7/25/2022

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, July 25, 2022

   


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The Rock, Bernal Hill, San Francisco


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpc40dmPlVM

 

Lyrics:

https://genius.com/Olivia-rodrigo-fuck-you-lyrics

Fuck You

With Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen

[Verse 1: Lily Allen]

Look inside, look inside your tiny mind

Then look a bit harder

'Cause we're so uninspired, so sick and tired

Of all the hatred you harbour

So you say it's not okay to be gay

Well, I think you're just evil

You're just some racist who can't tie my laces

Your point of view is medieval

 

[Chorus: Lily Allen]

Fuck you, fuck you very, very much

'Cause we hate what you do

And we hate your whole crew

So please, don't stay in touch

Fuck you, fuck you very, very much

'Cause your words don't translate

And it's getting quite late

So please, don't stay in touch

[Verse 2: Olivia Rodrigo, Lily Allen & Olivia Rodrigo]

Do you get, do you get a little kick out of being small minded?

You want to be like your father, it's approval you're after

Well, that's not how you find it

Do you, do you really enjoy living a life that's so hateful?

'Cause there's a hole where your soul should be

You're losing control of it

And it's really distasteful

 

[Chorus: Olivia Rodrigo, Lily Allen & Olivia Rodrigo]

Fuck you, fuck you very, very much

'Cause we hate what you do

And we hate your whole crew

So please, don't stay in touch

Fuck you, fuck you very, very much

'Cause your words don't translate

And it's getting quite late

So please, don't stay in touch

 

[Bridge: Crowd]

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you

Fuck you

 

[Verse 3: Lily Allen]

You say you think we need to go to war

Well, you're already in one

'Cause it's people like you that need to get slew

No one wants your opinion



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Doctors for Assange Statement

 

Doctors to UK: Assange Extradition

‘Medically & Ethically’ Wrong 


https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/12/doctors-to-uk-assange-extradition-medically-ethically-wrong/

 

Ahead of the U.K. Home Secretary’s decision on whether to extradite Julian Assange to the United States, a group of more than 300 doctors representing 35 countries have told Priti Patel that approving his extradition would be “medically and ethically unacceptable”.

 

In an open letter sent to the Home Secretary on Friday June 10, and copied to British Prime Minster Boris Johnson, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the doctors draw attention to the fact that Assange suffered a “mini stroke” in October 2021. They note:

 

“Predictably, Mr Assange’s health has since continued to deteriorate in your custody. In October 2021 Mr. Assange suffered a ‘mini-stroke’… This dramatic deterioration of Mr Assange’s health has not yet been considered in his extradition proceedings. The US assurances accepted by the High Court, therefore, which would form the basis of any extradition approval, are founded upon outdated medical information, rendering them obsolete.”

 

The doctors charge that any extradition under these circumstances would constitute negligence. They write:

 

“Under conditions in which the UK legal system has failed to take Mr Assange’s current health status into account, no valid decision regarding his extradition may be made, by yourself or anyone else. Should he come to harm in the US under these circumstances it is you, Home Secretary, who will be left holding the responsibility for that negligent outcome.”

 

In their letter the group reminds the Home Secretary that they first wrote to her on Friday 22 November 2019, expressing their serious concerns about Julian Assange’s deteriorating health.

 

Those concerns were subsequently borne out by the testimony of expert witnesses in court during Assange’s extradition proceedings, which led to the denial of his extradition by the original judge on health grounds. That decision was later overturned by a higher court, which referred the decision to Priti Patel in light of US assurances that Julian Assange would not be treated inhumanely.

 

The doctors write:

 

“The subsequent ‘assurances’ of the United States government, that Mr Assange would not be treated inhumanly, are worthless given their record of pursuit, persecution and plotted murder of Mr Assange in retaliation for his public interest journalism.”

 

They conclude:

 

“Home Secretary, in making your decision as to extradition, do not make yourself, your government, and your country complicit in the slow-motion execution of this award-winning journalist, arguably the foremost publisher of our time. Do not extradite Julian Assange; free him.”

 

Julian Assange remains in High Security Belmarsh Prison awaiting Priti Patel’s decision, which is due any day.

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/


If extradited to the United States, Julian Assange, father of two young British children, would face a sentence of 175 years in prison merely for receiving and publishing truthful information that revealed US war crimes.

UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled that "it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America".

Amnesty International states, “Were Julian Assange to be extradited or subjected to any other transfer to the USA, Britain would be in breach of its obligations under international law.”

Human Rights Watch says, “The only thing standing between an Assange prosecution and a major threat to global media freedom is Britain. It is urgent that it defend the principles at risk.”

The NUJ has stated that the “US charges against Assange pose a huge threat, one that could criminalise the critical work of investigative journalists & their ability to protect their sources”.

Julian will not survive extradition to the United States.

The UK is required under its international obligations to stop the extradition. Article 4 of the US-UK extradition treaty says: "Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense." 

The decision to either Free Assange or send him to his death is now squarely in the political domain. The UK must not send Julian to the country that conspired to murder him in London.

The United Kingdom can stop the extradition at any time. It must comply with Article 4 of the US-UK Extradition Treaty and Free Julian Assange.

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Dear friends, 

Recently I’ve started working with the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee. On March 17, Ruchell turned 83. He’s been imprisoned for 59 years, and now walks with a walker. He is no threat to society if released. Ruchell was in the Marin County Courthouse on August 7, 1970, the morning Jonathan Jackson took it over in an effort to free his older brother, the internationally known revolutionary prison writer, George Jackson. Ruchell joined Jonathan and was the only survivor of the shooting that ensued. He has been locked up ever since and denied parole 13 times. On March 19, the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee held a webinar for Ruchell for his 83rd birthday, which was a terrific event full of information and plans for building the campaign to Free Ruchell. (For information about his case, please visit: www.freeruchellmagee.org.)

Below are two ways to stream this historic webinar, plus 

• a petition you can sign

• a portal to send a letter to Governor Newsom

• a Donate button to support his campaign

• a link to our campaign website. 

Please take a moment and help. 

Note: We will soon have t-shirts to sell to raise money for legal expenses.

Here is the YouTube link to view the March 19 Webinar: 

https://youtu.be/4u5XJzhv9Hc

Here is the Facebook link:

 https://fb.watch/bTMr6PTuHS/

Sign the petition to Free Ruchell:

 https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/governor-newsom-free-82-year-old-prisoner-ruchell-magee-unjustly-incarcerated-for-58-years

Write to Governor Newsom’s office:

 https://actionnetwork.org/letters/free-82-year-old-prisoner-ruchell-magee-unjustly-incarcerated-for-58-years?source=direct_link

Donate: 

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=GVZG9CZ375PVG

Ruchell’s Website: 

www.freeruchellmagee.org

Thanks,

Charlie Hinton

ch.lifewish@gmail.com

No one ever hurt their eyes by looking on the bright side

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

U.S. Air Force veteran, Daniel Everette Hale has recently completed his first year of a 45-month prison sentence for exposing the realities of U.S drone warfare. Daniel Hale is not a spy, a threat to society, or a bad faith actor. His revelations were not a threat to national security. If they were, the prosecution would be able to identify the harm caused directly from the information Hale made public. Our members of Congress can urge President Biden to commute Daniel's sentence! Either way, Daniel deserves to be free.

 

https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=16979

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]



[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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Screenshot of Kevin Cooper's artwork from the teaser.

 

 “In His Defense” The People vs. Kevin Cooper

A film by Kenneth A. Carlson 

Teaser is now streaming at:

https://www.carlsonfilms.com

 

Posted by: Death Penalty Focus Blog, January 10, 2022

https://deathpenalty.org/teaser-for-a-kevin-cooper-documentary-is-now-streaming/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1c7299ab-018c-4780-9e9d-54cab2541fa0

 

“In his Defense,” a documentary on the Kevin Cooper case, is in the works right now, and California filmmaker Kenneth Carlson has released a teaser for it on CarlsonFilms.com

 

Just over seven months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation of Cooper’s death penalty case. At the time, he explained that, “In cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.”

 

That investigation is ongoing, with no word from any of the parties involved on its progress.

 

Cooper has been on death row since 1985 for the murder of four people in San Bernardino County in June 1983. Prosecutors said Cooper, who had escaped from a minimum-security prison and had been hiding out near the scene of the murder, killed Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes, a friend who was spending the night at the Ryen’s. The lone survivor of the attack, eight-year-old Josh Ryen, was severely injured but survived.

 

For over 36 years, Cooper has insisted he is innocent, and there are serious questions about evidence that was missing, tampered with, destroyed, possibly planted, or hidden from the defense. There were multiple murder weapons, raising questions about how one man could use all of them, killing four people and seriously wounding one, in the amount of time the coroner estimated the murders took place.

 

The teaser alone gives a good overview of the case, and helps explain why so many believe Cooper was wrongfully convicted.


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New Legal Filing in Mumia’s Case

By Johanna Fernández

The following statement was issued January 4, 2022, regarding new legal filings by attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”

With continued pressure from below, 2022 will be the year that forces the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and the Philly Police Department to answer questions about why they framed imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal’s attorneys have filed a Pennsylvania Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition focused entirely on the six boxes of case files that were found in a storage room of the DA’s office in late December 2018, after the case being heard before Judge Leon Tucker in the Court of Common Pleas concluded. (tinyurl.com/zkyva464)

The new evidence contained in the boxes is damning, and we need to expose it. It reveals a pattern of misconduct and abuse of authority by the prosecution, including bribery of the state’s two key witnesses, as well as racist exclusion in jury selection—a violation of the landmark Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky. The remedy for each or any of the claims in the petition is a new trial. The court may order a hearing on factual issues raised in the claims. If so, we won’t know for at least a month. 

The new evidence includes a handwritten letter penned by Robert Chobert, the prosecution’s star witness. In it, Chobert demands to be paid money promised him by then-Prosecutor Joseph McGill. Other evidence includes notes written by McGill, prominently tracking the race of potential jurors for the purposes of excluding Black people from the jury, and letters and memoranda which reveal that the DA’s office sought to monitor, direct, and intervene in the outstanding prostitution charges against its other key witness Cynthia White.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed and convicted 40 years ago in 1982, during one of the most corrupt and racist periods in Philadelphia’s history—the era of cop-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. It was a moment when the city’s police department, which worked intimately with the DA’s office, routinely engaged in homicidal violence against Black and Latinx detainees, corruption, bribery and tampering with evidence to obtain convictions. 

In 1979, under pressure from civil rights activists, the Department of Justice filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the Philadelphia police department and detailed a culture of racist violence, widespread corruption and intimidation that targeted outspoken people like Mumia. Despite concurrent investigations by the FBI and Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and dozens of police convictions, the power and influence of the country’s largest police association, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) prevailed. 

