RSN: Matt Ford | The Supreme Court's Public Legitimacy Crisis Has Arrived
26 September 22
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Americans’ antipathy toward the high court is deepening—and for the first time, a slim majority favors expansion.
Justice Elena Kagan raised similar concerns during a Rhode Island event this month. “The court shouldn’t be wandering around just inserting itself into every hot button issue in America, and it especially, you know, shouldn’t be doing that in a way that reflects one ideology or one set of political views over another,” she explained to the audience. Though neither Kagan nor Sotomayor mentioned their conservative colleagues by name, it was not hard to deduce to whom they were referring.
Their warnings are borne out by public opinion surveys conducted by three of the most reliable polling organizations on Supreme Court issues. Taken together, they show a clear and unambiguous shift in how the American people perceive the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade this summer—and a growing willingness to rein in the justices’ ideological shift. If that backlash among the public proves durable, and if the Supreme Court’s conservative majority does not change tack, some sort of confrontation between the two forces may be inevitable.
On June 23, Gallup found that only 25 percent of Americans said that they had either a great deal of confidence or quite a lot of confidence in the high court. That represented a 5 percent drop from the previous low in 2014, as well as a 10 percent decline from the 2021 survey. The Gallup poll technically preceded the release of the court’s decision in Dobbs on June 24. But it came more than a month after Politico published a draft copy of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the case, which all but proved that the court would overturn Roe later that month.
Next came a survey by the Pew Research Center on September 1. It incorporated the entire period after Dobbs’s release and found an even deeper shift in public opinion about the Supreme Court in three significant ways. First, it found that the court’s overall favorability ratings were underwater for the first time since it began asking Americans in 1987, with 49 percent of Americans viewing the court unfavorably and 48 percent favorably. That was a sharp reversal from two years ago when 70 percent of Americans said they viewed the court favorably and 28 percent said they didn’t. In essence, nearly a third of Americans have changed their mind about the Supreme Court over the past two years.
Which segment of Americans changed their minds? Pew’s second notable finding was the emergence of a major partisan divide in how people view the court. While 67 percent of Democrats described themselves as favorable in 2020, only 28 percent said the same thing in 2022. Republican support, by comparison, clocked in at 73 percent. The Supreme Court has seen other sharp partisan changes in its public perception in recent years. Republican support briefly dipped to 33 percent in 2015, the year that the justices struck down same-sex marriage bans and turned back right-wing litigation on abortion rights and affirmative action, before rebounding during the Trump era. But the post-Dobbs drop among Democrats stands out for both the size and the speed of the decline.
The third notable finding from Pew was a growing sense that the Supreme Court as an institution had grown too strong. Only 25 percent of Americans said in 2020 that the justices had too much power. That number jumped to 45 percent after Dobbs, with only a 3 percent gap separating them from those who were fine with the status quo. Here Pew also found a partisan divide and a surging sense of dissatisfaction on the left: 23 percent of Democrats said they supported court-packing the Supreme Court in 2020, when the question was already circulating among some Democratic officials and liberal commentators. After Dobbs, that number rose to 64 percent.
Marquette Law School’s most recent survey about the high court, which was published this week, again revealed a sharp decline in public support for the justices. It found that the court went from a 66 percent/33 percent approval/disapproval rating among all Americans two years ago to just 40 percent/60 percent today. The causal factor was again obvious, as Marquette found that roughly two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Dobbs ruling. But the real humdinger was buried in the crosstabs: 51 percent of Americans said that they either strongly or somewhat supported expanding the Supreme Court, including a bare majority of self-described independents. To my knowledge, this is the first reputable Supreme Court pollster to find majority support for that proposal, even if it is a bare majority at that.
At this point you might be asking, “So what?” These numbers would be calamitous for the court’s conservative justices if they were on the ballot in this fall’s midterm elections. But they are not and they never will be. And, indeed, there is an argument to be made that the Supreme Court is not supposed to be responsive or even sensitive to public opinion. It is, at least in theory, a court of law that is supposed to impartially decide cases and not an elected body with constituents to satisfy and voters to woo.
If the polls merely showed that Americans were mad at the Supreme Court, then it might be easier to overlook. But the post-Dobbs surveys also reveal that a clear plurality of Americans—and perhaps even a majority of them—are pairing that anger and frustration with a desire for institutional reform, particularly among Democrats. Whether this desire will persist in the long run or fade as time separates the country from the moment that Roe was overturned is impossible to predict. But for now, the desire undeniably exists.
For what it’s worth, I suspect that this urge will not fade immediately. Dobbs had immediate consequences for millions of Americans across the country, particularly in the Midwest and the South where a series of total or near-total bans snapped into place. The results of those bans have already drawn an intense backlash of their own. Abortion rights will remain an active political issue as state legislators and officials in places like Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin debate what comes next for their people in a post-Roe world. And even in the states where no legislative action is imminent, recent GOP proposals to pass a 15-week ban in Congress will ensure that abortion rights will play a major role in this fall’s midterm elections for all Americans.
Roe was somewhat unique in the firmament of Supreme Court decisions that Americans deeply care about. It is one of a scant few cases, along with Brown v. Board of Education and perhaps Dred Scott v. Sandford, that can be freely mentioned without having to describe the underlying details of the case. At the same time, the Supreme Court will have more opportunities in the upcoming term to touch raw nerves in American political life. In the next few months, the court will hear oral arguments on whether it should bar any consideration of race or diversity in college admissions, and the likeliest answer from the conservative majority will be “no.” The justices will also get yet another opportunity to narrow or gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it hears a racial gerrymandering case from Alabama this fall. If Justice Clarence Thomas gets his way, major precedents on everything from same-sex marriage to contraceptive access could be “revisited.”
Chief Justice John Roberts famously said during his confirmation hearing in 2005 that the Supreme Court justice’s role is akin to that of an umpire at a baseball game who simply calls balls and strikes. That comparison is not quite accurate, at least for him and his eight co-workers. It is fairly true for lower court judges, who, like umpires, have little to no say about which cases or at bats they must consider. But the Supreme Court’s docket is almost entirely discretionary, which allows for an ideological majority on the court to essentially choose how it will reshape the law and the Constitution.
When the court agreed to take up Dobbs, for example, there was no split among the circuit courts of appeal to resolve, or muddled decision by an appeals court to clarify, or major undecided question of constitutional law to answer. There was only a 50-year push by the conservative legal movement that wanted to overturn Roe and a realization by the conservative justices that they had the five votes necessary to do it. The college admissions cases that will be heard this term also came about without a circuit split or a major change in the law. They are mainly the product of one right-wing legal activist who has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to overturn the Supreme Court’s precedents on the matter for more than a decade. Imagine if a Boston-born umpire went out of his way to call balls and strikes by the Red Sox’s division rivals.
