Europeans Have Far More Reproductive Freedom Than Americans

https://popularresistance.org/europeans-have-far-more-reproductive-freedom-than-americans/


In both access to abortion and a pro-family welfare state, Europe beats the US hands down.

Since the end of Roe v. Wade, numerous European political leaders have lamented the decision. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson labeled the Dobbs decision a “big step backwards,” and French President Emmanuel Macron said abortion “must be protected,” as his country prepared to place a nationwide right to abortion in its constitution.

In response, conservatives have cried hypocrisy, both to deflect criticism and to cast doubt on European institutions in general. “Many of the leaders who criticized the United States for the decision have laws that are either comparable to the Mississippi law at the center of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which outlawed abortion past the 15th week of pregnancy,” Charles Hilu writes at National Review. “Americans should be very skeptical of the opinions of leaders across the pond.”

But this is not true on multiple levels. Though there are some moderate restrictions on abortion access in most European countries (and strict ones in a few), in practice almost all of Europe had far greater access to all aspects of reproductive freedom than Americans did even before Roe was overturned, and vastly greater freedom now.

Let me start with abortion rights. As Politico Europe points out, every major European country except the U.K., Poland, and Finland allows abortion on demand for at least part of the pregnancy term, typically the first trimester, and the U.K. and Poland have wide latitude in their rules. (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, and San Marino have stricter rules, but they are tiny.)

As the Center for Reproductive Rights elaborates, there are some moderately burdensome requirements in some countries, like waiting periods in Eastern Europe or mandatory counseling in Germany. In countries like Italy, it can be hard to find a doctor willing to perform one. But none of these countries are anything like Mississippi, where a restrictive abortion law is combined with systematic legal harassment that had closed down every abortion clinic but one by 2004.

Moreover, outside of Poland, major European health care systems render these restrictions far less meaningful than they might sound. The overwhelming majority of people who want an abortion will get one as soon as possible, and thanks to the fact of universal health care in most European countries it is a relatively simple matter to get an appointment and arrange payment. Pregnancy is a difficult, dangerous, and often quite unpleasant experience, and doubly so if the pregnancy is unwanted; very few normal people will procrastinate about ending one if they can help it. Almost all abortions happen either very soon after becoming pregnant, or after learning of some terrible medical problem later in the term, in which case it is widely acceptable across Europe.

Unfortunately for Americans, our awesomely horrible health care system often means tremendous obstacles to even the simplest medical needs. About 9 percent of Americans are uninsured, and a further quarter are underinsured—and thanks to the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid will not cover abortions except in case of rape, incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger.

The theoretical expansive access provided by Roe did not actually translate into reality for many: In the 2014 Guttmacher Institute Abortion Patient Survey (the most recent one), 53 percent paid for theirs out of pocket. It also found half of abortion patients below the poverty line, and another quarter below twice the poverty line; it can take weeks or months for such a person to scrape up even a few hundred dollars if they can do it at all. And now, of course, outright bans are either enacted or coming soon in something like 26 states.

Second, the punishments for European abortion regulations are almost always far less punitive than ones written by American reactionaries (again, except in Poland). Criminal penalties of any kind are relatively rare, and nowhere is there anything like the deranged bounty hunter law Texas cooked up.

On the other hand, there is the positive aspect of reproductive freedom—that is, the freedom to choose to have children. For workers living on wages (that is, most people), having a child is a problem for three reasons. First, one’s childbearing years come early in life, when one’s income is typically at its lowest point. Second, one must take time off work to care for the child, especially when it is first born. Third, children cost tons of money to raise, which creates enormous inequality between families based on how many kids they have.

Hence the European welfare state for families, which addresses these problems through paid leave for new parents, a child benefit to help with expenses, public provision of child care, and public school. Though institutional details vary considerably across the continent, on these terms Europe is simply blowing America out of the water.

The Nordic countries set the highest bar; their systems are incomprehensibly generous by American standards. Norway, for instance, has one year of parental leave that can be split up in various ways, and both public day care facilities and subsidies for private options, a child allowance of about $170 per month for children under six and $107 per month for children six and over, and public school (along with several other smaller benefits).

The U.S., by contrast, has no national paid leave (one of only two countries on Earth without it) and no public child care. For a year, we had a jerry-rigged child allowance that all parents were theoretically eligible for (though incompetent design left out many of the poor), but Joe Manchin killed that, and today the poorest parents with little or no work income once again get nothing from the Child Tax Credit. We managed to sneak through public school, though not universal pre-K.

American reactionaries barely even pretend to care about the massive anti-family coercion created by our atrocious welfare state. A 2004 Guttmacher survey of abortion patients found fully 73 percent including an inability to afford another child among their reasons for terminating a pregnancy, yet the best movement gurus like Chris Rufo can come up with are addle-brained schemes to provide a pitiful three months of paid leave by pushing back parents’ retirement age. The belief expressed by eternally optimistic people like Ross Douthat or Peggy Noonan, that now will be the moment that conservatives combine their concern for the life of a fetus with support for parents who have to take care of the child after birth, is so ludicrous that it gets laughed at routinely in polite company.

In right-wing utopia, all Americans will find abortions difficult or impossible to obtain, even in cases of medical necessity, and then those new parents (the ones who survive giving birth, that is) will get very little government help raising the child they didn’t want. Almost no Europeans live like this and they are right to be proud of that fact.

Teens Work, Drive and Pay Taxes; They Should Be Able To Vote, Too

https://popularresistance.org/teens-work-drive-and-pay-taxes-they-should-be-able-to-vote-too/



Greater Civic Engagement Will Depend On Enfranchising Young Voters.
low • er • the • vot • ing • age

noun a campaign to enfranchise younger voters for U.S. elections

“Well, you didn’t vote for me.” — Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D- CALIF.) to a 16-year-old Sunrise Movement activist in 2019, who was asking her to support the Green New Deal.
Just how young are we talking?

The most popular proposal is to give everyone 16 and up the right to vote. In the United States, 16-year-olds are working full-time, paying taxes and driving, so why not voting? And most live with their families, which may be a better time for them to cast their first vote — rather than when they’re in the midst of major life transitions a few years later.

In countries like Scotland and Austria, where 16- and 17-year-olds can vote in some or all elections, the teens vote at higher rates than their slightly older cohorts — and research shows voters who begin earlier stick with the habit. Civically engaged teenagers at home might even boost the participation of parents and other family members.

Enfranchising more young people could also combat what writer Astra Taylor has termed the “gerontocracy”: a generational cohort making long-term policy they won’t be around to deal with. While the electorate is growing more diverse and progressive overall, the system is rigged against outcomes reflecting that reality.
Do teenagers really care about politics?

They probably should. Some of the biggest problems facing society — climate change, gun violence, student debt — weigh most heavily on the young. Meanwhile, half of Congress is over 60.
What would it take to lower the voting age?

We’ve done it before. After years of mass protests (and more than 2 million Americans drafted to Vietnam), the 26th Amendment reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, adding 11 million new voters for the 1972 election.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.) revived the issue in March 2019. A month prior, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D‑Calif.) had been curtly rebuking youth climate activists, a scene that went viral. Pressley’s plan continues to face bipartisan opposition.

There is more movement at the local level. Efforts have faltered in San Francisco and Boston, but several small cities have lowered the age to 16 for local elections, where the policy has been effective and popular. Takoma Park, Md., was the first, back in 2013; under-18 voters had a turnout rate four times higher than those over 18.
What if the teens make bad decisions?

Youth are at the forefront of some of the most dynamic movements of our time. If you’re still not convinced, consider a simple counter: Are adults really doing such a great job?

This Appalachian Town Uses Co-ops To Build New Communities

https://popularresistance.org/this-southern-appalachian-town-uses-co-ops-to-build-new-communities-around-old-industries/



Morganton, North Carolina – In the foothills of western North Carolina, the small town of Morganton is home to a growing co-op movement that’s reinvigorating the region’s once-struggling textile and furniture manufacturing industries, and refashioning them around egalitarianism and localism.

This expanding collective of frontline workers and artists is changing the way people there view industry and the nature of work.
From Sharing To Solidarity

The birthplace of bluegrass and home to the oldest mountain range east of the Mississippi River, Southern Appalachia is not only fertile soil for the sharing economy, but a co-op-driven movement known as the solidarity economy.