Now, more than 40 years later, we’re still living with the failure to uproot these abuses. Philadelphia continues to fear the powerful FOP, even though it endorses cruelty, racism, and multiple injustices. A culture of fear permeates the “city of brotherly love.”

The contents of these boxes shine light on decades of white supremacy and rampant lawlessness in U.S. courts and prisons. They also hold enormous promise for Mumia’s freedom and challenge us to choose Love, Not PHEAR. (lovenotphear.com/) Stay tuned.

Workers World, January 4, 2022

https://www.workers.org/2022/01/60925/


Pa. Supreme Court denies widow’s appeal to remove Philly DA from Abu-Jamal case

 

Abu Jamal was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder of Faulkner in 1982. Over the past four decades, five of his appeals have been quashed.

 

In 1989, the state’s highest court affirmed Abu-Jamal’s death penalty conviction, and in 2012, he was re-sentenced to life in prison.

 

Abu-Jamal, 66, remains in prison. He can appeal to the state Supreme Court, or he can file a new appeal.

 

KYW Newsradio reached out to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys for comment. They shared this statement in full:

 

“Today, the Superior Court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to consider issues raised by Mr. Abu-Jamal in prior appeals. Two years ago, the Court of Common Pleas ordered reconsideration of these appeals finding evidence of an appearance of judicial bias when the appeals were first decided. We are disappointed in the Superior Court’s decision and are considering our next steps.

 

“While this case was pending in the Superior Court, the Commonwealth revealed, for the first time, previously undisclosed evidence related to Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case. That evidence includes a letter indicating that the Commonwealth promised its principal witness against Mr. Abu-Jamal money in connection with his testimony. In today’s decision, the Superior Court made clear that it was not adjudicating the issues raised by this new evidence. This new evidence is critical to any fair determination of the issues raised in this case, and we look forward to presenting it in court.”

 

https://www.audacy.com/kywnewsradio/news/local/pennsylvania-superior-court-rejects-mumia-abu-jamal-appeal-ron-castille


Demand Mumia's Freedom:

Governor Tom Wolf -1(717) 787-2500  Fax 1 (717) 772-8284
Office of the Governor
508 Main Capitol Building
HarrisburgPA  17120    
 
After calling the governor, send an online communication about our concerns.   https://www.governor.pa.gov/contact/#PhoneNumber
 
Let us know what there response was, Thank you.  Mobilization4Mumia@gmail.com
 
ONA MOVE
 

 

Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org



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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Screen shot from video.



Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603


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Bury My Heart with Leonard Peltier

How long will he still be with us? How long will the genocide continue?

By Michael Moore

—VIA Email: michaelmoore@substack.com

























LEONARD PELTIER, Native American hero. An innocent man, he’s spent 44 years as a political prisoner. The prosecutor who put him behind bars now says Peltier is innocent. President Biden, go to Mass today, and then stop this torture. (Sipa/Shutterstock)


American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier, at 77 years of age, came down with Covid-19 this weekend. Upon hearing this, I broke down and cried. An innocent man, locked up behind bars for 44 years, Peltier is now America’s longest-held political prisoner. He suffers in prison tonight even though James Reynolds, one of the key federal prosecutors who sent Peltier off to life in prison in 1977, has written to President Biden and confessed to his role in the lies, deceit, racism and fake evidence that together resulted in locking up our country’s most well-known Native American civil rights leader. Just as South Africa imprisoned for more than 27 years its leading voice for freedom, Nelson Mandela, so too have we done the same to a leading voice and freedom fighter for the indigenous people of America. That’s not just me saying this. That’s Amnesty International saying it. They placed him on their political prisoner list years ago and continue to demand his release.

 

And it’s not just Amnesty leading the way. It’s the Pope who has demanded Leonard Peltier’s release. It’s the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and the President Pro-Tempore of the US Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy. Before their deaths, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu pleaded with the United States to free Leonard Peltier. A worldwide movement of millions have seen their demands fall on deaf ears. 

 

And now the calls for Peltier to be granted clemency in DC have grown on Capitol Hill. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), the head of the Senate committee who oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has also demanded Peltier be given his freedom. Numerous House Democrats have also written to Biden. 

 

The time has come for our President to act; the same President who appointed the first-ever Native American cabinet member last year and who halted the building of the Keystone pipeline across Native lands. Surely Mr. Biden is capable of an urgent act of compassion for Leonard Peltier — especially considering that the prosecutor who put him away in 1977 now says Peltier is innocent, and that his US Attorney’s office corrupted the evidence to make sure Peltier didn’t get a fair trial. Why is this victim of our judicial system still in prison? And now he is sick with Covid.

 

For months Peltier has begged to get a Covid booster shot. Prison officials refused. The fact that he now has COVID-19 is a form of torture. A shame hangs over all of us. Should he now die, are we all not complicit in taking his life? 

 

President Biden, let Leonard Peltier go. This is a gross injustice. You can end it. Reach deep into your Catholic faith, read what the Pope has begged you to do, and then do the right thing. 

 

For those of you reading this, will you join me right now in appealing to President Biden to free Leonard Peltier? His health is in deep decline, he is the voice of his people — a people we owe so much to for massacring and imprisoning them for hundreds of years. 

 

The way we do mass incarceration in the US is abominable. And Leonard Peltier is not the only political prisoner we have locked up. We have millions of Black and brown and poor people tonight in prison or on parole and probation — in large part because they are Black and brown and poor. THAT is a political act on our part. Corporate criminals and Trump run free. The damage they have done to so many Americans and people around the world must be dealt with. 

 

This larger issue is one we MUST take on. For today, please join me in contacting the following to show them how many millions of us demand that Leonard Peltier has suffered enough and should be free:

 

President Joe Biden

 

Phone: 202-456-1111

E-mail: At this link

https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

 

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

 

Phone: 202-208-3100

E-mail: feedback@ios.doi.gov

 

Attorney General Merrick Garland

 

Phone: 202-514-2000

E-mail: At this link

https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice

 

I’ll end with the final verse from the epic poem “American Names” by Stephen Vincent Benet: 

 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,

You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

 

 

PS. Also — watch the brilliant 1992 documentary by Michael Apted and Robert Redford about the framing of Leonard Peltier— “Incident at Oglala”



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The Moment

By Margaret Atwood*

 

The moment when, after many years 

of hard work and a long voyage 

you stand in the centre of your room, 

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, 

knowing at last how you got there, 

and say, I own this, 

 

is the same moment when the trees unloose 

their soft arms from around you, 

the birds take back their language, 

the cliffs fissure and collapse, 

the air moves back from you like a wave 

and you can't breathe. 

 

No, they whisper. You own nothing. 

You were a visitor, time after time 

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. 

We never belonged to you. 

You never found us. 

It was always the other way round.

 

*Witten by the woman who wrote a novel about Christian fascists taking over the U.S. and enslaving women. Prescient!


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Union Membership—2021

Bureau of Labor Statistics

U.S. Department of Labor

For release 10:00 a.m. (ET) Thursday, January 20, 2022

Technical information: 

(202) 691-6378 • cpsinfo@bls.gov • www.bls.gov/cps

Media contact: 

(202) 691-5902 • PressOffice@bls.gov

In 2021, the number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions continued to decline (-241,000) to 14.0 million, and the percent who were members of unions—the union membership rate—was 10.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The rate is down from 10.8 percent in 2020—when the rate increased due to a disproportionately large decline in the total number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The 2021 unionization rate is the same as the 2019 rate of 10.3 percent. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

These data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For further information, see the Technical Note in this news release.

Highlights from the 2021 data:

• The union membership rate of public-sector workers (33.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.1 percent). (See table 3.)

• The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). (See table 3.)

• Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.6 percent) than women (9.9 percent). The gap between union membership rates for men and women has narrowed considerably since 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), when rates for men and women were 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. (See table 1.)

• Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.)

• Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 83 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($975 versus $1,169). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)

• Among states, Hawaii and New York continued to have the highest union membership rates (22.4 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina continued to have the lowest (1.7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)

Industry and Occupation of Union Members

In 2021, 7.0 million employees in the public sector belonged to unions, the same as in the private sector. (See table 3.)

Union membership decreased by 191,000 over the year in the public sector. The public-sector union membership rate declined by 0.9 percentage point in 2021 to 33.9 percent, following an increase of 1.2 percentage points in 2020. In 2021, the union membership rate continued to be highest in local government (40.2 percent), which employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as police officers, firefighters, and teachers.

The number of union workers employed in the private sector changed little over the year. However, the number of private-sector nonunion workers increased in 2021. The private-sector unionization rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in 2021 to 6.1 percent, slightly lower than its 2019 rate of 6.2 percent. Industries with high unionization rates included utilities (19.7 percent), motion pictures and sound recording industries (17.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (14.7 percent). Low unionization rates occurred in finance (1.2 percent), professional and technical services (1.2 percent), food services and drinking places (1.2 percent), and insurance (1.5 percent).

Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2021 were in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). Unionization rates were lowest in food preparation and serving related occupations (3.1 percent); sales and related occupations (3.3 percent); computer and mathematical occupations (3.7 percent); personal care and service occupations (3.9 percent); and farming, fishing, and forestry occupations (4.0 percent).

Selected Characteristics of Union Members

In 2021, the number of men who were union members, at 7.5 million, changed little, while the number of women who were union members declined by 182,000 to 6.5 million. The unionization rate for men decreased by 0.4 percentage point over the year to 10.6 percent. In 2021, women’s union membership rate declined by 0.6 percentage point to 9.9 percent. The 2021 decreases in union membership rates for men and women reflect increases in the total number of nonunion workers. The rate for men is below the 2019 rate (10.8 percent), while the rate for women is above the 2019 rate (9.7 percent). (See table 1.)

Among major race and ethnicity groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2021 (11.5 percent) than White workers (10.3 percent), Asian workers (7.7 percent), and Hispanic workers (9.0 percent). The union membership rate declined by 0.4 percentage point for White workers, by 0.8 percentage point for Black workers, by 1.2 percentage points for Asian workers, and by 0.8 percentage point for Hispanic workers. The 2021 rates for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics are little or no different from 2019, while the rate for Asians is lower.

By age, workers ages 45 to 54 had the highest union membership rate in 2021, at 13.1 percent. Younger workers—those ages 16 to 24—had the lowest union membership rate, at 4.2 percent.

In 2021, the union membership rate for full-time workers (11.1 percent) continued to be considerably higher than that for part-time workers (6.1 percent).

Union Representation

In 2021, 15.8 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union, 137,000 less than in 2020. The percentage of workers represented by a union was 11.6 percent, down by 0.5 percentage point from 2020 but the same as in 2019. Workers represented by a union include both union members (14.0 million) and workers who report no union affiliation but whose jobs are covered by a union contract (1.8 million). (See table 1.)