The terminology that we use to describe this situation—a crisis of legitimacy, a loss of prestige and authority, a decline in popularity, or something else—matters less than its practical implications. The Supreme Court has shown little to no interest in not taking up cases that resolve major political issues in the conservative legal movement’s favor, even if it is out of step with public opinion. A strong plurality (and perhaps even a narrow majority) of the American people is not only unsatisfied with this trend, but is also increasingly supportive of proposals that would prevent or reverse it. Eventually, one of these sides will have to win or give way.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows speaks on his phone as he waits for President Donald Trump to depart the White House on Oct. 30, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP)
Phil Waldron, an early proponent of various election-related conspiracy theories, texted Meadows on December 23 that an Arizona judge had dismissed a lawsuit filed by friendly GOP lawmakers there. The suit demanded state election officials hand over voting machines and other election equipment, as part of the hunt for evidence to support Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
In relaying the news to Meadows, Waldron said the decision would allow opponents to engage in “delay tactics” preventing Waldron and his associates from immediately accessing machines. Waldron also characterized Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” referring to similar efforts in other states like Georgia.
“Pathetic,” Meadows responded.
The messages, which have not been previously reported, shed new light on how Waldron’s reach extended into the highest levels of the White House and the extent to which Meadows was kept abreast of plans for accessing voting machines, a topic sources tell CNN, and court documents suggest, is of particular interest to state and federal prosecutors probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The messages also provide an early window into how an effort to gain access to voting machines through the courts and state legislatures morphed into a more clandestine endeavor that is now the subject of multiple criminal investigations. Despite attempts to distance himself from the more dubious attempts to keep Trump in office, the messages underscore how Meadows was an active participant, engaging with someone who former White House officials have described as a fringe outsider peddling outlandish ideas.
Waldron, a retired Army colonel with ties to Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn, has emerged as a key figure in the broader scheme to overturn the election and was the architect of several extreme proposals for doing so. That includes sending Meadows a PowerPoint presentation outlining a plan for overturning the election, which was later used to brief Republican lawmakers, titled, in part: “Options for 6 Jan.”
Waldron also helped draft language for an executive order directing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines on behalf of the White House.
Trump never signed the order, siding with White House lawyers who insisted the idea was legally perilous. But there is evidence that his closest allies, including Meadows, continued to entertain similar pitches from Waldron in the lead-up to January 6 as they sought to validate conspiracy theories about foreign election interference.
Criminal prosecutors in Georgia are demanding Waldron and Meadows testify as part of ongoing grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. Waldron is also engaged in a months-long legal fight with the January 6 Committee, which has subpoenaed his cellphone data. Meadows recently complied with a Justice Department subpoena to hand over information pertaining to the 2020 election including these text messages.
Recent subpoenas from the Justice Department related to the same probe indicate investigators are seeking information about claims of election fraud and efforts to persuade government officials to “change or affect” the election results, “or delay certification of the results,” according to one subpoena obtained by CNN, exactly the kinds of activities Waldron is known to have engaged in.
Waldron and his attorneys did not respond to several requests for comment. Meadows’ attorney also did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
‘Chasing election machines for years’
Before he retired from the Army as a colonel in 2017, Waldron specialized in psychological operations and worked alongside Michael Flynn at the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to his military records.
In numerous interviews, people familiar with Waldron’s background tell CNN that for years he has been obsessed with the idea that US voting machines are vulnerable to foreign hacking. “Waldron had been chasing election machines for years,” said one former US official with knowledge of his efforts.
It wasn’t until Trump started falsely claiming that the election had been stolen from him that Waldron had a chance to put his theories to use. Trump’s inner circle was warned by several Republican lawmakers that without evidence of fraud, their plan to subvert the Electoral College would almost certainly fail, text messages obtained by the House Select Committee investigating the US Capitol attack show.
In the days after the election, Waldron quickly emerged as one of the Trump legal team’s favorite “expert witnesses” on election fraud. He was a near constant presence during Giuliani’s road show in the weeks after the election when he and his team of Trump lawyers traveled around the country to convince state officials that the outcome had been tainted by widespread voter fraud.
During one December 2020 hearing in Georgia, Waldron appeared alongside Giuliani and conservative attorney John Eastman, where he pushed unfounded claims about Dominion voting machines and similarly alleged that fraudulent ballots had tainted the election results.
Those familiar with his role in the effort also described Waldron as being in charge of “operational planning” and working directly with Rudy Giuliani on gaining access to voting systems in states where Trump lost.
“Waldron was responsible for planning and overseeing execution” of efforts to access voting systems,” said one of those sources.
That was especially true in Antrim County, Michigan, where Waldron and his team of pro-Trump operatives gained access to voting systems there in late 2020 – producing a since-debunked report based on their findings that Trump repeatedly held-up as proof of election fraud even after it was dismissed by his own top advisers.
The Antrim County breach is now the subject of a criminal investigation by authorities in Michigan. Among those under investigation are Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee to become Michigan’s attorney general, and a number of people Waldron worked with after the 2020 election, including Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas.
Arizona audit
As Trump’s lawyers worked to enlist sympathetic state and local officials to help keep Trump in office, Waldron often served as a key liaison, according to emails and text messages obtained by the group American Oversight and shared with CNN. That was particularly true in Arizona, where Waldron was in direct communication with a number of GOP state officials and lawmakers about producing evidence of fraud.
In the weeks before his December 23 text to Meadows, Waldron exchanged nearly a dozen emails with state GOP officials in Arizona, discussing various plans for gaining access to voting systems or ballots from certain counties and pitching himself to analyze the election data for evidence of fraud, according to the documents reviewed by CNN.
On December 11, Waldron sent an email to three Arizona state GOP lawmakers who were pushing to overturn the election, suggesting a member of his team could “take a hard drive” to county elections offices, upload relevant voter data and “get the files to us.”
“This would be the fastest and most transparent way to give you the direct evidence you need to either pursue or close the issue,” he wrote, referring to ongoing efforts to upend the election results in Arizona.
“We are happy to consult with you to answer questions or coordinate a ‘way ahead,’” Waldron added.
Two days later, Waldron’s attorney and business associate, Charles Bundren, sent one of those same Arizona lawmakers draft language for subpoenas seeking electronically stored voting information. The document is nearly identical to subpoenas Arizona state Republicans ultimately filed demanding election officials hand over voting machines, emails obtained by the group American Oversight and provided to CNN show.
After an Arizona judge ultimately rejected those subpoenas on December 23, Waldron reached out to Meadows about the decision, according to the newly revealed text messages.
Waldron texted Meadows again on December 28, 2020, suggesting a member of his team had analyzed election data from “several counties” and pointing to two specific examples of what he called the “Southern steal” – an apparent reference to voting irregularities that, he alleged, had changed the election outcome in those localities.
“OK,” Meadows responded, acknowledging Waldron’s message.
Ongoing efforts
It remains unclear if there are additional texts between Waldron and Meadows beyond the messages exchanged on December 23 and December 28, in part because both men have sought to block the January 6 committee from obtaining their cellphone data.
