To support President Trump is to be complicit in the rule of a thin-skinned authoritarian who denigrates the free-speech rights of people who criticize him.
The latest illustration: his weekend outburst against Saturday Night Live, a sketch-comedy show that has regularly poked fun at every American president for 40 years. The most powerful snowflake in America was triggered by Alec Baldwin. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”
Lest there be any doubt about the implications, Trump tweeted in December of 2018 that “A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live,” declaring, “It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?”
Trump’s SNL tweets are of a piece with a larger, disturbing pattern of behavior in which he violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by calling for First Amendment freedoms to be abridged by bureaucrats and legislators; and by calling the press a public enemy and a target of his “drain the swamp” agenda.
For example, he has stated:
“It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write and people should want to look into it.” “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!” “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” “Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!” “Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer - it’s actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News!” “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!”These authoritarian outbursts would justify an article of impeachment. And they ought to embarrass the subset of Trump supporters who purport to value the Constitution and the free-speech principles set forth by America’s Founders.
Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET on February 17, 2019
Think of the stereotypical representations of medicine, as they might appear on a television show: the crisp white coat, of course, and the stethoscope dangling at the ready. Syringes and intravenous lines, maybe. An X-ray or CT scan slammed theatrically into a light box.
But any medical scene is incomplete without an electrocardiogram (EKG) machine running in the background, its jagged line tracing across the screen reassuringly, or alarming to cue a dramatic threat. The EKG is the backbeat of many hospital scenes on television. Important medical things are happening here, it says.
To tap into that potent association, many private medical practices, urgent care clinics, community hospitals, technology companies, and health-care product designers use EKG imagery in their advertising. Most of those images bear little resemblance to actual EKG tracings. The spikes and bumps generated for signs or emblems (like the logo of the daytime talk show The Doctors, for example) mostly amount to arbitrary peaks and valleys. They do not reflect the output of a human heart, healthy or diseased.
[Read: Should your watch monitor your heart?]
But accuracy might be less important than allegory. Like the white coat or the caduceus, the EKG has become talismanic, more valuable for the symbolism it provides than any diagnostic information it can convey. Now that EKGs are making their way into smartwatches, their symbolic purpose could risk overtaking their medical one.
Wearable medical technology promises a new, and better, way to manage personal health. Whether it’s Fitbits counting steps and calories burned, continuous blood glucose monitors aiding insulin dosing for diabetic patients, or Bluetooth earpieces offering round-the-clock heart rate and body temperature tracking, wearable devices sell the promise of the coldly clinical made portably intimate. Continuous EKG monitoring, like that available in the latest Apple Watch, might seem like a small technological leap, putting what was once the sole purview of hospitals and doctor’s offices neatly around a consumer’s wrist.
But continuous EKG monitoring is a little different from other, more discrete medical information. Unlike devices that measure more cleanly numerical metrics—step counts or target heart rates or blood glucose levels—a wearable EKG display doesn’t give the user an easy sense of hitting targets or falling short. Reading an EKG tracing is nuanced and interpretive, more art than math. A Fitbit gives you a number. An EKG paints a picture.
The 12-lead EKG, the gold standard of the diagnostic, measures the flow of current from 12 points on the patient’s body, offering a 360-degree view of the heart’s electrical activity. Its tracing reports the patient’s heart rate, rhythm, and regularity. Because the various parts of the heart produce different shapes of electrical activity owing to their size and muscularity, the EKG can also detect which chambers are beating at what time, and whether these chambers are correctly synced up and beating effectively. The larger a muscle is, the stronger its electrical impulses, so the size of an EKG wave can also indicate if parts of the heart muscle are enlarged or dangerously thickened.
The most urgent diagnostic use of the device determines the presence and location of cardiac damage due to decreased blood flow. Areas of the heart getting less oxygen will show changes in their electrical conduction, and the 12-lead EKG provides real-time information: not just indicating whether a patient is having a heart attack, but also which coronary vessels are most likely blocked. The 12-lead EKG can also detect the location of scarring left behind by prior, sometimes silent heart attacks. An EKG tracing will clearly show an area of dead heart muscle no longer conducting electrical signals. Dead meat don’t beat, as cardiologists put it.
Still, there’s plenty that a snapshot EKG can’t do, including diagnosing intermittent problems with rhythm or changes that only occur with certain activities. An EKG doesn’t capture the shape or function of the heart’s valves, nor can it diagnose precarious plaques in the coronary arteries that could signal heart attacks waiting to happen.
The fewer number of leads an EKG has, the less information it can give you. A one-lead EKG, such as the kind that appears in the latest iteration of the Apple Watch, gives just a single vantage point. For the diagnosis of some cardiac abnormalities, that may be akin to only solving one side of a Rubik’s Cube. A watch endowed with this kind of EKG feature likely won’t have a large public-health impact, despite promotional materials from Apple touting the “momentous achievement” of a wearable “that can provide critical data for doctors and peace of mind for you.” Apple’s not alone, either. Another smartwatch-EKG offering, from Withings, promises “the opportunity to take an ECG anytime and anywhere.”
Withings was unable to be reached for comment, but Apple pointed to a statement from its vice president of health, Dr. Sumbul Desai. Desai contends that features like the EKG “help users have more informed conversations with their physicians.” But evidence does not suggest that taking EKGs for asymptomatic individuals is beneficial. The average wearable user might be even less likely to benefit. A few years ago, the typical Apple Watch owner was a 40-year-old male. That might change over time, but even so, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that only two percent of patients under 65 suffer from atrial fibrillation, the only arrhythmia that the Apple Watch is approved to detect.
[Read: The incredible success of a heart monitor made for the iPhone]
Despite the bluster, these devices aren’t entirely new. “Personal” EKGs have been available for years in the form of thumb-drive-sized, portable monitors whose fingertip sensors can pull a one-lead EKG tracing and sync the recording to a tablet or smartphone. That’s less convenient than a smartwatch, to be sure, but diagnostic utility might not be the most important outcome. By incorporating an EKG into smartwatches and their marketing, Apple and other electronics makers use EKG to brand their watches, in the way that health-care providers use them to establish trust in their clinics, or television shows deploy them to communicate medical professionalism. Even when rendered nonsensically or in bulk, like the sloppy, narrow-range raw data a watch or portable monitor may generate, an EKG feels weighty and complex, standing in for doctors and their expected acumen. Don’t worry, the purveyors of an EKG are communicating, we’ve got this.
The history of the EKG has always pitted cutting-edge medical advances against the placebo of quasi-medical reassurance. The first electrocardiograph was developed in 1901 by Dr. Wilhelm Einthoven, a Dutch cardiologist. Einthoven’s original “string galvanometer,” which weighed approximately 600 pounds, required five skilled operators and a ready supply of water to cool its massive electromagnets. The machine was virtually impossible to use and its readouts equally difficult to interpret, yet it became a near-immediate sensation in the medical world, and Einthoven won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the contribution.
The modern 12-lead EKG is more streamlined, and the future (if the current crop of wearables is any indication) promises further downsizing of the device, with even more potential for unobtrusive integration into daily life. But whether it be room- or wrist-sized, the EKG has always attempted to record the size, shape, and timing of the heart’s intrinsic electrical impulses, giving people the ability to review, track, and potentially intervene on its functions. Put differently, the EKG tries to reframe the heart as a machine that can be monitored and, to some extent, mastered.
[Read: Medical technology makes “time of death” harder to pinpoint]
Shrinking and wearing an EKG is a symptom of technology’s drive to subsume health and wellness, and it renews a belief in humanity’s mastery of the heart, that most important muscle. EKGs might start to seem capable of producing meaning on their own, instead of producing pictures that can be interpreted by medical professionals.
That aligns the continuous, single-lead, wearable EKG with the set designer’s intentions for the symbol. The EKG—especially the 12-lead device—offers real diagnostics, but not nearly as often as its traces convey the symbology of health. As it shrinks, that secondary meaning could become more primary. The wearable EKG offers the comforting weight of medicine itself, worn on the wrist like an amulet warding off evil, whether it ever gets used or not.
Chloe Aridjis is not a novelist who appears to care about plot, so let’s get the story of Sea Monsters, her third book, out of the way. Its protagonist, a moody, Morrissey-loving teenager named Luisa, meets a boy named Tomás and lets him persuade her to run away from home. The two take the bus from Mexico City to Oaxaca, where they camp in a beach town called Zipolite and where Luisa rapidly loses interest in Tomás, replacing him with a silent, mysterious-seeming figure. After a while, her father tracks her down, and she returns to Mexico City.