Earnings

Among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $1,169 in 2021, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $975. In addition to coverage by a collective bargaining agreement, these earnings differences reflect a variety of influences, including variations in the distributions of union members and nonunion employees by occupation, industry, age, firm size, or geographic region. (See tables 2 and 4.)

Union Membership by State

In 2021, 30 states and the District of Columbia had union membership rates below that of the U.S. average, 10.3 percent, while 20 states had rates above it. All states in both the East South Central and West South Central divisions had union membership rates below the national average, while all states in both the Middle Atlantic and Pacific divisions had rates above it. (See table 5 and chart 1.)

Ten states had union membership rates below 5.0 percent in 2021. South Carolina had the lowest rate (1.7 percent), followed by North Carolina (2.6 percent) and Utah (3.5 percent). Two states had union membership rates over 20.0 percent in 2021: Hawaii (22.4 percent) and New York (22.2 percent).

In 2021, about 30 percent of the 14.0 million union members lived in just two states (California at 2.5 million and New York at 1.7 million). However, these states accounted for about 17 percent of wage and salary employment nationally.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Impact on 2021 Union Members Data

Union membership data for 2021 continue to reflect the impact on the labor market of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Comparisons with union membership measures for 2020, including metrics such as the union membership rate and median usual weekly earnings, should be interpreted with caution. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 led to an increase in the unionization rate due to a disproportionately large decline in the number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The decrease in the rate in 2021 reflects a large gain in the number of nonunion workers and a decrease in the number of union workers. More information on labor market developments in recent months is available at: 

www.bls.gov/covid19/effects-of-covid-19-pandemic-and- response-on-the-employment-situation-news-release.htm.


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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression


Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

Know Your Rights Materials

The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides. 

WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office

We also recommend the following resources: 

Center for Constitutional Rights

Civil Liberties Defense Center

Grand Jury Resistance Project

Katya Komisaruk

Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources

Tilted Scales Collective


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Articles

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1) Oakland Parents Occupy Elementary School to Prevent Its Closure

By Sara Herschander, July 17, 2022

https://truthout.org/articles/oakland-parents-occupy-elementary-school-to-prevent-its-closure/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=a0819f3e-09e9-4774-9b4a-fd30ff368bb3

Oakland Unified School District educators, students, and families participate in a rally against the possible closure of 16 schools in Oakland, California, on February 4, 2022.


On the last day of school at Parker Elementary, following tearful moving up ceremonies for fifth and eighth grades, one group of mothers — frustrated over a decision to permanently shutter the school — refused to leave.

 

Over 50 days later, they’re still there, occupying the school alongside a network of community activists and other supporters. In the meantime, they’ve started “Parker Community School,” which offers free summer programming for schoolchildren and adults. Even as the next school year approaches, they’re refusing to back down, with plans to expand their efforts as part of a broader fight against educational racism and inequity in Oakland and across the country.

 

“Our kids are important to us — and that’s the reason why this has to happen,” said Misty Cross, a mother of two in the district who has been one of several parents sleeping at the school. “When we keep seeing closures every year, those are entire communities that are at stake.”

 

In February, the Oakland Unified School District approved plans to close, merge or shrink 11 schools in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods in the district, including Parker, which has served children in grades K-8 for 96 years. While officials say the closures are necessary to address budget shortfalls, families, teachers and students in the district’s close-knit schools have expressed widespread and impassioned opposition.

 

The Oakland Education Association teachers union held a one-day strike and filed an unfair labor charge over the plan. In April, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the state’s attorney general on behalf of the Justice for Oakland Students coalition, urging an investigation into the closures’ disproportionate impact on Black students. In February, Maurice André San-Chez, an educator in the district, was hospitalized after hunger striking for 20 days to protest the closures alongside school administrator Moses Omolade.

 

Black students make up 22 percent of the district’s total enrollees, but accounted for roughly 43 percent of students at the schools slated for closure under the school board’s initial plan. The closures have been driven in part because Oakland students attend charter schools at more than double the rate of other children across the state, leading to declining enrollment in the district.

 

“This matters not just for these children, but for all children,” Cross said. “And, all Black and Brown communities who have been going through closures.”

 

Cross is also a co-founder of the Oakland activist group Moms 4 Housing, a collective of unhoused working mothers who successfully occupied and ultimately reclaimed an empty home owned by speculators in 2020. She’s been applying the strategies she learned through Moms 4 Housing to build support for the sit-in at Parker.

 

On Tuesday, Cross and her seven-year-old daughter went on a field trip to the East Oakland Collective as part of the occupation’s on-site programming, where they viewed an exhibit on the Black Panthers, who once operated a network of liberation schools and community care programs across the country.

 

The Parker Community School also features poetry nights, Narcan trainings, current event discussions, and other programming facilitated by parents, teachers and community members that Cross says shows “what a community school really looks like.”

 

“When we keep the community in the school, it keeps those families together,” said Cross, who fears what plans the district might have for selling the school building. “It is so important that this building stays in the community. And, that the land is not given to privatizers or changed into a charter school, or sold off to a billionaire to create market rate housing.”

 

For now, Cross says the parents and activists occupying Parker have big plans in anticipation of next school year, including bringing on other parents affected by closures. The district plans to close five more elementary schools at the end of the 2022-23 school year.

 

“The neglect has gone way too far,” Cross said, emphasizing that working parents were leading the struggle out of necessity in light of the district’s failures. “We fight for our kids until they fight for themselves.”



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2) The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Contempt for Women Is Worse Than I Imagined

By Michelle Goldberg, July 18, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/opinion/miscarriages-abortion-ban.html
Christopher Lee for The New York Times

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.

 

The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)

 

In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”

 

A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”

 

Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”

 

If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.

 

But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidance that under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suing to prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

 

Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.

 

In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”

 

I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.

 

I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”

 

This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”

 

On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.


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3) What Pregnancy and Childbirth Do to the Bodies of Young Girls

An Ohio 10-year-old’s recent abortion has generated fierce debate. Doctors in countries where pregnancy is common in adolescents say the toll of childbirth on young bodies is brutal.

By Stephanie Nolen, July 18, 2022

Stephanie Nolen has reported on maternal health and obstetric fistula in Ethiopia, India and more than a dozen other developing countries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/health/young-girls-pregnancy-childbirth.html

An X-ray of a healthy 10-year-old girl. Doctors who work in countries with underage pregnancies say a critical health issue is that the pelvis of a child is too small to allow passage of even a small fetus.

An X-ray of a healthy 10-year-old girl. Doctors who work in countries with underage pregnancies say a critical health issue is that the pelvis of a child is too small to allow passage of even a small fetus. Credit...Department of Radiology, U.C. San Diego Health


After the account a 10-year-old Ohio girl crossing state lines to get an abortion drew national attention last week, some prominent abortion opponents suggested the child should have carried her pregnancy to term.

 

But midwives and doctors who work in countries where pregnancy is common in young adolescent girls say those pushing for very young girls to carry pregnancies to term may not understand the brutal toll of pregnancy and delivery on the body of a child.

 

“Their bodies are not ready for childbirth and it’s very traumatic,” said Marie Bass Gomez, a midwife and the senior nursing officer at the reproductive and child health clinic at Bundung Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Gambia.

 

The critical issue is that the pelvis of a child is too small to allow passage of even a small fetus, said Dr. Ashok Dyalchand, who has worked with pregnant adolescent girls in low-income communities in India for more than 40 years.

 

“They have long labor, obstructed labor, the fetus bears down on the bladder and on the urethra,” sometimes causing  pelvic inflammatory disease and the rupture of tissue between the vagina and the bladder and rectum, said Dr. Dyalchand, who heads an organization called the Institute of Health Management Pachod, a public health organization serving marginalized communities in central India.

 

“It is a pathetic state particularly for girls who are less than 15 years of age,” he added. “The complications, the morbidity and the mortality are much higher in girls under 15 than girls 16 to 19 although 16 to 19 has a mortality twice as high as women 20 and above.”

 

The phenomenon of young girls having babies is relatively rare in the United States. In 2017, the last year for which data was available, there were 4,460 pregnancies among girls under 15, with just under half ending in abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights and surveys clinics regularly.

 

But globally, complications relating to pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death for girls aged 15-19, according to the World Health Organization.

 

Young maternal age is associated with an increased risk of maternal anemia, infections, eclampsia and pre-eclampsia, emergency cesarean delivery and postpartum depression, according to a 2014 evaluation published in the Journal of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine.

 

Babies born to girls are more often premature and have low birth weight, said Dr. Willibald Zeck, the maternal and newborn health coordinator for the United Nations Population Fund, who frequently delivered babies for young mothers while working as a gynecologist in Tanzania and later oversaw maternal health programs in Nepal and the Philippines.

 

While a pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio might have access to prenatal care and a cesarean section that would blunt the effects of obstructed labor, the experience of pregnancy in a young girl is the same in India as it is in the United States, Dr. Dyalchand said. “The girls would go through more or less exactly the same kind of complication: The only difference is because of access to better health care they may not have the same kind of terrible outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that the girl’s body and her life doesn’t get scarred.”

 

Dr. Shershah Syed, a gynecologist and expert on maternal mortality in Pakistan, regularly provides care to pregnant girls as young as 11. He said good prenatal care can avert the development of a hole between the wall of the bladder or rectum and the vagina — called  a fistula — which causes leaked urine or feces that is not only painful (the leaked urine causes burning sores) but also a source of enormous shame and humiliation.

 

But even good prenatal care cannot prevent the hypertension or urinary tract infections that are common in very young mothers, he said.

 

“In normal physiology a 10-year-old child is not supposed to be pregnant. The point is, she’s a child and the child cannot deliver a child, she’s not ready,” Dr. Syed said, adding: “And the mental torture she will go through, that is not measurable.”

 

In the cases he has seen, early pregnancy arrests the very young mother’s physical growth, and also often her mental development because many girls leave school and lose normal social interaction with peers, he said. But while an anemic mother struggles to carry the pregnancy, fetuses appropriate nutrients and continue to grow, until they have well surpassed what a young mother’s pelvis can deliver.

 

“They go to labor for three days, four days, five days, and after that labor, usually the baby is dead. And then when the head is collapsed, then the baby is delivered,” said Dr. Syed, who is one of South Asia’s pre-eminent experts on the repair of obstetric fistula, a common outcome of obstructed labor in pregnant girls.

 

In nearly all these cases, the girl has developed vesicovaginal fistula, a hole between the wall of the bladder and the vagina. In a quarter of cases, the prolonged labor will also cause fistula of the rectum, so that the girl constantly leaks both urine and feces.