Over the past year, Trump allies have continued to push baseless claims about widespread fraud and sought access to voting systems in various states. Waldron has remained a central figure in that effort.
Emails obtained by CNN connect Waldron directly to the 2021 partisan audit in Maricopa County, Arizona. After his work in Antrim County, Michigan, Waldron pushed GOP state officials in Arizona to hire his team to conduct the audit. But Arizona officials expressed concerns after Waldron’s Antrim County report was thoroughly debunked.
Instead, with Waldron’s endorsement, they hired Cyber Ninjas to conduct the Maricopa audit, which ultimately proved that Biden won the county. Waldron remained heavily involved, emails obtained by CNN show. It’s unclear whether Waldron was paid for his work as Arizona Republicans have fought to keep that information from coming out publicly. Emails have emerged that show contractors connected to Waldron were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by America Voting Rights Foundation, a Trump-affiliated PAC created last summer.
Over the past year, Waldron was also listed as a key participant for a series of “election integrity” planning sessions involving other notable Trump allies like Flynn and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Lindell and another known associate of Waldron, Conan Hayes, are subjects of a separate FBI investigation focused on an election system breach in Colorado.
In April, Waldron sued the House January 6 committee to block their efforts to obtain his cellphone data. Waldron’s own lawyer, Charles Bundren, has taken steps to shield his own communications from the committee.
Court documents show that Bundren stepped aside as Waldron’s primary attorney in the case against the committee last month and joined the lawsuit as a co-plaintiff, arguing the panel is seeking cellphone data that could expose the breadth of his own contacts with others involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Bundren did not respond to several requests for comment.
Edward Snowden, 39, fled the US after leaking secret files that revealed domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by NSA. (photo: Joseph Pierce/Guardian UK)
Former NSA intelligence contractor was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013
Snowden, 39, a former US intelligence contractor, has been living in Russia since 2013 to escape prosecution in the US after leaking secret files, published by the Guardian, that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the US National Security Agency.
In 2020, Snowden said that he and his then-pregnant wife were applying for Russian citizenship in order not to be separated from their future son in an era of pandemics and closed borders. Russia granted him permanent residency rights the same year, paving the way for him to obtain Russian citizenship.
“After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That’s why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we’re applying for dual US-Russian citizenship,” Snowden wrote on Twitter at the time.
“Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love, including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited. Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home.”
There was no immediate reaction from Snowden, whose name appeared on a list of 72 foreign-born individuals for whom Putin was granting citizenship.
Putin’s decree to grant Snowden citizenship quickly led to quips on social media that the whistleblower will soon be conscripted into the Russian army to fight in Ukraine as part of the country’s nationwide mobilisation campaign.
“Will Snowden be mobilised?” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the state-owned broadcaster RT on her Telegram channel.
Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told the state news agency Ria Novosti that his client could not be drafted because he has not previously served in the Russian armed forces. The lawyer added that Snowden’s wife, Lindsay Mills, was also applying for Russian citizenship.
The whistleblower largely keeps a low profile while living in Russia, occasionally posting photographs of his family in Moscow. He has said in 2019 that he was willing to return to the US if he’s guaranteed a fair trial.
Snowden, who has previously criticised Kremlin’s human rights record, has not commented in public about the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Prior to the war, he repeatedly voiced doubts that Russia would start a war, blaming the media for “pushing” the conflict.
“I’ve just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful because I called it wrong,” Snowden wrote on Twitter on 27 February, three days after Russia sent its troops to Ukraine.
Reproductive justice rally outside the White House, on 23 August. (photo: Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock)
Many pharmacies and physicians are forced to deny patients access to drugs, such as methotrexate, that can be used to help induce an abortion
Noblin, a 40-year-old college instructor in rural Missouri, never had trouble getting her monthly prescription of methotrexate for her rheumatoid arthritis. So she went to her local Walgreens to figure out why, standing in line with other customers as she waited for an explanation.
When it was finally her turn, a pharmacist informed Noblin – in front of the other customers behind her – that she could not release the medication until she received confirmation from Noblin’s doctor that Noblin would not use it to have an abortion.
Since the supreme court’s elimination of federal abortion rights, many states have been enacting laws which highly restrict access to abortion, affecting not only pregnant women but also other patients as well as healthcare providers.
As a result, many pharmacies and physicians have been forced to deny and delay patients’ access to essential medications – such as methotrexate – that can be used to help induce an abortion.
Noblin is one of the 5 million methotrexate users across the US and one of the country’s many autoimmune patients. Although she was eventually given her prescription, Noblin and other patients are now forced to grapple both with a monthly invasion of privacy at pharmacies that ask them about their reproductive choices as well as the possibility of being wholly denied the medication in the future due to restrictive laws.
For 60 years, methotrexate has been considered a cheap, standard treatment for nearly 60% of rheumatoid arthritis patients. It is also widely used to treat other autoimmune diseases, including Crohn’s disease, lupus and psoriasis. And, because it inhibits certain cellular functions, it has been used to treat a variety of cancers including leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer and lymphoma.
But methotrexate also treats ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. Although rare, with only about 100,000 occurring annually, ectopic pregnancies are fatal for fetuses and can severely jeopardize mothers’ health. Therefore, the only treatment is abortion, and methotrexate commonly is combined with other medicine to perform the procedure.
Methotrexate’s versatility prompted the World Health Organization to classify it as an “essential medicine”. Yet Roe v Wade’s reversal has significantly stunted access to the drug – even for patients who are not pregnant and simply require the drug to treat other conditions.
Numerous health organizations have confirmed reports of methotrexate being denied to women since the federal abortion rights were eliminated.
Calling the drug “an important part” of caring for the illness it is dedicated to fighting, the Lupus Foundation of America said: “We are aware of reports that some people are having difficulty accessing methotrexate in the wake of the supreme court’s ruling [in June].”
Similarly, the American College of Rheumatology said that it was aware of the “emerging concerns surrounding access to needed treatments such as #MTX [methotrexate] after the recent decision” from the supreme court in the Dobbs case that led to Roe v Wade’s reversal.
In Missouri, abortion is completely banned with limited exceptions for saving the pregnant person’s life or to prevent serious risk to that person’s physical health. As a result, for someone like Noblin, being banned from getting access in Missouri to her monthly doses of methotrexate – even if temporarily – was and is still quite damaging.
Methotrexate helps Noblin and others alleviate pain as well as swelling in their hands and shoulder joints that occasionally becomes so excruciating that it hinders their ability to get dressed or drive to work.
“If I weren’t taking it,” Noblin told the Guardian, “I don’t know how I would be able to function.”
After her pharmacy got confirmation from her doctor that she was not going to be using the drug to induce an abortion, Noblin was finally able to get her prescription for July. In August, Noblin went into the pharmacy again, expecting the process to be smoother this time around. However, to her surprise, she was required to consult with a pharmacist before getting the medication and confirm that she was not pregnant and didn’t intend to become pregnant while taking the medication.
