Joe Biden Wants to End Prison Profiteering. One of His Top Fundraisers Is a Major Player in Prison Health Care.

After decades of championing legislation that escalated mass incarceration, former Vice President Joe Biden released a criminal justice plan seeking to reverse key provisions of the 1994 crime bill he helped write. The wide-ranging proposal, which he rolled out roughly a week before the second Democratic presidential primary debate in July, would ban private prisons and reduce incarceration. It also takes a clear stance on those who are cashing in on the prison system: “Stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration,” his website reads.

But one of Biden’s top fundraisers, Michael F. Neidorff, is the CEO and chair of Centene — a health insurance company that’s a major player in the prison health care market. Prisons and facilities in 16 states have contracted out their health care services to Centurion, which is owned by the $60 billion health insurance company, according to its website. This year, Neidorff has also donated to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the reelection campaigns of Republican Sens. David Perdue, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins, as well as Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, FEC filings show.

Biden’s platform vows to “end the federal government’s use of private prisons” by building off an Obama-era policy that was rescinded by the Trump administration, along with ending the use of private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants. Neither the Biden campaign nor Centene responded to a request for comment.

“Biden will also make eliminating private prisons and all other methods of profiteering off of incarceration — including diversion programs, commercial bail, and electronic monitoring — a requirement for his new state and local prevention grant program,” his policy plan says. “Finally, Biden will support the passage of legislation to crack down on the practice of private companies charging incarcerated individuals and their families outrageously high fees to make calls.”

Since 2012, more than 20 states have shifted over to private, for-profit firms that provide health services in an effort to cut costs — with tragic consequences. Centene, along with its subsidiaries, has faced numerous lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths in prisons, leaving a pregnant inmate to give birth in a cell, and not providing adequate mental health care to suicidal patients, the Arizona Republic noted. While landing lucrative deals in states like Arizona and Florida, for example, Centene also contributes to the campaigns of politicians in the states it operates in.

Neidorff was identified as a bundler for Biden’s presidential bid late Friday night when the Biden campaign released a list of more than 200 individuals and couples who have brought in at least $25,000 in campaign contributions.

Biden’s other bundlers include notable names from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, in addition to a number of current lawmakers like Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg released his own list of bundlers earlier this month, and Sen. Kamala Harris did too before dropping out of the race. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s on track to raise more money than any other candidate in the crowded Democratic primary field, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren don’t hold big-dollar, closed-door fundraisers, so they aren’t releasing similar lists.

The post Joe Biden Wants to End Prison Profiteering. One of His Top Fundraisers Is a Major Player in Prison Health Care. appeared first on The Intercept.

Your Bedroom Is Too Hot

It’s a classic situation among couples: One person says the bedroom is too cold. The other says it’s too hot. There is a bitter battle for control of the thermostat. Both people say things they regret.

One person—let’s call her Sharon—starts spending a little too much time with your best friend, Greg. You try to talk to Greg about it at the YMCA, but he just shrugs, like, What am I supposed to do? Then he says you should listen to Sharon about turning up the bedroom temperature.

Moments like this are the reason science exists: to prove other people wrong. What is the ideal temperature for a bedroom?

This question turns out to matter even beyond the simple issue of relationship-destroying tension. Sleep quality affects our health, cognitive functioning, and financial well-being. Extreme temperatures obviously disrupt sleep—recall a summer night spent sweating through sheets, or a winter night spent curled into a tight ball to preserve heat, and being noticeably bleary the next morning. More often, the influence is subtler. Many of us could probably improve the quality of our sleep by being more attentive to temperature.

[Read: Why do we need to sleep?]

Sharon is wrong, and I found studies to prove that her whims affect other people in very real ways. Anyone complaining about it being too hot in the bedroom is not just being “a whining loser.” People who sleep in hot environments have been found to have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol the next morning. Researchers also recently posited that patients sleep so poorly in hospital ICUs in part because the rooms are too warm.

Those who sleep in cold environments, meanwhile, tend to fare better. A study of people with a sleep disorder found that they slept longer in temperatures of 61 degrees Fahrenheit versus 75 degrees. The cold-sleepers were also more alert the next morning. The basic physiology is that your body undergoes several changes at night to ease you into sleep: Your core and brain temperatures decrease, and both blood sugar and heart rate drop. Keeping a bedroom hot essentially fights against this process. Insomnia has even been linked to a basic malfunctioning of the body’s heat-regulation cycles—meaning some cases could be a disorder of body temperature.

In light of this physiology, sleep experts unanimously suggest keeping your bedroom cooler than the standard daytime temperature of your home. There is no universally accepted temperature that is the correct one, but various medical entities have suggested ideal temperature ranges. The most common recommendation, cited by places like the Cleveland Clinic and the National Sleep Foundation, is 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit. Within that range, experts vary. A neurologist in Virginia told Health.com that the magic number is 65. Others have advised an upper limit of 64.

[Read: How to sleep]

The U.S. Department of Energy recommends keeping your home at 68 degrees during the day and “lower while you’re asleep.” That guideline is based on money, not health: It was originally suggested by President Richard Nixon as a way of conserving oil during an embargo. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter went further, suggesting 65 degrees in daytime and 55 at night. He ordered that the White House thermostat be lowered accordingly, and subsequently extended the rule to all public buildings. The change was estimated to have saved around 300,000 gallons of oil daily.

Even though no one was fined under the thermostat rule, Ronald Reagan promptly undid it in 1981, citing “unnecessary regulatory burden.” No such executive thermoregulatory fiats have since been attempted. If you want to work and sleep in a sauna-like sweat box, that is your God-given right as a red-blooded American. But it should be done with the knowledge that thermostat decisions affect far more than one’s own personal sleep. The burning of fossil fuels contributes to the air pollution that kills millions of people every year, and the health effects of climate change are far-reaching.

As for individual health guidelines, human variation makes giving any specific number almost impossible—and borderline irresponsible. Different temperatures will suit different people differently. At the same time, a range like “60 to 67 degrees” can feel nebulously broad. It’s less satisfying than a single number, and it doesn’t solve the bed-partner argument. So I will say this: 60 degrees is the correct temperature for winter sleep. Anything warmer is incorrect.

[Read: I found the key to the kingdom of sleep]

If 60 degrees is simply intolerable, physically or existentially, the National Sleep Foundation recommends sleeping in socks or putting a hot water bottle at your feet. Or maybe wear a warm hat, which also prevents bed head. Regulating the temperature of just your feet or head is more precise than adding blankets, and more efficient than trying to regulate an entire room. (In truth, you could go much, much colder on the thermostat by simply adding more clothing and blankets. I’ve slept very well while camping in frigid weather with the right sleeping bag. I’ve also felt on the brink of death in similar circumstances with the wrong sleeping bag.)

A final caveat is the little matter of summer. Should people use vicious amounts of air-conditioning to get the temperature down? Definitely not. Summer sleeping is not as ideal, and many people do report getting worse sleep then. But it’s possible to sleep well outside that ideal temperature range. A lot can be accomplished with a strategically placed fan. It’s also definitely possible to train oneself to sleep without covers—without a sheet, even.

Anyone who shares a bed with you may not be immediately comfortable sleeping a few degrees colder. It’s not a subject to be broached aggressively. But as in most cases of habit alteration, gradual change is sometimes the key to making the impossible possible. Maybe try dropping the thermostat by one degree a week for the next four weeks. Like easing your way into a tepid swimming pool, before you know it, you may develop a new sense of normal.

If not, you can go back to burning lots of energy and spending lots of money. But if it works, the collective result of just a few degrees of change could mean significant benefit to the economy, personal and public health, and the environment—not to mention the sustainability of romantic and nonromantic bedroom-sharing arrangements.

In the Shadow of the Federal Death Chamber, Executions Are on Hold — For Now

On the day the Trump administration was supposed to kill Daniel Lewis Lee, Zann Carter sat in a cafe in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana. It was a dreary Monday morning but the space was warm; wreaths hung in the windows and Christmas music filled the room. The execution was the first in a series of five set between December and January, and it had originally been scheduled to take place between 7 and 8 a.m. A vigil had been planned outside the federal prison, just a few miles down the road, but the courts had put the killings on hold. That morning, December 9, activists from around the country gathered for breakfast at a nearby diner before driving home.

For Carter, 67, Terre Haute is home, though she grew up in Florida, where her views about the death penalty were first formed. In 1979, when the state carried out its first execution in the “modern” death penalty era, Carter discussed capital punishment with her father, “the chief federal probation officer for the Southern District of Florida,” she said. “And he told me he was opposed to the death penalty, ‘because innocent people get convicted more than you think.’”

Zann Carter is a leader in the Terre Haute community when it comes to advocacy and activism against the death penalty. She stands in front of the original Federal Building, where activists held protests against the last round of federal executions.