These events are less plot, in truth, than scaffolding. Sea Monsters derives little energy from what happens to Luisa, or from how she changes during her travels. Instead, it works like a poem, gathering steam through image, repetition, and metaphor. Aridjis deploys set pieces the way a poet might, and seems particularly attracted to performances: peacocking Goths in a nightclub, a man building an elaborate sandcastle, lucha libre fighters soaring through their choreographed moves. She riffs like a poet, too, letting each image twist and grow into the next.
These tendencies aren’t surprising, given Aridjis’s background. Her father, Homero Aridjis, is among Mexico’s most celebrated poets, and the surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington was a family friend. Aridjis curated Carrington’s retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 2015 and writes art criticism in addition to fiction. Her art writing leaks into Sea Monsters, though not as forcefully as it may have into her graduate dissertation, which compared the autobiographies of 19th-century French magicians to the symbolist poets who were their contemporaries. In Sea Monsters, both of those influences are equally clear. Like a magician, Aridjis is obsessed with elusiveness; like a symbolist, she far prefers imagination and metaphor to plain sight.
Aridjis alerts readers to this preference early and often. Sea Monsters begins with Luisa on the beach at Zipolite, contemplating the ancient Greeks, to whom she returns often. She muses that they “created stories out of a simple juxtaposition of natural features … investing rocks and caves with meaning.” Aridjis does this, too. Nature comes alive in her hands. She reserves her fullest imagistic powers for the water: Early in the novel, Luisa watches the surf “write and erase its long ribbon of foam,” and later, in an image I have found impossible to shake from my mind, the waves become “rows of muscular men with interlocking arms that came closer in with each roll.”
Aridjis tends to wear her influences lightly, but she makes an exception for Baudelaire. Before Luisa runs away from home, her French teacher assigns Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. Luisa latches on to “Un voyage à Cythère,” a bleak poem in which Aphrodite’s native island transforms into the deserted site of a hanging. At first, Luisa, wanting an airtight explanation, tries to explain the poem: “The poem’s heart was a carbonized black, and Kythera a somber rocky place where dreams got dashed against its shores.” But her teacher steers her away from that reading: Better, he suggests, to focus on what lies beneath the text. Or as he puts it, better to remember that “events were the mere froth of things, and one’s true interest should be the sea.”
If there is a moment when Aridjis herself appears in Sea Monsters, this is it. From this scene on, she adheres fully to the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s dictum that literature should “evoke little by little an object in order to show a state of soul, or inversely, to choose an object and release from it a state of soul through a series of unravelings … There must always be enigma in poetry, and the goal of literature—there is no other—is to evoke objects.” In Sea Monsters, Aridjis translates this idea effectively from poetry to fiction. As Luisa roams Zipolite, Aridjis invests her full literary powers in sketching the beach around her. She rarely writes about Luisa’s emotions explicitly, but her descriptions slowly guide readers into Luisa’s “state of soul.”
Perhaps the most important descriptions in Sea Monsters are of seashells. When Luisa arrives in Zipolite, she learns that its name might be Zapotec for “‘Lugar de Caracoles,’ place of seashells, an attractive thought since spirals are such neat arrangements of space and time.” Later, she recalls a party in Mexico City with “a large spiral of white powder … [its] whorls so thick it looked like the ghost of an ammonite.” At that party, Luisa achieved a state of happy suspension in time, a state she struggles to summon in Zipolite. As she roams the beach town, hunting for shells and examining crushed toads on the sidewalk, it’s clear that she’s not content. But by only letting Luisa express her unhappiness obliquely, Aridjis evokes dual longings: Maybe Luisa wants time to pass more quickly, or maybe she wishes to no longer care whether time is passing at all.
This duality of meaning squares well with Mallarmé’s disdain for single interpretations. In an 1891 interview with the journalist Jules Huret, the poet claimed that writers who “take the object in its entirety and show it, lack mystery; they take away from readers the delicious joy that arises when they believe that their own minds are creating.” Luisa seems to pursue that same joy, but the narratives she creates are personal. Twice in Sea Monsters, she falls briefly in love with a man, or rather, the idea of a man. First, there’s Tomás, with whom she travels to Zipolite, but once there, he bores her. Then there’s a man she spots at a beachfront bar, “a ring of silence around him,” who she imagines is a merman. When Luisa discovers that he’s a local boat operator named Gustavo, her interest again fizzles out.
This, then, is Sea Monsters’ true arc. A moody, Morrissey-loving teenager named Luisa sees magic everywhere. Repeatedly, the magic dissipates, but she doesn’t mind. Here, we can see the 19th-century magicians’ influence in two ways. A magic trick is meant to elude its viewer, and it isn’t meant to last. One trick should give way to the next, and, later, to a vague but lingering memory of amazement. Luisa views her trip the same way. On her return to Mexico City, she has no regrets, no real desire to talk about her time in Zipolite. She’s happy to let it float away.
As a result, the novel’s satisfactions come not from character growth or plot resolution, but from the evoking of emotion through symbols. As Luisa wanders through Zipolite, she returns to a handful of images: iguanas, breaking waves, shipwrecks, the island of Kythera, an ancient Greek predictive device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Each one shifts in meaning, like the seashells, and tracking their evolving significance pulls readers deep into the novel’s interpretive project. Few novels operate this way, but many poems do. I found that Sea Monsters frequently conjured Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” with its rapt attention to the fish’s real and imagined body. The victory at the poem’s end comes not from catching or keeping the fish, but from having beheld it. Observation and beauty create meaning.
The same holds true for Sea Monsters. Often I wished to watch it, or examine it like a canvas. Sea Monsters would lend itself beautifully to movie adaptation, and yet on film, Aridjis’s gifts of evocation would be lost. A shot of waves could not bring the same pleasure as those “rows of muscular men with interlocking arms.” Hearing the word Kythera is no match for Luisa debating whether she prefers “the cackle of Kythera or the sorceress C of Cythère.” The novel’s strength lies in its ability to turn to the next magic trick, the next detail, the next sight. Those sights are all the more impressive when conjured solely from language. By opting out of fiction’s conventional prioritization of plot or character development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The result is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarmé would be proud.
Technically, Colin Kaepernick withdrew his collusion case. Technically, the NFL did not admit that it conspired to blackball Kaepernick from the league after he began taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. But nontechnically speaking, the NFL lost. Massively.
The terms of the settlement, announced on Friday, were not disclosed. But it doesn’t matter how much money Kaepernick ultimately receives from the NFL; what matters is that he bested a league that has a long history of pummeling its opposition in court, especially players.
In a way, the NFL had no other choice. Last August, arbitrator Stephen Burbank rejected the NFL’s request to have the case dismissed. That meant he believed Kaepernick’s team had compiled enough receipts to present their case. With another hearing reportedly scheduled for next month, did the NFL really want to let Kaepernick’s legal team expose those receipts in court?
Of course not.
Owners and coaches had already given depositions in Kaepernick’s case, and the details that emerged from those proceedings did not look good for the NFL.
For one, the depositions showed just how much league owners were petrified of President Donald Trump, who had loudly criticized the player protests. According to The Wall Street Journal, Jerry Jones, who owns the Dallas Cowboys, testified in a deposition that the president had told him in a phone conversation, “This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” and “Tell everybody you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”
Trump felt that public sentiment was on his side when it came to the player protests, and was warning that he would not back off. That conversation with Jones, and separate ones with the Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and the New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, suggested that the league was allowing their fear of Trump to influence how it dealt with Kaepernick and the other protesters.
Had Kaepernick’s case gone further, there was no question that more sensitive and damaging information would have come out. Who knows what was said about Kaepernick or other players in texts and emails. Even if Kaepernick had lost the case, the NFL would have been left with a significant mess.
Some are already criticizing Kaepernick for settling, not realizing how rare it is to see the NFL backed into a corner, especially by a player. Tom Brady, arguably the greatest quarterback ever, couldn’t beat the NFL in court. Even he eventually had to accept his four-game suspension for Deflategate in 2016.
[Read: How Trump turned Kaepernick’s protest into a success]
That Kaepernick was the one to make the NFL eat crow is a special kind of karma. This is just punishment because the league incompetently handled the player protests, starting with Kaepernick’s, from the beginning. Had the league not been so heavy-handed in policing the protests, this issue likely would have abated sooner. Had the league ignored Trump instead of cowering to his bullying, appeasing Trump wouldn’t have become a priority. Had one league owner had the guts to sign Kaepernick, this collusion case would have been a nonstarter.