Noblin told the pharmacist it was not their business. The pharmacist then told Noblin that she would not be able to get her medication if she did not answer the question.
“I’m going to have to answer [that] every single month before they will even consider giving me the medication,” Noblin said.
Additionally, another problem that Noblin and many others face is potentially being forced to spend $14,000 a month without insurance for Humira as a brand-name alternative. And they are worried about prosecution by their states.
Noblin said she is on birth control but frets to think if she still gets pregnant.
In that case she said she would get an abortion in Illinois, which has protected abortion rights. But would she be exposed to prosecution, accused of lying because she would have told a pharmacist she didn’t intend to get pregnant?
“It feels like I don’t have any control over my own body,” Noblin said. “My body belongs to Missouri.”
Jennifer Crow, a 48-year-old from Tennessee, faced similar issues after the supreme court eliminated federal abortion protections. On 1 July, Crow, who has inflammatory arthritis, received an automated call from her CVS pharmacy, informing her that her refill was declined.
The call came in during Friday evening on a holiday weekend. As a result, Crow was left without her weekly dose of methotrexate.
Before she started methotrexate, Crow’s joints would become too stiff and sore for her to move without pain in the mornings, limiting her mobility significantly.
“Methotrexate gave me back my independence,” she told the Guardian. “I knew without it, I’d be right back to limited mobility and lots of pain.”
Four days later, the pain and stiffness started to return. She also began panicking, unsure if she would ever be able to get her medication because she and her Georgia-based medical providers were both in states that implemented abortion bans after the Dobbs decision.
She couldn’t understand why she was in that position, given that she’d had a hysterectomy years earlier. Eventually, Crow found out that CVS refused her refill because the chain had asked pharmacists to decline filling methotrexate prescriptions unless they indicated a diagnosis unrelated to an abortion, a practice Crow finds “invasive and unnecessary”.
Crow, like Noblin, eventually got her prescription refilled. But since her treatment’s disruption she has struggled with increased pain and decreased mobility.
“The Dobbs decision has many unintended consequences, and as a middle-aged woman without a uterus, I didn’t think it would affect my care,” she said.
Complicating matters: methotrexate is not the only essential medication that many are now struggling to access, despite the US health and human services department’s guidance on laws prohibiting pharmacies from rejecting patients with prescriptions for medications that may end a pregnancy.
People on misoprostol – which prevents stomach ulcers for those who take aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen – are also facing access hurdles because the drug can also be combined with other medication to induce abortion, said the Global Healthy Living Foundation’s chief legal officer, Steven Newmark. Such disruptions not only can lead to “serious health consequences”, but they violate patients’ treatment preferences, Newmark added.
Nonetheless, methotrexate vividly illustrates the uncertainty created by Roe’s reversal. Texas lawmakers have made it a felony to dispense methotrexate there to someone who is past seven weeks pregnant and uses the medication to terminate a pregnancy.
There have been reports from doctors that some pharmacies are refusing to carry methotrexate and other certain essential medication entirely. And some physicians have refused to prescribe those medications to patients who may become pregnant, citing concerns about prosecution.
In a joint statement by multiple pharmacy organizations across the country, pharmacists and healthcare providers expressed concern about “state laws that limit patients’ access to medically necessary medications and impede physicians and pharmacists from using their professional judgment”.
The statement went on to call for clear guidance from state boards of medicine and pharmacy, agencies and other policymakers.
To Rachel Rebouché, an expert in reproductive health law and dean of Temple University’s law school, the largest problem is clear.
“The biggest issue is the confusion,” Rebouché said.
The SmartLINK phone app, made by BI Incorporated under contract with ICE, uses facial recognition, voice recognition and GPS to track nearly a quarter-million immigrants. (photo: Carolina Sanchez Boe/InTheseTimes)
Under Biden, monitoring of immigrants by cell phone has jumped 808%.
Carlos settled in Fontana, Calif., coming from Chimalhuacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, in 2002. But after a misdemeanor in 2019, Carlos was subject to deportation proceedings. He was imprisoned for three months, electronically shackled for more than a year, and, in January 2021, ordered to install an app on his phone so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could check in on him.
The app uses voice recognition and geolocation to verify that Carlos is at home, which ICE says helps ensure his “compliance with release conditions.” People in deportation cases are required to live at one permanent address and alert ICE if they move.
In an initially weekly (now monthly) check-in, an automated voice asks him to state his name and repeat five digits. The app is notoriously buggy. “If it doesn’t detect your voice then it says, ‘We couldn’t make out what you said,’ and they order you to let your deportation officer know,” Carlos says. “One has to immediately call to let them know what is going on. … The first time it happened to me, I felt they were coming for me.”
Carlos’ daughters also live in fear that one day Carlos will simply not come home from work. They have welcomed him home in tears on days he takes longer than usual to arrive. Their teachers say they are distracted in class and their academic performance has dropped, and the school has recommended therapy.
Carlos’ weekly app check-ins have also hampered his ability to get and keep a job. “On the day they call, they just call once,” Carlos explains. He knows the day but never knows the time — simply a window to be at home, from, say, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., he says.
“You are missing days of work,” Carlos says, “so which kind of employer would want a worker like that? … So when work slacks a little bit, we are the first ones to be laid off.”
Carlos doesn’t tell his coworkers he even has to use the app, because “they would have fear and they would even distance themselves from me” if they knew, he says, because ICE has been known to use geotracking data from electronic monitoring to conduct workplace raids. “If they track me down and my colleagues do not have documents, it is obvious that they will be affected,” Carlos explains.
A May report, commissioned by 13 immigrant rights organizations, found in interviews with immigrants that ICE’s app “causes deep anxiety about ICE’s access to personal lives and a constant sense of being watched.” It adds the anxiety is especially intense for “communities of color who are overwhelmingly subjected to [ICE’s electronic monitoring] and targeted by all forms of law enforcement more broadly.” And, importantly, “In addition to limiting a person’s livelihood, the fear of constant monitoring silences family ties, organizing efforts and the ability for immigrants to speak freely and advocate for themselves and their communities.”
AMPLE DISCRETION
Founded in 2004 without transparency or external oversight, ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) has quietly mushroomed from an $11 million budget in fiscal year 2005 to $475 million in 2022. All of that money for immigrant surveillance, all from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), benefits only one company: BI Incorporated, founded in 1978 as a cattle monitoring company.
BI now monitors 296,250 immigrants — like Carlos— ordered by ICE agents to wear electronic shackles or check in through its SmartLINK phone app.
BI won its 2004 ICE contract over the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Vera offered a case management approach to deportation proceedings, helping people find legal aid, translation services, housing and medical care. Without any electronic monitoring, Vera had achieved a 90% hearing attendance rate in a three-year pilot with ICE, compared with 71% for those outside the program.