 

If fistula sufferers learn that treatment is available and make their way to his clinic, Dr. Syed said he can repair the condition. But the process requires a long recovery: fistula of the bladder takes about five weeks to heal, while a rectal fistula needs four or five months.

 

In 1978, Dr. Dyalchand began his career in public health at a small district hospital in rural Maharashtra, on the western coast of India. In his first week, two young pregnant girls bled to death — one while in labor, the other at the entrance to the hospital, before she ever made it inside. It started him on a long career of working with communities to convince them to delay the age of marriage and first conception in girls.

 

That intervention has shown considerable success, and, Dr. Dyalchand noted, India has also been steadily expanding abortion access. The procedure is legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

 

In Gambia, Ms. Bass Gomez said that her clinic is able to offer good prenatal care to pregnant girls, but that does little to blunt the larger trauma of the experience. Her clinic is designed to serve adults, she said. “But when you have a child walk in equally pregnant it’s really traumatizing for the child,” she said. “It’s not comfortable, that environment, it’s not set for them. You can tell they are struggling. There’s a lot of shame and disgrace.”


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4) PSL editorial: Uvalde catastrophe shows that cops do not keep us safe

Liberation Staff, July 18, 2022

https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-editorial-uvalde-catastrophe-shows-that-cops-do-not-keep-us-safe/



















The official report on the Uvalde school shooting has confirmed what has long been painfully clear: police responded in a catastrophic and disgraceful fashion as innocent children were being massacred. The utter cowardice and inaction by officers the day of the mass shooting exposes the cops’ myths and serves as a bitter reminder that police officers do not keep us safe.

 

The report, carried out by the Texas state legislature, found that “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making” contributed to a disaster in which police “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.” Video made public shortly before the report’s publication showed cops in the school callously checking their phones and sanitizing their hands as children screamed inside the classroom where they were trapped with the gunman. Outside, police brutalized parents who were desperately pleading with them to rescue their children.

 

This cannot possibly be blamed on “a few bad apples.” Three hundred and seventy-six cops were present at the scene of the massacre. They came from a wide range of agencies, including Uvalde city police, Uvalde school police, San Antonio Police Department, Uvalde county sheriffs, Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, and Texas Department of Public Safety. 

 

Their total disregard for the lives of innocent children who attended a working-class Latino school is a reflection on the entire institution of policing under capitalism. When it comes to terrorizing and inflicting violence on defenseless people, the cops posture as courageous defenders of “law and order.” But when it came time to confront a mass shooter, not a single one of the cops on the scene decided to act.

 

As they so often do, the police lied about what happened. Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, falsely claimed on May 25 that police “did engage immediately” and that “As the shooter was approaching, there was a school district resource officer that approached him.” In fact, it took the police well over an hour to take action. 

 

A debate about public safety is raging across the country. Pro-police organizations, politicians and media outlets are attempting to manipulate people’s genuine concerns about safety to promote the idea that police should be celebrated and showered with even more resources. This, they hope, will help the cops regain their political footing after being challenged in historic fashion by the 2020 nationwide uprising against racism. 

 

What transpired at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde shows what a cynical maneuver this is. The multifaceted epidemic of violence in the United States can only be truly addressed by a profound transformation of society that ends the systematic devaluation of human life that is so pronounced in this country. Immediate steps like the expansion of social programs, violence interrupter programs and an end to the legal impunity enjoyed by gun manufacturing corporations can do so much more to alleviate the crisis than the enlargement of police power. As officers stood idly by outside the classroom on that tragic day, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that their role in society has nothing to do with keeping people safe.


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5) There’s a Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things

By Bryce Covert, July 21, 2022

Ms. Covert is a journalist who focuses on the economy, with an emphasis on policies that affect workers and families.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/racism-paid-leave-child-care.html

Illustration by Dakarai Akil; photographs via Shutterstock


The United States is one of six countries in the world without a national guarantee of paid parental leave. Twenty-three other countries have universal child or family allowances. We spend just 0.2 percent of our gross domestic product on child care for our youngest children, compared with an average of 0.7 percent among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

 

In other words, paid leave, child care systems and child allowances are so common as to be banal in much of the rest of the developed world. But the United States has none of these things. That was supposed to change when House Democrats passed the Build Back Better reconciliation package, which originally included 12 weeks of paid family leave, heavily subsidized child care and universal pre-K, and a continuation of expanded child tax credit payments that went out in 2021 and acted as a kind of child allowance.

 

But negotiations over that ever-diminishing package came to a halt late last year when Senator Joe Manchin walked away. (Now there’s a phrase we’ve heard repeatedly during President Biden’s first two years in office.) Democrats have since scrambled to piece together a narrower deal that eschewed all of these things, but after Mr. Manchin recently balked at raising taxes on wealthy Americans, hopes for even that smaller deal have dimmed, if not gone totally dark. It’s not just Mr. Manchin who stands in the way. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has opposed raising taxes on the rich, while some House moderates have also started to question raising taxes before the midterms.

 

Why is it so much harder — right now, seemingly impossible — for our country to enact new programs that are customary in much of the rest of the world? It’s easy to blame one or two senators, but the problem runs much deeper. More or less, it comes down to our long history of racism and how it’s wormed its way into every debate over government benefits.

 

In a seminal 2001 paper, the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote tried to answer this very question: Why doesn’t this country have a welfare system that looks like the ones in European countries, progressively taxing those with the most wealth to redistribute resources to those with the least? Economic differences, they concluded, don’t explain it. But they did find that “racial fragmentation” has played a “major role” in keeping us from these policies in a way it hasn’t elsewhere. They also find that while Europeans see the poor as members of their own group who are merely unfortunate, Americans see them as lazy “others.” American voters are less likely to demand that their leaders pass policies that help the least well off. “Racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately Black, unappealing to many voters,” they conclude.

 

The United States is not the only country that has racists and racism, of course. But our history is deeply intertwined with race, tracing back to slavery and its role in building the country. It was “often more grotesque” and more “salient” here than in other countries that had slavery, noted Zach Parolin, a senior fellow at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Other countries certainly have their divisions, but “in the U.S. it appears that the most salient dividing line is race,” Dr. Alesina, Dr. Glaeser and Dr. Sacerdote write.

 

Race has played an outsized role in nearly every debate over the American social safety net. Cutting out agricultural and domestic workers, who were majority Black, made it easier to win the support of Southern Democrats for Social Security legislation. Racism has long stood in the way of universal health care. Before welfare was reformed in the 1990s, Dr. Alesina, Dr. Glaeser and Dr. Sacerdote found, states with higher shares of Black people offered less generous benefits. Then President Ronald Reagan used the “welfare queen” trope to gin up racial resentment against people on cash assistance, and President Bill Clinton signed a welfare-reform bill into law that was deeply shaped by Mr. Reagan’s politics and gave states broad authority over their programs.

 

Dr. Parolin has found that ever since, states with larger proportions of Black residents allocate fewer of the resources to direct cash assistance. Hana Brown, an associate professor of sociology at Wake Forest University, has found that state lawmakers are more likely to push through restrictive welfare policies when racial tension is high, in order to appease white voters. States with higher Black populations also have the strictest rules for unemployment insurance.

 

The United States has a far higher child poverty rate than most peer countries: Out of 40 countries, we rank at number 38. The main difference is that most other countries spend far more on children, often through a child allowance, but the United States didn’t have one until expanded child tax credit payments were sent out to most parents in the second half of last year. And the reason we don’t, Dr. Parolin said, is “inseparable from the racialized perceptions of who receives social assistance benefits in the U.S.” Americans believe programs like public housing, food stamps and welfare primarily serve Black people, even though whites make up the largest or an equal percentage of recipients.

 

It might seem almost obvious at this point that the United States doesn’t offer the social benefits that Nordic countries do. But even comparing us to more similar countries shows how out of touch and out of step we are. Take one case study in particular: how the United States and the United Kingdom have approached child care. Both countries were on the verge of passing universal child care and early education in the 1970s, and yet both turned around and rejected the policy. In the 1980s, President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could have been cut from the same cloth, pushing an anti-welfare ideology.

 

And yet in the 1990s the two countries “go in completely different directions,” said Anna Danziger Halperin, a postdoctoral fellow at the New-York Historical Society who wrote a dissertation on the two countries’ approaches to child care policy. In the United States child care spending has continued to be dedicated mostly to poor parents. But Britain embarked on universal child care in 1996, at first with vouchers for families of 4-year-olds and then with guaranteed preschool spots for all 3- and 4-year-olds. The country’s spending on early education and child care quadrupled between 1997 and 2008.

 

Race, again, played a huge role in the diverging paths the two countries took. After the 1960s, the U.S. federal government mostly invested in child care for poor mothers through cash assistance and Head Start. It ended up “being tied so closely to welfare,” Dr. Danziger Halperin said. In Britain, however, “the imagined person is a white British family,” she said. “Both programs would have been for broad populations, but the way that people think of who this is about is different.”

 

The other reason for the divergence, she found, was how child care was defined and whom it was intended to serve. In the 1960s, lawmakers in both countries argued in favor of universal child care as an educational program benefiting children. But after President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan universal child care bill by saying it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family‐centered approach,” in the United States, “conservatives paint it as a feminist boogeyman,” Dr. Danziger Halperin said. That’s when it became “untouchable.” Even today, we arbitrarily divide child care from school. But there was no similar extensive right-wing backlash in Britain. “You just don’t get that kind of thinking,” she said. Instead, in Britain child care is talked about as something that benefits children.

 

There is also more of an acceptance in Britain, despite Thatcherism and what followed in its wake, “that the state does have a role to play,” Dr. Danziger Halperin said. Britain, after all, has universal health care. “There is more of a state responsibility for the family and for children’s well-being than we have here.”

 

That’s not how we think about government in the United States. A thick streak of individualism has been embedded in the bedrock of the country’s values since its founding. Americans have been told to “turn first to our families, our own efforts in the labor market,” said Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia, “and turn to government only as a last resort.” We’ve relied on the private market, through employers, to deliver things like health care and paid time off, rather than the government.

 

Our political structures are also to blame. There have been times in the past when more webbing was added to the social safety net. But Congress “didn’t have the filibuster in the way we have the filibuster in either the Great Society or the New Deal,” said Mike Konczal, a director at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself From the Grip of the Invisible Hand.” Its use to block legislation has grown in recent decades; about half of all uses of the filibuster have happened in just the last 12 years. Despite currently holding a majority in both the House and the Senate, Democrats had to pile all of their priorities into an unwieldy package and try to pass it through budget reconciliation to avoid a Republican filibuster, which is “a very time-sensitive and brittle process that is very good for cutting taxes and slashing programs,” Mr. Konczal said, “but actually very hard to do on the side of building a better society.”