But too often the NFL has shown an embarrassing commitment to being on the wrong side of history for the sake of profits. The league settled a $1 billion class-action concussion lawsuit brought by former players, but in the process, the NFL wasted a lot of time looking absolutely foolish denying its culpability. And regardless of the money it spent trying to make the issue go away, concussions and head trauma still haven’t disappeared from the public consciousness.
I still doubt that Kaepernick will ever play in the NFL again, but the point of suing the NFL wasn’t necessarily about resuming his football career. It was about holding the league accountable for something that was entirely preventable.
Though this legal battle with Kaepernick has been resolved, he isn’t going away either. The league will forever have to live with the fact that it was complicit in destroying someone’s career simply because he wished to bring attention to the injustices suffered by his people. If owners and Roger Goodell believe that they no longer will have to face questions about why Kaepernick isn’t in the league, they’re wrong. No matter what an arbitrator rules, how the NFL treated Kaepernick will always be the mistake they can never amend.
There is no toxin more pernicious than hatred based on racial stereotypes. Despite progress in overcoming the sin of racism in recent years, racism still exists in American society—causing pain and hurt, and even leading to death. As a case in point, Keith Tharpe sits on death row in Jackson, Georgia, convicted of a gruesome murder 28 years ago. While we cannot speak to the legal issues of this case, it is apparent that racism may have played a part in Tharpe’s death sentence. After the trial, one of the jurors displayed shocking racial prejudice in an affidavit, liberally using racial slurs as he “wondered if black people even have souls.”
Lower courts have been unwilling to reconsider the verdict, but the case is now before the United States Supreme Court, which could grant a writ of certiorari to consider the merits of Tharpe’s contention of racial bias. The failure to thoroughly consider the effect of racism in jury deliberations could lead to Tharpe’s execution. We therefore join with many others in asking the Supreme Court to consider this case and the effects of an admittedly racist juror.
Progress against racism in society cannot obscure the fundamental problems with our system of justice if racism infests the application of criminal laws. The Catholic bishops of the United States recently issued a pastoral letter against racism titled “Open Wide Our Hearts—The Enduring Call to Love,” which acknowledged the history of racism in the United States and reaffirmed our commitment to its eradication. We believe that part of our work as religious leaders is to challenge racism by reminding the public that we are all brothers and sisters, equally made in the image of God. As we noted in our letter, racism is a failure to acknowledge the human dignity of all people.
Whenever personal prejudices surface in a trial, society relies on appellate courts and especially the Supreme Court to rectify these biases. We thus exhort the Supreme Court to take up Tharpe’s case and correct the clear, documented racism in the case by granting him a new sentencing hearing.
As bishops, we take very seriously Jesus’s call to visit those in prison. We have visited prisoners, including those on death row. In most parishes with prisons or jails, a priest or deacon visits every week to offer religious services. We have been blessed to witness true rehabilitation and meet prisoners who earnestly seek redemption through God’s grace.
It’s not just the stain of racism that leads us to oppose Tharpe’s execution. The Catholic Church teaches that in the light of the Gospel, “the death penalty is inadmissible,” a teaching that has been reinforced most recently by Pope Francis. Indeed, the death penalty violates human dignity even if the convicted individual has committed a terrible crime.
Jesus called his followers to console those who mourn. While seeking consideration and mercy for Tharpe, we also pray for the family of Jacquelyn Freeman, who died at Tharpe’s hand.
In our pastoral letter, we explain that racism comes in many forms—and one of them is the sin of omission. This occurs when individuals, communities, and even churches remain silent and fail to act against racial injustice when it is encountered. To do justice requires an honest acknowledgment of our failures and the restoring of right relationships among us. That’s why we are speaking out about Tharpe’s case. The U.S. Supreme Court must intervene in his case to ensure that fairness is protected and justice is defended—before it’s too late. To do nothing would be tragic not only for Tharpe, but for our collective dignity.
No último 8 de agosto, o operário Luís Fernando Pereira, de 38 anos, morreu ao inalar gás durante um serviço de rotina numa tubulação da siderúrgica Usiminas, em Ipatinga, no interior de Minas Gerais. Dois dias depois, um dos quatro gasômetros da empresa explodiu.
A destruição do reservatório de gás fez a terra tremer em 1.86 na Escala Richter, hospitalizou 34 funcionários, quebrou as vidraças da Câmara Municipal e deixou uma população de mais de 250 mil habitantes em pânico – a fábrica da siderúrgica fica no centro do município.
“Foi na hora do almoço de uma sexta-feira, as vésperas do Dia dos Pais. O comércio estava lotado. As ruas cheias. De repente aquele estrondo enorme. Nem as autoridades sabiam como proceder. Foi um caos”, lembra Geraldo Magela, presidente do Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos da cidade.
Controlada pelo grupo Usiminas, maior produtor de aços laminados planos da América Latina, a atividade da siderúrgica na região é marcada por problemas trabalhistas e ambientais. Além de poluir o ar da cidade e contaminar o lençol freático de alguns bairros situados ao seu entorno, a usina passou a ser palco recorrente de graves acidentes nos últimos meses – boa parte deles escondidos pela empresa.
Segundo levantamento feito pelo Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos através dos Comunicados de Acidente de Trabalho – registro que a empresa precisa enviar obrigatoriamente ao sindicato e ao Ministério Público do Trabalho por conta de um acordo coletivo com a categoria –, ano passado 42 operários se acidentaram dentro do chão de fábrica da usina. O número desconsidera as 34 vítimas hospitalizadas após a explosão do gasômetro e também o trabalhador que terminou morto ao tentar fugir.
“A Usiminas alega que não houve lesão aos trabalhadores. Dá para acreditar nisso?”, diz Bruno de Almeida Pedersoli, médico do trabalho que assiste o sindicato. “Acidente com metalúrgico sempre acontece e quase nunca é noticiado. A empresa esconde mesmo. A novidade após a explosão do gasômetro é que o mundo passou a ter noção do perigo de se trabalhar lá dentro. A sensação de medo não é mais exclusividade dos trabalhadores”, completa Magela.
Em Ipatinga, a Usiminas tem 13 mil funcionários – 7 mil contratados e cerca de 6 mil terceirizados, segundo o Ministério Público do Trabalho – e é a maior empregadora da cidade. Para se ter uma ideia da influência da empresa na região, até o prefeito de Ipatinga, o emedebista Nardyello Rocha, é ex-funcionário da siderúrgica. A assessoria da empresa não respondeu ao Intercept sobre o número de acidentes ocorridos em 2018.
O tanque destruído na explosão de agosto continha uma mistura de gases LDG, abreviatura de Linz Donawitz Gás, utilizada na produção do aço. Trata-se de um material composto por monóxido de carbono, dióxido de carbono, nitrogênio, hidrogênio e oxigênio. É inodoro e incolor e também inflamável e altamente tóxico. A sorte, diz Magela, é que o gasômetro estava praticamente vazio. “Caso contrário, Ipatinga inteira teria ido pelos ares.”
Três dias depois da explosão, o eletricista Ricardo Alves, de 36 anos, teve um dos braços amputados no hospital após prender parte de seu corpo em uma máquina ainda ligada. Questionada pela imprensa regional à época, a Usiminas não explicou a causa da morte do operário Luís Fernando e tampouco o episódio que envolveu o eletricista. A justificativa para a explosão do gasômetro veio apenas quatro meses depois, no final de novembro. O relatório apresentado pela siderúrgica aponta que o acidente se deu por falha técnica no maquinário. Desde então, ninguém foi responsabilizado criminalmente pelo acidente, e os Ministérios Públicos de Minas Gerais e do Trabalho informaram que continuam a investigar os três casos.
A empresa é a maior empregadora de Ipatinga – e até o prefeito é ex-funcionário da siderúrgica.
Foto: Nilmar Lage
O procurador do Ministério Público do Trabalho Adolfo Jacob conta que o ministério tomou conhecimento sobre a morte de um trabalhador, ocorrida em 2016, apenas no início de 2018. E por acaso. “Eu atuava em uma reclamação trabalhista em que a viúva e os filhos do trabalhador morto processavam a siderúrgica. Foi aí que soube do caso”, lembra. Reginaldo José da Silva, que trabalhava como técnico de Energia e Utilidades em uma empresa terceirizada que atende a Usiminas, recebeu uma descarga elétrica de 3 mil kW numa subestação de energia da empresa. A suspeita é de que o acidente ocorreu por manutenção inadequada.