Photo: Lucas Carter for The Intercept

It was not until Carter moved to Indiana, however, that she felt compelled to put her opposition to the death penalty into practice. In 1993, soon after she arrived in Terre Haute, the United States Bureau of Prisons announced that the town would be the site for a new federal death row. The next year, Bill Clinton signed the Federal Death Penalty Act, vastly expanding the crimes punishable by death. In 1995, the year Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City, the BOP unveiled the $300,000 death house, “an antiseptic place with ugly green tile,” as described by the Associated Press.

In the summer of 1999, 20 condemned men from across the country were moved to Terre Haute’s new death row. At an activist meeting in Bloomington, organizers voted to start a statewide anti-death penalty group. Carter became the point person for Terre Haute. When the Department of Justice announced it would execute a man named David Paul Hammer in November 2000, she began organizing protests outside the old federal building downtown. On Thursdays she set up a table with petitions and buttons at a nearby coffee shop.

It was on one of those Thursdays at the coffee shop that news arrived: Timothy McVeigh had decided to “volunteer” for execution. By then, Hammer had resumed his appeals, making the Oklahoma City bomber the first federal execution in more than 37 years. Carter felt immediately daunted. Hammer was relatively unknown; he had killed his cellmate while incarcerated at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. McVeigh, on the other hand, had committed the worst homegrown terror attack in U.S. history. But she thought, “We have no choice. This is here in our backyard. If we don’t protest this, if we don’t, then who will?”

Carter worried about the executions’ effect on Terre Haute. She didn’t want it to be a “prison hub” like Huntsville, Texas, which is widely known for its death chamber. “It’s just a negative thing that I don’t think is healthy for the community, really.” But local leaders seemed unfazed. “I don’t believe that it’s the greatest thing that could happen to us,” Terre Haute Mayor James Jenkins told a local paper. “But in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know that it will have that much impact on the community.”

McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001. The event brought throngs of reporters and protesters. Neighbors of the prison rented out their lawns to media crews; local businesses sold T-shirts reading “Die! Die! Die!” along with shirts saying “Stop the Killing, Let Timothy McVeigh Live.” The owner of David’s Food Center, a grocery store just across from the prison on State Road 63, became a minor celebrity in the national press for his plans to sell kebabs on the day of the execution. “It was ramping up to be a circus,” Carter recalled.

But the frenzy quickly faded after McVeigh’s execution. When Juan Raul Garza was killed in the death chamber just one week later, the execution attracted a fraction of the national attention. By the time the federal government executed Gulf War veteran Louis Jones on March 19, 2003, the national press was focused on George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, launched the same day.

Today in Terre Haute, the looming return of federal executions does not seem to have created much of a stir. As news came down on Friday, December 6, that the Supreme Court had put the killings on pause, people were flocking to the annual holiday fair downtown, Miracle on 7th Street. At the Dollar General across from the penitentiary on Monday morning, a clerk said there wasn’t much of a change from the norm in the past few weeks. Down the road on 63, a sign above David’s Food Store advertised “Tiki Kabob,” marinated pork on a stick. But it sat vacant with a sign reading “under new management.”

Standing Up to Trump

The disconnect between the death chamber and daily life in Terre Haute mirrors much of the rest of the country. Most Americans just don’t think about capital punishment very often, even those in active death penalty states. Federal death row is especially opaque. Only three people have been executed in the federal death chamber since the Supreme Court reauthorized executions in 1976 — a tiny fraction of the more than 1,500 people executed in the U.S. in that time.

Abe Bonowitz speaking to the media in Terre Haute, on the eve of the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001.

Photo: Courtesy of Zann Carter

The anti-death penalty movement had been bracing itself for the return of federal executions since the moment Trump was elected. Abe Bonowitz remembers driving back home from Washington, D.C., as the inauguration was getting underway in January 2017. A veteran organizer based in Ohio, Bonowitz had just been arrested protesting executions in front of the U.S. Supreme Court alongside Derrick Jamison, who spent 20 years on death row before being exonerated in 2005. As they drove back to Ohio, Bonowitz recalls, “I’m sitting there thinking, ’Who is there in the movement who is going to stand up to Trump?”

Soon afterward, Bonowitz co-founded Death Penalty Action, with precisely that mission in mind. When U.S. Attorney General William Barr finally made his dreaded announcement — that the federal government was resuming capital punishment after a nearly two-decade hiatus — Bonowitz wasted no time. “This is the moment Death Penalty Action was created for,” he wrote in an email to supporters. One of the first calls he made was to Zann Carter. The two had worked together in the run-up to the last round of executions, organizing an 82-mile march from Indianapolis to Terre Haute in November 2000. At first she was reluctant to get involved. In the years after the last federal execution, her mother became sick and her son fell into a drug addiction that would later take his life. “It was a terrible, terrible time for me,” she told me.

Carter had struggled to find joy in abolition work. “There’s so much pain in the death penalty,” she said. “Everywhere you look. I mean, you want to be happy when there’s a stay. But there’s still somebody who’s been murdered. There’s still somebody on death row. There’s still families grieving … and that can be wearing after a time.” She was especially bothered by the way her activism had positioned her in opposition to grieving families. There was one in particular, the parents of a woman murdered in Terre Haute, who used to stage counterprotests against the abolitionists. It pained her to know that her activism was dragging them to revisit their trauma again and again. But she was also angered at the way their tragedies were weaponized by prosecutors who used their grief as “ammunition.”

Yet some of the most powerful voices against McVeigh’s execution came from murder victims’ families opposed to the death penalty. Bill Pelke, an Indiana native and founder of Journey of Hope, came to Terre Haute with his friend George White, who was wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder in Alabama. Bud Welch, whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City attack — and who developed an unlikely friendship with McVeigh’s father — spoke numerous times alongside Paul Stevens, whose daughter was murdered in Evansville in 1969. “Vengeance isn’t OK because vengeance destroys,” Welch told the Terre Haute Tribune Star in March 2001. It was vengeance that had killed 168 people in Oklahoma City, he added.

Despite her hesitation, Carter welcomed Bonowitz back to town in 2019. As he got reacquainted with Terre Haute, Bonowitz realized that the federal executions had had more of an impact than he had realized. One woman, who was in college when she participated in the 2000 march, told him that the issue had split the community, with Bureau of Prison employees on one side and death penalty opponents on the other. “If you weren’t for the executions you were against the prison people.” Carter herself was dragged through the mud in an angry letter by the wife of a federal prison employee, published by the Tribune Star.

Particularly shocking was a hate crime that took place in 2003, when a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the window of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. The building was almost completely destroyed, with the perpetrator spray-painting “Remember McVeigh” on one of the outside brick walls. To Bonowitz, it seemed like a clear warning of the death penalty’s “brutalizing effect” — the theory that executions contribute to more crime and social upheaval.

Beginning in October, activists under the banner of Terre Haute Death Penalty Resistance hosted events in classrooms and churches in the community. One speaker, Ashley Kincaid, told the story of being 13 years old when McVeigh was executed, an hour from her hometown. On the eve of his execution, she said, she was in the car with her father, who pointed at a beautiful sunset and laughed, telling her it was McVeigh’s last sunset. It was her “first empathic experience,” Kincaid said; the next morning she woke up “and imagined what it would be like for the guards to come up and open that cage and to know it’s time.”

The events also featured Jerry Givens, the former executioner for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Givens killed 62 people in his official position between 1982 and 1999. His duties ranged from overseeing the final visits between the condemned and their loved ones to pushing the button that would activate the electric chair. At a downtown church in late October, Givens shared the story of how he almost executed a man who would later turn out to be innocent. “They’re not equipped mentally to do this,” he told me about the people working inside the federal prison in Terre Haute. “People don’t understand.”

Givens is one of several former prison officials who wrote to the Trump administration in November urging him to stop the executions. “To walk into a room and kill somebody, that is traumatic,” wrote former prison superintendent Frank Thompson, who oversaw two executions in Oregon years ago. In a subsequent piece, Thompson described the “long-term repercussions from the process of practicing, over and over, to kill someone.”

Activists march through Terre Haute on Dec. 8, 2019, the eve of Daniel Lewis Lee’s scheduled execution.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

On November 20, a U.S. District Court judge declared a stay of execution for Daniel Lewis Lee and the other men scheduled to die. With the future unclear, Bonowitz and his fellow activists decided to move forward with their plans in Terre Haute no matter what. They announced a convocation to take place on December 8, the eve of Lee’s  scheduled execution, at St. Benedict Catholic Church. It would feature numerous speakers directly impacted by the death penalty, among them, the brother of Texas death row prisoner Rodney Reed, who narrowly avoided execution earlier this year.

On December 5, Bonowitz received an unexpected email. It came from a man named Lance Gurel. His wife’s sister had been murdered by Lee, the first man set to die. The family had been outspoken about their opposition to Lee’s execution. Gurel said that they planned to be in Terre Haute should the execution proceed. He would join them at the church.

An American Crossroads

The Vigo County Courthouse in Terre Haute, Ind.