Aimed at generating locally rooted wealth and ensuring its equitable distribution, the solidarity economy is fiercely democratic.

For Sara Chester, co-executive director and founder of The Industrial Commons (TIC), a 501(c)3 organization that fosters employee ownership, in a solidarity economy “workers are appreciated not just for their labor but their ideas, insights, and innovations. Workers are not just a piece of the business, they are the reason the business exists.”

Sometimes referred to as the co-op model, this approach is about creating prosperous and resilient communities by emphasizing worker agency and ownership, environmental sustainability, and the value of place.

According to Tea Yang, manager of values and culture at TIC, co-ops offer a “system wide approach to ensuring everyone benefits” from a business, as compared to exploitative entrepreneurial models that tend to treat workers like expendable resources.

The power of the worker coop model can be found not only in its egalitarianism but its solution-making mechanism.


“Those closest to the process know the issues and solutions best,” Yang continues. “It’s a matter of giving them a voice, the opportunity for leadership development, and the organizational structure to enact change.”

In Morganton, TIC continues a long tradition of cooperative and solidarity movements in Southern Appalachia.

According to the “2021 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector” report, produced by the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, North Carolina is the eighth largest worker co-op state in the country, with more than 20 democratic or worker-owned workplaces.

Raised in Morganton, Chester believes the solidarity economy goes hand in hand with the region’s character and topography.


“I think there is something about Southern Appalachia and being in the mountains that have instilled a spirit in individuals and communities of a cooperative mentality,” she says.

With resources being scarce and communities often isolated, there is a long history in Southern Appalachia of individuals working together to achieve their goals.

She believes this ethos has been further nurtured by other newcomers bringing “a spirit of cooperation to our region,” including a large immigrant Guatemalan/Mayan community.
Reclaiming, Renewing, Rebuilding

Due to the region’s abundant timber, furniture manufacturing once thrived, but economic instability has plagued Southern Appalachia for decades. TIC is working deliberately to overcome that, Yang says, and capture the energy of the region’s “deep and rich history in textile and furniture craftsmanship and manufacturing.”

Once considered the furniture capital of the United States, North Carolina lost more than half of its furniture manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2009, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

In part, this is a result of large manufacturers moving business overseas, often where worker wages are considerably lower than domestically—alongside other less worker-centric policies.

TIC’s bold goal, to rebuild “a diverse working class based on locally rooted wealth,” is a common refrain among team members.


What makes [Southern Appalachia] prime grounds for co-op and circular economic development is that we’re not trying to replace these existing industries, but revitalizing them by doing the work in a way that benefits everyone and the environment — not just a few people. — Tea Yang, manager of values and culture at TIC

Aware of the region’s strong cooperative spirit, Chester, TIC co-founder, saw an opportunity to enhance what was happening and wanted to ensure that local economic growth wasn’t being concentrated, but rather “shared by everyone in our community.”

TIC grew out of Opportunity Threads, a worker-owned, cut-and-sew textile plant started by Molly Hemstreet in 2008. Hemstreet and Chester met in 2012, and shortly thereafter founded the Carolina Textile District, which eventually evolved into TIC in 2015.

TIC is an incubator for regional co-ops and service programs, including the Carolina Textile District, a member-governed collection of textile manufacturers in North and South Carolina; Material Return, which uses a circular economic model to transform textile waste into new products; and Good Books, a worker-owned, women-led, cooperative bookkeeping group for the many coops and businesses in the region.

Ashley Dula, a training and hospitality coordinator for the Carolina Textile District and head instructor of their youth sewing program, says her students start with repairing their own clothes, and later develop a “skill set for potential employment. The income provided by these skills gives students the opportunity to have an affordable lifestyle in the community versus working an odds-and-ends job.”

Among these more explicitly economic endeavors are arts and educational programs, such as TOSS, a collection of arts initiatives in Morganton, including writing, murals, and art classes for children, designed to foster TIC’s shared values of solidarity economics, racial justice, and environmental sustainability.

Hometown Walkabout (HW), a guided, educational tour of regional cultural landmarks, highlights the diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural history of the surrounding county, which may surprise participants who hold very different expectations for the demographic makeup of a small Southern Appalachian town. These include a statue celebrating local African-American blues artist Etta Baker and sites related to the “Maya of Morganton,” to name a couple.

HW tours facilitate challenging conversations around race and community. For instance, participants discuss the implications of a 20-by-30-foot Confederate flag that furls next to I-40 as visitors drive into Morganton, a protest by the Sons of Confederate Veterans against the movement by other Southern Appalachians who want to take down Confederate Statues and other related symbols—including a county monument in downtown Morganton.

The program connects participants with personal narratives and conversations about the diversity of the region, and has been designed and offered to specific cohorts in the region, including attendees from UNC Healthcare, Western Piedmont Community College, and the North Carolina School of Math and Science, a residential high school focused on STEM, which recently opened a new campus in Morganton.

Some models of change focus exclusively on economic development as a means of addressing poverty, but TIC asserts a more well-rounded and grassroots approach is needed.


”We know that providing a good job that pays a liveable wage is not the only solution to eradicating generational poverty, so we take a system-wide approach that includes bringing racial equity, diversity, and inclusion to the forefront of all of our work.” says Tea Yang. “So much of systemic racism is directly tied into economic mobility and stability.
Making A Better Place — For Everyone

When asked whether there has been much pushback from the wider community — businesses, government, or residents — Sara Chester says she has “never had anyone approach us as a critic.”

People are mostly just curious, she says, which is why TIC has prioritized keeping its doors open, and being as collaborative with the community as possible.

TIC has strong partnerships and collaborations with local, city, county, and state governments, Yang notes. This may be due, in part, to their nonpartisan focus on making material changes.


“No matter the political spectrum of our partnerships,” she says, “our interests are aligned in the shared desire to develop a vibrant and thriving economy and that is something everyone can get behind.”

Nonetheless, challenges remain.

For instance, North Carolina is a right-to-work state, where state laws make it difficult for workers to unionize or have greater leverage when negotiating with employers.

While this may not completely undermine the co-op model, Yang believes it is one of their “biggest challenges,” especially as TIC helps businesses transition into worker-owned enterprises.

However, she hopes that TIC’s vision will help people become more open and interested in the co-op model.


“We do not shy away from criticism or curiosity,” she says. “We invite anyone who is skeptical about our work to engage with us and learn more about the ‘why’ behind our mission.”

TIC’s work always comes back to strengthening relationships with members of the local community — giving everyone the means to stay in a place, liberated from the pains of poverty.


“I’m from here and hope to live here for the rest of my life,” Chester remarks. “Being committed to place allows you to go deep where you live and not be worried about moving on to the next professional step or location. We’re here and we want our community to be a better place — for our children and grandchildren and everyone else’s children and grandchildren.”

Industry Insiders Question Louisiana Regulators Over Cleanup

https://popularresistance.org/industry-insiders-question-louisiana-regulators-over-cleanup-on-exxonmobil-land-amid-corruption-claims-and-pollution-fears/


Amid Corruption Claims and Pollution Fears.

As billions in federal funds start flowing to state orphan well programs, a DeSmog investigation raises questions about whether oil-friendly states will put industry interests ahead of the environment.

If you had ventured down a dirt road running through remote marshland along the Gulf Coast in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, at just the right time back in late February, you might have come across a pit of gray muck. Down in that pit, you’d find a contractor welding a steel cap about the size of a dinner plate onto a stub of pipe jutting up from the mud below.

That pipe was the last visible sign of an old oil and gas wastewater well that once dropped over a half-mile deep into the earth, now plugged up and sealed by contractors hired by the state.

For decades, oil and gas companies disposed of millions of barrels of waste down that hole, ringed with cement and steel, dubbing the wastewater well Freshwater City SWD 01, according to state records.

Experts told DeSmog the well was defective and that using it put underground supplies of drinking water in the area at risk.

“It’s a mess,” said Cornell engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea, who reviewed public well records provided by DeSmog and found that Freshwater City was riddled with flaws.

That means the process of “abandoning” the old well creates new problems. “If they just do the usual plugging job, and now there’s a suspicion that this well was leaking over some period of time and contaminating the water supply,” he said, “you’ve lost the opportunity to do the diagnosis.”

Properly plugging and abandoning oil and gas wells is vital to protect the environment and stop methane leaks – but for decades, oil operators have often slipped away without paying to clean up, leaving millions of deteriorating abandoned wells across the U.S.