Outro episódio descoberto de forma não oficial pelos procuradores foi um vazamento, também em 2016. Cinco funcionários de uma empresa terceirizada ficaram intoxicados e foram hospitalizados depois de inalarem gás tóxico que vazou para o sistema que deveria filtrar o ar no topo de um dos fornos da usina. Assim como na explosão do reservatório de gás em agosto, os comunicados de acidente do trabalho não foram encaminhados ao sindicato.
Jacob, no entanto, não soube precisar com exatidão o número de ocorrências registradas nos últimos anos. “A imprensa não publica nada, e a Usiminas só se manifesta depois que o inquérito é formalmente instaurado. Por força de lei, a usina deveria informar todo e qualquer acidente. Não é o que acontece”, diz.
‘Gostaria que a empresa se tornasse mais humana.’
Diante da omissão, uma das ferramentas utilizadas pelo procurador para descobrir ocorrências tem sido a internet. “Muitas situações são denunciadas pelos trabalhadores por meio das redes sociais. Isso passou a nos ajudar para que tenhamos noção da realidade lá de dentro.”
O Intercept teve acesso a inúmeros vídeos feitos por funcionários da Usiminas e a boletins informativos publicados pelo sindicato que assiste à categoria. A maior parte desse material revela as condições precárias de trabalho impostas aos operários. Acúmulo de função, assédio moral de supervisores, galpões fechados sem o devido sistema de ar-condicionado, maquinário velho, vazamento de gases, entre outras situações até então ignoradas pela maior parte da sociedade que vive do lado de fora da usina.
“Gostaria que a empresa se tornasse mais humana. Que não se preocupasse com o trabalhador somente após a sua morte”, disse uma viúva de um operário, que pediu anonimato.
Questionamos a Usiminas sobre o plano de evacuação e o prazo para que seja colocado em prática, as denúncias dos funcionários referentes à más condições de trabalho, o número de acidentes e as declarações tanto do sindicato quanto do MPT de que a empresa costuma esconder essas ocorrências – entre elas, a morte de Reginaldo. A empresa se limitou a responder que toda a sua atuação “segue rigorosamente a legislação brasileira em vigor, as normas específicas aplicáveis à siderurgia e os compromissos firmados com os órgãos competentes”.
Em dezembro, novo susto. Uma das máquinas que transportam materiais dentro da usina pegou fogo.
Foto: Nilmar Lage
A direção da Usiminas admitiu, 18 dias após a explosão do tanque em agosto, a possibilidade de apresentar um plano emergencial de evacuação para toda a cidade, iniciativa até então inédita no município. Entretanto, passados mais de seis meses do anúncio, nada foi compartilhado até o momento.
No dia 15 de dezembro, mais um acidente. Uma das máquinas que transportam materiais dentro da usina pegou fogo por volta das 14h30. O equipamento incendiado ficava a menos de 300 metros da prefeitura, da câmara municipal e de um dos maiores supermercados da cidade. Não precisou de muito tempo para que a combustão da borracha existente na máquina formasse uma espessa nuvem preta visível a quilômetros de distância.
“Quando vimos aquele volume de fumaça subindo o céu já ficamos desesperados. Estava pegando fogo dentro da Usiminas, outra vez. Devemos nos acostumar com isso?”, lembra o empresário Diego Andrade. “A sensação é que a qualquer hora algo muito ruim vai acontecer. E isso aumenta diante de acidentes que parecem ocorrer cada vez com maior frequência. Eu sinto medo de viver aqui”, diz o locutor Bruno Gonçalves, funcionário de uma loja de roupas próxima ao parque industrial da siderúrgica, no centro de Ipatinga.
Foto: Nilmar Lage
Além dos acidentes, a população de Ipatinga também reclama da poluição do ar e da água. Em 2010, a empresa foi obrigada por um Termo de Ajustamento de Conduta com o Ministério Público mineiro a instalar quatro painéis eletrônicos em diferentes pontos do município depois que uma investigação mostrou indícios de contaminação do ar da cidade. O objetivo era tornar público à população informações sobre o monitoramento da qualidade do ar local em tempo real.
A assessoria de comunicação da Usiminas negou o acesso aos dados do monitoramento e afirmou, sem apresentar nenhum dado, que não há risco de contaminação por gases tóxicos na cidade. O Intercept pediu informações relacionadas à qualidade do ar da cidade à prefeitura, à câmara municipal e ao MP mineiro. Nenhum dos três apresentou quaisquer dados que comprovem o devido monitoramento do ar. O prefeito Rocha sequer retornou as solicitações encaminhadas por email à sua assessoria de comunicação reiteradas vezes.
A Usiminas foi obrigada pelo MP a instalar quatro medidores de qualidade do ar pela cidade.
Foto: Nilmar Lage
Em vistoria feita pela secretaria após a explosão do gasômetro, o órgão afirmou que não houve alteração na qualidade do ar no município. “Os dados meteorológicos indicaram que no momento e após o acidente as condições de dispersão dos gases na atmosfera estavam favoráveis”, informou o representante do governo ao site G1 no dia 12 de agosto.
Entretanto, o Intercept teve acesso a um documento apresentado pela Usiminas ao Ministério Público em que justifica a indisponibilidade de dados referente ao monitoramento de poluentes no período de 1 de junho a 16 de agosto do ano passado.
No próprio site da Secretaria de Estado de Meio Ambiente de Minas Gerais, o último boletim sobre a qualidade do ar de Ipatinga publicado é de 2015. O relatório não especifica o mês em que o levantamento teria sido feito e tampouco o resultado da análise.
Não que os moradores da cidade confiem na versão da empresa. “Eu nunca vi um painel apontar qualidade ‘ruim’. É sempre ‘boa’”, diz Marcelo Antunes Dias, que reside no bairro Cariru, um dos pontos que deveriam ser monitorados conforme os termos acordo.
A dúvida é reforçada pela fumaça densa que sai das chaminés da indústria todos os dias. “Pela manhã, a poeira preta predomina no chão das casas. A Usiminas polui e quem vive aqui sabe disso”, diz Andrade, que costuma filmar a fumaça e a sujeira que ela causa e postar em suas redes sociais.
“A Usiminas veio aqui e disse de um dia para o outro que teríamos de lacrar nosso poço. Para compensar o prejuízo, ela paga nossas contas de água”, contou a aposentada Maria Barbosa.
Foto: Nilmar Lage
Também em 2010, a Usiminas foi obrigada a fazer outro Termo de Ajuste de Conduta com o MP, dessa vez devido a presença de substâncias tóxicas no lençol freático de bairros próximos à usina. A empresa deveria, segundo o acordo, realizar ações de despoluição da água – o que não ocorreu.
O bairro Vila Ipanema teve parte de seu lençol freático comprometido pela siderúrgica. Poluída por benzeno e naftaleno, substâncias fortemente cancerígenas, a água utilizada para alimentar poços artesianos da comunidade está proibida de ser consumida há dez anos. “A Usiminas veio aqui e disse de um dia para o outro que teríamos de lacrar nosso poço. Para compensar o prejuízo, ela paga nossas contas de água”, contou a aposentada Maria Barbosa.
Todos os poços da região foram fechados. “Foi um cala boca que a Usiminas deu para abafar a situação e que a maioria das pessoas aceitou sem questionar. Não existe diálogo por parte da empresa e a cidade segue sendo prejudicada. Precisamos de ajuda”, diz o sindicalista Arildo Ferreira, funcionário da Usiminas há 31 anos.
The post A explosão não foi a única tragédia da Usiminas. Empresa escondeu até morte de funcionário em Ipatinga. appeared first on The Intercept.
Last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., ignited a controversy by tweeting a song lyric implying that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the flagship Israel lobby group in the U.S., leveraged the financial means at its disposal to enforce Washington orthodoxies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Republicans quickly piled on, denouncing Omar as an anti-Semite. Almost as quickly, Democratic leaders in both chambers swiftly issued statements saying that Omar’s tweets — though not the member of Congress herself — were anti-Jewish.
In a tweet Monday afternoon, Omar apologized for offending constituents. But amid a political landscape where progressives are increasingly critical of money in politics and human rights abuses, Omar also doubled down on the substance of her initial salvos. “I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry,” she wrote. “It’s gone on too long and we must be willing to address it.”