Photo: Lucas Carter for The Intercept

I first visited Terre Haute in late October. The city of roughly 61,000 sits on the banks of the Wabash River on the border of Illinois, about an hour from Indianapolis. The second annual Birthplace of the Coca-Cola Bottle Festival had been held a month earlier, and dozens of bottle-shaped sculptures decorated the city. At the intersection of Wabash and Seventh Street downtown, a historic marker designates the spot where U.S. Highway 40 met Highway 41 — the “Crossroads of America.”

It was less than a week before the Vigo County municipal election. Downtown, where empty storefronts persist despite efforts at revitalization, colorful signs advertised competing ballot initiatives. Particularly ubiquitous were green signs reading “Vote Yes on #1,” a referendum to bring a casino to the area, and with it, jobs. That vote passed by a healthy margin.

Like other areas of Indiana’s Wabash Valley, where mines and manufacturing once powered the local economy, Vigo County has struggled over the past few decades. Economic woes have led to controversial decisions about where to devote government resources. Especially contentious is the recent decision by the county commission to divert education funds to construct a “megajail” to the tune of $66.5 million. “We are a poor county with a declining population,” one opponent wrote in a 2018 letter published in the Tribune Star. “If we ever hope to turn things around here then we need to make this an appealing place to live, a place where young people might want to settle down. … How can we have first-rate high schools and a mega-jail too?”

New prisons and jails have often been pitched as a boon to American communities, only for projects to evolve beyond their original scope while failing to bring the desired economic benefits. The original U.S. penitentiary on State Road 63 was designed to hold 1,200 people, at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt, who authorized the project in 1938. Terre Haute’s selection for the new prison site was cast as a matter of civic duty; the chamber of commerce solicited funds to purchase the land it would lease to the federal government. The Coca-Cola Bottling Company sent a supportive note on cheerful stationary, along with a $2,500 check. As the city prepared to unveil the project, the chamber lauded the local media for their “splendid cooperation” in not endangering the plan through premature publicity — “a matter in which every citizen can take a great deal of pride.”

A newspaper clipping from the archives belonging to the Vigo County Historical Society and Museum, showing the ceremony to break ground at the penitentiary in 1938.

Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Indeed, the opening of the new prison was buoyed by a cheerleading press, which extolled its pioneering philosophy of incarceration, from a more benevolent architectural design to its philosophy of rehabilitation. The men at the prison would be “those who are more mischievous than wicked,” as one news report put it. Another lauded the facility as “a hospital to cure men of tendencies which make them socially undesirable.”

Key to this rehabilitation was prison labor: the Terre Haute facility was one of the original sites for Federal Prison Industries, Inc., the government corporation that generates hundreds of millions of dollars by paying incarcerated people less than a dollar per hour for manufacturing work. As the prison expanded, it strayed further from its celebrated humane approach. By 1990, with the federal drug war underway, the population hovered at 2,000 — and the Indianapolis Star reported plans for a $10.6 million segregation unit, along with more funding for trucks, reroofing, and augmented perimeter security. Today the federal penitentiary complex comprises three different facilities housing more than 2,635 people, including those in Communication Management Units — a post-9/11 experiment in heightened isolation.

The last time the BOP restarted federal executions, the demands on the penitentiary were intense. “Hundreds of staff were involved in planning for the execution, developing the policy and execution protocol, readying the facility, meeting the needs of the media and the public, and ensuring the unprecedented viewing by victim witnesses at a distant location,” the BOP’s official newsletter reported after the killing of McVeigh. One man who is currently on death row in Terre Haute told me that he could tell that the prison was gearing up to restart executions months before Barr made his announcement, based on the level of activity around him. “The day that the Justice Department announced that they would be re-starting executions, it literally shook this place to its core,” he wrote.

In the days leading up to the first execution date, the guys on the row were on “pins and needles,” he said.“Constantly checking the news, checking the court logs.” The stay by the courts came as a huge relief, he said. “But how long is the stay gonna last?”

Not in Our Names

A photograph of Nancy Mueller hangs at the home of her mother, Earlene Peterson, in Hector, Ark., on Oct. 18, 2019. A white supremacist was convicted of murdering Mueller, her husband, and her daughter, but the victims’ family members, the prosecutor, and the judge have all said the scheduled death sentence was too arbitrary to justify.

Photo: Andrea Morales/The New York Times via Redux

On Friday, December 13, the day of the last execution scheduled for that week, Lance and Kimma Gurel were driving back home to Washington State from the East Coast. It had been one week since the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the stay put in place by the U.S. District Court. The news came as they were visiting Kimma’s 82-year-old mother in Arkansas. “We just let out a big whoo-hoo,” she said. “Because that meant we got to stay with her another day.” They canceled their trip to Terre Haute, made plans to see Lance’s father and taped a video message to the activists while they drove. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be there today,” Kimma Gurel said. “But I’m glad we didn’t have to be there today.”

The Gurels had been dreading their trip to Terre Haute. Their daughter planned to attend the execution, not out of support, but in order to bear witness. “We’re just going to be there to support her because we know it will probably be traumatic,” Kimma Gurel said. The anticipation of more trauma compounded a painful ordeal that has lasted for decades. Kimma’s sister, Nancy, was brutally murdered in 1996, along with her husband and 8-year-old daughter Sarah. A pair of white supremacists named Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lewis Lee, members of the Aryan Peoples Republic, were charged with the crime. U.S. attorneys initially offered a plea deal to both. After Kehoe took the deal, “they brought us into a room and told us … if we offer Daniel Lee life without parole and he accepts it, we can just stop right now. The trial’s over, that’s it. And we said, ‘Absolutely. Do it.’”

But under Attorney General Janet Reno, the DOJ overruled the decision. A six-week trial ensued, during which it was revealed that Kehoe, not Lee, had been the leader in the slaughter. After Lee said he was not capable of killing a child, Kehoe murdered 8-year-old Sarah. Yet Kehoe’s life was spared while Lee was sentenced to die. Not only did it seem like a travesty of justice, the case only dragged on from there. Kimma’s mother, Earlene Peterson, has held on to an old flip phone for years, solely to ensure that she does not miss any calls from the BOP. In an op-ed earlier that month, the family called out Bill Barr for claiming the executions would bring closure to victims’ families. “In truth, this has been as much a sentence carried by us as the person scheduled to be put to death in our names.”

With the specter of an execution date ahead, the Gurels got in touch with people who advocated for Lee. “We wanted him to know that if they do put him to death that it wasn’t us,” Kimma said. With his execution off for now, the relief feels only temporary. As the Trump administration continues to try to push the execution through in the coming year, “we may be right back where we were.”

Before leaving Terre Haute, I drove toward the prison on South Third Street, one of the main commercial arteries in town. Some four miles from the penitentiary, next to a tax office, is a small building with railroad track out front. This is the rebuilt CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, the one that was destroyed by fire in 2003.

The museum’s founder, Eva Mozes Kor, named it CANDLES as a tribute to her own twin sister and siblings like them; it stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. Along with her sister, Kor was subjected to the torture of experiments at the hands of Josef Mengele, the Nazis’ notorious “angel of death.” In a memoir, Kor described how she returned to Auschwitz in 1993 and met with a doctor who had signed the mass death certificates of people murdered by the Nazis. He told her how the images from the gas chambers haunted him.

In 1995, as officials in Terre Haute were getting ready to unveil the execution chamber, Kor returned to Auschwitz and stood alongside the former Nazi doctor. He signed an affidavit about what he had seen and done while Kor signed a statement of forgiveness. “Immediately I felt that a burden of pain had been lifted from my shoulders, a pain I had lived with for fifty years,” she wrote. “I was no longer a victim of Auschwitz, no longer a victim of my tragic past. I was free.”

As the museum prepared to close on December 13, a docent told his own story to a small group of visitors. He escaped the Nazis to the Unites States and eventually settled in Terre Haute. He emphasized that his German neighbors had been good people. Anti-Semitism was “a government imposed policy,” he said.

A few feet from where he spoke, burnt remnants from the 2003 arson were on display in a glass case. I asked if he recalled the hate crime carried out to avenge the death of Timothy McVeigh. “I was there a few hours after the fire was put out,” he replied. The community helped rebuild the museum, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of months.

But like most people I met in Terre Haute, he said he was not eager to discuss the federal executions or the penitentiary a few miles away. “It’s a good town.”

The post In the Shadow of the Federal Death Chamber, Executions Are on Hold — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Immigration Detention Is Part of Mass Incarceration: The Case for Abolishing ICE and Everything Else

Not many people besides immigration law wonks had probably heard of “Section 1325,” before Julián Castro called for repealing it during the first Democratic presidential primary debate this summer. The law in question makes it a federal crime to enter the U.S. without permission — turning an immigration offense into a criminal one. President Donald Trump used a policy of “zero tolerance” for breaking that law to justify separating families at the border, but under George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him, 1325, along with illegal reentry — coming back after being deported — was already being used to jail and deport more and more immigrants. In fact, immigration-related crimes now make up the majority of all federal criminal prosecutions.