The abandonment of Freshwater City played out amid a firestorm of infighting and allegations of public corruption surrounding Louisiana’s orphan well plugging program, documents show. The tangle of fights between Louisiana officials over this one site offers a preview of battles that could be on the way across the U.S., potentially affecting the ultimate fate of millions of abandoned oil industry wells.
Ranking Louisiana’s Orphan Wells

Freshwater City has ties to some of the world’s biggest oil giants but wound up on Louisiana’s orphan well list, putting the burden on the state to fund its cleanup and attempt to recoup costs later.

The wastewater well sits on land that’s owned by ExxonMobil, was drilled by ConocoPhillips, and eventually wound up run by a tiny start-up called Black Elk Energy that specialized in wringing out the last dregs of oil from aging wells.

Black Elk went belly-up in 2015 after a deadly explosion on one of its offshore platforms — leaving a bankruptcy judge in Texas to decide how the company’s remaining assets should be split between workers and the families of those killed and those to whom Black Elk owed money, including contractors hired to plug and abandon its wells.

DNR currently lists over 4,600 orphan wells in Louisiana, including oil and gas producing wells and injection disposal wells where oil and gas industry waste is gotten rid of deep underground.

The environmental threat from orphan wells and the difficulty and expense of plugging varies radically across the U.S., and regulators in different drilling regions face different issues. Done right, plugging can stop climate-warming methane emissions and other environmental issues like water contamination. In some cases, plugging wells removes a costly obstacle to companies that want to exploit the surrounding land, like nearby oil and gas drillers, who may need the wells to be plugged first.

Regulators in Louisiana – like those all across the U.S. – lack enough funding to properly plug and abandon every orphan well. Even with the influx of federal funds, only a small fraction of the wells can be cleaned up, leaving a large number behind.

So how do state regulators decide which sites to choose first? It’s different in each state, but in Louisiana there is no strict ranking system that dictates the order wells should be plugged, as oversight commission meeting transcripts show. As part of its Oilfield Site Restoration (OSR) program, Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) scores each site, adding points for a variety of red flags, in an effort to identify which sites are particularly problematic or slated for “potential economic development.”

At a heated April meeting of this program’s oversight commission, Commissioner David Levy demanded to know why the Freshwater City disposal well was plugged before actively polluting oil and gas wells. Companies had already stopped pumping in more wastewater years ago – and if Freshwater City had leaked when it was in use, as experts feared, those leaks would have flown into aquifers deep underground where inspectors couldn’t see them.

Levy, owner of Petrotechnologies, a company that makes specialty parts for the oil and gas industry, charged that DNR didn’t follow its own standard operating procedures when it bumped Freshwater City up the list. DNR added points to Freshwater City’s score for a “missing or damaged” wellhead, Levy pointed out, even though the inspection report the score was based on indicated no wellhead damage and no leaks found at the surface.

“This is taxpayer money that was expended on a false document,” Levy, the most recent commissioner appointed, told the other oversight commissioners, pointing to over a half million dollars in costs for the project. “I’m astounded. I don’t know where — what to do with this.”

The final bill for Freshwater City isn’t yet in, DNR told DeSmog, but a spokesperson estimated costs might have reached up to $700,000. That would mean that the project cost nearly ten times the roughly $71,000 it cost DNR to restore an average orphan well from 2008 to 2019, state records show.

Some of the state’s highest scoring orphan wells have obvious methane leaks, have no wellhead left, or are close to habitat for endangered species.

Levy was puzzled to find lower-scoring wells were slated to be plugged before wells that were more dangerous to the environment and public when he reviewed DNR’s choices. Freshwater City jumped out at him, he said, because it consumes a large chunk of the fund’s annual budget and it is located on ExxonMobli’s land.

At the April oversight meeting, Levy asked if DNR had updated their standard operating procedures, a revision due in 2018. DNR said the agency likely had not, but would look into it.

DNR spokesperson Patrick Courreges told DeSmog that the agency’s decision to plug Freshwater City was based on damage to its storage tanks from Hurricane Laura in 2020 and not just the score at the heart of Levy’s objections. “If you look at our checkboxes, ‘migrating tanks’ is not on there,” he said about the decision to add points for a damaged wellhead. “So we think what our inspector did was just say, ‘okay, that’s part of the well set up, so I’m going to count it as that.’ We didn’t have a way to check a box and say okay, ‘tank batteries have left the building.’”

But Levy, who took aerial photos of the site, dismissed DNR’s claims that the storm damaged tanks represented a threat to the public. He told DeSmog that, like Cornell’s Ingraffea, he’d also become concerned that by plugging Freshwater City, state regulators had made it much more difficult and expensive to trace any possible past water contamination back to the companies responsible.

Registered drinking water wells nearby include both shallow wells and others reaching over 600 feet down, state data shows.

When asked if there was reason to be concerned the well could have caused water contamination below ground during the decades it was used to dispose oilfield waste, Ingraffea replied: “Absolutely.”

DNR, which permitted the injection well back in 1972, oversaw its use for decades, and ultimately arranged for its plugging and abandonment, told DeSmog it believes water contamination was unlikely. “Our folks aren’t seeing a good pathway for injection fluids to have gotten out,” Courreges told DeSmog.

“If you tried to get us to permit a well in that configuration today, we would not permit it,” he said, saying the well had been grandfathered in by DNR during the early 1980s. He said the agency was looking into allegations that DNR should have caught problems at Freshwater City in the 1990s, when the well underwent another review to see if it met federal standards. He agreed that Freshwater City had some problems but disputed others, saying that it “would probably pass” those federal standards, in DNR’s view.

Courreges confirmed DNR does not test for groundwater contamination when injection wells are plugged. “Unfortunately, we’re not set up to do that,” he said, noting that testing adds costs. “That probably would be one for the landowner to try and take up with the operators up the chain, if they can.”

“Nobody’s complained to us,” about their drinking water, Courreges noted. “That’s not the same as saying that it’s not possible.”

ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips did not respond to questions from DeSmog, including when asked if the companies were aware of any groundwater pollution related to Freshwater City.
A Trip To Freshwater City

As with so many oil industry orphans, the story of Freshwater City runs from riches to rags, a Horatio Alger tale spun in reverse.

About a century ago, famed businessman E.A. McIlhenny, whose family made its fortunes producing Tabasco Sauce, bought up a 150,000-acre swath of swampland in Vermilion Parish along the coast of southern Louisiana.

It was “all part of this grandiose vision that he had to set up a great hunting and fishing and recreational facility,” Judge William P. Edwards III, then-president of Vermilion Corp., one of a host of corporations that eventually grew out of McIlhenny’s plans, explained to historians, “a place for northerners to come down and sort of snowbird.”

Enticed by the discovery of oil and gas in the region, Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) bought up Vermillion Corp.’s land in 1958, then leased the surface rights back to Vermilion.

Some of Humble Oil’s executives seem to have found their way to living out McIlhenny’s dream themselves. In 1958, Humble wound up being offered ten memberships in the private club that leased the property’s best hunting grounds, Judge Edwards said, adding that Humble divided those memberships among the oil company’s executives.

For decades, a blend of crude and water flowed from offshore oil wells to Freshwater City, drilled in 1975 by ConocoPhillips right where Exxon’s land met the Gulf of Mexico. A web of subleases fed Vermilion Corp. and Exxon income, legal filings show.

Those companies reported injecting at least 3.6 million barrels of wastewater piped to shore from a half-dozen Gulf oil and gas platforms into Freshwater City from 1982 to 2008 (records from earlier years were unavailable).

Black Elk purchased Freshwater City an oil company called W&T Offshore in late 2009, as part of a larger deal. But trouble lay ahead for the Houston-based start-up, founded just two years earlier.

Fueled by a New York-based hedge fund, Black Elk had embarked on a buying spree in the Gulf — and not just for oil assets. Black Elk bought up aging oil wells – and also boats, helicopters, and even a cigar room for the firm’s offices, the company’s chief financial officer would later say under oath.

Then, in November 2012, a deadly explosion rocked Black Elk’s West Delta 32 platform off Louisiana’s coast, an incident that would ultimately lead to Black Elk being convicted of eight felonies and a misdemeanor. Two of the hedge fund’s executives were later convicted of securities fraud related to Black Elk.

