceration plain, increasing the pace of decarceration and adoption of electronic monitoring or e-carceration. The pandemic is also opening up new opportunities for surveillance schemes in the name of public health, contact tracing, and potentially, a system of immunity passports. Add an unfolding depression and the austerity that is already straining fiscal budgets, and there is no going back. These developments will likely further accelerate the end of mass incarceration and hasten the recalibration of the administrative violence of state power around a new logic: mass supervision.
In this context, it does not seem alarmist to worry that the righteous calls to defund the police will be rolled into a larger set of austerity measures, that demands for structural change will be narrowed down to procedural reforms, that the Camden model will be generalized, and that mass supervision will become the fourth peculiar institution.
But there are also reasons for hope — and reasons to fight. The George Floyd rebellion is shaking the country to its core. The breakthrough of abolitionist thought is expanding our ideas of what’s possible — and doing so in ways that are aligned with the struggle to transcend capitalism. As Angela Davis recently declared, “abolitionist strategies are antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist, internationalist.” The challenge for us is to ensure that the horizons called forth by the rebellion and related demands to defund and disband the police aren’t overtaken by the Camden model and used to pacify us.
They may be doing it again, but there’s no guarantee it will work.
New ICE Guidelines Say International Students Must Leave the U.S. If Classes Go Online
“It’s going to cause enormous confusion and uncertainty,” Hartle said. “ICE is clearly creating an incentive for institutions to reopen, regardless of whether or not the circumstances of the pandemic warrant it.”
AP LOS ANGELES TIMES
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/new-ice-guidelines-say-international-students-must-leave-us-if-classes-go-online
International students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools offer classes entirely online this fall, under new guidelines issued Monday by federal immigration authorities.
The guidelines, issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, provide additional pressure for universities to reopen even amid growing concerns about the recent spread of COVID-19 among young adults. Colleges received the guidance the same day that some institutions, including Harvard University, announced that all instruction would be offered remotely.
President Trump has insisted that schools and colleges return to in-person instruction as soon as possible. Soon after the guidance was released, Trump repeated on Twitter that schools must reopen this fall, adding that Democrats wanted to keep schools closed “for political reasons, not for health reasons.”
“They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” Trump wrote.
Under the updated rules, international students must take at least some of their classes in person. New visas will not be issued to students at schools or programs that are entirely online. And even at colleges offering a mix of in-person and online courses this fall, international students will be barred from taking all their classes online.
It creates an urgent dilemma for thousands of international students who became stranded in the U.S. last spring after the coronavirus forced their schools to move online. Those attending schools that are staying online must “depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction,” according to the guidance.
The American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, said the guidelines are “horrifying” and will result in confusion as schools look for ways to reopen safely.
Of particular concern is a stipulation saying students won’t be exempt from the rules even if an outbreak forces their schools online during the fall term. It’s unclear what would happen if a student ended up in that scenario but faced travel restrictions from their home country, said Terry Hartle, the council’s senior vice president.
“It’s going to cause enormous confusion and uncertainty,” Hartle said. “ICE is clearly creating an incentive for institutions to reopen, regardless of whether or not the circumstances of the pandemic warrant it.”
The international education group NAFSA blasted the rules and said schools should be given the authority to make decisions that are right for their own campuses. It said the guidance “is harmful to international students and puts their health and well-being and that of the entire higher education community at risk.”
Nearly 400,000 foreigners received student visas in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, down more than 40% from four years earlier. School administrations partly blame visa processing delay.
Colleges across the U.S. were already expecting sharp decreases in international enrollment this fall, but losing all international students could be disastrous for some. Many depend on tuition revenue from international students, who typically pay higher tuition rates. Last year, universities in the U.S. attracted nearly 1.1 million students from abroad.
Trump’s critics were quick to attack the new guidelines. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said the “cruelty of this White House knows no bounds.”
“Foreign students are being threatened with a choice: risk your life going to class in-person or get deported,” Sanders said in a tweet. “We must stand up to Trump’s bigotry. We must keep all our students safe.”
Dozens of colleges have said they plan to offer at least some classes in person this fall, but some say it’s too risky. USC last week reversed course on a plan to bring students to campus, saying classes will be hosted primarily or exclusively online. Harvard on Monday said it will invite first-year students to live on campus, but classes will stay online.
Immigration authorities suspended certain requirements for international students early in the pandemic, but colleges were awaiting guidance on what would happen this fall. ICE notified schools of the changes Monday and said a formal rule would be forthcoming.
The announcement was the Trump administration’s latest pandemic-related strike against legal immigration. Last month, authorities extended a ban on new green cards to many people outside the United States and expanded the freeze to include many on temporary work permits, including at high-tech companies, multinational corporations and seasonal employers.
The administration has long sought deep cuts to legal immigration, but the goal was elusive before the coronavirus.
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