Castro’s proposal to repeal 1325 might have seemed to come out of left field, but it’s the exercise of the law that is historically the outlier: While laws criminalizing entry have existed since 1929, they “were largely ignored for a century,” the lawyer and scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández reminds us in a new book, “Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants.” In 1975, he noted “a mere 575 people” were charged with an immigration crime; in 1993, only 2,487. Contrast that with fiscal year 2018, when prosecutors brought 105,692 federal immigration charges.

Image: Courtesy of The New Press

The criminalization of immigration, especially the scale at which it happens now, is a relatively recent trend, Hernández argues. And it ought to be reversed. His book joins a number of recent works that put contemporary immigration politics in the same light that scholars and activists have shone on mass incarceration — showing it to be a phenomenon inextricably linked to the history of land, race, and capitalism in the United States. “The immigration prison is a reminder that human bondage based on racial and economic markers of undesirability can’t be relegated to some distant past,” Hernández writes. “If we’re willing to lock people up, we’ll find a reason. Most of the time the targets will be people of color. We can call this coincidence, but we would be lying to ourselves.”

Hernández lays out in a lucid, linear fashion the evolution of immigration law and its enforcement in the United States, from laws restricting the movement of certain people across state lines — formerly enslaved people, for instance — to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first in a series of acts that barred Asian immigrants for decades.

Any history of how the notion of “illegality” in migration took root has to consider the experience of Mexicans. While the first U.S. immigration laws focused with explicit racism on excluding Asians, Mexicans were the ones often physically targeted by Border Patrol — harassed, removed, or allowed to pass to satisfy the desires of powerful Southwest planters. In Hernández’s words, Border Patrol “detained and deported their way to a scared workforce.” Many of those workers, whether unauthorized or sanctioned under the bracero program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, were rendered “illegal” by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which got rid of national quotas and more or less established the United States’ current immigration regime, wherein countries are allotted a certain number of visas. Though ostensibly a progressive measure doing away with the racist quotas and nationality bans of previous eras, when it came to Mexico, the act, also known as Hart-Celler, ignored the closeness of the nations and subjected Mexicans to a national cap nowhere near high enough to accommodate traditional migration levels. “Perversely, the Hart-Celler Act’s formal equality turned immigration law against Mexican migrants,” Hernández writes. Mexicans became “illegal,” and “illegal aliens” became racially coded as Mexican.

Its focus on detention sets Hernández’s book apart from other recent histories of immigration and the border, including Kelly Lytle Hernández’s history of the Border Patrol; “Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration,” by Ana Raquel Minian; and Greg Grandin’s “The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.” Early immigration prisons were “atrocious” “dockside facilities,” like a two-story wooden shed on the San Francisco wharf run by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, where Chinese migrants waited to be approved entry by U.S. officials. Ironically, it was to address these terrible conditions in company-run centers that the federal government got involved, creating facilities like Ellis Island in the New York Harbor, which opened in 1892, and Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. For the first time, Congress required inspection officers “to detain anyone not ‘clearly and beyond doubt entitled to admission,’” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández writes in “Migrating to Prison.” In 1896, the Supreme Court “emphatically declared that immigration imprisonment was constitutionally permissible.”

Yet it was a relatively brief experiment. By 1954, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to today’s immigration agencies) “had all but abandoned its detention policy.” Ellis Island shut down with little fanfare. Hernández concludes that, “in fact if not in law, the United States came remarkably close to abolishing immigration imprisonment.” While that was, in the words of the attorney general at the time, a step in the direction of “humane administration of the immigration laws,” it was also self-interested, Hernández notes. Immigration prisons were costly, and, as has been the case throughout U.S. history, businesses wanted migrants out of prison so they could be used as cheap labor.

A group of Chinese and Japanese women and children wait to be processed in a wire mesh enclosure at the Angel Island Internment barracks in San Francisco Bay in the late 1920s. The Angel Island Immigration Station processed one million immigrants from 1910 to 1940, mostly from China and Japan.

Photo: AP

Again, Hernández connects this history to that of incarceration writ large in the U.S. There was a time when, even within Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, the utility of prison was questioned. But the ’70s ushered in a politically orchestrated crime panic, and the war on drugs, which led to mandatory minimum prison terms and sentencing disparities for powder cocaine and crack. A parallel process played out with immigration. Migrants, like black Americans, were linked to drugs, crime, and unrest, and portrayed as leeches on government services.

In the 1980s and ’90s, legislation introduced new levels of criminality for immigrants, which in turn expanded the population of imprisoned people. As Hernández writes, “Congress denied immigration judges the discretion to release anyone convicted of an aggravated felony,” which includes serious offenses like murder but also shoplifting and tax fraud. Detention and deportation, once decided with considerable discretion, became mandatory for all sorts of offenses. The link between mass incarceration and immigrant incarceration is clear in the legislative history: The same 1986 law that created mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine created “detainers,” requests to local police to hold someone in jail until they can be picked up by immigration. Liberals were complicit too. As Grandin notes, Bill Clinton played a key role, signing “a number of extremely punitive crime, terrorism, and immigration bills into law, which created the deportation regime that exists today.”

Muslims and other immigrants from majority-Muslim countries suffered the racist expansion of immigration detention after September 11, 2001, as counterterrorism enveloped immigration into the ballooning national security apparatus. And, as with the incarceration of U.S. citizens, black migrants have been disproportionately impacted by the shift to “crimmigration,” as scholars call it — more likely to be detained for a crime, and more likely to be removed.

Considering the recent explosion in immigration detention, Hernández explores federal contracts with local law enforcement and private prison companies. He looks not just at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also the U.S. Marshals Service, which holds some 60,000 people a day in pre-trial detention, making deals with state and local jails around the country (the deaths of immigrants in Marshals custody were recently investigated by Seth Freed Wessler for Mother Jones). Again, the degree to which immigration offenses dominate the criminal justice system is stark — in 2013, marshals detained 97,982 people on immigration crimes, compared with 28,323 drug defendants. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the Department of Health and Human Services, had 49,000 children in custody in 2018, in “shelters” that range in comforts offered but which are all tightly controlled. Whatever agency officially holds them, Hernández argues, “to the migrants who are under constant surveillance and whose liberty has been denied there is little difference.”

Detention is also used with the idea that it will dissuade people from coming.  Although Hernández points out this is legally suspect — detention of asylum-seekers and people accused of other non-criminal immigration offenses is not supposed to be a punishment — multiple administrations have invoked deterrence as a reason to keep people locked up.

U.S. Border Patrol agents detain people caught near a section of privately built border wall under construction on Dec. 11, 2019, near Mission, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Trying to separate immigrants who deserve imprisonment and those who don’t, distinguishing between shelters and detention centers and jails, obscures the workings of the whole system, Hernández says, which is designed to punish people for nothing more than being born in the wrong place. “Migrants are expected to live out the exceptionalism that U.S. citizens imagine in themselves,” he writes. The legal immigration system rewards wealth, education, and family connections, while the immigration enforcement system has no tolerance for human error.

Daniel Denvir’s forthcoming book, “All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It,” complements Hernández’s by focusing on political history. He, too, traces the development of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies alongside anti-black ones, arguing that “resistance to desegregation, a white identity politics of racial grievance, mass incarceration, the war on terror: all were dedicated to a quixotic mission to keep dangerous others from crossing U.S. borders and to restrict the free movement of those inside them.”

Democrats likewise fell into the trap of demonizing “illegal immigrants” and “criminal aliens,” believing that by doing so they could protect legal immigration from hard-right restrictionists and defend themselves from soft-on-crime accusations (just as they’d attempted to do by jumping on the war-on-drugs bandwagon).

Image: Courtesy of Verso Books

 

The bipartisan embrace of immigration enforcement, Denvir argues, was the product of the elusive quest for so-called comprehensive immigration reform, which would combine a path to legalization for people already in the country with the liberalization of legal immigration — goals sought by immigrant rights groups and big business alike. In order to get it, Democrats and some Republicans, from Clinton through Bush and Obama, tried to appease nativists with promises of “border security,” miles of fencing, massive increases in the Border Patrol, and surveillance systems befitting a war zone. Each time, however, the nativists were not, in fact, appeased, crying “amnesty” and sabotaging the prospect of reform. “The long-term advantage,” of focusing on enforcement, Denvir writes, “would accrue to the Right, which was better positioned to link the immigrant threat to crime, welfare, black people and terrorism.” Trump’s attempt to demand funding for his pet wall in order to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program last year, was a repeat of the same pattern. In the end, Trump plowed ahead with construction (literally, through delicate desert ecosystems), and DACA’s fate remains unsettled.

Over time, the left flank of immigration activism has grown wary of both comprehensive immigration reform (finding those “reforms” incremental) and the attempt to distinguish “good” immigrants from “bad” ones. As Denvir notes, “lots of ‘good’ immigrants were being deported too. And how bad were the bad ones, given the vast number of individuals convicted of crimes in the carceral state?”