By 2015, Black Elk was bankrupt, brought down by creditors who dragged the company into bankruptcy court with an involuntary chapter 7 petition.

Freshwater City had fallen into disuse long before Black Elk’s bankruptcy – in fact, largely before the start-up even arrived on the scene.

By the time Black Elk collapsed, Freshwater City had seen little use for at least seven years. The well sat unused in 2006 and 2007 — “shut in due to Hurricane Rita,” records show — then was used to inject less than 5,000 barrels of wastewater shortly before the sale to Black Elk in 2009. No other volumes were reported after Black Elk took over.

Environmental groups have long criticized Louisiana regulators for allowing the oil and gas industry’s wells to linger unused and unplugged for years (unlike other states that require companies to plug and abandon wells after they’ve fallen out of use for a set period of time).

“Each storm brings more wells from ‘shut-in’ into the orphan category,” Scott Eustis, Louisiana organizer for environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf, wrote in a March letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior, noting that 26,000 inactive oil and gas wells dot Louisiana. “These wells are ill-maintained, and we have found that coastal wells in this category are the majority of wells that leak oil and gas in storms, such as Hurricane Ida.”

After Black Elk’s bankruptcy, state inspectors who visited would find the Freshwater City disposal well site overgrown with vegetation, its massive storage tanks increasingly unsound.

Finally, in 2020, Hurricane Laura tore through Vermilion Parish, breaking Freshwater City’s storage tanks from their moorings and scattering them in the surrounding swamp. One roughly 25,000-barrel tank landed nearly a mile away. A 500-barrel tank traveled twice as far.

Not long after, Freshwater City landed on the state’s list of orphans to plug.
States Gear Up For Billions In Federal Orphan Well Funding

By the time a well is abandoned, complications may have layered on for decades — and meanwhile, any revenue generated by the well has dwindled away. But since the dawn of the oil era, the nation’s patchwork of rules governing plugging and abandonment has left important and expensive decisions until the very end of most wells’ lifespans.

The result? At least 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the U.S. have never been properly plugged, a 2020 Reuters investigation reported, a number that doesn’t include the wastewater wells used by the oil and gas industry like Freshwater City. Gaping loopholes make it possible for companies to slip away, leaving the mess of millions of these inactive wells.

A 2021 McGill University study estimated that one-tenth of the U.S. emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, comes from abandoned oil and gas wells, accelerating the alteration of Earth’s climate already underway. Unplugged oil and gas wells have contaminated groundwater and been responsible for deadly home explosions. And then, in Texas, there’s a sixty-acre stew of corrosive brines, dubbed Lake Boehmer by locals, from which deadly hydrogen sulfide gas wafts. The toxic lake is fed by wells the oil industry drilled decades ago — but never properly plugged.

Billions in taxpayer funds are now being aimed at cleaning up those wells — a move President Biden says will combat the climate crisis and create jobs while tackling “super-polluting” methane emissions.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed this past November set aside $4.7 billion in federal funding to plug orphan wells, which are abandoned wells without links to any solvent company that is both liable and available. Those billions are just a drop in the bucket compared to the $280 billion that watchdog group Carbon Tracker estimates it will eventually cost to plug those wells.

Federal regulators immediately reported “overwhelming interest” in orphan well funding from states.

But industry insiders like Levy, who also consider themselves stewards of the environment, and fiscal watchdogs warn that without tighter rules, billions in public funds that lawmakers said would help fight climate-altering methane leaks from orphan wells will be dished out to the same regulatory agencies that oversaw the rise in orphan wells. If those funds are misspent, they warn, they could even wind up promoting more fossil fuel production and undermining climate goals.

“We should have a new federal agency that actually does this work. An Abandoned Well Administration would directly employ people, would have the actual equipment, so we’re not renting from Halliburton during record oil prices,” said Megan Milliken Biven, former U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management staffer and founder of the energy transition nonprofit True Transition. She added that she has drafted model federal legislation to do the job.

“In the U.S., oil and gas regulation is delegated to the states, where lax rules have conspired to swell the nation’s inventory of discarded and orphaned oil and gas wells,” Biven and two co-authors wrote in a June 15 American Prospect op-ed.

“The states should not be doing this because the states are co-creating the issue,” she told DeSmog, explaining that the ground rules states set over the years wound up allowing drillers to avoid liability. “We would not have orphan wells if state regulators did not create them. They are orphan [well] creators.”

Louisiana DNR is expected to receive roughly $48 million in the first phase of the federal funding, which was billed as addressing climate pollution. The state’s inspectors do not currently own methane meters for field use during orphan well visits, Courreges confirmed on a call.

“It is beyond me why that is not taking place,” Commissioner Levy said at the most recent commission meeting in late April. “They’re like $120 off of Amazon.”

This gap leaves the field inspectors who are examining abandoned wells to rely on little more than listening for the sound of hissing gas to detect leaks of colorless and odorless methane.

“You may see us moving to that,” Courreges said about the state possibly investing in methane detectors. “I think a lot of regulatory agencies — and we’re one of them — are dealing with a shift in the way we approach dealing with methane.”

Courreges added that DNR had begun looking into collaborating with local universities to help develop techniques to identify high risk orphan wells, explaining that effort could help the state figure out which wells to plug first and to demonstrate that DNR’s work reduces methane emissions.
Claims Of “Corruption Within The Government Agency”

Levy isn’t the first oversight commissioner to raise concerns about how Louisiana spends its orphan well funds in recent years, documents obtained via open records requests show.

“I recently began to observe what appeared to me, and in my opinion, [was] corruption within the government agency I was trusted to serve,” then-Commissioner John Connolly wrote in a March 31, 2021 email to Mark Cooper, chief of staff for Governor John Bel Edwards, who had appointed Connolly. The email asked the governor to accept Connolly’s resignation.

Just one day earlier, documents show Connolly and other Oilfield Site Restoration Commission members had been informed by a DNR representative that the state was “seeking opportunities presented by the federal legislation” to fund orphan well plugging and abandonment.

Shortly after Connolly’s resignation, in May 2021, DNR opened bidding for the Freshwater City project.

DNR confirmed that no formal investigation into Connolly’s allegations was ever launched by the department. A legislative auditor did ask a few questions, he noted, but DNR didn’t hear more about it afterwards. “As far as we could tell, we couldn’t see anything founded by it and he didn’t get into any specifics, he just said there’s corruption, he just said that ‘you’re not doing it right,’” Courreges said.

“He didn’t agree with the way the program was carried out,” the DNR spokesperson continued, “and seemed to view anything that was done in a way that he didn’t agree with to be corruption.”
Oversight Commissioner Told To Pay For State Records

Connolly’s resignation email had pointed to “recent” disputes over access to information and data he said he needed from DNR to fulfill his duties.

Courreges said that no other oversight commissioner asked for as many documents on the program’s spending as Connolly had.

Commissioner Connolly, DNR decided, would have to pay for copies or to come into DNR’s office and review them like any member of the public.

“If he had said, ‘okay, the board needs this,’ and got a majority of the board to vote, yes, we want the staff to turn that over, we’d turn it over to everybody,” Courreges said, “but if it’s just him asking, then by the law, we’re supposed to be charging so much a page – and he balked heavily at that.”

Connolly declined to comment, including on the reasons for his resignation from the oversight commission, when contacted by DeSmog.

Levy, who took Connolly’s seat on the oversight commission, has raised much more public concerns about DNR’s choices by airing those concerns in a public forum.

“It’s like, when I ask, ‘why did you say that the wellhead was damaged and this picture shows this wellhead, there’s nothing wrong with it,” he told DeSmog. “And they just start talking nonsense.”
DNR Takes Lead On Federal Funds

When it comes to the new influx of federal funding to clean up orphan wells, DNR plans to leave the state oversight commission on the sidelines, Courreges said.

“The OSR commission is not going to have a role in the federal dollars. That’s going straight through, being managed through the office of the secretary” of DNR, Courreges said.

The commission will continue to oversee the state’s orphan well fund, Courreges said, explaining that the agency’s program staff will handle much of the legwork created by the influx of federal funds.

“The oversight is basically, ultimately going to be the federal government.”