 

On top of that, our nonproportional two-party system means we haven’t developed a labor or social democratic party that stands almost exclusively for increasing the role of government in helping people get by. “In the United States, both parties have been relatively market-oriented,” Dr. Waldfogel said. Our courts have also generally been hostile to redistributive policies and more inclined to protect personal property.

 

In the end, though, experts agree that race is the most defining factor. “Racial prejudice is a real and enduring feature of the American landscape,” Dr. Alesina, Dr. Glaeser and Dr. Sacerdote write. We’ve yet to shake that legacy, and it seeps into everything. “Racism has undermined efforts to deliver a social safety net in the U.S. for a very long time,” Dr. Brown said. It’s a hurdle we still haven’t been able to clear.


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6) Chipotle closes a Maine store, and workers say it’s because of a union drive.

The shutdown was announced hours before a hearing on a possible vote to unionize the location, which employees said was understaffed.

By Noam Scheiber, July 20, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/business/economy/chipotle-union-maine.html


Workers who filed for a union election at a Chipotle in Augusta, Maine, are accusing the company of seeking to undermine their campaign by closing the restaurant.

 

The company notified employees of the closing on Tuesday morning, hours before the two sides were scheduled to take part in a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board about the possible election.

 

“We have been unable to adequately staff this remote restaurant,” Laurie Schalow, the company’s chief corporate affairs officer, said in a statement. Ms. Schalow added that “because of these ongoing staffing challenges, there is no probability of reopening in the foreseeable future, so we’ve made the decision to permanently close the restaurant.”

 

A lawyer representing the workers filed a charge with the labor board contending that the closing was an illegal act of retaliation.

 

“I’m referring to this as Union Busting 101,” said the lawyer, Jeffrey Neil Young, who frequently represents unions in the state. “It’s a classic response — employees decide to organize and the employer says it’s closing the store.”

 

The labor board will investigate the charge and issue a formal complaint if it finds merit in the accusation, at which point the case would go before an administrative law judge. The two sides could reach a settlement beforehand.

 

A handful of workers at the store walked off the job in mid-June to protest what they said were unsafe conditions that stemmed from understaffing and insufficient training.

 

“Not being properly trained to prepare food has a lot of risks to both the preparer and the people eating the food,” said Brandi McNease, a worker involved in the walkout and the union campaign. “You worry about knife skills, using equipment that is dangerous — hot, sharp.”

 

Within a few days, the company closed the store to the public while it sought to improve staffing, including retaining two recruiting experts, according to Ms. Schalow. During this time, workers continued to report to the store, where they received some training and helped clean it, but often for fewer hours a week than they previously worked.

 

On June 22, workers filed a petition to hold a union election. The labor board requires at least 30 percent of workers to indicate their support before it will order one.

 

The hearing scheduled for Tuesday was meant to consider arguments from the two sides about the proposed election. Chipotle had asserted in filings that the election should not go forward, partly because the store was understaffed and so the workers eligible to vote would not be fully representative of its eventual work force.

 

Mr. Young, the lawyer representing the workers, said the closing could chill organizing efforts at other stores in the chain, including those underway in Lansing, Mich., where workers have also filed for a union election, and New York City.

 

“By closing the Augusta store, it’s signaling to Chipotle workers elsewhere who are involved in or contemplating nascent organizational drives that if you organize, you might be out of job,” Mr. Young said.

 

Ms. Schalow, the Chipotle official, said in her statement that closing the store “has nothing to do with union activity.” The company said it had closed 13 locations out of about 3,000 because of staffing issues, performance, lease agreements and other business reasons over the past 18 months. Most of the closings appear to have come in the first half of last year.

 

Chipotle has offered the Augusta workers four weeks of severance pay based on their hours over the past two weeks, which have typically been lower than before the restaurant closed to the public. It has not offered to place the workers at other locations in Maine, the nearest of which is roughly an hour away, according to the company.

 

Ms. McNease said she and her co-workers planned to fight to have the store reopened. “No one is bailing now,” she said.

 

Chipotle is among several employers in the service industry whose workers have sought to unionize over the past year. Roughly 200 corporate-owned Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since last fall, as have workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, an REI store in Manhattan and an Apple store in Maryland.

 

The labor board has formally accused Starbucks of closing certain stores in retaliation for union organizing. The company has denied the accusations.

 

Last week, Starbucks said it was closing 16 additional stores because of safety concerns like crime, which it said have been reflected in incident reports over the past year. The union representing the newly unionized Starbucks workers has filed charges of unfair labor practices, accusing the company of closing the stores to undermine organizing activity or avoid bargaining with unionized workers.


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7) I Feel Utterly Hopeless About American Climate Policy

By Farhad Manjoo, July 22, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/opinion/us-climate-policy.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Opinion
Climate activists staging a die-in across from the White House in April.

Climate activists staging a die-in across from the White House in April. Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


In a column published in June 2021, I declared the coming year would be a “hinge in history” for American participation in the global effort to address the climate crisis. Having won the White House and control of the House and the Senate, Democrats had cracked open a rare window of political opportunity — their first chance since 2010 to pass major federal legislation to reduce our carbon emissions.

 

But the window wasn’t very big, and it wouldn’t stay open long. President Biden had proposed setting a target of 2030 for the United States to cut carbon emissions to half of 2005 levels. He’d outlined hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in clean energy, public transit, electric vehicle infrastructure, severe weather preparedness and climate-related research and development. Now, in the face of united Republican opposition, and with midterm politicking rapidly approaching, could Democrats seize what I called “the country’s last best political opportunity” to address climate change and pass Biden’s plan?

 

Well, a year has passed, and the answer is in: Nope.

 

When Senator Joe Manchin pulled his support last week for even a significantly scaled-down version of Biden’s climate plan, America’s great window of opportunity all but slammed shut. Manchin’s decision was no surprise — he has been stringing his party along for more than a year — but for me it still packed a wallop.

 

Was I thrown into a spiral of despair about the incapacity of our political system to take on urgent issues? Was I left feeling hopeless about the world’s efforts to avoid climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios? Did I wonder more than once what even was the point of Democrats running the show if they could not secure this plan? Yeah, maybe just a little.

 

It is difficult to overstate the case for a huge federal effort on climate change. It’s popular — most Americans think Congress should address the causes and effects of climate change. And because there are new disasters brought about by a warming planet seemingly every week now, the issue will only grow more urgent. (About 100 million Americans are sweating through severe heat this week.)

 

Biden’s plan also made economic sense: Regardless of whether America participates, a global transition to renewable fuels is already underway. China leads the United States (and the rest of the world) in growth in renewable power generation capacity and in solar panel manufacturing; because the Chinese government is investing heavily in renewables while we are not, we risk falling further behind in industries that will dominate the future.

 

It has also rarely been clearer that our dependence on fossil fuels is doing us no national security favors. Biden was in Saudi Arabia last week when he conceded defeat on the climate bill. He was there to ask one brutal petromonarch for more oil because another brutal petromonarch is using his fossil fuel profits to finance an invasion of a sovereign neighbor. But despite an embarrassing fist bump with the Saudi crown prince, whose country Biden once aimed to sideline as a global “pariah,” the president hasn’t yet secured any guarantees for more oil. That may change at an upcoming meeting of the OPEC+ oil cartel — but shouldn’t we be striving for a future in which we wouldn’t have to bend to such characters because they happen to sit on a lot of dead plants and animals?

 

It’s precisely the strength of the case for federal climate action that has left me feeling so down. Democrats seem headed toward losing their congressional majorities in the midterms, and Biden’s approval ratings are abysmal. It is difficult to imagine the party will get another shot at taking major climate action anytime soon. What will become of climate change as a political issue if Democrats are out in the political wilderness? Are we doomed to another decade of inaction?

 

Climate experts told me not to abandon all hope. Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research group, took issue last year with my characterization of Biden’s plan as a do-or-die moment for the American climate movement.

 

“There isn’t a 12-year deadline or a one-year deadline,” Trembath told me this week. He argued that advocacy that leans on such deadlines is bound to provoke nihilism, and that a better way to talk about climate change is as a long-term issue that we will have to keep dealing with for as long as we live.

 

Trembath also pointed out that some of the most effective American environmental regulations were passed “quietly” — that is, they were small, boring-seeming rule changes and tax credits hidden in bigger legislation. Rather than pushing for a sweeping climate bill, perhaps Democrats can now aim for passing many such small measures in future legislation.

 

There is also executive action. On Wednesday, Biden announced several steps that his administration would be taking on the climate — for instance, he’ll direct the Interior Department to allow the installation of offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

I don’t want to dismiss these efforts out of hand. “With climate change, everything we do matters,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies environmental politics. “Every ton of carbon pollution we can cut is a good thing.”

 

But even though Stokes is pushing for strong executive action, she was careful to note the limits of this strategy. By pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable fuels and infrastructure, Biden’s legislative plan would have accelerated the creation of a clean-energy economy in the United States. Regulation, on the other hand, might curb the worst excesses of the fossil fuel economy, but it would do little to build something new. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves,” Stokes said. “It’s not as powerful as investments in Congress.”

 

Stokes was also skeptical that “quiet” climate policy will continue to yield benefits. “The way that we have gotten climate policies in the past is absolutely through quiet politics,” she told me. “You stick something in a bill, people don’t really pay attention to it, and boom, years later it ends up being really important and it builds a whole industry.” But the fossil fuel industry has become wise to this game. “That ship has sailed,” Stokes said. “The fossil fuel industry is not stupid. They know what we’re up to. And they will fight every little thing we try to put anywhere.”

 

Where, then, are we left with American climate policy? Not anyplace good. Joe Manchin has squandered his party’s best opportunity to mitigate catastrophe, and Joe Biden has few options for what to do next. I hate to sound defeatist, but I don’t see an alternative. If you aren’t despairing about the climate, you aren’t paying attention.



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8) Sixth Teenager Charged in Central Park Jogger Case to Be Exonerated

Steven Lopez is expected to have a robbery charge linked to the 1989 attack cleared from his record.

By Jonah E. Bromwich, July 25, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/nyregion/steven-lopez-central-park-jogger-case.html

Five of the six defendants in the Central Park Jogger case, during a 1990 court appearance. From left: Steven Lopez, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Michael Briscoe.

Five of the six defendants in the Central Park Jogger case, during a 1990 court appearance. From left: Steven Lopez, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Michael Briscoe. Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times


Steven Lopez was charged with the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, along with five other teenagers. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but his conviction is expected to be thrown out Monday.

Steven Lopez was charged with the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, along with five other teenagers. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but his conviction is expected to be thrown out Monday.

Credit...Clarence Davis/New York Daily News, via Getty Images


A forgotten co-defendant of the Central Park Five, who, like them, was charged with the rape of a jogger in a case that shook New York City and the nation, is expected to have a related conviction overturned Monday.