Hernández ends his book with the case for abolishing immigration detention, while admitting that few people have a specific vision for how to do it. Denvir ends with an analysis of an electorate that might be willing to try. As he puts it, “record deportations and a radicalizing racist right has triggered a revolt among the Democratic Party’s increasingly young and diverse base,” and Democrats under Trump have become “staunchly pro-immigrant” and “more hostile to enforcement.” Hernández also decides to see Trump’s hostility to immigrants not just as horror but also as opportunity. Has the bipartisan consensus of “immigration is a ‘problem’ that needs fixing” finally broken? Will Trump’s nativist wish list of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee policies permanently shift Democrats away from their position that enforcement is always necessary?

Decriminalization of entry and reentry is a start, as Denvir and Hernández advocate (among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Andrew Yang have said they agree). Denvir also calls for downsizing the Border Patrol, destroying existing physical barriers, breaking up agreements between ICE and local law enforcement, and increasing opportunities for legal immigration, especially from Central America and Mexico. Hernández urges, on a personal and institutional level, divestment from private prison companies. Eliminating cash bail and giving every migrant the right to a lawyer would drastically increase their odds of success, as would case management — offering help with housing and legal assistance.

These types of measures might actually lead to better compliance with immigration law, satisfying the obsession with people migrating “the right way.” But they would not offer concessions to a nativist right that wants any and all nonwhite immigration restricted, and they would have to resist the scare tactics bent on tying immigrants to crime and the rhetoric of scarcity that will inevitably accompany an economic downturn and worsening climate conditions. The court cases challenging the most horrendous aspects of confinement in immigrant detention centers are important. But if radical changes come, Hernández writes, “it won’t be because the law demands it. It will be because people demand it.”

The post Immigration Detention Is Part of Mass Incarceration: The Case for Abolishing ICE and Everything Else appeared first on The Intercept.

A indústria do petróleo quer comprar os jovens que lutam pelo clima

No mesmo dia em que a ativista climática Greta Thunberg, 16 anos, fez um discurso emocionante na Cúpula de Ação Climática das Nações Unidas em setembro, no qual criticou os representantes por “roubar meus sonhos e minha infância com suas palavras vazias”, os arquitetos da crise climática receberam participantes jovens selecionados da cúpula para jantar.

CEOs de empresas de combustíveis fósseis, como a BP, Royal Dutch Shell e Equinor da Noruega estavam participando do encontro anual da Iniciativa Climática de Petróleo e Gás em Nova York, a OGCI, que incluiu líderes do setor que afirmam estar comprometidos em tomar ações “práticas” sobre as mudanças climáticas. Na agenda do almoço estava “explorar opções de engajamento de longo prazo” com jovens nos quais a indústria podia confiar. A Student Energy, uma organização sem fins lucrativos com sede em Alberta, perto da região de extração de areia betuminosa do Canadá, ajudou a organizar o evento, que incluiu tempo para que os estudantes interrogassem os CEOs sobre sua inação na mudança climática.

A tensão na sala era alta, disse a diretora executiva da Student Energy, Meredith Adler, de 30 anos, ao Intercept. “Toda a discussão começou com um de nossos participantes falando sobre a razão de os jovens não confiarem nas empresas de petróleo e gás”, disse ela. Mas, no final da reunião, Adler tuitou que estava “muito impressionada” com a OGCI. “Não acho que eles tenham todas as respostas ou respostas suficientemente boas, mas estão realmente nos ouvindo”, escreveu ela.

As perguntas dos estudantes podem ter sido difíceis, mas o evento foi ótimo para a indústria de combustíveis fósseis. Longe estão os dias em que os CEOs questionavam abertamente a existência das mudanças climáticas. Hoje, os líderes do setor estão fingindo uma sensação de urgência climática, enquanto levam adiante propostas de ação que permitirão às empresas continuar colhendo produtos emissores de carbono no futuro. Submeter-se a um grupo de estudantes céticos foi uma oportunidade para os executivos de petróleo e gás aumentarem sua credibilidade em uma época em que muitos jovens ativistas só interagiam com eles se cartazes e piquetes estivessem envolvidos.

Jovens ativistas dizem que estão vendo mais desse uso dos jovens à medida que o movimento climático global da juventude ganha impulso, inclusive na conferência anual da ONU sobre o clima, conhecida como COP 25, realizada em Madri no início de dezembro. Com a “juventude” se tornando sinônimo de ação climática, empresas e políticos estão usando cada vez mais os jovens para mostrarem uma postura séria sobre o clima.

“Existe um perigoso uso simbólico da juventude em benefício de uma imagem pública.”

“O uso da juventude nas campanhas está se tornando cada vez mais evidente”, disse Eilidh Robb, 24 anos, membro da Youth Climate Coalition do Reino Unido, que se envolveu em pressionar a ONU a adotar uma política de conflito de interesses que impeça que representantes da indústria de combustíveis fósseis exerçam influência na COP. “Existe um verdadeiro perigoso uso simbólico da juventude em benefício de uma imagem pública”.

O encontro da OGCI foi um exemplo particularmente flagrante de disso. A OGCI forneceu financiamento à Student Energy, e a diretora de negócios da OGCI, Rhea Hamilton, faz parte do conselho de administração do grupo. Entre os “parceiros” listados no relatório anual de 2018 da Student Energy estão a Royal Dutch Shell e a Suncor, um dos maiores produtores de areia betuminosa do Canadá. As empresas de combustíveis fósseis têm repetidamente financiado a conferência anual da organização.

Embora os líderes da Student Energy muitas vezes ecoem os pontos de discussão de ativistas como Thunberg, os membros do grupo – uma rede que alega incluir 40 mil jovens – são em grande parte pessoas que desejam trabalhar no setor de energia.

A Student Energy está entre os grupos de jovens com status de observador na COP 25, o que significa que seus membros podem ter acesso a espaços de negociação, conversar com as partes envolvidas e participar de eventos. Espera-se que sua presença nas negociações internacionais da ONU sobre o clima cresça. O relatório de 2018 da Student Energy observou que o grupo havia visto um aumento de 73% nos seus comitês filiados em atividade. No próximo ano, a BP se comprometeu a enviar 50 representantes da Student Energy para a COP26. O financiamento dobraria o tamanho da delegação usual do grupo, de acordo com um comunicado da BP. Em um espaço de conferência que serve como um campo de batalha de ideias sobre como lidar com a crise climática, a BP aparentemente vê a presença da Student Energy como benéfica para a corporação.

Mas os financiadores da Student Energy, algumas das empresas com maior responsabilidade na crise climática, não mostram sinais de desaceleração. O portfólio de produção da Suncor, que inclui principalmente a extração de areia betuminosa, é a que mais consome carbono entre as 100 maiores empresas de combustíveis fósseis do mundo, e a empresa pressionou por novos oleodutos que permitiriam continuar aumentando a produção. A Shell, a 11ª maior emissora de gases de efeito estufa do mundo entre as empresas de petróleo e gás, deve aumentar sua produção de combustíveis fósseis em 38% até 2030. A BP, a 14ª maior emissora, aumentará a produção em 20%.

As projeções das empresas são contrárias às medidas que os cientistas afirmam serem necessárias para cumprir a meta da ONU de reduzir as emissões de gases do efeito estufa em 45% até 2030. O objetivo da COP é avançar em direção a esse objetivo.

Adler disse ao Intercept que a Student Energy participou do evento da OGCI para desafiar o setor de petróleo e gás cara a cara. Ela disse que a organização segue princípios rígidos de parceria que impedem os financiadores de exercer influência sobre as atividades do grupo. Uma grande proporção dos membros da organização deseja trabalhar no setor de energias renováveis, não em uma empresa de combustíveis fósseis, acrescentou ela, e no próximo ano eles estarão diversificando significativamente suas fontes de financiamento. Quanto ao financiamento da BP para a COP26, Adler disse que a Student Energy não aceitou oficialmente o dinheiro. “Estamos verificando o que isso é de fato, as implicações disso e se eles são o parceiro certo.”

Para Taylor Billings, porta-voz da organização sem fins lucrativos Corporate Accountability, não é surpresa que o setor esteja buscando um movimento juvenil para colaborar. Como ela disse, “se as zebras estivessem liderando a marcha, as empresas de combustíveis fósseis e os governos do norte do mundo estariam escalando os muros para entrar no zoológico”.

Juventude nas Nações Unidas

A ONU fez pouco para eliminar as oportunidades de uso da juventude como massa de manobra em suas conferências. Desde 2015, o órgão governamental internacional realiza anualmente o Concurso Global de Vídeos Juvenis, no qual os participantes enviam curtas-metragens destacando as ações climáticas. O prêmio deste ano: uma viagem com tudo pago para a COP 25.

Jovens representantes do SustainUS durante uma ação na COP 25 em 4 de dezembro de 2019. O grupo tem sido uma voz importante dos jovens contra a influência corporativa nas discussões sobre o clima.