The ten-member oversight commission, by state law, includes four members nominated by industry groups and one by a landowners association (plus two from DNR, two nominated by environmental groups, and one at-large member). This setup positions commissioners to oversee spending that might benefit the corporations that employ them. “I work for Apache Corporation,” Commissioner Tim Allen said during an OSR commission meeting in January, referring to a Houston, Texas-based oil and gas company. “We have a plethora of these types of wells on our property, and I’m anxious to work with everybody and let’s make this problem go away for the state of Louisiana.”

In May, Louisiana enacted a state law designed to position the DNR to capture an estimated $200 million in federal orphan well grants — by giving DNR more discretion and allowing it to spend more on plugging low-priority wells.

Separately, DNR also recently asked federal regulators to give the state more authority over permitting new injection wells in the future – giving the state power over so-called “Class VI” injection wells, used for carbon capture. But critics say the feds should be providing more oversight of state regulators, not less.

“Both Texas and Louisiana are applying,” for that new authority over carbon capture wells, Biven said. “And really both Texas and Louisiana are in a state of crisis with their injection wells.”

The Houston Chronicle editorial board penned an editorial this month opposing approval for Texas state regulators. “Might as well let the bank robber guard the vault,” they wrote.
Getting Off The Road To Freshwater City

Orphan well watchdogs have been urging the Interior Department to act now and adopt rules to get out in front of many of the issues on display in the Freshwater City controversy.

For example, federal programs should first test for existing leaks and casing problems and then plug the wells, Ingraffea, the Cornell engineering professor, told DeSmog.

That process, he suggested, can preserve vital evidence – and help regulators figure out which wells actively pose hazards and should jump to the front of the line. He called on federal regulators to adopt that plan in public comments on the new pot of cleanup money in March, he noted.

Guidance released by the Interior Department in April for the first round of funds encouraged states “as a best practice” to inspect for leaks and to “measure or estimate” water contamination before plugging wells – but fell far short of requiring states to do the sort of testing Ingraffea described. States should report on water contamination and other pollution, Interior wrote, but they will be allowed to rely on estimates rather than measurements.

The guidance also allows well plugging programs to rank orphan wells based on factors including “other land use priorities” – a phrase that opens the door to plugging old wells to make it easier and cheaper for oil companies to drill new ones nearby.

Maps of the Louisiana coast show the land surrounding Freshwater City is largely owned by oil and gas giants including ExxonMobil and is located near Henry Hub, Vermilion Parish’s famed pipeline hub, making the area potentially prime acreage for carbon capture projects that play a major role in the oil and gas industry’s favored response to the climate crisis.

Interior wrote that federal rules may be “further refined” after the first round of grants – meaning the debate over prioritization and pollution is hardly over.

Watchdogs have said it’s crucial for federal plugging and abandonment programs to start making oil and gas wells that are actively polluting a top priority.

Because plugging Freshwater City proved so expensive, DNR will be able to seek repayment from two of the oil companies that previously used the wastewater well, making Freshwater City an outlier in that respect. State law allows regulators to seek repayment from earlier operators – but only if costs exceed $250,000. (In general, the capped OSR fund is replenished with fees from oil producers, which bring in about $4 million a year.)

Courreges told DeSmog he didn’t have readily available figures for how often DNR ultimately recouped those costs.The problem too, environmental advocates say, is that it can take time to fight over who pays once things hit that point – and timing matters, particularly when it comes to climate-altering methane leaks and other pollution. They are calling for structural changes across the U.S. to make it harder for drillers to walk away from cleanups – including making drillers pay into trust funds to cover plugging up front. A recent Carbon Tracker report details ideas on how to prevent games of hot potato both on land and offshore.

Right now, the oil and gas industry is relatively flush with funds amid surging oil and gas prices. But the emerging energy transition — as well as the shale industry’s struggles with profitability over the past decade — suggests this won’t always be the case.

Environmental advocates remain deeply concerned about the possibility that funds meant to combat climate change could wind up being used to prepare old oil and gas sites for more drilling or fossil fuel infrastructure. If cleanup funds aren’t prioritized with climate in mind, they warn, the result could be that billions in spending winds up fueling today’s climate fires, rather than fighting them.

“They have all of the information in the priority systems,” Levy said, “but they don’t choose to pick them according to the priority system.”

“It’s a complete fraud on the Louisiana citizens that expect this operation to protect them,” he said.

Time Is Running Out For Julian Assange

 

https://popularresistance.org/time-running-out-for-julian-assange-as-tories-introduce-law-to-savage-our-human-rights/ 

 

As Tories introduce law to savage our human rights.

As reported by The Canary, on 17 June, home secretary Priti Patel gave her approval to a court ruling to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US. He will face 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. Assange’s lawyers are planning to appeal Patel’s approval of extradition and cross-appeal on other grounds – including a breach of client-lawyer confidentiality. But the High Court will have to approve those appeal requests. A judicial review of Patel’s decision is also possible.

In addition, Assange may appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). However, proposed UK legislation could make such an appeal problematic – and not just for Assange.

ECHR Rulings Easier To Override

A British Bill of Rights (BBR) has been introduced by UK justice secretary and deputy prime minister Dominic Raab and is currently at the second reading stage. The bill is bypassing measures for pre-legislative scrutiny, which will allow it to “avoid demands from parliamentary committees”.

If enacted, the BBR will replace the 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated rights defined by the European Convention on Human Rights (the ‘Convention’).

The ECHR is the judicial wing of the Council of Europe, which the UK joined in 1949 with Winston Churchill as a prime mover. Raab has made it clear that the UK will not leave the ECHR. However, the BBR as written would allow UK courts to more easily override rulings by the ECHR. Indeed, the BBR makes “explicit that the UK Supreme Court is the ultimate judicial arbiter”. In a press release, it emphasises “that the case law of the European Court of Human Rights does not always need to be followed by UK courts”.

ECHR Role Weakened

Alongside the BBR, a government memorandum specifically addresses future UK dealings with the ECHR. For example, it states there will be a change in approach as to the: “interpretation and application of Convention rights (clauses 3 – 8)”.

The memorandum also makes it clear that “the Supreme Court is the ultimate judicial authority on questions arising in domestic law in connection with the Convention rights”. And the bill adds that “the new clauses [in the bill] are intended to lead to a greater willingness by the domestic courts to decline to follow Strasbourg jurisprudence”.

The BBR further intends that human rights claimants will have to demonstrate they have “suffered a significant disadvantage” before permission is granted for their claim to be heard in court.

All in all, the clauses listed in the bill appear to weaken the role of the ECHR, while providing greater opportunities for parliament to intervene.

“Rights Removal Bill”

Law Society president I. Stephanie Boyce said that the proposed legislation “would make it harder for all of us to protect or enforce our rights”. She added:

Dismantling [the Human Rights Act] will have far-reaching consequences, conferring greater unfettered power not just on the government of today, but also on future ruling parties, whatever their ideology.If the new Bill of Rights becomes law, it would make it harder for all of us to protect or enforce our rights. The proposed changes make the state less accountable. This undermines a crucial element of the rule of law, preventing people from challenging illegitimate uses of power.

UK chief executive of Amnesty International Sacha Deshmukh commented:

Ignore the name of this new legislation. It is a rights removal bill, and it will leave us all the poorer.

Case Study: Julian Assange

Assange’s defence lawyer Jennifer Robinson said that he will cross-appeal in the UK courts on grounds of free speech, the inability to get a fair trial in the US, the political nature of the case, and the spying that took place on Assange and his legal team.

If necessary, she adds, he will also appeal to the ECHR:

Back in August 2020, Lawyers for Assange published an open letter that outlined the articles of the Convention and other bodies that the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder would arguably contravene.

For example, in regard to the breach of client-lawyer confidentiality, it stated:

Mr. Assange’s legal privilege, a right enshrined in Art. 8 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and long recognised under English common law, was grossly violated through constant and criminal video and audio surveillance at the Ecuadorian embassy carried out by the Spanish security firm, UC Global. …The surveillance resulted in all of Mr. Assange’s meetings and conversations being recorded, including those with his lawyers. The Council of Bar and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than a million European lawyers, has expressed its concerns that these illegal recordings may be used – openly or secretly – in proceedings against Mr. Assange in the event of successful extradition to the US. The Council states that if the information merely became known to the prosecutors, this would present an irremediable breach of Mr. Assange’s fundamental rights to a fair trial under Art. 6 of the ECHR and due process under the US Constitution.