In 2011, BI was acquired by infamous private prison corporation GEO Group. The company says it provides “high quality case management” but, according to a March investigation by The Guardian, case managers sit in a round-the-clock call center tracking as many as 300 people simultaneously. They “often don’t have enough time to offer immigrants tailored support … and are even discouraged by managers from doing so,” according to The Guardian.
In a June program assessment report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office found ICE’s oversight of BI to be spotty and opaque. While there was no transparent rubric or reporting of the program’s effectiveness, the Government Accountability Office estimated, for example, that as many as a quarter of participants moved without giving ICE a change of address. (Asked about the report, DHS pointed to the GAO’s finding that the department is working to fix most of the problems identified.
Despite the lack of evidence of efficacy, ICE has added more than 200,000 people to the number of immigrants it surveils through these alternative-to-detention tools during the Biden years, up from 86,860 in January 2021, according to data compiled by the Syracuse University project TRAC. This increase is primarily driven by an 808% jump in the use of the SmartLINK app. The use of shackles or ankle monitors — the alternative-to-detention choice of the Trump administration, which caused electrical shocks, physical harm, social isolation, unemployment and even suicidal thoughts — has been reduced by half, to 14,901, while SmartLINK monitors 241,614 people.
The enormous growth of the Alternatives to Detention Program has not meant an emptying of immigration prisons. ICE states prominently on the program’s website that it is “not a substitute for detention,” and the number of immigrants in physical custody in July was 23,886, up from 14,195 in the final month of the Trump administration.
Anil Kalhan, a law professor at Drexel University, is the author of a seminal 2014 paper on electronic surveillance in immigration enforcement. The government decided to institute these tools, Kalhan says, “but there is not much transparency in what they’re doing, no clear legal authorization, no clear oversight, and therefore there’s not really much by way of accountability for misuse.”
ICE field agents decide who is to be detained, released, shackled or electronically monitored, and they do so with ample discretion. The Government Accountability Office report found a lack of oversight to ensure decision-making protocols were followed or to check for racial bias. A 2021 study by the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, for example, found that, of 1,119 people in the program, Black immigrants were twice as likely as others to be subject to e-shackling.
TRUST US, SAYS ICE
Questions abound regarding what happens with the data BI and ICE collect. Some electronic monitoring companies and law enforcement agencies do share collected personal data, including GPS location data. For example, at the massive fusion center in Arlington, Va. — a post 9/11 intelligence sharing hub used by 25 local and federal enforcement agencies — D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department shares GPS data from its parolee tracking program, VeriTracks.
Created by Securus Monitoring, VeriTracks allows law enforcement to run automatic searches comparing “crime scene information with GPS tracking data from probationers and other personnel who are being monitored and tracked by GPS devices,” according to a hacked internal MPD document published in 2021 by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. “If a tracked person is identified to be near a crime incident at the approx time of the incident, a ‘hit’ occurs and the proper officials are notified by email.” Civil society group ICE Out of DC is especially concerned about data use by the Department of Homeland Security, which shares offices with the fusion center.
ICE and BI claim SmartLINK’s capabilities, such as face and voice recognition and geolocation, are restricted to check-in calls, which leaves the public simply to trust that “ICE is complying with its own representation,” says Julie Mao, co-founder of Just Futures Law, a women-led law project advocating for immigrants’ rights. “There is no policy, manual or law restricting how and when ICE tunes in or listens into the application,” Mao says. A joint media investigation by Documented NY and The Markup concluded, in June, that the SmartLINK app can actually access location, camera, voice-recording and external storage data on a person’s phone, as well as read phone numbers and make external calls without the user’s permission.
In an online fact sheet, GEO Group deems it “a myth” that BI misuses data collected through electronic monitoring and denies it conducts “surveillance” activities. BI’s contract with ICE stipulates that data is to be stored only on the user’s phone and that all data is ICE’s property, not BI’s, stresses GEO Group. In an email to In These Times, Monica Hook, a GEO Group spokesperson, writes that BI “does not record participant audio or video, regardless of user-approved permissions,” and referred to the SmartLINK privacy policy.
Whatever records ICE does keep about SmartLINK, ICE has refused to release them. In April, the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a complaint on behalf of the nonprofits Community Justice Exchange, Just Futures Law and Mijente — after ICE refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request to provide “records regarding the collection of data from the SmartLINK application; the retention, sharing, and use of such data; and, the nature of monitoring through the application.” The litigation is pending in federal court.
This opacity itself contributes to a “chilling” effect on immigrants, according to Mao. Carolina Sanchez Boe, a scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark studying digital detention, has arrived at a similar conclusion, saying that SmartLINK provokes a fear “of putting people in danger, whether they are relatives or coworkers.” And that fear is rooted in reality: In 2019, for example, ICE used electronic tracking of undocumented immigrants to arrest 680 poultry plant workers in Mississippi in the largest immigration raid of a U.S. workplace in more than a decade.
“People are really afraid of endangering others,” Sanchez Boe says.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY
Julio’s coworkers know he has an automated check-in call with SmartLINK every Tuesday between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
“When the phone rings, they tell me, ‘Take the photo, because if you’re not going to send that photo, we’re all in danger here,’ ” explains Julio, a pseudonym he requested pending his asylum case. “They say that as a joke, but in the end they do it with a bit of fear, because they are also undocumented.”
According to Julio, an ICE agent ordered him to have his phone’s geolocation service on uninterruptedly. “If the location is turned off, the program is disconfigured,” Julio says. At least 10% of SmartLINK users are permanently on GPS, GEO Group acknowledged on its fact sheet.
Julio left La Ceiba, Honduras, with his wife and 12-year-old daughter because he was unable to gather the money a gang was extorting from his three businesses — a car wash, laundry and cafe. Julio knew of a woman who had been killed after her husband, another small business owner, was unable to pay the gang. In 2018, after traveling more than 2,000 miles, Julio and his family requested asylum in the United States, citing credible fears of gang violence.
As they moved through asylum hearings, Julio and his wife were first electronically shackled for about a year; then, she was relieved from the check-ins and he was ordered to check in weekly through SmartLINK.
“You only get five attempts to send them a picture, but sometimes the pictures fail all five attempts,” Julio says in a phone interview from Chicago, where he lives now.
He says he finds it hard to believe the United States is spending money on surveilling him, considering the huge incentive he has to appear at his court dates.
ISAP monitoring — including telephone check-ins, shackles and SmartLINK — costs about $1,600 per immigrant annually, according to Homeland budget documents.
Julio also finds it troubling that “companies are making millions out of this.”
BI has been awarded three of the top 10 ICE contracts of the past three years, and it is now ICE’s second-largest contractor — second only to parent company GEO Group. In 2020, BI, whose only business is immigrant surveillance, won a five-year, $2.2 billion ICE contract, the most recent order of which was placed August 1, well into the Biden administration. BI has received $1.51 billion from ICE so far.