Foto: Cortesia de David Tong

Mas, ao lado de várias agências da ONU que patrocinam o projeto, estava a Fundação BNP Paribas, financiada por um banco que gastou mais de 50 bilhões de dólares em investimentos em combustíveis fósseis entre 2016 e 2018. Em resposta, 29 organizações climáticas que trabalham com jovens enviaram uma carta aos organizadores da ONU no projeto.

“Esse tipo de captura corporativa de uma iniciativa de empoderamento dos jovens não é apenas decepcionante, mas também criminosa”, dizia a carta, observando que o BNP Paribas é o quinto maior financiador de combustíveis fósseis da Europa. As organizações pediram à ONU que “imediatamente encerre sua parceria com o BNP Paribas para garantir que o envolvimento dos jovens permaneça livre da influência de grandes poluidores e financiadores”.

“Não sejam responsáveis pela corrupção de nossa coragem e ação”, pediram os autores.

A ONU desconsiderou a carta. “Compartilhamos suas opiniões sobre a necessidade de descarbonizar o mundo e, para esse fim, também descarbonizamos portfólios de investimentos de instituições financeiras o mais rápido possível”, disse Niclas Svenningsen, gerente de Ação Global do Clima da ONU. No entanto, ele acrescentou: “Acreditamos que também é importante abrir o diálogo e ver como as partes interessadas de diferentes setores estão fazendo a transição de seus modelos de negócios.”

Para muitos, foi uma resposta típica. Quando se trata da captura indevida dos jovens, “o maior e mais flagrante exemplo são as Nações Unidas”, disse Jonathan Palash-Mizner, co-coordenador de 17 anos da Extinction Rebellion Youth US, que está na COP 25. Ele disse que os espaços para jovens na ONU costumam parecer uma “mesa das crianças”, com os participantes com pouco poder de decisão.

Enquanto isso, “você entra em qualquer negociação e todo negociador invocará Greta Thunberg”, disse Sarah Dobson, 23 anos, membro da Youth Climate Coalition do Reino Unido. “É vergonhoso porque eles não farão jus a essa visão.”

Jovens grevistas protestam durante a COP25, em 6 de dezembro de 2019.

Foto: Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Dobson está envolvida em um esforço juvenil de longa data para expulsar conflitos de interesse da COP. O braço oficial da juventude da ONU, a YOUNGO, impede que seus comitês locais façam parcerias com empresas “que estão em conflito com os interesses dos jovens”. O grupo pressionou por anos por uma política que manteria qualquer um que trabalhasse para uma empresa de combustíveis fósseis fora das futuras conferências climáticas e exigiria divulgação de reuniões entre a indústria de combustíveis fósseis e os países em negociação ou funcionários da ONU.

Eles apontam para a Convenção-Quadro da Organização Mundial da Saúde para o Controle do Tabaco, que afirma que as partes “precisam estar alertas a qualquer esforço da indústria do tabaco para minar ou subverter os esforços de controle do tabaco” e devem proteger o acordo de “interesses comerciais e outros na indústria do tabaco”.

A YOUNGO voltou a defender uma política de conflito de interesses em uma reunião da ONU em junho, onde foram discutidas a logística da COP – mas com os EUA, a União Europeia e outros representantes globais do hemisfério norte que rejeitando a ideia, eles perderam.

“Políticos e CEOs estão fazendo parecer que uma ação real está acontecendo quando, na verdade, quase nada está sendo feito além de contabilidade inteligente e relações públicas criativas.”

Assim, quando a COP 25 começou em Madri no início de dezembro, uma série de representantes da indústria de combustíveis fósseis percorreu os corredores ao lado dos negociadores que decidirão o formato do mais importante acordo internacional sobre o clima. Os líderes da BP, Shell, Total e Suncor receberam credenciamento para participar da conferência por meio da International Emissions Trading Association, líder do setor, que tem status de observadora. Outras delegações convidaram representantes da Chevron, Petrobrás e outras empresas de combustíveis fósseis. Enquanto isso, entre os patrocinadores da COP 25 estava a empresa de serviços públicos Endesa, o maior emissor de carbono da Espanha.

A indústria de combustíveis fósseis tentou obstruir um forte acordo climático desde que a ONU começou a negociar a questão nos anos 90. Este ano, as associações comerciais da indústria intervieram mais em uma seção do acordo conhecida como Artigo 6, que inclui regras para esquemas de comércio de emissões. No geral, os sistemas internacionais de comércio de carbono falharam em reduzir significativamente as emissões onde foram implementadas. Ao invés de simplesmente forçar cortes por meio de regulamentações, os mercados permitem que as empresas invistam em projetos de compensação climática que, em muitos casos, mostraram ter pouco impacto climático real.

A forma dos mercados fará uma enorme diferença em quanto a indústria de combustíveis fósseis terá que pagar. Na COP, como Dobson colocou, “as empresas estão literalmente em todo lugar”.

Empresas de combustíveis fósseis #FazemOFuturo

A uso da juventude em causas se proliferou além dos encontros climáticos da ONU.

Robb mencionou a reunião do primeiro-ministro canadense Justin Trudeau com Thunberg em setembro, realizada antes de participar de uma marcha das Sextas-feiras Pelo Futuro liderada por jovens, onde foi criticado pelos canadenses que o rotularam de criminoso climático. Trudeau se esforçou muito para se mostrar sério sobre o clima, mas no ano passado seu governo comprou o oleoduto Trans Mountain proposto por Kinder Morgan, um projeto-chave altamente contestado e intensivo em carbono para manter rentável o setor de areia betuminosa do Canadá.

O primeiro-ministro canadense Justin Trudeau fala com a ativista ambiental sueca Greta Thunberg em Montreal, em 27 de setembro de 2019.

Foto: Ryan Remiorz/Imprensa canadense via AP

Obviamente, os exemplos mais perturbadores do uso dos jovens como massa de manobra envolvem a indústria de combustíveis fósseis. Este ano, a BP patrocinou a conferência anual One Young World, às vezes chamada de “Davos Jovem”, e pagou para que 30 estudantes focados em questões de energia de baixo carbono pudessem participar do evento. No evento de outubro, o CEO da BP e seu economista-chefe se revezaram no palco. “Mas espere, sou economista-chefe da BP, uma das maiores empresas de petróleo e gás do mundo. O que a BP está fazendo aqui? Não somos parte do problema? Na verdade, eu realmente acredito que não somos”, disse o economista Spencer Dale. “Empresas como a BP podem ser, e realmente precisam ser, parte da solução.”

A Shell lançou uma campanha intitulada #MaketheFuture (#FaçaOFuturo), sugerindo que está construindo um futuro melhor em vez de destruí-lo. A campanha promove a Shell como uma impulsionadora da tecnologia de baixa emissão de carbono e apresenta imagens de jovens, bem como publicações nas redes sociais sobre o financiamento da empresa para programas de engenharia e ciências para jovens.

Até a CO2 Coalition da extrema direita, financiada pelo dinheiro dos combustíveis fósseis dos irmãos Koch e liderada por ex-conselheiros de Trump que afirmam que as emissões de CO2 são boas para a Terra, está tentando recrutar jovens. Depois de se esforçar para atrair apoio de jovens funcionários republicanos, o grupo teria procurado estudantes nos campi de faculdades na tentativa de “alcançá-los um pouco mais cedo”.

“Eles têm dinheiro praticamente infinito para gastar e tentar mudar o círculo eleitoral mais resistente à sua agenda”, disse Julian Brave NoiseCat, 26 anos, e vice-presidente do think tank progressista Data for Progress.

De fato, a gigante da areia betuminosa Suncor também foi o “parceiro fundador” da primeira Cúpula de Energia de Estudantes Indígenas da Student Energy, realizada em janeiro – uma oportunidade para a empresa alcançar ao mesmo tempo dois dados demográficos associados à resistência a combustíveis fósseis. Outros financiadores da conferência de jovens indígenas incluem a Enbridge, TC Energy e LNG Canada, que lucram com oleodutos de areia betuminosa que foram interrompidos por coalizões lideradas por indígenas.

Adler disse que, até recentemente, era apenas a indústria de combustíveis fósseis que demonstrava interesse em financiar a programação do grupo. “A realidade é que havia bem poucos tipos de organizações interessadas na juventude até cerca de um ano atrás”, disse.

Quando a COP 25 terminou, com questões-chave não resolvidas, Thunberg foi nomeado Pessoa do Ano da revista Time. Em um discurso na ONU no mesmo dia, ela fez referência à maneira como empresas e políticos cooptaram suas palavras. “Essas frases são tudo em que as pessoas se concentram. Eles não se lembram dos fatos, das próprias razões pelas quais digo essas coisas em primeiro lugar”, disse ela. “Eu ainda acredito que o maior perigo não é a inação – o perigo real é quando políticos e CEOs estão fazendo parecer que uma ação real está acontecendo quando, de fato, quase nada está sendo feito além de contabilidade inteligente e relações públicas criativas”.