In February 2020, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights issued a strongly-worded statement on the Assange case, concluding:

In view of both the press freedom implications and the serious concerns over the treatment Julian Assange would be subjected to in the United States, my assessment as Commissioner for Human Rights is that he should not be extradited.

But should an application to the ECHR be lodged after this act is passed, and the court rules in Assange’s favour, the BBR as currently worded, will enable UK courts to more easily ignore that ruling.

Dangerous Times

Rather than enhance our rights, the BBR will serve to diminish them. For example, UK courts will be better positioned to ignore ECHR rulings in relation to the offshore processing of refugees, which will no doubt please Johnson’s xenophobic constituency.

The BBR also comes at a time when other contentious bills are being examined. They include the National Security Bill, which seeks to jail journalists, and the Public Order Bill, which seeks to further criminalise protests.

These are dangerous times

 

 

 

 

 

How Maryland Is Preventing Prisoners From Getting College Degrees

https://popularresistance.org/how-maryland-is-preventing-prisoners-from-getting-college-degrees/




“Atiba” Demetrius Brown is taking correspondence courses while incarcerated in Maryland.

But because of a new decree by the Department of Public Safety & Correctional Services, he can’t take his exams.

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>

Education is one of the few rehabilitative options available to incarcerated people, yet all across America prisoners are prevented from pursuing their education. “Atiba” Demetrius Brown, for instance, has been dedicated to improving himself and his post-incarceration prospects by taking correspondence courses while incarcerated in Maryland, but thanks to a draconian new decree by the Department of Public Safety & Correctional Services (DPSCS), Atiba can’t take his exams. In this installment of Rattling the Bars, Victor Wallis joins Mansa Musa to discuss the case of “Atiba” Demetrius Brown and the calculated cruelty of the prison-industrial complex.

Victor Wallis is a professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has been involved in prisoner support activities since the 1970s in Indiana, and he is the author of numerous books, including Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on US Politics, which has been used in prison education projects.

To contact “Atiba” Demetrius Brown:

Demetrius Brown #401226
sid #2642892
MCTC
18800 Roxbury Rd.
Hagerstown, MD 21746
Transcript

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition Rattling The Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. And before we get started, let me update you all on Eddie Conway. Eddie Conway is doing great. He’s recovering at a remarkable speed, and we hope to have him back in the space in the near future.

When we think of education and the education of people, or the lack thereof, very rarely do we look at the impact that education would have on changing a person that’s in the criminal justice system. Or, more importantly, the impact that education will have on changing people that are incarcerated. This is not the case within the Maryland Department of Corrections.

We have a situation where a prisoner, Demitrius Brown, also known as Atiba, has taken initiative to acquire an AA degree. He has taken initiative to have the discipline to study. He’s taken initiative to put himself in a position financially to make sure that he can get the corresponding course. He’s done everything along these lines to better himself. But the Department of Corrections, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service has thrown a roadblock in his way, and is preventing him from not only obtaining an education that might lead to a better opportunity for punished release, but also in this policy that they’re putting into effect, will have collateral consequences. Here to talk with me today about this is Victor Wallis.

Victor has a political science degree from Berkeley College in Boston. He’s been active in working with prisoners’ issues since 1970. His book, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on US Politics, has been used to teach classes within prison. Welcome, Victor, to Rattling the Bars.

Victor Wallis: Thank you, man. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mansa Musa: Victor, let’s start out by giving our viewers and our listeners an overview of Demetrius Brown, also known as Atiba. Who is Atiba?

Victor Wallis: Atiba is a… It’s hard to describe him. I would say he’s a model of someone who is forming himself. He’s not only educating himself, but he has built a tremendous prestige, I think, a tremendous degree of respect. I would say one of the things that most impresses me about him is the accounts he’s given of situations where conflict has arisen and where he’s served as a kind of mediator or peacemaker.

But the other thing he does also, to a tremendous extent, is educate other prisoners while he’s educating himself. And he’s led study groups. It’s getting a little more difficult now. He finds the prisoners there now less motivated than when he started. But he’s very eager to, let’s say, help them educate themselves. Obviously with a political thrust, because it’s a recognition of the kind of injustices of the system as a whole, which are felt with particular strength in the prisons. But that’s a motivational factor, and he builds on that, and makes it possible for prisoners to begin to discuss among themselves what to do about this situation that they’re in. I don’t know what else… He’s from Baltimore.

Mansa Musa: Okay.

Victor Wallis: He’s been in prison for the last 10 years or so, since he was in his early 20s, I believe.

He’s highly motivated, when he comes out, to continue doing constructive work of some kind. I mean, in the sense of whether it’s counseling or political work, certainly. But he’s very dedicated, I would say, to improving himself.

Mansa Musa: And so let’s pick up on that. So all things considered, he’s one person that has taken initiative to better himself at the exclusion of anything that’s going on within the system. Let’s talk about his education. You spoke on the fact that he’s done a lot in terms of educating himself on different levels. Let’s talk about his formal education. Prior to coming to prison, what was his formal education?

Victor Wallis: He graduated from high school several years before he was arrested. That was the extent of his formal education, but in prison he’s done an enormous amount of reading. Like many prisoners, George Jackson was a tremendous inspiration. But he’s branched out from there in every direction, especially the history of socialist movements, of popular struggles of various kinds, the history of Black people’s liberation movements, and various topics. But stretching very widely, and I would say going into the philosophical aspects of things in depth, I would say.

Mansa Musa: And now based on this, he wanted to take a correspondence course. He went about taking this correspondence course. Walk us through what the course is and what type of degree he was trying to get, or was planning on getting.

Victor Wallis: Well, the correspondence course was possible through Adam’s State University, which is located in Colorado. He’s going towards an associate degree. He’s just starting it. And the two courses that he’s enrolled in right now, one is history of civilizations, and the other is called the sociological imagination.

Mansa Musa: And this correspondence course, is it funded by the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service? Do we have a Pell Grant for it?

Victor Wallis: No. The Correctional Services has nothing to do with funding. It’s private support.

Mansa Musa: So he’s got private support to get an AA degree, which is two years. How much time does he have left before he’s released to society?

Victor Wallis: I would say three or four years, approximately.

Mansa Musa: So his plan is to get a degree, or AA degree. Is the credits transferable, to your knowledge?

Victor Wallis: I presume so.

Mansa Musa: All right. So he is going to get a degree, a AA degree. Two to three years left on his sentence, get a AA degree, that has transferable credits that would allow him upon his release to be able to get a BA degree. Is that correct?

Victor Wallis: Well, it could count towards a BA degree.

Mansa Musa: It could count towards a BA degree. What is the problem with him obtaining this degree, or continuing this correspondence? What exactly is the problem?

Victor Wallis: The exact problem is that all of a sudden, in the middle of his first semester of study, the prison refused to provide proctors for him to take exams for his courses. And this is a service which they previously had done routinely, but without any advanced warning, they suddenly stopped the process. And they said that it was because of a decree in effect from the Department of Public Safety that prohibited the prisons from cooperating in any way with external correspondence courses.

It set him back tremendously. It was tremendously demoralizing, because here he was doing very well in his courses, and suddenly they’ve put this roadblock in his way. So fortunately at the present moment, Adams State may be able to accommodate him and allow him to complete the courses without having proctored exams. But the only reason that they’re doing that is that they are still operating under a regimen having to do with the COVID pandemic, which allowed for certain flexibility. But they said when that is ended, they’ll go back to insisting that the students take proctored exams. And the proctoring has to be provided by someone in the prison.

Mansa Musa: In that regard, the proctor examiner – And full disclosure, I was incarcerated for 48 years. I’m familiar with the institution, [was housed] at Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown. So I’m familiar with that system, and I’m familiar with the educational system. But in terms of offering the proctor, exactly what would that entail? What would that look like? Educate our listeners and viewers on what that actually would entail.

Victor Wallis: Proctoring just means that you have some person in an official capacity who’s sitting there while you’re taking the exam, making sure that you’re not looking at notes, and setting a time limit for you to answer the questions. That’s all it is.

Mansa Musa: And I’m familiar with that. And the reason why I was asking that is because I’ve been in the space, and this is really all the proctor does. The system that they had set up when I was incarcerated was you go to the school, they put you in the classroom, and the proctor sits there while you take the exam. When you finish taking the exam, you hand the exam in, and you leave. The time it takes for the proctor to do its job is the time it takes for the person that’s taking the exam to finish.

