RSN: Rachel Monroe | The Supreme Court's Abortion Decision Has Given Beto O'Rourke a Fighting Chance
09 September 22
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08 September 22
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As a candidate for Texas governor, the Democrat was considered a long shot. But the state’s new—and extreme—restrictions have galvanized his campaign.
Even before the trigger law went into effect, Texas’s punitive abortion policies were generating uncertainty and fear—and political opportunities for Democrats. O’Rourke appeared alongside Elizabeth Weller, one of a number of Texas women carrying nonviable fetuses who have been forced to continue their pregnancies despite physical and emotional risks. In May, during Weller’s eighteenth week of pregnancy, her water broke. Doctors determined that her amniotic sac had ruptured; the fetus would not survive outside the womb. After consulting with her physician, Weller and her husband decided to have the pregnancy terminated, but, because of uncertainty about the legal circumstances in Texas, the hospital refused to perform the procedure unless she developed certain severe symptoms, she said. “The administration of the hospital told me that I was not sick enough at the time that this happened to me,” she said. “And they sent me home to wait for either my baby to die or for me to incur an infection.” After several days, as Weller’s symptoms worsened, an ethics board finally determined that she could undergo the procedure .
A few months ago, Governor Greg Abbott had a double-digit lead over O’Rourke, but during the summer that gap shrank significantly. The new law and the shooting in Uvalde have kept Texas’s policies on abortion and guns in the news. “That’s not optimal for the Governor,” James Henson, of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project, said. “That’s not the election environment they were looking for.” Fifty-nine per cent of Texans believe that the state is on the wrong track, according to a survey by the Texas Politics Project, the highest number since the poll started, in 2009. “There’s a lot of discontent out there,” Henson said. “The stock Republican campaign of the last decade, decade and a half, has been talking about Texas prosperity. That doesn’t land quite as well when the mood is so sour.”
O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, against Ted Cruz, and narrowly lost. He largely declined to make negative comments about Cruz until the final weeks of that campaign, but this time he has pointedly blamed Texas’s woes on Abbott. The O’Rourke campaign’s first two TV ads, released in late August, condemn the trigger law in manifestly Texan terms. “This is a free country,” a man, identified in the ad as a lifelong Republican, says. “We need a governor who gets that.” The recent vote on a ballot measure in Kansas, where voters overwhelmingly chose to keep the right to abortion in the state constitution, gave new hope that the issue could be a mobilizing factor, even in states that skew conservative. “I watch the polls. It’s made a difference,” Laran Vondo, an attendee at an O’Rourke rally in Fort Bend County on a late-August afternoon, told me. “I believe in my heart that Roe v. Wade—they gave us a gift when they overturned that.”
If O’Rourke, or any Democrat vying for statewide office, is to win, persuading suburban voters will be essential. Fort Bend County, a sprawl of developments southwest of Houston, illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of banking on the suburbs. The once rural area voted reliably Republican for half a century until, boosted by Houston’s supercharged growth, it more than doubled in population between 2000 and 2020, becoming one of the more diverse counties in the nation. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the first Democratic Presidential candidate to win Fort Bend since Lyndon Johnson. Two years later, O’Rourke doubled her margin, winning the county by about twelve points.
O’Rourke outperformed expectations in the suburbs, and his close loss to Cruz seemed to portend the long-awaited purpling of Texas, where no Democrat has been elected to statewide office since 1994. In 2020, Democrats made a splashy effort to win control of the Texas House, targeting twenty-two seats they considered vulnerable. One was in District 28, in Fort Bend, where a moderate Republican had just resigned, triggering a special election. Democrats spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the off-season campaign. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren endorsed the Democratic candidate, Eliz Markowitz, and O’Rourke and Michael Bloomberg block-walked on her behalf. But Markowitz lost the special election by sixteen points and didn’t do much better in the regular election a few months later. Democrats needed to pick up nine seats to flip the House; they didn’t win a single new one. “Why did we not do better? I think Democrats were frankly outworked by Republicans,” O’Rourke told me, last week. “Democrats, in the middle of a pandemic, were literally phoning it in. And the Trump campaign, and Republicans statewide, were really hungry. That’s why what you see from us in 2022 is making sure that we go everywhere, earn every vote, write nobody off, and take nobody for granted.”