O que está em jogo, disse Dobson, é a diluição de um movimento juvenil vigoroso. “As empresas captam nossas imagens, pegam os símbolos de nosso movimento e as usam para validar suas próprias atividades, desrespeitando completamente o esforço que colocamos na construção desse movimento popular”, disse ela. “Isso dá a ilusão de que os jovens venderam seus valores para apoiar as atividades de negócios horríveis”.

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Como o plástico está tornando comunidades da América Central inabitáveis

Os pescadores estão com as pernas até a altura das coxas imersas na água barrenta quando nosso barco se aproxima da costa, a grama roçando o casco. É uma manhã quieta e fresca, e a névoa esconde o rio quando o sol começa a subir acima das árvores. Na praia, uma garça branca se ergue no raso e alça voo em uma explosão de som quando os pescadores levantam a rede para revelar sua captura brilhante. Ao lado deles, semissubmersa, uma garrafa de refrigerante de plástico aponta na direção do mar.

Quando piso na praia, noto mais pedaços de plástico entre os juncos, meio enterrados na lama, além de retalhos de tecido manchados, pedaços de espuma de embalagem, uma única sandália de plástico rachada. Logo depois, o rio Motagua, na Guatemala, desagua no Caribe, levando consigo um carregamento diário de detritos lavado de lixões superlotados e aterros clandestinos a centenas de quilômetros rio acima.

Em todo o mundo, estima-se que 80% do plástico oceânico provenha da terra como “lixo mal administrado”. De fato, na Guatemala, quase não existem aterros sanitários gerenciados adequadamente e praticamente não há estações públicas de tratamento de água. O resultado é um ensopado nocivo de esgoto, escoamento industrial e agrícola e uma flotilha sempre cheia de lixo plástico, saindo da foz do rio em direção ao imenso recife mesoamericano, que há muito sustentava comunidades ricas em biodiversidade e pesca de Cancún à Nicarágua. Agora, as praias daqui e da vizinha Honduras são regularmente soterradas por pilhas artificiais de escovas de dentes, recipientes de maquiagem, seringas velhas e frascos de líquido intravenoso, bonecos de ação, serpentinas de filme plástico e sacos de papel alumínio.

Hendrik, um jovem funcionário do departamento de áreas protegidas do país, fez uma excursão comigo e alguns colegas no final de 2018. No último ano, trabalhadores empregados pelo ministério do meio ambiente estavam limpando esse trecho de praia, carregando carrinhos de mão com muito lixo, mas mesmo assim a areia está coberta por um mosaico de pedaços coloridos de plástico. “É um esforço constante”, diz Hendrik. Por mais lixo que tirem, o rio sempre traz mais para substituí-lo.

Os moradores de El Quetzalito são encarregados de manter as “biocercas” recentemente instaladas pelo governo, que atuam como barreiras superficiais para impedir que o lixo flutuante chegue à foz do rio ao desaguar no Caribe.

Foto: Celia Talbot Tobin

A cidade fica no final de uma estrada de terra que passa por intermináveis fileiras de bananeiras e palmeiras, a poucos quilômetros da fronteira da Guatemala com Honduras. Um pouco além das casas situadas na margem do Motagua, o rio vira à direita para um beco que vai até o Caribe em uma nuvem lamacenta de sedimentos e detritos.

Embora a pequena comunidade, habitada por apenas cerca de 305 pessoas, esteja a quase 300 quilômetros da movimentada capital, cheia de gases, o lixo da cidade passa flutuando e chega às praias todos os dias. Em 2016, imagens de um grande deslizamento de lixo no lixão da Cidade da Guatemala que teria provocado a morte de três catadores e brevemente chamado a atenção internacional para as condições insustentáveis no local. Mas com infraestrutura sobrecarregada ou inexistente em toda a Guatemala, a estação das chuvas leva regularmente grandes quantidades de materiais descartados de muitos lixões para os rios todos os anos.

Com poucos aterros adequadamente contidos na Guatemala, a estação das chuvas leva grandes quantidades de materiais dos lixões para os rios.

“É algo que vem acontecendo há um tempo”, diz Marco Dubón, conhecido como Marquito. Durante a infância e adolescência, ele não se lembra de uma época em que o rio não estivesse cheio de lixo. Nos últimos anos, no entanto, ficou muito pior.

Em 2017, ameaçado por um processo de Honduras pelas praias poluídas, o ministro do Meio Ambiente da Guatemala apresentou um dispositivo que ele chamou de “biocerca”. Feito de garrafas plásticas vazias amarradas com uma rede de plástico, a barragem flutuante projeta-se da costa para a corrente principal do rio em ângulo, canalizando o lixo para o lado antes que ele chegue ao mar.

A cerca biológica foi instalada perto de El Quetzalito, e um pequeno grupo de moradores, supervisionado por Marquito, foi contratado para remover o lixo capturado pela barreira. Eles também trabalhariam para limpar a praia pouco depois da cidade e, com sorte, causar algum impacto na poluição geral.

Numa segunda-feira de setembro de 2018, quando a visitamos, havia uma série de garrafas de plástico e paus flutuantes presos na curva da biocerca. A superfície parece sólida, mas ondula-se contra o casco do barco amarrado ao lado da margem. No momento, não há muita coisa descendo o rio, explicou Marquito, mas o lixo voltará com as chuvas. “Quando está cheio, praticamente dá para caminhar sobre ele”, diz.

No momento, os trabalhadores se concentram na praia, um rápido passeio de barco rio abaixo. É cedo, mas o sol já está forte. Uma fogueira de madeira encharcada e detritos não identificáveis envia ondas de vapor e fumaça pela praia, mas a maior parte do que os trabalhadores juntam vai para sacos grandes para serem transportados de volta à cidade, ao centro de reciclagem. Lá, vidro e plástico limpos serão separados, e todo o resto, compactado em combustível para os fornos de incineração de uma empresa de cimento.

Os trabalhadores recebem cerca de 2,8 mil quetzales por mês, um pouco menos de US$ 400. O trabalho não é agradável, mas é mais estável do que a pesca. Carlos René Ortega diz que prefere trabalhar na praia a limpar a biocerca ou separar o lixo no calor do abafado centro de reciclagem com telhado de zinco. Na praia, há uma brisa perto do meio-dia. E, quando trabalham na biocerca, os trabalhadores precisam entrar na água para remover o lixo. “Nós nos revezamos”, explicou ele, “mas depois de três ou quatro horas, saímos com coceira”.

“Dez anos atrás, era incrível pescar aqui”, diz Izak Dubón, fazendo uma pausa para plantar sua pá na areia. “Dava para pegar peixes grandes e realmente ganhar dinheiro.” Izak, 20 anos, é alto e magro, com uma voz surpreendentemente profunda por trás do lenço azul que amarrou sobre a boca e o nariz. Ele costumava pescar com o pai, mas agora sente que não tem outra escolha senão trabalhar para ministério do meio ambiente. “Este é um ótimo país”, diz. “Se não tivéssemos toda essa contaminação, teríamos turismo.”

À tarde, pegamos o barco pela foz do rio até a praia em frente. Ali, ninguém removeu nada do lixo que agora está empilhado em dunas tão grandes que impossibilitam que se veja a areia. Há uma TV está meio enterrada no lixo. No outro extremo da praia, a carcaça de uma vaca com as patas esticadas rola na borda da superfície, inchada e brilhante, com um abutre curvado sobre ela.

Marquito, parado entre as pilhas de plástico e madeira, tem uma expressão indecifrável. Baixinho, como que falando sozinho, diz: “Tem trabalho aqui para anos”.

O único aterro oficial da Guatemala, localizado na capital do país, com 3 milhões de habitantes, é o maior da América Central.

Foto: Celia Talbot Tobin

Desde que o primeiro plástico sintético apareceu em 1907, produzimos 8,3 bilhões de toneladas, 5 bilhões das quais ainda estão espalhadas pelo mundo, não mais em uso, mas sem perspectiva de desaparecerem tão cedo. Em todo o mundo, países com economias em desenvolvimento, como a Guatemala, são a principal fonte de plástico oceânico. Embora países de alta renda, como os EUA, consumam a uma taxa mais alta – e, portanto, joguem fora muito mais plástico per capita –, os países menos desenvolvidos geralmente não têm infraestrutura para reciclagem ou eliminação adequada de resíduos, o que significa que muito mais do seu lixo acaba no oceano.

Em 2017, os pesquisadores descobriram que 90% do plástico marinho foi levado aos oceanos por apenas 10 rios, incluindo o Yangtze, o Nilo e o Ganges. Eles são as vias navegáveis de algumas das áreas mais populosas do mundo e, como resultado, carregam enormes quantidades de lixo plástico. Como o Motagua, podem ter infraestrutura mínima para tratamento de água ou disposição de resíduos. No total, entre 5 e 12 milhões de toneladas de plástico fluem da terra para o mar todos os anos.

Com o rio contaminado demais para ser usado para fornecimento de água potável ou irrigação, as comunidades ao longo do rio ficam presas a um cenário cada vez mais fechado de escassez e poluição.