 

The case against the Five — teenagers of color who were innocent of the 1989 sexual assault on a white woman but who were convicted on the basis of false confessions that the police elicited — continues to shape attitudes surrounding racism in the criminal justice system, the media and society writ large. But the story of the sixth man — Steven Lopez — had previously been all but ignored.

 

Mr. Lopez, who was arrested when he was 15, struck a deal with prosecutors just before his trial two years later to avoid the more serious rape charge, instead pleading guilty to robbery of a male jogger.

 

Like his peers, he went to prison; collectively, the group served close to 45 years. Soon after the true assailant in the Central Park rape was identified in 2002, the authorities overturned the rape convictions against the five men. They have gone on to win a $41 million settlement from New York City and become the subjects of films, books and television shows.

 

But Mr. Lopez, now 48, has not received any settlement money or media attention, and his story is far less well-known.

 

His robbery conviction is expected to be tossed out in a Manhattan courthouse on Monday. The exoneration will be the first under the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who vowed during his two years on the campaign trail to bolster the work of the office’s wrongful conviction unit.

 

A lawyer for Mr. Lopez declined to comment before the hearing. It’s not clear if Mr. Lopez has been in touch with the men now sometimes referred to as the Exonerated Five: Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam.

 

“We talk about the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five, but there were six people on that indictment,” Mr. Bragg said. “And the other five who were charged, their convictions were vacated. And it’s now time to have Mr. Lopez’s charge vacated.”

 

A Signed Confession

 

Mr. Lopez was 15 when he was arrested and charged with the rape of the jogger, 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili. Mr. Lopez also faced charges linked to the robbery of a male jogger in the park that same night, April 19, 1989.

 

According to the review of his case conducted by the Manhattan district attorney’s post-conviction justice unit, Mr. Lopez had been arrested in Central Park after a series of assaults had broken out, including that of the male jogger who was thrown to the ground and beaten.

 

The police held the teenagers at a precinct for hours and hours, pushing them on the details of what had happened in the park. The teens, who were between 14 and 16 years old, said they were led to blame each other for the crime.

 

Mr. Lopez was in a holding cell for about 20 hours before he was questioned. His parents, who were not native English speakers, were present, but no translators were provided. After nearly two and a half hours of questioning, a detective wrote out a statement that Mr. Lopez and his father signed.

 

The statement placed Mr. Lopez at the scene of the attack on the male jogger. But despite aggressive questioning, Mr. Lopez refused to say he had been involved in the assault on Ms. Meili.

 

While a number of the other teenagers, questioned under similar duress, said that Mr. Lopez had committed crimes against both the male and female jogger, there was no forensic evidence tying him to the attack on the male jogger. Forensic investigators, however, identified a hair found on Mr. Lopez’s clothing as possibly belonging to the female jogger. (Later, it was determined that the original investigation’s analysis of hair strands was unreliable.)

 

Ms. Meili had been badly beaten and left for dead. Details of the crime horrified New York City and inflamed racial tensions. Mr. Lopez and the other five boys were charged with rape. (Ms. Meili remained anonymous for more than a decade following the attack before identifying herself; she has objected to the settlement and believes that more than one person attacked her.)

 

Convictions and Exonerations

 

The teens arrested that night, all of whom were Black or Hispanic, were treated as symptoms of a city descending into crime-ridden chaos. They were condemned by the police, prosecutors, the media and a famous real estate developer, Donald J. Trump, who placed full-page ads in the city’s newspapers calling for them to face the death penalty. They were often called “beasts” or a “wolf pack,” as if they were not human.

 

Their trials came the year before the brutal beating of Rodney King, and many Americans were at the time ignorant of the extent of police misconduct and the coercive tactics that could result in false confessions.

 

It was decided that the six teenagers charged with the rape would be tried in three separate proceedings. Mr. McCray, Mr. Salaam and Mr. Santana were convicted on Aug. 18, 1990. Mr. Richardson and Mr. Wise were convicted on Dec. 11, 1990.

 

A month later, right as his trial was scheduled to begin, prosecutors offered Mr. Lopez a plea bargain in which he would plead guilty to first-degree robbery in exchange for having the rape charge dropped. Mr. Lopez agreed and was sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in state prison.

 

In February 2002, DNA evidence indicated that an uncharged suspect, Matias Reyes, had attacked the jogger. Mr. Reyes, who was serving time for a separate rape and murder, confessed to the crime.

 

That year, the Manhattan district attorney at the time, Robert M. Morgenthau, moved to have the rape convictions thrown out over the objections of police leadership. In the litigation that followed the exoneration of the Central Park Five, it emerged that a number of those who had been prepared to testify against Mr. Lopez disavowed their previous statements about his guilt. One said that he had only named Mr. Lopez after being told the name by police detectives.

 

In 2014, the Central Park Five received $41 million from New York City. Once, the five teenagers had represented to many people a city that was on the verge of spiraling out of control. But their story came to symbolize the overreach of the justice system, the gullibility of the media and American society’s deeply ingrained racism toward Black and brown youth.

 

The Forgotten Man

 

Until Monday, Mr. Lopez had been a forgotten element in their story. He was not featured in the 2012 documentary that Ken Burns made about the case, and no actor playing him appeared in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 television dramatization of the case, “When They See Us.”

 

Mr. Lopez’s story was ignored, in part because he pleaded guilty. (Another defendant, Michael Briscoe, pleaded guilty to assaulting a third jogger; his conviction stands.) He served more than three years of his sentence and did not appeal his conviction.

 

Instead, nearly 20 years after the exoneration of his co-defendants, Mr. Lopez quietly reintroduced himself to the Manhattan district attorney’s office in February 2021, asking that his conviction be reviewed. The following month, the office agreed and began its review of the case.

 

On the trail, Mr. Bragg, who frequently talks about the experience of the Exonerated Five, made the revamped unit a central tenet of his campaign, and upon taking office he recruited Terri S. Rosenblatt, well known in New York legal circles for her work on criminal defense and civil rights cases, to lead it.

 

Ms. Rosenblatt said that Mr. Lopez’s exoneration was notable as an example of something that happens too often: an innocent defendant, pleading guilty.

 

“We talk about wrongful trial convictions a lot, but there can be guilty pleas that are wrongful too,” she said. “And our understanding now about people who falsely confess translates over to people who will sometimes even falsely admit in court to a crime that they didn’t commit.”

 

Mr. Bragg, who in January became the first Black Manhattan district attorney, was a 15-year-old teenager living in Harlem when the Central Park case first began to make headlines. He recalled relating effortlessly to the experiences of the young men, saying that he had played basketball and had ridden the bus past the same park where the events that led to their arrests took place.

 

Mr. Bragg was a friend of Ken Thompson, who was the first Black Brooklyn district attorney and who, before his death in 2016, became known for the work of a unit that reinvestigated questionable convictions.

 

Such work was “a cornerstone of the administration of justice,” Mr. Bragg said. And he stressed that, in times of public concern about safety — as was the case in 1989 and as is the case again today — exonerations like that of Mr. Lopez could help restore faith in the function of the legal system.

 

“I am beyond humbled to be in a position to really replicate that work,” he said.


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9) Congo to Auction Land to Oil Companies: ‘Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet’

Peatlands and rainforests in the Congo Basin protect the planet by storing carbon. Now, in a giant leap backward for the climate, they’re being auctioned off for drilling.

By Ruth Maclean and Dionne Searcey, Published July 24, 2022, Updated July 25, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/world/africa/congo-oil-gas-auction.html
Peatlands in Équateur province in Congo last year.
Peatlands in Équateur province in Congo last year. Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Miners hauled bags of cobalt in southeast Congo, last year.
Miners hauled bags of cobalt in southeast Congo, last year. Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

DAKAR, Senegal — The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels.

 

The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.

 

“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.

 

Congo’s about-face in allowing new oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas comes eight months after its president, Félix Tshisekedi, stood alongside world leaders at the global climate summit in Glasgow and endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect its rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin, which is second in size only to the Amazon.

 

The deal included international pledges of $500 million for Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the first five years.

 

But since then, the world’s immediate priorities have shifted.

 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.

 

At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.

 

Congo has taken note of each of these global events, said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons.

 

Congo’s sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth.

 

“That’s our priority,” Mr. Mpanu said, in an interview last week. “Our priority is not to save the planet.”

 

Congo announced the auction in May, with a video posted on Twitter that showed a shining river nestled in a deep bed of lush rainforest. The video quickly cut to a close-up of a filling station pump, where yellowish gas gushed into an automobile tank. The American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies were tagged in the post.

 

Environmental groups were outraged. Last week Congolese officials doubled down, expanding the number of blocks — vast parcels of land — up for grabs, from 16 to 30, comprising 27 oil and three gas blocks. TotalEnergies said it did not intend to bid, and Chevron did not respond to a request to comment. Other oil major producers also declined to comment.

 

The auction highlights a double standard that many political leaders across the African continent have called out: How can Western countries, which built their prosperity on fossil fuels that emit poisonous, planet-warming fumes, demand that Africa forgo their reserves of coal, oil and gas in order to protect everyone else?

 

And it raises a question asked by many communities whose very survival is based on cutting trees for sale or for cooking fires: If they protect carbon stocks of incalculable value to the whole world, what do they get in return?

 

“Maybe it’s time we get a level playing field and be compensated,” Mr. Mpanu said.

 

Many Congolese officials believe that after decades of colonialism and political mismanagement, their country’s needs should be prioritized against those of the world.

 

For President Tshisekedi, casting his nation as a bulwark against global warming has met with political realities. The country’s next presidential election is 18 months away, but the jostling has already begun with Mr. Tshisekedi running for another term. In 2018, he was declared the winner in a highly contested election. He cut a deal with his predecessor, the unpopular but still powerful Joseph Kabila, whom western officials have labeled corrupt. The pair’s arrangement fell apart in 2020, but some analysts caution that Mr. Kabila or his cronies could wind up on the ballot at a time when foreign investment is pouring into the country.

 

Just how much compensation is at stake for Congo is something that will not be known until seismic surveys are carried out — by itself a very destructive process, according to scientists.

 

In May, Didier Budimbu, Congo’s minister of hydrocarbons, said the country, which currently produces about 25,000 barrels of oil a day, had the potential to produce up to 1 million barrels. At current prices that’s the equivalent of $32 billion a year, more than half of Congo’s GDP.

 

Mr. Mpanu pointed to the Amazon as an example of how nations with natural resources must act if richer nations would not compensate them.

 

In 2007, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president at the time, set up a trust fund that the international community could finance to stop the country from exploring an oil block in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. The goal was to raise around $3.6 billion. Years later, it had only raised $13 million. So in 2013, the government decided to allow oil exploration. Drilling began three years later.