Parent company GEO Group, meanwhile, donated $4.2 million to campaigns and elected officials in the 2020 election cycle — the largest amount the company has ever given to politicians and lobbying. In 2021 and 2022 (so far), GEO Group has spent $1.4 million on lobbying, mostly to the House and Senate appropriations committees, which are in charge of funding government contracts.
For the 2023 fiscal year budget, Homeland requested $527 million — an $87 million increase from the previous budget — for its “continued expansion” of ICE’s electronic monitoring program. The House Appropriations Committee not only approved it but added $10 million to the request. Reuters, meanwhile, reports the government intends to electronically surveil up to 400,000 immigrants by September 2023, on track with the current growth rate of 10,000 more people each month.
These projections are good news for GEO Group as almost a quarter of its income came from the privately operated federal prisons that Biden is phasing out; its main business — operating immigration detention centers — is also declining. The current number of immigrant detainees has decreased to fewer than half of the almost 56,000 detained at the height of the Trump administration (which, in its final year, was forced to release tens of thousands of detained individuals because of issues related to the pandemic). While Congress pays GEO Group by the bed (regardless of whether the beds are occupied), the 2023 budget includes plans to reduce detention beds from 32,500 to 25,000, a $271.2 million decrease.
In response, GEO Group is actively trying to move its business toward electronic surveillance. “Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to offer electronic monitoring,” as well as community-based reentry services and monitoring and supervision, the company stated in its most recent annual report.
But a push to control SmartLINK’s expansion is on the way. In February, a group of 25 Democrats in Congress, led by Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, sent a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, requesting to “significantly reduce the number of individuals” subjected to electronic monitoring, to publicly disclose the data collected through this program and to reevaluate its contracts with BI. Homeland has not publicly responded to the letter and did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
Advocates’ goal is to create a genuinely fair and humane immigration system, as Biden promised in his presidential campaign. Meanwhile, a 2019 report by the National Immigrant Justice center cites ample evidence that community-based and community-supported alternatives to detention, run by nonprofit organizations under a case management model, maintain an average compliance rate of 90% (or higher) with a price tag as much as 80% less than traditional detention.
As for oversight and transparency, “I do want to underscore that the Biden administration could choose to be more transparent on its own,” Drexel professor Anil Kalhan says. “Nothing is stopping the Biden administration from beginning a process of developing a more transparent and regularized governing legal framework for this program and many others like it.”
Giorgia Meloni at a press conference she gave after early projections had her coalition winning a majority in Parliament, in Rome early Monday. (photo: Gianni Cipriano/NYT)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We begin today’s show in Italy, where the country’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, has declared victory, as the right-wing alliance led by her Brothers of Italy party looks set to win a clear majority in the next Parliament. Meloni is also allied with Spain’s far-right Vox party, Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, Sweden’s newly formed coalition government led by the anti-immigrant, far-right Sweden Democrats party, which emerged out of Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Far-right French politician Marine Le Pen’s party hailed Meloni’s strong showing as a lesson in humility to the European Union. Meloni has vowed to shift the EU’s politics sharply to the right.
The pan-European progressive movement, co-founded by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, said in a statement on the Italian election, quote, “Italians must now repeat what their ancestors once did: defeat fascism. But not for the return of the politics-as-usual that brought the fascists to power in the first place,” he said.
As the leader of the biggest party in the winning alliance from Sunday’s election, Meloni is expected to become Italy’s first woman prime minister after the new government is sworn in. She addressed supporters Sunday night.
GIORGIA MELONI: [translated] This is surely, for many people, a night of pride, surely a night of payback, surely a night of tears, hugs, dreams and memories.
AMY GOODMAN: During her campaign, Giorgia Meloni tried to downplay her party’s post-fascist roots and instead to portray it as a mainstream conservative party.
For more, we’re joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on fascism and authoritarianism, whose new article for The Atlantic is headlined “The Return of Fascism in Italy,” author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She publishes Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy.
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you just start off by talking about — well, Giorgia Meloni has declared victory. Talk about her and her party, what they represent.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, Meloni is somebody who was a hardcore neofascist, who was in the — at 15, she joined the party that was founded right after Benito Mussolini’s original party was banned in 1945. And this become the fourth-largest party, the neofascist party, called the Italian Social Movement. And she was not only a militant, she became by the ’90s the head of its student organization.
And the flame — if you look at the logo of her party, called Brothers of Italy today, which was founded in 2012, she insisted on keeping a tricolor flame in the logo. And that is the flame that’s the symbol of the original neofascist party. And over the years, many people have told her to get rid of that flame, but she won’t. So this tells us a lot about her loyalties. And she really sees her party as carrying the heritage of fascism into today, so much so that Ignazio La Russa, who’s a party elder, let’s say, he said a few days ago, “We are all heirs of the Duce.”
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to a clip of Giorgia Meloni, as a teenager, describing her support for the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
GIORGIA MELONI: [translated] I believe that Mussolini was a good politician, which means that everything he did, he did for Italy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, take her from her teenage years, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, to the present and to this victory and the party that she represents.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: So, she is as much a creation of Mussolini, let’s say, as Berlusconi. And Silvio Berlusconi, who is part of her far-right coalition, gave her her real start as minister of youth in his very far-right government in 2008. And his party fused with the former, the other — it was— the Italian Social Movement renamed itself the National Alliance, and these two parties fused. And the reason Brothers of Italy was founded — and she was very active in the founding — is there was no more autonomous extreme-right party in Italy. So, that’s important to know.
And many of her positions, which she’s now trying to say she’s a conservative and a moderate, she has — she is a proponent of great replacement theory, the idea that nonwhite births are going to extinguish white births. But she’s so far right that — some people espouse this theory as a natural outcome of demographic change. She actually is a conspiracy theorist. She believes, and there’s many tweets to this, many speeches, that there is a plot, a design, a plan, she calls it, by Soros, by the EU, to kind of force mass immigration onto Europe and Italy and extinguish everything that makes us who we are, she says.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about her views on immigration — as you talk about the great replacement theory — her views on reproductive rights, on her fierce opposition to the LGBTQ community.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yes. So, a lot of what she espouses can seem very familiar if you follow the far right in Hungary — again, the obsession with George Soros, the opposition to what she calls LGBTQ lobbies, who are ruining civilization with what she calls gender ideology. And she’s an example of what political scientists call genderwashing, when women politicians say that they are for women and that they are going to improve female conditions, but actually they go after reproductive rights, and they have a very specific idea of womanhood and the family, and that is very much rooted in the far-right ideology.
And she also will seem familiar if you follow GOP politics. An important — I want to mention that she’s very close with Steve Bannon. She’s very close with the GOP. She’s been to the National Prayer Breakfast. She’s been to CPAC. And so, her position on abortion rights, reproductive rights, in general, approaches all of these far-right parties.