So if the person can finish in 40 minutes, the proctor takes the exam, and the person will leave. And in most cases I’ve known from experiences that, because correspondence courses are rare in the prison system because of the ability for a prison to finance it, you have very few people in that environment that would be a classroom size, where you might have 15-20 people, where you have to have a proctor in that regard.

But let’s dial down on why you think they’re doing this to Atiba? Because you outlined a lot of things that’s going on with his character in terms of him being an impactful individual within the prison environment, and being a person that’s there to educate and raise the prisoners’ consciousness about their environment, and try to get them to change their thinking. Why do you think they’re doing this to him in particular?

Victor Wallis: Well, they’re not doing it just to him. It’s a general ruling that applies to anyone. And there I see it as part of a general phenomenon that’s taking place all over the country of making things more and more difficult for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves in every way, especially in the form of disrupting their contacts with people in the outside world.

I’m in communication currently with a prisoner in Pennsylvania and one in Virginia. In both those states, in order to write to them, you have to write to an address in Florida, where they photocopy it and send it back. Now, I just heard from a prisoner in Missouri. I just got this letter today. He says the state of Missouri has started a new system where mail has to be sent to a digital scanning system after August 1. You’ll no longer get mail into the prison. It says all you can send in is books and literature.

It’s incredible what they’re doing. I’ve heard of other states… Well, in Indiana, they’ve [privated] greeting cards and other places like that. They’re doing everything they can to make it more punitive, more isolating for the prisoner to be in the system. They don’t recognize, or at least they don’t care that separating someone from society is itself punishment. But they have a kind of philosophy, it’s not in their official idea. Correction means you’re improving someone, supposedly. But their working philosophy is punishment, punishment, punishment, and more punishment. And this is one aspect of it.

Mansa Musa: And we recognize that the prison-industrial complex overall is the new plantation, and the prisoners are the chattel. This is a recognition that we see throughout the United States of America. 2.5 million people are incarcerated. Beyond that point, it’s over 10 million people that’s locked into the criminal justice system in the form of parole, probation, the county jail, detention center. So your observation is correct in regard to… And this being a concerted effort on the part of the establishment and the prison-industrial complex and these bloodsuckers in terms of minimizing or dehumanizing or relegating prisoners into a sense of hopelessness.

But in terms of Atiba, how has he responded to… I heard you say earlier that it brought on a sense of depression. But how is he doing thus far in regard to him maintaining his focus and continuing to educate himself and others around him?

Victor Wallis: Well, his immediate response in terms of the courses is that he’s writing to his instructors, requesting them to accommodate him and to allow him to complete the course without having to take proctored exams. And for the moment, that’s possible in terms of Adam State ruling, but it may not be possible after they lift the special rulings they had during COVID. So he’s doing that. But it was a terrible disruption and very demoralizing at first. And so he’s apprehensive. The moment the COVID rules get lifted, Adam State will once again insist on having their exams proctored. Which means, in addition to what I said about their being present in timing, that all the correspondence about the exams is through the proctor. In other words, the institution sends the exam to the proctor, and the proctor sends the exam back to the institution.

So there’s going to have to be that kind of collaboration. And again, this is not just for Atiba, but for everyone, for anyone who would be taking correspondence courses. As far as Atiba is concerned, he’s highly motivated, and he’s continuing to read and study on his own. But this was a big setback for him. He told me for the couple of weeks after it started, he wasn’t sleeping. He was so angry that they were doing this totally arbitrary interference with what he was trying to do to improve himself.

Mansa Musa: And it’s a recognition that the prison-industrial complex is primarily used for warehousing people, and that very few institutions in the United States of America… And rural, I know for a fact in particular has a lot of programs, often a lot of program services. So when someone takes the initiative to better themselves and have this impediment, it will be demoralizing. But I want to look at the collateral consequences of this decision. Because like you said, it affects everybody. Have you looked at it in terms of the overall impact it would have on the Department of Corrections in general or the Division of Correction in general?

Victor Wallis: Yeah. Well, of course the immediate thing in Maryland, what’s important is to put pressure on the Department of Public Safety to lift this ban. This is something that really is a responsibility for anyone who is concerned about the prisoners in Maryland. And in a wider sense, what this kind of practice reflects is a general increase in the repressive responses of those in power to anything in the nature of a threat that they perceive just in people preserving their humanity.

They would love to have the people in prison fighting each other in gangs, spaced out on drugs, and so on. What they don’t want is purposeful prisoners who are developing a consciousness and who can become effective organizers both in the prison and later when they get out. And the repressive measures that they’re taking are just horrendous. Of both this interference with the correspondence by having to send letters to another state, and then only sending the prisoner the photocopy, and then digitizing the incoming mail, and so on. And another thing… You mentioned some of the things with… Well, for example, in some jails, they don’t even allow direct visits anymore. You have to do it through video. It’s all also a money making opportunity for these outfits that provide these services.

But I was also saying that the repressive aspect is consistent with the wider phenomenon of repression that’s manifested in the voter suppression methods, preventing people from voting because you’re afraid that what they would vote for would be programs and people that would push the society in a more… Let’s say just direction, a more redistributive direction. And that would take power away from those with privilege. So the prison system is a part of this larger apparatus which controls and limits the capacity of citizens, of ordinary people, working people, to speak for themselves effectively in an organized way, and not just in the form of random protests or frustrated acts of despair.

Mansa Musa: Right. And [inaudible] educated prisoners or educated persons is dangerous. We know that slaves weren’t allowed to read, and the prison-industrial complex being the new plantation and prisoners being the new chattel, it seems consistent with the thinking of the establishment, the fascist government, that anyone educated, any person is more likely to resist the oppression and the dehumanization that capitalists are inflicting on people throughout the world. But Victor, you have the last word on this. What’s your last word on this?

Victor Wallis: Well, just picking up on that point of education, where education is dangerous to the ruling elite, to this ruling class, is when it takes the form of consciousness raising among the people who have suffered injustice, especially in the prison context, who can communicate with each other about it. In a way, the prison is an ideal learning environment because people are surrounded by demonstration or proof of the injustice of the society. And they’re thrown together with others who are experiencing the same thing at the same time, and they may even have time to engage in study. While it’s a terrible situation to be put into, there’s a way in which it can backfire on those who are doing it. And as people have said, prison can become a school of liberation.

And I always remember George Jackson’s statement that, it’s not an exact quote, but it’s roughly to the effect that prison will either break you or make you indestructible. Something along those lines. And that’s educating oneself within the prison context, in the light of all these conditions, is exactly what’s necessary and what’s important. But I think, more generally, education is a basic right, and people shouldn’t be prevented from pursuing it. And it’s not necessarily the case that every prisoner will educate himself or herself in a political direction, but it’s important that this be allowed. And this is part of the process of rehabilitation, of reentering society.

Mansa Musa: Talk about what can be done to support not only Atiba, but anyone that’s confronted with this situation.

Victor Wallis: I mean, I would say of course, on the one thing that they should contact the… I guess the Department of Public Safety, but whoever oversees the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, that this is an outrage. That should be made a public issue in itself.

But in the wider sense, it involves all the general things we talked about, that the changes that are needed in the society to… Since this is part of a national repressive trend, it can only be fought politically at the widest level. People have to get involved in revolutionary struggle of some kind or other, in whatever situation they find themselves in.

Mansa Musa: And there you have it, the real news about the prison-industrial complex’s continued oppression and repression of people. The new plantation, they are constantly inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on people throughout the United States.

Here we have another example of something as basic as education. They want to control that. Atiba might be an individual, but he’s the face of how repressive the prison-industrial complex is when it doesn’t allow a person to educate himself and spend his own money or solicited support to educate himself by taking a correspondence course. To block him from doing that, they block him from being able to take the exam and putting a hardship on not only him, but the institution that wants to support him.

There you have it, the real news about the repressive educational system policy in the Division of Corrections and Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service in Maryland. Thank you very much, Victor. We enjoyed this conversation. Can you send the information where people can contact Atiba if they want to correspond with him and interact with him?

Victor Wallis: Yes. I will send it to you and you can post it.

Mansa Musa: Yeah. Please, I’d appreciate that.

Victor Wallis: Thank you so much, Mansa. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Mansa Musa: Definitely. Thank you.