“We’re not into threats,” Mr. Mpanu said, dismissing the notion that Congo’s auction was merely an attempt to scare countries into offering more financial assistance. “We have a very humble attitude. We have a sovereign right to go ahead.”

 

But scientists say going ahead could destroy precious rainforests and peatlands, which provide one of the last lines of defense for a planet struggling to limit rising temperatures.

 

Seismic surveys to identify oil deposits would entail long trails being cut through the rainforest and explosive charges being set off. Waste from the oil production process, which contains salt and heavy metals, could upset the salt balance of the entire Congo Basin ecosystem, as it has in the Amazon. Road construction, necessary for the oil industry, would open up vast areas of sparsely populated rainforest to human habitation, leading to increased logging.

 

It would likely also drain and dehydrate peatlands, peat experts said, ultimately leading to their decomposition and the release of the carbon they trap.

 

If this happened, said Susan Page, a physical geography professor at the University of Leicester in Britain, the huge amount of carbon very rapidly released “could be a type of tipping point, effectively, for global climate.”

 

Mr. Mpanu asserted that drilling could be “surgical” and that companies could find a way to drill diagonally to avoid touching the peat. He insisted that any action would be in keeping with global climate commitments and would come after extensive environmental impact reviews and studies of how local populations would be affected.

 

A Greenpeace team recently consulted people living inside the proposed oil blocks and said inhabitants were opposed to drilling and would launch protests, according to Ms. Wabiwa.

 

Rather than alleviating poverty, she said, the sale of oil blocks would make a lot of money for a few people.

 

Mr. Budimbu, Congo’s hydrocarbons minister, has consulted some of Africa’s biggest oil producers, like Angola, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, “so that the D.R.C. can take the same path,” according to a recent release on the ministry’s website.

 

But if Congo were to follow in their footsteps, it could mean a fate some call the “resource curse,” in which citizens don’t benefit from their country’s natural wealth and economic development remains anemic. In Nigeria, oil is the mainstay of the economy but its production has also led to devastating spills and widening inequality. In Equatorial Guinea, the majority of the population lives below the poverty line and reaps no benefit from the country’s vast oil wealth.

 

The decision to allow more exploration was carefully considered, government officials said, though it appeared to be the subject of some internal debate.

 

In March, Ève Bazaiba, Congo’s minister of environment, told The New York Times that officials were mulling going ahead. “Should we protect peatland because it’s a carbon sink or should we dig for oil for our economy?” she said.

 

Last week she indicated a willingness to back down on the auction.

 

“If we have an alternative to the oil exploitation, we’ll keep them,” she said, speaking of the peatland.

 

But Mr. Mpanu said Congo already has paid its climate dues. It allows the mining of minerals and metals such as cobalt and lithium that are key to the renewable energy industry and it plans to develop hydropower.

 

“We are part of the solution, but the solution also includes us making use of our oil resources,” he said.

 

He said the nation could seek to protect other land to offset what would be lost by drilling in places like Virunga, and noted that it would be up to oil companies to decide whether they would drill inside the park boundaries.

 

“If we lose 10 hectares we could now protect 20,” he said. “Sure, it won’t have the same biodiversity and fauna, but the country has that right.”

 

Asked what oil company, in an era where consumer awareness is higher than ever, would consider drilling in a protected gorilla habitat, Mr. Mpanu did not hesitate.

 

“It is what it is,” he said. “We just have to see how much people value that resource.”


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10) Elevator Shutdown Will Impact Elderly and Disabled Residents, Tenants Say

By E.L. Danvers, July 24, 2022

https://ilovetheupperwestside.com/elevator-shutdown-will-impact-elderly-and-disabled-residents-tenants-say/

101 West 85th Street (Google Maps, October 2017)


Residents at 101 West 85th Street (just west of Columbus Ave) – many of whom are reportedly elderly or unable to use the stairs – are facing a two-month elevator shutdown. Most have been left scrambling to make proper plans after receiving a notice of less than five days.

 

The 85th Columbus Corporation notified residents at the six story, 40-unit rental building that its one operational elevator would be shut down for eight to ten weeks starting on the morning of July 25 for “modernization,” according to two tenants who spoke to ILUTWS. Notice was not provided until late Wednesday, July 20, despite a permit being issued in April 2022.

 

“The building has a lot of elderly people or people who need the elevator to get up and down,” said Jenna, a two-year resident. “I am worried for them and want to help them if I can. A lot of people will not be able to physically leave their apartments during this time.”

 

Jenna tells us several tenants banded together to ask management to delay the project. “They said they were open to dialogue but not to postponing the work. Entirely unhelpful. We need time to prepare for those who can’t leave.”

 

Among those who will be severely impacted by the impromptu shutdown include a couple in their 90s, a wheelchair-bound resident, a tenant who needs to use a walker, one currently hospitalized for a knee replacement, and another who recently had a hip replacement, according to a second tenant who spoke to ILTUWS on the condition of anonymity. All of these residents would need to use the stairs to get to and from their apartments.

 

“The elevator is not broken. It has not failed inspections. It works fine and the work to be done is not an emergency, Jenna said. “There are no issues with elevator. At least a 10-day notice is required.”

 

According to the NYC Construction Code, “In multiple dwelling units, owners are mandated to notify residents if an elevator will be out of service during planned construction or if the elevators are expected to be out of service for two or more hours. When an application for modernization has been filed, notices must be posted at least ten business days before work begins. Notices should specify the type of work being done and indicate the start and end dates of the elevator maintenance. Once the work permit is obtained, the permit must be posted in public until the work has been completed and signed-off.”

 

The notice provided to the tenants at 101 West 85th Street explicitly states that the scheduled work is designed to “enhance elevator performance” and for “modernization.” There’s no mention of it being an emergency, nor does it mention how management intends to comply with NYC’s building code, which “requires buildings five stories or more in height to have at least one elevator that provides access to all floors, regardless of the building’s occupancy classification.”

 

A permit for electrical purposes was issued on April 4, 2022, according to the NYC Department of Buildings. It expires on September 21, 2022. “None of us were told about the expected work until late Wednesday night,” both sources confirmed.

 

The residents reached out to City Councilwoman Gale Brewer for help. The long time Upper West Side advocate contacted at least one city agency to inquire about the legality of the notice and spoke with the tenants at their impromptu meeting Saturday. In an email from Brewer forwarded to one tenant, she called the management’s act “outrageous.”

 

On Sunday, we called RCR Management — reportedly the parent company of 85th Columbus Corporation — and spoke to an individual named Nancy who informed us that our message would be forwarded to the appropriate party.


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11) Brittney Griner’s Lawyers Argue for Leniency in Russian Court

By Ivan Nechepurenko, July 26, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/world/europe/brittney-griner-russia-court.html
The W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner arriving for a hearing near Moscow on Tuesday.
The W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner arriving for a hearing near Moscow on Tuesday. Credit...Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Wearing a black and gray sweatshirt with the slogan “Black lives for peace” printed on the back, Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who has been detained in Russia on drug charges, appeared in a court near Moscow on Tuesday as her defense team continued to present evidence that she had not intended to break the law.

 

She was escorted to a courtroom by a group of police officers, one of them wearing a balaklava, and stood in a metal cage, holding photographs of her relatives, teammates and friends, according to video footage from the scene published by Russian state television.

 

After being detained in a Moscow airport one week before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Ms. Griner has become an unlikely pawn in a diplomatic game between Moscow and Washington. With her guilty plea making the verdict seem a foregone conclusion, experts said that her best hope was that the Biden administration could find a way to swap her for a high-profile Russian being held by the United States.

 

During court hearings, her defense team argued for leniency, saying that Ms. Griner had not intended to smuggle narcotics into Russia and that, like many other international athletes, she had used cannabis to help ease pain from injuries.

 

A narcology expert testified in court on Tuesday, Ms. Griner’s lawyers said, to present a case that in some countries, including the United States, medical cannabis “is a popular treatment, specifically among athletes.”

 

“With the prescription in place, Brittney may have used it for medical, but not for recreational purposes,” said Maria Blagovolina, one of Ms. Griner’s lawyers and a partner at Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin & Partners, a firm in Moscow.

 

At the previous hearing, the lawyers presented a note from Ms. Griner’s doctor recommending cannabis to treat her pain. Ms. Griner was also expected to appear in court on Wednesday, when she could be called to testify.

 

Ms. Griner had traveled to Russia because she played for a team in the country to earn extra money during the off-season. Russian customs officials discovered two vape cartridges with hashish oil — a cannabis derivative — in her luggage.

 

Ms. Griner was taken into custody near Moscow and accused of willfully smuggling the vape cartridges, a charge that can carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

 

On July 7, Ms. Griner pleaded guilty to the charges, saying that she had unintentionally carried a banned substance into Russia because she had packed in a hurry. The Russian authorities have signaled that no possible exchange can take place before a verdict in court.

 

American officials have said that they are doing all they can to return Ms. Griner home, arguing that she was wrongfully detained. Last week, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said that such statements were “political, biased, and illegitimate.”

 

“If an American citizen was detained on drug trafficking charges and she does not deny it herself, then this should correspond to Russian legislation, and not to the laws adopted in San Francisco,” Ms. Zakharova said.

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12) The War on Drugs Has a Warning for Post-Roe America

By Maia Szalavitz, July 26, 2022

Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer. She covers addiction and public policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/opinion/medicine-criminal-law.html
Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times; Photographs by MirageC and PhotographerOlympus via Getty

With the fall of Roe v. Wade, physicians across the country are struggling to balance the conflicting imperatives of their calling to care with their institutional duty to avoid legal liability, all to the detriment of their patients.

 

Medicine is hard to govern with the blunt instrument of criminal law. Human biological processes, including pregnancy, are enormously variable. In many cases, determining the precise moment when someone’s life or health is so threatened that abortion would be legal under a particular law is not an ethically answerable scientific question. And so doctors turn to lawyers, often with no medical experience, to protect themselves from prison.

 

Under Roe, most obstetricians and gynecologists didn’t face this level of legal peril. But this isn’t the first time America has criminalized aspects of medicine. Physicians who prescribe controlled substances like opioids carry a similar burden. They can face decades in prison if prosecutors target them for overprescribing. Although there are cases of bad actors who prescribed opioids for profit, even legitimate physicians may fear being targeted by law enforcement, and research shows that the threat of legal action has a broad chilling effect on the way doctors provide care. The war on drugs shows that when medicine is criminalized and politicized, harm to patients and doctors increases, while the activities that the laws are intended to curb continue or even increase.