Lurking behind the weeklong Omar controversy is a rapidly shifting battlefield over Israel inside the Democratic Party.The reception to Omar’s tweets and her subsequent apology may be viewed as a cautionary tale for those who wish to see a more progressive policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the mere discussion of Israel lobby groups’ influence, the cash behind those efforts, and Palestinian human rights can also be seen as something of a step forward.
Meanwhile, lurking behind the weeklong controversy is a rapidly shifting battlefield over Israel inside the Democratic Party.
Omar has not been alone at the center of recent firestorms over the politics of the Mideast conflict: Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American freshman from Michigan, has also faced backlash for purported anti-Semitism. Underlying the accusations against the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress, however, is the fight over the growing movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its human rights abuses, which is known as BDS. Omar and Tlaib find themselves at the vanguard of these public scuffles not least because they are the first and only members of Congress to publicly support the BDS movement.
There are signs for pro-Palestinian activists to take heart. Omar’s and Tlaib’s strong stances reflect progressive voters’ desires for a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they certainly aren’t the only politicians paying attention. Democrats seem to be drifting left on the Mideast conflict, even some powerful figures in the party — including contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Just last month, several 2020 presidential contenders broke with Democratic Party leadership in an attempt to thwart a major legislative priority for AIPAC: passing a law that attacks the BDS movement.
Twenty-six states across the country have taken up a some form of anti-boycott law to insulate Israel from criticism, part of a broader Israel lobby effort focused squarely on combating the BDS movement. Some of the measures have been pilloried for restricting free speech, but many have passed without issue. Such anti-boycott bills have also made an appearance on the national stage — frequently with strong AIPAC backing. And yet hesitance to support the measures within the Democratic Party has sometimes squashed such efforts — as with a congressional effort to impose criminal penalties for those who engaged in boycotts.
When another anti-boycott law came up in the new Senate — the upper chamber’s very first bill — liberal opposition was not enough to squash it. The bill, known as S.1, gave Congress’s blessing to state- and local-level BDS bans.
Almost every major announced or potential Democratic presidential candidate voted against the AIPAC bill.The bill passed with an overwhelming vote — but a curious thing happened on the way: Almost every major announced or potential Democratic presidential candidate voted against it. Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown all voted no, with only Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a longshot candidate, casting an “aye” vote.
Some of these 2020 hopefuls’ positions constituted reversals of a sort. In the cases of Booker and Gillibrand, both had been previous sponsors of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would have criminalized certain forms of participation in BDS, making their departures on this softened measure noteworthy. Gillibrand abandoned her support of the 2017 bill after public outrage at its free-speech implications, particularly with the American Civil Liberties Union declaring the bill unconstitutional.
Explaining his vote against S.1, Booker threaded the needle. He told The Intercept that he opposed the bill because of free speech concerns but suggested that he still supported the larger anti-boycott bill that he previously co-sponsored.
“I have a strong and lengthy record of opposing efforts to boycott Israel, as evidenced by my co-sponsorship of S. 720, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act,” Booker said in the statement. “I drafted an amendment to help address these widely held concerns, but there was no amendment process offered to allow for this bill to be improved. There are ways to combat BDS without compromising free speech, and this bill as it currently stands plainly misses the mark.”
Booker is still planning to find other ways to combat BDS, his spokesperson told The Intercept, but S.1 wouldn’t be one of them.
Though S.1 contained many provisions apart from the anti-BDS language, activists working for civil and human rights in Israel and Palestine say the reversal from Booker — who has staunchly opposed the BDS movement – was undoubtedly influenced by that portion of the measure. The change, the activists said, signals a broader attempt among Democratic presidential hopefuls to position themselves on BDS in a way that won’t alienate the leftward-shifting base in the run-up to 2020.
“As a recently announced presidential candidate, Sen. Booker’s recent vote appears to be designed to appeal to the base of the Democratic Party, a majority of whom support sanctioning Israel to end its colonization of Palestinian land,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “Sen. Booker’s vote against debating a bill that would encourage states to punish individuals who boycott for Palestinian rights is an indication that his position on this issue is evolving for the better.”
Ruebner also pointed to the other 2020 hopefuls who voted against the new anti-boycott bill amid the long run-up to the Democratic primaries next year. Other activists saw the same dynamics at play.
“We’re seeing progressives in this country steadily uniting behind a shared platform of human rights, freedom, and equality for Palestinians,” Michael Deheeger, a congressional organizer with the Jewish Voice for Peace, said in a statement to The Intercept. “And the fact that 21 Democratic senators supported our right to boycott by voting against S.1 shows that they see this shift too.”
A corollary to the rise of BDS has been efforts by pro-Israel figures — including elites in the Democratic Party — to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Israel at all. This was the storm that Omar stepped into.
The tack was laid out by Israel lobbyists when an undercover Al Jazeera reporter infiltrated several right-wing pro-Israel groups for a documentary that was never aired, but leaked nonetheless. In one of the clips in the documentary, Kenneth Marcus, then the head of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law but now a Trump administration appointee, told Al Jazeera about plans to link allegations of “anti-Israel politics” with anti-Semitism. “What you’ve got to show: that they’re not the same, but they’re not entirely different either,” said Marcus, who has been a vocal critic of BDS movements across the country.
Initiatives pushed by Israel lobby groups that blur the line between criticisms of Israel and anti-Semitism have sometimes been championed by Democrats.Initiatives pushed by Israel lobby groups that blur the line between criticisms of Israel and anti-Semitism have sometimes been championed by Democrats — including those gearing up for a 2020 run. The most notable arena has been the U.N.
In 2017, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, Brown, and Klobuchar joined every sitting senator in signing a letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres claiming that the world body has an anti-Israel bias. The letter implored the U.N. to “improve its treatment” of Israel and “eliminate anti-Semitism in all its forms.” The same year, Klobuchar, Booker, Harris, Brown, and Gillibrand joined 73 other senators in co-sponsoring a congressional measure objecting to a late 2016 U.N. Security Council resolution deeming Israeli settlements illegal and calling for their end. Israeli settlements are in fact considered illegitimate under international law and according to longstanding U.S. policy.
In the two years since, several of these 2020 hopefuls have taken stands against lines pushed by Israel lobby groups. Sanders, who says he does not support BDS, sent a letter, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, urging Senate leadership to keep the anti-boycott measure out of the year-end appropriations bill.
Compared to other Democratic presidential contenders, Warren has made perhaps the most drastic changes in her stances on Israel in recent years. In 2014, at a local town hall, the senator defended her vote — along with Booker, Gillibrand, Brown, and Klobuchar — to approve a 2013 bill that sent $220 million in military support to Israel for its Iron Dome weapons system. Sanders voted against that measure.
“America has a very special relationship with Israel,” Warren said at the town hall, in remarks that closely hewed to pro-Israel groups’ talking points. “Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren’t many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law. And we very much need an ally in that part of the world.”
Along with Gillibrand, Booker, Brown, and Klobuchar, Warren also joined 76 senators co-sponsoring another measure reaffirming a “strategic partnership” with Israel that same year.
Soon after, however, Warren began to pivot. In 2017, she joined Sanders and eight Democratic senators in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging his government not to proceed with demolishing and forcibly evicting Palestinian communities from the villages of Susiya and Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank. Last year, she signed a letter with Sanders and Brown asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “do more to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.” Last May, she spoke out against Israeli attacks that killed more than 60 Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip, joining Sanders in calling for the Israeli government to respect their right to protest.
Not all the 2020 hopefuls have made such drastic changes. After the killings in Gaza, demonstrators assembled outside Harris’s Los Angeles office and Booker’s Newark office, asking them to condemn the violence. Harris’s and Booker’s offices offered to have meetings with the protesters. After one such meeting in Booker’s office, the senator merely released a statement stating that the senator and his colleagues “believe deeply in the democratic process and folks speaking up on the issues that matter to them.” No condemnation of the killings came.
AIPAC’s role looms large in the Democratic Party shifts. There was a time when any serious political contender would make it a priority to appear before the influential Israel lobby group’s annual summit. Harris gave a formal address to AIPAC in 2017, and both Booker and Gillibrand have spoken at the group’s conferences in the past. Sanders was slated to speak at the group’s 2016 conference, but skipped it, citing his travel schedule. Last year, however, Klobuchar was the only major Democratic 2020 contender who spoke at the AIPAC confab.
The once tight-knit relationship between Democrats and AIPAC saw its first major rifts open up with the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. AIPAC worked tirelessly to kill the deal, spending millions of dollars. But it was a major achievement for a Democratic president, Barack Obama, and so almost every single Democrat backed it. Notably, among the Democratic dissenters in the Senate — Sens. Chuck Schumer, Bob Menendez, Ben Cardin, and Joe Manchin — are figures who hold powerful positions in the party’s caucus and constitute some of the closest Democrats to AIPAC.