AMY GOODMAN: The position of Italy on abortion, without Meloni, just its — overall, what the law is?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: It was a very hard-won battle, as you can imagine. Italy is unusual, because the Vatican is inside Italy. It’s a very Catholic country. 1978, abortion rights were granted. And what her party has done — we can look at what’s happened in places where Brothers of Italy, her party, has already been governing, like Verona. And what she’s done is she’s made it more difficult to access abortion. She’s made it more complicated for women to exercise their reproductive right.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Giorgia Meloni speaking to her supporters in Spanish, addressing the far-right Vox party of Spain.
GIORGIA MELONI: [translated] The left defends the woman, unless it encounters a criminal foreigner at that moment. Because of their ideology, the criminal foreigner is more valuable than the woman. And they would say that you’re a dangerous extremist, racist, fascist, denier, homophobic. They would say you’re not presentable and have incapable leaders to govern. They would say it is useless to vote for you, because you don’t have a chance to win. But you know what? Don’t be afraid, because they don’t decide. You, the people, decide. The people are the first strength that the party needs.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is more of her addressing Vox party of Spain.
GIORGIA MELONI: [translated] Now is not the time for weak thoughts. Today, the left-wing secularism and radical Islam are a risk to our roots. Against this challenge, there is no middle ground. Either you say yes or you say no — yes to the natural family, no to the LGBTQ lobby; yes to sex identity, no to gender ideology; yes to the culture of life, not the abysm of death; yes to the university of the cross, no to the Islamist violence; yes to secure borders, no to mass migration; yes to the work of our citizens, no to big international finance; yes to the sovereignty of peoples, no to the bureaucrats in Brussels; and yes to our civilization.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Giorgia Meloni, a candidate for Italian prime minister when she spoke. She has now declared victory. So, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, talk about the neofascist movement of Italy and how it affects the Vox party o Spain, how it affects Sweden, how it affects Poland, how it affects Hungary. All of the leaders in these places have congratulated Meloni on winning.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, I will. I just want to mention you see the yes and the no and her style of speaking. She’s a demagogue. And at the end of my book Strongmen, which is about male leaders and machismo, I predicted that there will be a female-led far-right authoritarian government. We thought it would be Le Pen. But you hear her style of speaking, which is very much the charismatic demagogue. So, they can come in the figure of a woman, too.
She is part of this far-right international, a kind of — you could call it a second fascist international. I studied and wrote about the first one in the '30s and ’40s. And, you know, Hungary is a node, is a hub. And they're very active in trying to have this kind of new political culture that is transnational. Fascism has always been transnational. And the fact that she’s polylingual — she speaks four languages — has always been a help to her. So she’s a real, you know, European politician. And she also speaks English — that’s going to help her with the GOP. But there is a transnational design to bring this new far-right culture into being, and it’s absolutely terrifying. You heard what she is saying. You know, it’s Islamaphobic. It’s racist. You’re going to expect a very draconian treatment of immigrants, boats turning back, you know, deaths.
We’ll have to see — we’ll have to see what she does in terms of how constrained she is. She has a big majority in Parliament. So, in terms of what actually happens, we’ll have to see. But she is a female demagogue. Now, Italy has always been a political laboratory. Mussolini invented fascism. In the ’90s, Berlusconi brought fascists into the government, neofascists, for the first time. He broke a taboo. And now Italy has the first female far-right prime minister.
AMY GOODMAN: Especially for young people — and you teach, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, young people at New York University — can you talk about who Mussolini was, to understand what she is embracing, and Mussolini and Hitler’s connection?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, it’s really important that — the reason I mentioned Berlusconi also is, when he brought back neofascists into the government, he also did a whole rehab whitewashing job, which affected generations of Italians. He actually told the then-journalist Boris Johnson in 2003, “Mussolini never killed anyone.” Now, instead, Mussolini’s dictatorship committed genocide in Libya, mass war crimes in Ethiopia, used gas in its colonies, participated in the Holocaust.
It was the first dictatorship, and he was so successful in his repression and his propaganda — he was a big star in America, he had a syndicated column in Hearst newspapers — that Hitler worshiped him through the entire 1920s. And Hitler actually learned a lot from him, including Mussolini was a fan of great replacement theory. And he gets short shrift. Hitler is the one who is remembered, but Mussolini was very, very important, very innovative. And we see that Meloni is part of this heritage.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about those who say, “No, she is not fascist, she’s conservative”? And then let’s talk about not only her influence in Europe, but also in the United States, and her relationship with Donald Trump.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, well, you know, this is — what do we call these things today? Do we call them fascist? And, you know, there is this whitewashing that’s going on, where Viktor Orbán has said for years that his is an illiberal democracy, when, honestly, there’s nothing democratic about what goes on in Hungary today. But it sounds good. And, you know, there’s these people like Orbán — he’s trying to have it both ways. He gets EU funds, and then he has this electoral autocracy.
So, Meloni is an extreme case, because she’s calling herself a conservative, which is what we’re hearing from the MAGA Republicans in our country, too. They keep calling themselves conservatives. But as we see — just go back to that speech, that demagogic speech — there’s nothing conservative about Meloni. There’s nothing conservative about her party. I repeat, her party was founded because there was no autonomous extreme-right party to carry on the heritage of fascism.
AMY GOODMAN: So, again, if you can go to today, what’s happening in the United States? Talk about the violence of January 6th. Talk about Trump advocating for everyone from QAnon to the Proud Boys. And then we’re going to be speaking with the author of a new book on the Proud Boys.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, it’s a good segue, because the GOP, I’ve been saying for a long time, has to be seen as a far-right authoritarian party in the model of European parties. And what’s going on right now, we’re having — history is being made before our eyes. The party is remaking itself to support whatever form of illiberal rule it wants to have in the United States. And, of course, we’re seeing this at the state level, in Texas and especially in Florida.
And so, when a party is remaking itself, it pushes some people out, and these are, let’s say, moderates, like Cheney, Kinzinger, all these — all the people who were anti-Trump. And who is being invited in? Lawless people, violent people. That’s why, if you want to get ahead in the GOP, your campaign ad has to have you and an assault rifle. People who participated in January 6th — criminals — are being invited to run for office, and actual extremists, like Mark Finchem in Arizona. He is an Oath Keeper. He is very proud. He’s very public about being an Oath Keeper, a member of the violent extremist group. And so, he is now the Arizona candidate for secretary of state. So, getting ahead in today’s GOP, being an extremist is a help to that, because they are remaking themselves as a far-right party. So there are going to be, I predict, a lot of interchange between Meloni’s neofascists and the GOP.
AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on fascism and authoritarianism, author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. We’ll connect to Professor Ben-Ghiat’s new article for The Atlantic titled “The Return of Fascism in Italy.” She also publishes Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy.
Next up, we continue with fascism, or neofascism, to the far right here at home. As the House committee investigating the January 6th Capitol is set to hold another public hearing Wednesday, we look at one of the key groups that carried out the attack: the Proud Boys. We’ll speak with the author of the new book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of American Extremism. Stay with us.