The UN Refugee Agency Is Exaggerating The Number Of Nicaraguan Refugees

https://popularresistance.org/the-un-refugee-agency-is-exaggerating-the-number-of-nicaraguan-refugees/



Managua, Nicaragua – Two years ago, COHA reported on the manufactured “refugee” crisis around Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica. Now the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is saying that “102,000 people fled Nicaragua and sought asylum in Costa Rica” in 2021. As this article shows, this statement is inaccurate, adding further to the myth that Nicaragua is suffering a refugee crisis.

On June 20, a group called “SOSNicaragua” which is based in Costa Rica, held a conference to mark World Refugee Day. Called “Breaking down walls, building hope,” it was addressed by the head of the Costa Rican government’s Refugee Unit, Esther Núñez. She confirmed that, since 2018, Costa Rica had received 175,055 applications for asylum, the majority from Nicaragua. However, the rest of her message must have been less welcome to the participants. Her unit had limited capacity to deal with these cases, she said, but in any case “a large proportion” of the people who apply for refugee status in Costa Rica do so “because they need to regulate their migratory status, but they do not really qualify for asylum” [my emphasis].
A closer look at asylum claims of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica

Núñez was repeating a point made by the then president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, when numbers of asylum claims first began to grow, after the violent, US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. He declared that more than 80% of recent asylum requests came from people who had been living in Costa Rica without documents before Nicaragua’s crisis. In the four years since this statement, Costa Rica has made a decision on just 7,803 asylum claims from Nicaraguans and has rejected 60% of them. Even getting an initial appointment to make a claim means a wait of two to three years, according to a Costa Rican NGO that assists refugees.

Yet the UN behaves as if all the asylum claims are not only justified but are made by people who have recently crossed the border, driven by political persecution in Nicaragua. On June 16, the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, warned that “sociopolitical, economic and human rights crises” in Nicaragua are forcing thousands to leave their homes, in a wave of migration that is growing in “unprecedented numbers.” Bachelet said that over the last eight months “the number of Nicaraguan refugees and asylum seekers in Costa Rica has doubled, reaching a total of 150,000 new applicants since 2018.″ She made no reference to the Costa Rican government’s assertions that most of these claims come from Nicaraguans already living there before 2018. Nor did she explain that claims have only “doubled” because significant numbers of them have reached the formal stages after sometimes waiting for years to be processed.
Costa Rica and Nicaragua are economically interdependent

As Jeff Abbott points out in The Progressive, “Nicaraguans have been migrating to Costa Rica for decades. The two countries are historically and geographically tied together, with seasonal migration filling important jobs within the Costa Rican economy.” He quotes the coordinator of Costa Rica’s Nicaraguan Links Association, describing the “economic interdependence between the two countries.” In fact, around 385,000 Nicaraguans are officially residents in Costa Rica, with perhaps another 200,000 there without official documents, totaling about 10% of the population. In a typical year, there are more than 900,000 official cross-border movements by Nicaraguans, with similar numbers leaving as there are entering the country: principally, migrant workers traveling back and forth, according to Costa Rica’s seasonal job opportunities (see table). Thousands more make unofficial crossings to avoid paying the border fees.

However, official cross-border movements fell by two-thirds in 2020, during the pandemic. Costa Rica was desperate to keep its Nicaraguan workers, with the then vice-president urging Nicaraguans to stay. But the country was hit hard by COVID-19, which badly affected its tourist trade: The Economist reported that government debt reached one of the highest levels in Latin America and, in return for loans to bail out the government, the IMF insisted on spending cuts. Poverty now affects nearly one-third of Costa Rican households. In 2021, over 5,000 more Nicaraguans left Costa Rica than entered it. Although traffic has increased in the first months of 2022, it is still less than half of pre-pandemic levels. Lack of job opportunities in Costa Rica, for Nicaraguans who have historically worked there, is one of the factors leading to more migration north to the United States.

Of course, Nicaragua was also affected by the pandemic, as well as the additional damage caused in November 2020 by two devastating hurricanes. Its economy grew by 10% in 2021, which returned it to pre-pandemic levels, but growth was still not sufficient for the country to recover from the harsh economic effects of the 2018 coup attempt. It is therefore not surprising that, while far fewer Nicaraguans are traveling to Costa Rica to work, a proportion of those already there are looking to regularize their immigration status by seeking asylum, as Esther Núñez pointed out.
Migrants are instead heading to the United States

The temporary breakdown of the historic economic ties between the two countries has almost certainly given extra impetus to Nicaraguan migration northwards, to the United States. Some 163,000 Nicaraguans have been encountered after crossing the U.S. border since January 2020, while before then numbers amounted to a few hundred each month. While (again) this increase is blamed (by the BBC, for example) on the “atmosphere of terror” in Nicaragua, the reality is more mundane.

As Tom Ricker points out, writing for the Quixote Center, while political instability may be a factor, it is certainly no more of a factor than it is for the larger migration flows from the “northern triangle” countries (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala). Post-COVID economic problems are also as great, perhaps greater, in the northern triangle. But there are factors unique to Nicaragua: reduced job opportunities in Costa Rica, the growing effect of U.S. sanctions, and the relatively more favorable treatment which Nicaraguans have received after crossing the U.S. border. Indeed, the BBC quotes the case of a Nicaraguan who declared himself to the U.S. border patrol, was detained for a few weeks and then released to await a court hearing on his case. Many new arrivals get travel permits to join relatives elsewhere in the U.S., and the government pays for bus and air transport. The perception that well-paying U.S. jobs are readily available to Nicaraguans has been created by advertising in social media and the activities of the “coyotes” who facilitate the journey north.
The UN Refugee Agency gets it wrong – again

However, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) appears to be blind to economic factors driving migration, and ever keener to claim that Nicaraguans are escaping political repression. In its recently issued report on Global Trends 2021, it picks out Nicaragua on a world map showing forced displacement, and a chart shows Nicaragua ranked #2 in the world for asylum applications last year, below Afghanistan but ahead of Syria (see chart).

Of the 111,600 claims attributed to Nicaraguans in 2021, almost all (102,000) are made in Costa Rica. However, the official Costa Rican figure for claims registered by Nicaraguans in 2021 is only slightly more than half of this, at 52,894. How does UNHCR arrive at the higher figure? Key to understanding the statistics is awareness of the extreme slowness with which Costa Rica deals with asylum applications. By the end of 2021, it had dealt with fewer than 7% of the 116,970 applications from Nicaraguans received over the previous four years. In addition to these formal claims, there are around 50,000 more applications at various stages before registration, many of them lodged before 2021. In correspondence with the UNHCR statistics office, they revealed that “In agreement with the Government of Costa Rica,” they added this backlog of what might be called “pre-applications” to the official tally of registered claims, to produce a total of 102,000. But the Global Trends report, far from making this clear, treats this number as relating to new claims in 2021 alone, and concludes that 102,000 Nicaraguans “fled” their country last year (see picture). The caption maintains: “In 2021 some 102,000 people fled Nicaragua and sought asylum in Costa Rica.”
Disinformation, used by opposition media

Why the UNHCR wants to portray Nicaraguans as being as much at risk as people fleeing Afghanistan and Syria is a question only they can answer. It is a convenient ploy for the Costa Rican government, since it receives UN financial assistance to respond to the plight of Nicaraguans. However, it also gives added momentum to the media message that Nicaraguans are fleeing persecution. Because the increase in Nicaraguan migration northwards is a focus of media attention, exaggerating the flows southwards to Costa Rica adds to the impression of a country in crisis. This adds fuel to the flames for Nicaragua’s opposition media, of course. For example, Confidencial, a web outlet much cited by international media, gives ever more exaggerated versions of the migration figures. It claimed in June that some 400,000 Nicaraguans had left the country since the beginning of 2020. Yet even adding together the encounters over that period at U.S. borders (163,000), with the accumulation of asylum applications in Costa Rica over the same period (93,000), only produces a total of 256,000. And as we have seen, this does not compare like-with-like.

The empirical evidence indicates that migration to Costa Rica has almost certainly fallen sharply, while there has been a matching increase in migration to the United States. Economic motives are likely to be predominant, although there are political factors too. However, it is far from an “exodus” and it is ridiculous to create a headline (as the BBC does) suggesting that most people would “rather die” than stay in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, and irresponsibly, the UN Refugee Agency is adding to the scare stories, rather than sticking to the facts.