The Iran deal vote signaled that AIPAC was losing it bipartisan grip on Capitol Hill Democrats. The threat of political backlash was no longer enough.
The Democrats who voted with the deal were in tune with public opinion, which largely supported the Iran deal. But those party elites who opposed the deal had to catch up. And some have: Schumer, four years later, has since opposed President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement.
Schumer’s tale is instructive. Even as some Democrats step away from AIPAC in order not to transgress the progressive base ahead of the 2020 primaries, they must contend with a reticent and virulently pro-Israel party leadership.
“I think there is some disagreement over the BDS because of the free speech issue. But I reject it, I don’t find that a compelling argument at all.”Take the unfolding fight over BDS, where Schumer has supported AIPAC’s positions on S.1. and other bills. Likewise, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chair of the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, is staunchly against BDS and supports anti-boycott measures over the First Amendment objections.
“I think BDS is a horrific thing,” Engel told The Intercept. “I think you have to look at some of these issues not politically. You have to look at what’s right and what’s wrong.” Engel rejected the idea that pro-Israel politics were no longer a guarantee in Congress and said he thought there was “clearly” still a pro-Israel majority among both parties in the House. “I think there is some disagreement over the BDS because of the free speech issue,” he said. “But I reject it, I don’t find that a compelling argument at all.”
With Israel’s body politic shifting to the right, so too have Israel lobby groups — and with them the staunchest of pro-Israel Democrats. Yet the Democratic Party as a whole seems to be moving to the left.
The Democratic Party’s shift might best be embodied in the rise of politicians like Omar, Tlaib, and New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They ran on reimagining of the political process, lifting even the most radical voices of their constituents, and beating mainstream predictions that they couldn’t win. They’ve attracted an energetic following owing to their unapologetically progressive positions — something 2020 contenders are surely heeding as they move into presidential campaign mode.
Consider the way Harris has come around on criminal justice reform. Known as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who ran to unseat a progressive district attorney, she’s been criticized for policies that unfairly delayed justice and threatened to hit poor communities of color the hardest. Later, though, Harris pivoted to a “smart on crime” approach, joining the public push for a humane and restorative approach to justice reform. In addition to warming up to broader criminal justice reform, she’s since lightened up on marijuana, too. Originally opposed to legalizing recreational pot, she joked last week on a radio show about smoking during college.
Moves like Harris’s will be necessary for all the 2020 contenders if they want to capture the energy around the new crop of freshmen members who don’t hesitate to buck the conventional wisdom in Washington. It will be tough for more establishment-oriented politicians to keep up. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the principled stances of the new progressive Democrats might eventually clash with the cautious political opportunism of some of the 2020 candidates.
The post Ilhan Omar, AIPAC, and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Contenders appeared first on The Intercept.
The most obvious thing about the Supreme Court’s decision to stay a Louisiana law that would have shuttered two of the state’s three remaining abortion clinics is that it was Chief Justice John Roberts who stopped that from happening. Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal justices to deliver a 5-4 majority that maintains the status quo, for now, and keeps the clinics open.
What is perhaps less obvious, at least at first glance, is the level of intellectual dishonesty baked into a four-page dissent penned by the court’s newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh voted along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch to deny the stay, but was the only justice to try to explain his thinking in writing. If he wanted to maintain the fidelity-to-precedent fiction he peddled at his confirmation hearings, it probably would have been better if he had stayed silent. The document is a mess of omissions and misrepresentations dressed up to appear anodyne.
At issue is a 2014 state law that would require abortion doctors in Louisiana to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinics where they work. It is identical in substance to a law passed in Texas a year earlier, a law that was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2016. There, the high court found that there was a “virtual absence” of any health benefit conferred by the law and that it amounted to an undue burden on abortion access. It was yet another reiteration of four decades of the court’s precedent upholding women’s reproductive right of choice.
The Kavanaugh dissent is a mess of omissions and misrepresentations dressed up to appear anodyne.Nonetheless, the admitting privileges requirement remains a favorite among lawmakers bent on curbing access to abortion who claim it protects women’s health. But admitting privileges are a bureaucratic matter. They are not standardized, and a doctor can be rejected for pretty much any reason. Only one of the abortion doctors in Louisiana has admitting privileges. The others have tried repeatedly and have been rebuffed. One of the doctors sought privileges and was rejected by every hospital within 30 miles of the clinic in Shreveport. If the law were to take effect, that clinic and doctor would be unable to continue providing care. Two other doctors in the state were rejected precisely because they are abortionists.
The law has been tied up in litigation since its passage, and in January 2016 a district court judge issued a detailed, 112-page ruling blocking it from taking effect. The state appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — the same court that upheld the legality of Texas’s law before its error was corrected by the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, last fall a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit overturned the lower court’s ruling, engaging in serious mental gymnastics in order to conclude that women in Louisiana would not be burdened by the law’s impact. In fact, the panel majority suggested that the doctors had simply not tried hard enough to secure privileges — even though the evidence in the record is entirely to the contrary.
The Center for Reproductive Rights sought to have the entire court reconsider the panel’s ruling, but the court declined, teeing the case up for the Supreme Court. It is the first direct challenge to abortion rights to make it all the way to the reconstituted court, and the conventional wisdom is that the justices will consider the merits of the case during their next term, which begins in October.
The Kavanaugh “Compromise”In the main, Kavanaugh proposes what sounds like a compromise. The court should deny the stay and allow Louisiana’s admitting privileges law to take effect. He notes that the state says it will take 45 days to implement the new law, giving the doctors a bit of extra time to secure privileges. If they can’t and the clinics close, then CRR could file a new legal challenge in district court — effectively starting back at square one.
There are a lot of things wrong with this scheme and its premise and I’ll get to that, but first it is worth noting that this is precisely the kind of alleged compromise that Kavanaugh suggested in his dissent in Garza v. Hargan, which involved the government’s efforts to block a 17-year-old migrant in its custody from getting an abortion. The teen, who was detained at a private shelter in Texas, had already obtained a judicial bypass — meaning that she could access care without a parent or guardian’s permission — but the government refused to allow her to go to a clinic. Instead, they forced her into counseling at a crisis pregnancy center. The American Civil Liberties Union sued on her behalf and won in the D.C. Circuit Court, prompting Kavanaugh’s dissent. There he suggested that the government should have more time to find the teen an immigration sponsor. That way, the government wouldn’t have to be involved in directly facilitating the abortion, and the teen would be in a position to get counseling from her adult sponsor before having the procedure. If the government couldn’t find a sponsor, the girl could again ask the court to intervene.
This was a disingenuous and ridiculous proposal. For starters, the government had already been trying to find the teen a sponsor and hadn’t been able to, so there was no reason to think that one would suddenly appear — and in the process, they had been blocking her access to abortion for more than a month. She’d already gone through judicial bypass, which isn’t exactly easy: During the process, a judge determines whether the teen is mature enough to make the decision on her own and often tests her resolve. The judge granted her request, so there was also no reason to think that she was suddenly going to change her mind after talking things over with one more random adult.
In essence, then, what Kavanaugh was selling as a procedural compromise was really nothing more than a solution that would give the state license to do as it pleased by placing additional unnecessary and unconstitutional barriers in front of a woman seeking abortion. With his opinion in the Louisiana case, he is offering the same sort of solution — and misrepresents or conveniently omits important facts of the case to do so.
In his supposed compromise in the Louisiana case — known as June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee — Kavanaugh leans heavily on the idea that there’s no immediate harm or foul because the state of Louisiana says that it will not be enforcing the law for 45 days after it takes effect. Meaning that in the interim, he writes, the abortion doctors could continue to provide care while also chasing admitting privileges. This is just wrong. The alleged 45-day ramp-up is a fiction. It wasn’t until just before the state’s lawyers filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing against the stay that the state posted a notice to the health department’s website outlining how it would go about verifying admitting privileges for purposes of enforcing the law. So the 45-day waiting period never existed until the state was readying to argue that no harm would come to anyone by allowing the law to take effect.