A protestor during the 2019 fires in the Amazon holds a sign saying 'The Amazon is on your plate.' Brazil has one of the highest rates of beef consumption in the world – one of the main drivers of deforestation – more than 3 times the global average. (photo: Sarah Sax/Mongabay)
Food production and deforestation are responsible for almost half of greenhouse gas emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and meat plays an outsized role. More than 77% of agricultural land globally is used for livestock, either for grazing or feed production. And food demand is only expected to rise by more than 50% by 2050. In Latin America, cattle ranching is especially important: the region is home to 67% of beef cattle and 76% of dairy cattle. Beef production is expected to increase by 125% by 2050 to sustain meat demand.
Food production is an enormously important for the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean. Commodities like soy and beef are the main and often most lucrative exports for many countries, and the sector employs roughly 15% of people in the region. But at the same time, the region suffers from both increasing rates of food insecurity alongside rising rates of obesity, especially among children.
Bringing its food system, currently one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases, to ultimately net-zero emissions in the next few decades remains a big challenge for the region, where almost a dozen countries have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by around 2050. According to a new report from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), reaching net zero by 2050 will require ambitious and sustained improvements in crop yields as well as dietary changes, especially in beef consumption. It calls for shrinking the proportion of land dedicated to agriculture, and increasing the area available for carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation.
It’s a timely report, said Florence Pendrill, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden who studies the drivers of tropical deforestation and land use change.
“There is an increasing recognition and focus on the role of agriculture and land use in the joint crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, both coming out of the climate COP26 in Glasgow late last year, and going into the U.N. Biodiversity Conference [COP15] later this year,” Pendrill, who was not involved in the report, told Mongabay. “The IADB report considers both supply-side and demand-side measures to reduce emissions, which can be useful as countries work toward realizing these goals.”
Patrice Dumas, a co-author of the report and senior researcher at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), said the report is largely directed at stakeholders in the region, providing a comprehensive overview of the best options for reducing emissions, alongside figures that help compare and evaluate them. What surprised him, he said, was not that cattle ranching turned out to be one of the primary ways to decarbonize the food system, but the ample opportunities to sustainably intensify the livestock sector.
“I knew that it would be big, but not that big,” Dumas said. “Latin America has always had very extensive cattle production, thanks in part to an abundance of land, and so a shift to more intensive forms of production in areas less valuable for carbon and more amenable to pasture, like savannas, presents a big opportunity.”
Supply and demand must work in tandem
The report reviews options to reduce emissions and transform the land-use system into a net carbon sink by 2050 while improving nutritional security for the region’s growing population. Providing cattle with more concentrated feed, boosting nitrogen in pasture soils, silvopasture, and improved pasture management are all some of the supply-side options that the authors identified to help intensify livestock production and bring emissions savings. They also pointed to agroforestry practices to help slash emissions from cocoa, beef, and coffee production. Demand-side solutions include switching beef for a more plant-based diet or for pork and poultry, which produce lower emissions in their production, and reducing overall beef consumption, especially in Brazil and Latin America’s South Cone (encompassing Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), where daily beef protein intake per person is three to four times higher than the global average.
But the report goes beyond just considering direct emissions. It also looks at the carbon opportunity cost of land, or at the amount of carbon that could be sequestered if land used for food production was instead used to grow native vegetation.
“With the carbon opportunity cost one can go a step further to consider also the land that is already used for agriculture — what if that land wasn’t used for agriculture? Then it could instead be used for other things, including carbon sequestration,” Pendrill said. However, she said a metric focused solely on carbon doesn’t consider other potential environmental and social impacts, such as biodiversity loss or displacement of traditional peoples.
The report also tracks separately emissions produced in Latin America and the Caribbean and emissions linked to trade, given that between a fifth and a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions from the region’s food system are associated with agricultural products used elsewhere in the world.
Results show that, overall, reducing the carbon footprint of beef is essential to transforming Latin America and the Caribbean into a net carbon sink. The most ambitious supply-side scenario includes cultivating more cattle on less land, rapidly increasing coverage of silvopasture and other practices to dramatically improve pasture yields, and improving crop yields to meet growing food and feed demand without having to deforest more. This would reduce direct emissions by 10% compared to 2010 levels, and revert previously cleared land, which would sequester 1.33 billion metric tons of emissions a year on average — around the same amount emitted by 356 average-sized coal-fired power plants.
On the demand side, the most ambitious scenario sees a reduction of beef consumption of up to 85% in Brazil and the Southern Cone countries, and to a lesser degree in Andean countries. Countries in Central America and the Caribbean, where the average beef consumption is lower than the global average, could even see an increase in consumption. This would stabilize direct emissions, improve nutritional security across all countries, and revert formerly degraded land, which could absorb the equivalent of 1.74 billion metric tons of emissions annually, or the equivalent of taking nearly 375 million cars off the road.
Combined, these solutions could help the region reach net zero by 2050 if emissions from energy, industry and waste also undergo equally ambitious cuts, the report says.
“There are options both on the demand side and on the supply side, but really the two need to be done together,” Dumas said. Some countries, like Brazil, have already shown deep commitment to improving efficiency in crop production and land use, he added. But “ambitious action can’t just be on the supply side, it also has to be on the demand side,” Dumas said.
Talking about dietary change, especially beef, remains culturally sensitive, according to Dumas, despite overwhelming research that cutting our consumption of meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce our impact on the planet. The biggest demand for beef comes from within the region itself, the report says, where people consume more than twice as much beef per capita — 9 grams per person — than the global average of 4 g. In the Southern Cone and Brazil, those numbers are even higher: 18 g and 13 g, respectively.
“Time and time again we see that it is just not possible to get the deep cuts in environmental impact we need via technological developments or shifts in production alone,” said Paul Behrens, associate professor of environmental change at Leiden University in the Netherlands who researches food and energy systems and was not involved in the report. “Saving the land and reducing the emissions from beef production is vital.”
Behrens said that although the study provides an important detailed analysis of the Latin America and Caribbean region, the big picture adds more evidence to what a growing number of studies have already shown: “While supply-side measures targeting beef do help a little, such as manure management, these reductions are not as large as simply changing diets,” Behrens said. “You need that dietary change to really get the big reductions.”
Citations:
Dumas, P., Wirsenius, S., Searchinger, T., Andrieu, A., … Vogt-Schilb, A. (2022). Options to achieve net-zero emissions from agriculture and land use changes in Latin America and the Caribbean (1337). Retrieved from Inter-American Development Bank website: https://publications.iadb.org/en/options-achieve-net-zero-emissions-agriculture-and-land-use-changes-latin-america-and-caribbean
Figueroa, D., Galicia, L., … Suárez Lastra, M. (2022). Latin American cattle ranching sustainability debate: An approach to social-ecological systems and spatial-temporal scales. Sustainability, 14(14), 8924. doi:10.3390/su14148924
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