O custo desses rios altamente poluídos também é alto em terra.

“Olhando para o mapa, a Guatemala deveria ter água em abundância”, explicou Gerardo Paiz em seu escritório na organização sem fins lucrativos Madre Selva – ou Mãe Floresta –, onde trabalha como ativista e porta-voz. Ele aponta para um mapa topográfico de aparência exuberante do país enquanto explica o que toda aquela paisagem de selva e montanha esconde. O Motagua percorre cerca de 480 quilômetros, cruzando a maior parte do istmo da América Central, mas, segundo Paiz, quase toda a contaminação ocorre em cerca de um terço de seu comprimento, onde ele se junta a afluentes que transportam esgoto, escoamento industrial e lixo da cidade da Guatemala.

O lixo se acumula em uma entrada nos arredores de Puerto Barrios, na Guatemala.

Foto: Celia Talbot Tobin

Paiz diz que não há estações de tratamento de água públicas no país. As poucas estações de tratamento de águas residuais existentes são caras e difíceis de manter, e muitas não estão mais funcionando. Nos últimos anos, vários projetos financiados internacionalmente para construir novas infraestruturas de águas residuais foram suspensos, possivelmente como resultado do governo da Guatemala, atingido por escândalos. Enquanto isso, esgoto e detritos não tratados fluem desimpedidos para o rio.

Para os estados de El Progreso e Zacapa, situados rio abaixo, a água está se tornando um problema maior. Esses estados ficam ao longo do “corredor seco” da Guatemala, uma região agrícola que foi duramente atingida pelas mudanças climáticas e pela seca na última década. Com o rio contaminado demais para ser usado para fornecimento de água potável ou irrigação, as comunidades ao longo do rio ficam presas a um cenário cada vez mais fechado de escassez e poluição. Esses problemas ambientais, agravados pela violência, a corrupção e a pobreza, estão entre os fatores que motivaram mais de 116.808 guatemaltecos a tentarem atravessar a fronteira dos EUA em 2018.

Quanto ao plástico, não é difícil acompanhar o problema de volta à sua origem.

“A indústria do plástico está se movendo agressivamente para aumentar a produção”, explica Judith Enck, ex-administradora regional da Agência de Proteção Ambiental dos EUA e professora de políticas públicas no Bennington College. Um relatório de 2016 previu que a produção de plástico dobraria nos próximos 20 anos. Enck aponta que, apesar da má repercussão recente em relação a plásticos nos EUA, as empresas petroquímicas ainda estão planejando novas fábricas para transformar subprodutos da fraturamento em plástico. “Eles estão apenas avançando com literalmente dezenas de novas fábricas nos Estados Unidos.”

“Grandes empresas estão lançando muitos produtos que sabem que não têm chance de serem reciclados. E eles estão sendo vendidos em locais com pouco acesso a aterros sanitários.”

Isso dá às empresas um forte incentivo para vender mais plástico nos países em desenvolvimento, onde as economias em crescimento proporcionaram novos mercados para produtos plásticos baratos e descartáveis. Em um mercado em Puerto Barrios, pequena cidade a cerca de 40 minutos de El Quetzalito, bancas exibem camisas de futebol e camisetas baratas embrulhadas em plástico, bonés de beisebol de malha de espuma e plástico, brinquedos em cores neon, sandálias e calçados baratos e muito mais.

Uma fonte grande e crescente de resíduos de plástico é a embalagem, especialmente os pacotes de folhas laminadas frequentemente usados para alimentos e outros produtos de uso único, como sabonete ou xampu. Eles são populares em economias emergentes como a América Central e a Ásia, observa Enck, porque pode ser acessível às pessoas comprar pequenas quantidades de um produto em vez de uma garrafa inteira. Mas esses materiais, feitos de plásticos especializados e folhas laminadas juntas, raramente são recicláveis.

“Grandes empresas estão lançando muitos produtos que sabem que não têm chance de serem reciclados”, diz Enck. “E eles estão sendo vendidos em locais com pouco acesso a aterros sanitários.”

Em outras palavras, com as atividades normais atuais, empresas projetam e produzem materiais não biodegradáveis e não recicláveis que serão usados uma vez e depois descartados para fluir diretamente para o oceano.

Em 26 de setembro de 2018, trabalhadores separam tipos de papel em uma instalação de recolhimento na Cidade da Guatemala, onde os materiais são separados e organizados antes de serem enviados para reciclagem.

Foto: Celia Talbot Tobin

“Como resolver a poluição plástica na sala de reuniões em vez das praias?”, foi a pergunta feita por Luisa Santiago, líder da América Latina para a iniciativa New Plastics Economy, nova economia de plásticos, da Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Reciclar não é a resposta, diz ela. Apenas 9% dos plásticos produzidos atualmente são reciclados, e a maior parte desse material só pode ser reciclada uma vez antes de também ser enviada para a aterro ou lixão.

“Entendemos que lidar com o lixo é parte do problema, mas a poluição do plástico realmente precisa ser resolvida rio acima”, afirma Santiago. Isso significa trabalhar com governos e a indústria para encontrar melhores soluções para os problemas que os plásticos de uso único devem solucionar. A organização de Santiago publicou uma análise em 2016 que constatou que de US$ 80 bilhões a US$ 120 bilhões desaparecem da economia todos os anos na forma de embalagens plásticas de uso único que nunca são recicladas.

Ao fazer um argumento econômico contra o plástico e em direção a uma economia mais circular, a organização de Santiago espera obrigar a indústria a mudar de maneira sistemática, em vez de confiar nos consumidores para tentar fazer escolhas individuais dentro de um sistema defeituoso. “Precisamos redesenhar o sistema, e o consumidor será automaticamente transferido para esse sistema – assim como o consumidor foi transferido para um sistema de uso único algumas décadas atrás”, observa ela.

A pedra angular do plano da New Plastics Economy é uma promessa de eliminar “plásticos desnecessários” até 2025. Para isso, Santiago acredita que é necessário trabalhar com empresas como Coca-Cola e Nestlé, mesmo que essa abordagem dificulte uma postura contra os motivos de puro lucro do setor. “Nós não acreditamos na proibição do plástico”, Santiago me disse.

Instalações privadas de coleta de lixo para o país existem apenas na capital. Ali, materiais recicláveis, como garrafas de refrigerante de plástico, papel e sacolas plásticas finas, são separados por tipo, cor e peso, e depois compactados.

Fotos: Celia Talbot Tobin

Judith Enck discorda. “A proibição de sacolas reduz a poluição do plástico”, afirma. Desde que a Enck deixou a EPA em 2017, iniciou um projeto chamado Beyond Plastics, com o objetivo de levar as comunidades a eliminar a poluição de plásticos na base. Segundo ela, onde as proibições de sacos são implementadas, além de restringir o isopor e disponibilizar canudos de plástico apenas mediante solicitação, elas podem ser bastante eficazes –uma abordagem que ela chama de “trifecta dos plásticos”. “São frutas baixas”, observa Enck. “E existem alternativas fáceis.”

O problema é que esses tipos de políticas ainda não são comuns. Segundo ela, menos de 10% dos municípios dos EUA aprovaram qualquer tipo de legislação antiplástico. No mundo em desenvolvimento, no entanto, as políticas sem-plástico estão se espalhando. Em 2002, Bangladesh se tornou um dos primeiros países a proibir completamente as sacolas descartáveis e, até este ano, de acordo com a National Geographic, 34 países africanos tinham proibições em suas leis.

O governo guatemalteco anunciou a proibição do plástico descartável e do isopor a partir de 2021.

Também na Guatemala, o plástico é cada vez mais visto como um problema. No final de 2016, a cidade de San Pedro La Laguna ganhou as manchetes ao proibir sacolas e embalagens de plástico. Os moradores as estão substituindo por alternativas reutilizáveis. Em setembro deste ano, o governo guatemalteco anunciou uma proibição de plástico descartável e isopor a partir de 2021. Os dois anos seguintes devem dar aos fornecedores tempo para encontrar alternativas compostáveis ou reutilizáveis.

E se a política demorou a acompanhar o problema, a conversa sobre o plástico está mudando rapidamente. As pessoas em El Quetzalito nos disseram que estavam mais conscientes da poluição do que costumavam ser. Muitos deles disseram que tentaram reduzir o próprio desperdício. Miguel López, um homem de meia idade com rosto bronzeado e sombrio sob um boné de beisebol azul-petróleo, nos disse que se sentia parte de algo bom.

“É importante fazer isso”, disse, endireitando-se do ancinho para empurrar o chapéu de volta à cabeça. O trabalho, embora difícil e às vezes desagradável, tem um propósito. Apertando os olhos na direção da água, ele nos disse, simplesmente: “Para amanhã, precisamos de praias limpas”.

Esta reportagem recebeu o apoio da International Women’s Media Foundation, como parte da Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative.

Tradução: Cássia Zanon

The post Como o plástico está tornando comunidades da América Central inabitáveis appeared first on The Intercept.