Despite the state’s protestations to the contrary, there is evidence in the record that Louisiana lawmakers proposed the regulation not to improve patient safety, but solely to close abortion clinics.Instead of seeing this for what it was — a brazen misdirect — Kavanaugh blithely adopted the fiction. And even though Kavanaugh asserts that Louisiana has said that during this interim period the doctors, “could lawfully continue to perform abortions,” there is nothing to suggest this is the case. The law itself contains both civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance, and nothing in the state’s health department notice changes this. Moreover, enforcement of the criminal portion of the statute lies with prosecutors, not the health department, so even if there was some sort of administrative interim period that doesn’t necessarily constrain any particular prosecutor from taking action.
Kavanaugh also doubles down on this notion that the doctors just need to try harder to obtain admitting privileges and that the 45-day reprieve will give them the opportunity to do so. This is insulting and adopts the 5th Circuit’s revisionist history of the case.
In its 2016 opinion blocking Louisiana’s law, the district court made detailed findings on this point — findings that the 5th Circuit’s 2-1 panel majority all but ignored. In fact, the panel leaned heavily on the idea that the doctors were to blame for not receiving privileges. Louisiana has run with this idea — writing in its brief to the Supreme Court that it shouldn’t be penalized “from the independent decisions of doctors not to seek in good faith to comply with the law” — and Kavanaugh has, again, simply adopted this reasoning: Allowing the law to take effect, he wrote, would allow time for the doctors to put forth “good-faith efforts” to comply.
All of this ignores the fact that Louisiana’s law was passed in 2014. The doctors have been trying to obtain privileges for more than four years. One was flat-out denied by every single hospital; two were denied because they provide abortions. There is no timeline for a hospital to make a determination on privileges, and some of the Louisiana doctors have had their applications pending for years, which amount to de facto denials.
And despite the state’s protestations to the contrary, there is evidence in the record that Louisiana lawmakers proposed the regulation not to improve patient safety, but solely to close abortion clinics. In its opinion, the district court pointed out that the state health department, anti-abortion advocacy groups, and the law’s primary sponsor, Rep. Katrina Jackson, undertook a coordinated effort to restrict abortion access in the state. In fact, in an email exchange, the vice president of an anti-abortion advocacy group wrote to Jackson to laud the law and point out that in Texas, the statute had “tremendous success in closing abortion clinics.”
The Case of the Missing DoeAnd then there’s the matter of the Missing Doe. In his dissent, Kavanaugh essentially argues that all that’s at issue here is whether three Louisiana abortion doctors — designated as Doe 2, Doe 5, and Doe 6 — can obtain privileges. He notes that one doctor in the state already has privileges (without acknowledging that this is so only because the doctor has a private ob/gyn practice through which he admits a certain number of patients a year) and then pivots back to the idea that Does 2, 5, and 6 can use this 45-day period to give this all another shot. If they get privileges, then they can continue providing care and there will be no undue burden on abortion access, he concludes.
What he completely omits is any mention of Doe 1, one of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Doe 1 is the doctor from Shreveport who sought privileges at every hospital in that area and has been denied privileges. So, a 45-day extension isn’t going to change anything for Doe 1 and if the law takes effect, the Shreveport clinic will close and leave thousands of women without meaningful access to care.
The omission of Doe 1 from Kavanaugh’s analysis seems particularly dishonest: Doe 1’s predicament belies the notion that there is any period of time that would be harmless for women seeking care and it suggests what is to come, because there is no reason to think that Doe 1 is somehow different than the other three doctors who have spent years seeking privileges without success. Meaning that if the law were to take effect, regardless of whether that happens tomorrow or 45 days from now, the most likely outcome, supported by actual facts, is that Louisiana would be left with just one doctor and one clinic to provide services to the roughly 10,000 women in the state who seek abortion care each year.
There is at least one additional problem with Kavanaugh’s dissent, and it has to do with the role of the 5th Circuit. In reviewing the district court’s findings that blocked the law, the appellate court was supposed to be analyzing the decision for “clear error” — meaning that if the trial court’s factual determinations, based on witnesses and evidence presented to it, are plausible in light of the entire record, the appellate court may not reverse the lower court opinion even if it would have decided it differently.
Clearly, the 5th Circuit did not do that here. The district court’s decision was fact-heavy and clearly supported. That the 5th Circuit didn’t like its conclusion — that enacting the law would be detrimental to women seeking abortion — is irrelevant. Instead, in order to justify its decision, the panel majority whipped out some fanciful math to come to the conclusion that no women would be unduly impacted by the regulation. They claim that even if the Shreveport clinic closes, two other doctors — doctors who have not been able to obtain admitting privileges — would merely have to obtain privileges and then, between them, would only have to work 3.6 additional hours per week to handle the increased patient load. And that, the court concluded, means women seeking abortion would only end up waiting an extra “54 minutes” to obtain services. There is literally nothing in the lower court record to plausibly support these assertions.
If the law were to take effect, the most likely outcome is that Louisiana would be left with just one doctor and one clinic to provide services to the roughly 10,000 women in the state who seek abortion care each year.Not that it is entirely surprising that the 5th Circuit would substitute its judgment about the facts of the case — or that it would just make up its own “facts.” The court is notoriously ideological and results-oriented — and, with the addition of four new Trump-appointed judges, is poised to become even more so. In another abortion-related Texas case, Trump appointee Judge James Ho last summer wrote a startling opinion championing those who object to the “moral tragedy” of abortion and accusing a respected and long-serving district judge of being anti-Christian. And this is the same circuit court that upheld the Texas abortion provisions ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. At one point, in defending her position that the restrictions didn’t actually present a burden for women (even though they’d led to the closure of nearly half of the state’s clinics), Judge Edith Jones opined that Texas has uncongested roads and high speed limits, so traveling longer distances for care wasn’t really an issue.
So it’s hardly surprising that the panel would try to rejigger the facts in June Medical Services to bring them in line with the court’s outright hostility toward reproductive rights. What is more astounding is that in adopting the 5th Circuit’s conclusions, Kavanaugh has basically signed off on the court’s improper, if not simply rogue, approach to its work. Put another way, what the 5th Circuit has done is put itself into the position of being the final legal arbiter. It has positioned itself as both the district court and Supreme Court — making findings of fact and then applying precedent in a way that limits its meaning and allows an onerous restriction on abortion to all but eliminate access.
Paging Susan CollinsPerhaps there is no reason to be surprised that Kavanaugh would come out like this so soon and unabashedly, even though he tried to represent himself as a moderate who would respect precedent. Still, it is disturbing that he would so easily omit critical facts from his analysis and then couch the impact of his revisions as if they represent some benign compromise. Notably, none of the other justices signed on to his dissent.
Since the ruling, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins has been widely criticized (again) for casting the deciding vote last fall in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. At the time, she said that Kavanaugh had, both publicly and privately, assured her that he wasn’t gunning for Roe v. Wade, which he considered “precedent on precedent.” Defending her boss, Collins’s Communications Director Annie Clark said last week that it was “clear that a lot of the critics of Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion haven’t even read it.”
One has to wonder if Collins has done so.
“To say that this case,” she told CNN, “this most recent case, in which he wrote a very careful dissent, tells you that he’s going to repeal Roe v. Wade I think is absurd.”
Maybe. But Kavanaugh certainly seems to be trying to make Roe irrelevant.
The post What Brett Kavanaugh’s Dishonest Anti-Abortion Dissent Reveals About His Supreme Court Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.
Há duas semanas, uma repórter da Folha foi até à gráfica utilizada por uma candidata-laranja do PSL e constatou que não havia nada funcionando no endereço. O partido despejou R$ 380 mil de dinheiro público nessa gráfica fantasma. Confrontado, o presidente do partido de aluguel Luciano Bivar contestou a reportagem: “Mas se ela for lá, ela vai ver as máquinas todinhas. Se não tiver máquina, você pode escrever que eu sou um mentiroso amanhã”. A Folha foi e não encontrou nem um cartucho de tinta. Mesmo autorizado, o jornal elegantemente se absteve de chamá-lo de mentiroso.
A mentira sempre esteve presente na política brasileira, mas pela primeira vez alcançou a condição de método, de estratégia política. A escola Steve Bannon, o estrategista de Trump, é uma realidade. A verdade não importou durante a eleição e continua não importando no início do governo. Por isso foi engraçado ver o vereador carioca Carlos Bolsonaro que, por um acaso é filho do presidente, acusando o ministro da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência, Gustavo Bebianno, de ser um mentiroso. Logo ele, o comandante das redes sociais bolsonaristas que funcionavam como fábricas de mentiras e boatos.