 

The inability of criminal law to regulate medicine safely is visible in how people in pain or with suspected addiction are treated. I’ve written about suicides by chronic pain patients who were cut off from opioid medications that had helped them, in part because of doctors’ fears of legal consequences. Research now shows that for this group, cutting prescriptions dramatically increases risk of overdose and mental health crisis, compared with staying the course. But since physicians remain scared, the cutbacks continue.

Criminalization simply doesn’t allow for nuances that are part and parcel of medicine, such as the fact that some people need large doses of opioids because the enzymes that metabolize drugs vary widely because of genetics and other factors. Even in terminal cancer care — in which few if any deny the need for opioids — doses fell by 38 percent between 2007 and 2017, as legal pressure to do something about rising overdose deaths grew.

 

And criminalization invites suspicion, framing patients as liars. Health care providers, often unconsciously, can become contemptuous of those whose cases may bring legal scrutiny, corroding care. In 2017, for example, the artist Quána Madison said, an E.R. nurse called the police to remove her from the hospital and claimed that she was seeking drugs. Ms. Madison has chronic pain from complications of major surgeries required to reduce the cancer risk from a genetic syndrome. “As a Black woman, I know to never say ‘I’m seeking pain relief’ and to focus on the issue because I’m not taken seriously otherwise,” she said, describing how she believes it was only the presence of her white boyfriend that allowed her to avoid being jailed.

 

It’s not hard to imagine, in the wake of Roe’s demise, similar or worse happening to women who seek medical help for pregnancy complications and are suspected of having illegal abortions. Already women say the laws in their state are preventing them from receiving the care they need, including for miscarriages.

 

The drug war, according to Dana Sussman, the deputy executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, “laid the foundation for criminalizing pregnancy and all pregnancy outcomes more broadly” and “deputized health care providers to report their patients.”

 

At least 1,700 women were prosecuted from 1973 to 2020 for stillbirths, miscarriages or exposing their fetus to some actual or perceived risk of harm, including, in many cases, for allegations of drug use during pregnancy. Consequences included lengthy prison sentences and child custody loss, even when there was no proof that the substances caused damage. Many were reported to the police by medical professionals; those targeted were overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately Black.

Loopholes in medical privacy laws — often justified by drug enforcement — mean that hospitals have discretion to share records without patient consent. Only 19 states ban warrantless searches of prescription drug monitoring databases, and at the federal level, the Drug Enforcement Administration claims that it should be able to search these databases without a warrant in any state. Almost half of the states define drug use during pregnancy as child abuse, which triggers mandatory reporting to child welfare agencies and can also result in criminal charges. It’s not too difficult to see how similar data could be used to target women seeking abortions or doctors helping with their care.

 

Terrified of legal action, some physicians are already taking extreme measures to protect themselves from abortion prosecutions, such as ending women’s prescriptions for an immune disorder treatment, methotrexate, because if they get pregnant, it can cause miscarriage. The Texas Medical Association recently asked state regulators to act, saying that several hospitals are turning away patients with pregnancy complications for fear of violating the state’s abortion ban. Women who are miscarrying have been left to wait until they have severe bleeding before help is offered. As with the drug war, legal fear is driving doctors to prioritize themselves over their patients’ health.

 

The Supreme Court, however, offers one glimmer of hope in the fight against escalating medical criminalization. In a little-noticed 9-to-0 decision, Ruan v. United States, released just days after Roe was overturned, it decided to draw a line in the war on drugs. Some circuit courts had ruled that doctors accused of running “pill mills” could be convicted simply for prescribing more than prosecutors found acceptable. Others, in contrast, had ruled that drug dealing requires criminal intent and that doctors must have the right to defend themselves as practicing in good faith.

 

The Supreme Court sided with physicians. Prescribing outside the mainstream still risks malpractice suits, but without signs of criminal intent like selling specific drugs for specific dollar amounts, doctors can’t be convicted as dealers, the court ruled. It’s unclear why this intent requirement would not pertain to abortion cases as well.

 

But it is already obvious that prosecuting physicians hasn’t ended the overdose crisis. Instead, it scared many into defensive medicine and drove people with addiction and even some pain patients to far more deadly street drugs. Last year, the United States had its highest rate of overdose death, with the majority lost to opioids.

 

As with the drug war, criminalizing abortion will increase harm while failing to stop the behavior it is intended to reduce.


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13) In San Antonio, the Poor Live on Their Own Islands of Heat

By Edgar Sandoval, July 26, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/us/texas-heat-poverty-islands-san-antonio.html
Amelia Castillo, 67, and Antonio Castillo, 66, wait at a bus stop with no roof in San Antonio.  “Sometimes we have to wait for 40 to 50 minutes,” Amelia said.
Amelia Castillo, 67, and Antonio Castillo, 66, wait at a bus stop with no roof in San Antonio. “Sometimes we have to wait for 40 to 50 minutes,” Amelia said. Credit...Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times

SAN ANTONIO — One day last week, Juanita Cruz-Perez poked her head out the back door of her two-bedroom home in San Antonio and shook her head no. It wasn’t quite noon yet, and the heat was already unbearable. She opened the front and back doors, praying for any kind of breeze, and turned on a plastic fan that sputtered hot air. She resisted the temptation to turn on the power-guzzling air-conditioner.

 

“The A.C. only goes on at night, no matter how hot it gets,” she said.

 

Ms. Cruz-Perez suffers from a slew of health problems that are exacerbated by the stifling heat, including diabetes and high blood pressure, but her $800-a-month budget leaves little room for what she would consider a luxury.

 

In San Antonio, weathering the second week of a heat wave that has been ferocious even by Texas standards, lower-income residents like Ms. Cruz-Perez are sometimes left with few options to relieve the misery. Not only can she not afford air-conditioning during the hottest part of the day, she lives in the Westside, one of several parts of San Antonio — nearly all of them working-class or poor neighborhoods — where there are few trees to provide shade.

 

Simple things like venturing into the back yard, walking to the store or waiting for a bus can be perilous.

 

“When you are poor, the sun finds you faster,” Ms. Cruz-Perez said.

 

San Antonio has seen at least 46 days of 100-plus-degree weather so far this year, according to the National Weather Service. Through July 25, measurements taken at the city’s airport have detected that all but one day in July has surpassed the 100-degree mark.

 

The heat wave has been blamed for a series of wildfires, including a blaze that damaged at least 29 homes Monday evening in Balch Springs, a suburb of Dallas. The heat has also tested the state’s beleaguered power grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which runs the power grid, has pleaded for power conservation from those who can afford air-conditioning to avoid rolling blackouts.

 

High temperatures have afflicted much of the southern and eastern parts of the United States over the past two weeks, and have reached this week into the normally temperate Pacific Northwest. The oppressive impact is particularly visible in places like the San Antonio metropolitan area, a Latino-majority region where nearly 18 percent of the population lives in poverty.

 

The heat is inescapable in the city’s historic Westside, where the high ratio of asphalt to green space — along with old structures, freight trains and an abundance of concrete — creates the kind of “heat island effect” that is known to lead to higher energy consumption, more pollution and a greater risk of related health problems.

 

“It is the poor who usually end up suffering through these heat spells, because they lack the resources,” said Kayla Miranda, who heads the Coalition for Tenant Justice, an advocacy group that is pushing for more green spaces in San Antonio. “We feel forgotten by those in power. The wealthier neighborhoods have more green spaces, shade.”

 

Ms. Miranda knows this personally. She and her four children live in public housing, at the Alazan-Apache Courts, where her door opens onto a landscape of dry lawns and blistering sidewalks. She often struggles to pay the nearly $350-a-month electric bill to keep her children cool.

 

The heat is a lot more tolerable in San Antonio’s best-known area, the River Walk, where tourists drink margaritas from colorful plastic cups and ride boats under the shade trees that trace the placid river. The city’s wealthier neighborhoods, a few miles north of downtown San Antonio, are often adorned with soap-opera-style mansions, manicured lawns and lush green foliage.

 

The Westside, by contrast, is dotted with taquerias, small stores known as tienditas, and murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe and of folkloric singers that honor the neighborhood’s Mexican American history. A little more than a mile from the city center, the neighborhood lies next to Interstate 35.

 

San Antonio as a whole is no stranger to scorching temperatures. When the temperature hit 107 degrees on July 11, that was only the sixth hottest day since 1885, according to the National Weather Service; the hottest day on record, reaching a blistering 111 degrees, was 22 years ago.

 

Even so, scientists are increasingly finding that, as the climate warms across the globe, heat in urban areas is not distributed equitably. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is joining other agencies this year in mapping the distribution of heat in 14 cities around the country. Urban heat islands, often located in the neighborhoods occupied by lower-income residents and people of color, can be up to 20 degrees hotter than adjacent areas on summer days, researchers already have found.

 

In Austin, Texas, about 80 miles northeast of San Antonio, the University of Texas is using a grant from NOAA’s Climate Office to research the city’s hot spots and strategies for cooling them down.

 

These can include planting more trees, installing vegetation-covered or reflective roofs and canopies, and using “cool” pavement that absorbs more water than concrete or asphalt, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

San Antonio officials said the city had created a campaign known as “Beat the Heat” to offer some temporary relief. Cooling centers are open during the hottest days, and residents are reminded through various media to stay indoors as much as possible, drink plenty of fluids and take frequent cool baths if air-conditioning is not an option.

 

But some residents in the Westside have to take a bus to get to the cooling centers. And with little shade, waiting for a bus can often be an excruciating experience.

 

On a recent day, Amelia Castillo, 67, walked slowly behind her husband, Antonio Castillo, 66, struggling with a walker, to reach a bus stop with no roof along Guadalupe Avenue in the Westside. Mr. Castillo settled onto an old wooden bench and winced as the sun baked his skin. His wife tilted a blue umbrella above their heads.

 

“It feels like the sun is getting hotter every day,” Ms. Castillo said. “And we are still in July.”

 

Minutes later, a bus arrived, and Ms. Castillo shared a surprised smile. “Sometimes we have to wait for 40 to 50 minutes,” she said.

 

Not far from the bus stop, Jessica Vasquez fanned herself with her hands as her three children and their Great Pyrenees puppy Simba took turns sipping warm water from the water fountain at Cassiano Park.

 

The pool at the park was closed, with a sign indicating that it would reopen on Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. “I wish it was open,” Ms. Vasquez said. “That would have been great. I don’t know why they close it during the week when the kids are out of school.”

 

Another pool less than a mile away is open during the week, a city pool worker said.

 

Susana Seguraa

Elpidio Palacios, 56, rolled his wheelchair in her direction. He said he had lost both of his legs years ago when he fell off a train and landed on the tracks. He took a bottle of cold water from Ms. Segura and took a sip. He then showed off a straw hat that Ms. Segura had given him the day before — his version of shade.

 

“If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what I would do in this heat,” Mr. Palacios said. “You can’t outrun the sun.”



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