Com a sapiência e a delicadeza de um garoto criado por Jair Bolsonaro, Carluxo ajudou seu pai a transformar uma crise em estágio inicial, que ainda rondava apenas o PSL, em uma grave crise do governo. Foi uma situação bizarra. O presidente se recusou a falar com um ministro que estava sendo acusado de corrupção e o acusou publicamente de mentir ao povo brasileiro. O vereador carioca vazou trecho de conversa entre um ministro e o presidente. O presidente não demitiu imediatamente o ministro no qual ele demonstrou publicamente não ter nenhuma confiança. Bizarro é um adjetivo fraco pra qualificar essa sequência de fatos. A nova era há de inventar um termo adequado para classificar o estilo bolsonarista de governar.
Mas há quem ache tudo lindo nisso, quase revolucionário. O Delegado Waldir, líder do PSL na Câmara, não viu nada de mais nessa sequência de trapalhadas. Para ele, isso tudo é fruto da transparência e da modernidade: “Nossos debates não são atrás das portas. Brigamos na frente de todo mundo. É um novo modelo que muita gente não está acostumado. Somos da era digital.” Entenderam? Não foram eles que armaram um circo constrangedor para lavar roupa suja em público. Somos nós que ainda não evoluímos o suficiente para acompanhar esse novo jeito de fazer política.
Em entrevista para a emissora do seu aliado Edir Macedo, Jair Bolsonaro mandou um recado para o ministro com o qual ele se recusa a conversar pessoalmente. Disse que se Bebianno for responsabilizado pelos crimes, “lamentavelmente o seu destino não pode ser outro a não ser voltar às suas origens.” Aproveitou também para lançar o seu super trunfo moral: o ministro Sergio Moro. Disse que ordenou que ele abrisse um inquérito para investigar o caso. Quase senti firmeza.
É a primeira vez que o presidente mostra algo parecido com indignação em um caso de corrupção envolvendo o seu governo. Ele já passou pano para o caixa 2 em dose dupla de Onyx Lorenzoni — com o apoio de Sergio Moro — e também para o laranjal do ministro do Turismo, suspeito de participar de um esquema de laranjas idêntico ao de Bebianno. Isso para não falar das suspeitas envolvendo ele próprio e sua família. Por que essa indignação repentina apenas com Bebianno? Ele fez algo mais grave do que distribuir tetas públicas para parentes do chefe do crime organizado? Emprestou dinheiro para miliciano de forma suspeita? Algum criminoso depositou um cheque na conta da sua esposa?
(Foto: Agência Brasil)
É estranho que justamente Bebianno tenha sido o único companheiro largado ferido na estrada. O advogado sempre foi um soldado linha de frente do bolsonarismo. Durante a campanha, ele se apresentava como tesoureiro, presidente do PSL e assessor de imprensa de Bolsonaro. Mesmo sem ter nenhuma experiência com política, Bebianno foi escolhido pelo presidente para ser o principal articulador político durante a campanha. Os dois eram bastante próximos e mantinham confiança mútua. Foi de Bebianno a ideia de lançar a candidatura bolsonarista pelo PSL, partido que presidiu por escolha do próprio Jair Bolsonaro e que alcançou a segunda maior bancada da Câmara. O presidente está pagando com traição.
Parece que o maior problema de Bebianno é não contar com a simpatia dos filhos do seu chefe, principalmente com a do Carlos. Não é de hoje que o “pitbull” — apelido dado por papai — vem vociferando contra Bebianno. Durante a campanha, Carluxo não conseguia esconder a insatisfação com a proximidade do pai com o advogado. Segundo a Gazeta do Povo, o filho do presidente não gostava das alianças propostas por Bebianno e achava que ele se aliou ao pai apenas por interesses próprios. A desavença se tornou insuportável durante a transição do governo, quando o pitbull do presidente abandonou a equipe e latiu muito no Twitter.
Caráter não se negocia e quando há compulsão por aparecer a qualquer custo sempre tem algo por trás. Somos humanos e falhamos, mas a procura por holofote é um péssimo indicativo do que se pode esperar de um indivíduo. Jamais trairei meus ideiais! ??
— Carlos Bolsonaro (@CarlosBolsonaro) November 22, 2018
Segundo Maurício Lima, da revista Veja, não foi apenas a influência familiar que fez Bolsonaro passar a desprezar seu ex-braço direito. A gota d’àgua pode ter sido a reunião que Gustavo Bebianno marcou com o vice-presidente de Relações Institucionais do Grupo Globo, Paulo Tonet Camargo, no Palácio do Planalto. A intenção era abrir um canal de diálogo com a emissora depois do caso Queiroz, mas Jair Bolsonaro gravou um áudio indignado para Bebianno: “Como você coloca nossos inimigos dentro de casa?”
O presidente da Câmara Rodrigo Maia fez comentários bastante duros sobre o caso, sem poupar o presidente. “A impressão que dá é que o presidente está usando o filho para pedir para o Gustavo Bebianno sair. E ele é presidente da República, não é? Não é mais um deputado, ele não é presidente da associação dos militares”. É inacreditável que o presidente da Câmara tenha que vir a público passar o pito no presidente da República e pedir para ele tomar as rédeas da nação das mãos do filho. Não posso imaginar nada mais vergonhoso para alguém que se elegeu sendo chamado de capitão.
Gustavo amava Jair de um jeito louco. Era amor verdadeiro mesmo. Quando Bolsonaro levou a facada, era ele quem decidia quem entrava e quem saía do quarto do hospital. No meio de uma entrevista ao UOL no Albert Einstein, Bebianno colocou as mãos no rosto, abaixou a cabeça e chorou: “hoje que eu estou conseguindo chorar porque o sentimento de ódio estava muito grande. Posso dizer que eu tenho amor por ele.”
Mesmo depois da pressão, Bebianno se recusou a se demitir. Bolsonaro ficou irritado e se viu numa sinuca de bico. Se o demitisse, criaria um inimigo com alto potencial de destruição. Se o mantivesse no cargo, ficaria com a imagem do presidente bunda-mole que não teve coragem de mandar um funcionário mentiroso embora.
A confiança dos demais ministros no presidente também fica abalada, já que ficou claro que até um vereador tem acesso às conversas entre eles, podendo vazá-las em um momento de raiva. O baixo clero que ascendeu ao poder está completamente perdido.
Depois de fazer o ministro passar por uma humilhação nunca antes vista na história da República, Bolsonaro decidiu pela demissão. Em reunião com Bebianno e os generais Mourão e Heleno, argumentou que perdeu a confiança. Para tentar amansar o espírito vingativo do ex-braço direito, ofereceu um cargo de diretor em Itaipu. Isso garantiria um rendimento de R$ 67,6 mil mensais para o homem que conhece cada galho do imenso laranjal do PSL. Segundo relato da Veja, Bebianno ficou irritado com a proposta. Lembrou dos serviços prestados ao presidente e encerrou dizendo que não aceitaria prêmio de consolação.
Parece que a pressão do seu pitbull impediu Bolsonaro de enxergar o óbvio. Bebianno é conhecido por gritar, xingar e ameaçar em discussões com correligionários. Esse não é o perfil de quem vai aceitar tudo tranquilamente depois de tanta dedicação e lealdade. O amor se transformando rapidamente em ódio é um clichê infalível. Se uma investigação como a da Lava Jato pega Bebianno sem foro privilegiado, as chances de uma delação premiada não respingar no presidente são mínimas. Ou será que o presidente tem certeza de que não correrá esse risco? Bastará pedir perdão a Sergio Moro?
Bebianno foi o homem forte da campanha. É o cara que tinha as chaves do cofre do PSL e acesso total à informações sigilosas e estratégicas. Convenhamos, a possibilidade dessa grana do laranjal ter abastecido a campanha presidencial não parece ser remota. A um interlocutor, Bebianno chamou Bolsonaro de “ingrato” e ameaçou: “se isso acontecer na segunda (exoneração), o Brasil vai tremer”
O deputado Alexandre Frota (PSL-SP) deu uma declaração sobre os casos de corrupção envolvendo seus correligionários que é a síntese perfeita do que é o PSL, o bolsonarismo e a nova era: “Se tá em crise ou não, eu não sei, porque estou muito feliz no PSL. E eu não quero saber da briga desses caras porque o PSL nunca fez nada pra mim a não ser me dar a legenda. (…) Então, se Bebianno tá brigando com Carlos Bolsonaro, se Eduardo briga com Joice…eu não quero saber. Eu quero que se fodam todos eles, entendeu?”
The post A humilhação pública de Gustavo Bebianno pode se voltar contra Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept.
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