Even as Texas suburbs trend more competitive, they’ve become the sites of the state’s most vicious culture wars. Ultraconservative groups have successfully taken over ostensibly nonpartisan school boards in the North Texas suburbs and have said that they hope to expand elsewhere in the state. The big news in Fort Bend County the week I visited was about a mother in the city of Katy who’d filed a criminal complaint, citing a book in a high-school library that she considered “harmful.” (The book, “Flamer,” by Mike Curato, is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a closeted teen-ager at Boy Scout camp; it won a Lambda Literary Award in 2021.)
But Texas Republicans’ pandering to their radical fringe has offered O’Rourke an opportunity to position himself as the reasonable alternative, and the abortion law provides him with a particularly strong case. Eighty per cent of Texans, including more than seventy per cent of Republicans, support access to abortion for victims of rape and incest—for whom the law makes no allowance—according to the Texas Politics Project’s polling. O’Rourke is making an overt play for these voters, releasing a series of social-media posts featuring former Republican voters who have switched allegiance. “I’ve always been a bit more conservative-leaning, but I find his passion intriguing,” a middle-aged woman in a floral blouse told me, at an O’Rourke event in a San Antonio bookstore. When I asked her about the abortion law, she sighed. “That’s a hard one. For me to lean toward the middle on that is . . . ” she said, widening her eyes theatrically. “But I’ve come to see there are gray areas.”
In his campaign appearances, O’Rourke is emphasizing another area in which some of his views align with the majority of Texans’: gun restrictions. During its 2021 session, the legislature removed many limits on carrying firearms in public. In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, perpetrated by a young man who bought two AR-style rifles days after his eighteenth birthday, O’Rourke has been pushing to raise the minimum age for buying such weapons to twenty-one. The idea is broadly popular in Texas, even with the notably conservative mayor of Uvalde, who is no fan of O’Rourke. Families of Uvalde victims, as well as the Uvalde city council and the school board, have asked Abbott to call a special session to enact the policy; so far, he has declined to. (O’Rourke is also advocating red-flag laws and universal background checks, which are likewise supported by a majority of Texans.)
Republicans have done their best to paint O’Rourke as a gun-seizing radical. But not everyone is buying it. “I’m anti-government, and she’s more left,” Tyrel Dunaway told me at the event in Fort Bend, gesturing at his girlfriend, who was wearing a pink Beto 2022 shirt. “She gets mad at me for going around the house saying, ‘Taxation is theft!’ But I agree with most of his policies.” Dunaway, a hunter and a fan of sport-shooting, said that he found O’Rourke’s views on guns “very sensible”: “I have kids in school. After Uvalde, for two days I couldn’t sleep, just thinking that we could’ve done something, but we didn’t.”
To win, O’Rourke will have to overcome the obstacle of negative partisanship, which is strong in Texas—and particularly so when it comes to him. But his opponent faces similar challenges; Abbott’s disapproval rating is higher than Ted Cruz’s was in the months before O’Rourke lost to him. “It’s one thing for a Republican to not agree with the abortion law, but it’s another thing entirely to vote for Beto O’Rourke,” Henson said. “But there’s a lot more uncertainty about that now than there was six months ago.”
Outside the venue where the Fort Bend rally had happened, a group of about ten protesters held signs with slogans that included “Defund the Media” and “Unborn Lives Matter.” The head of the Fort Bend County Young Republicans, a freckled woman with a delicate gold necklace, told me that her group was there to protest O’Rourke, but had also recently protested on behalf of the unborn, for instance, at a Planned Parenthood in Fort Bend County. With abortion essentially banned in Texas, some Republicans are considering even more radical action. The state has already got creative with its anti-abortion legislation, most notably via S.B. 8, which allows private citizens to file civil suits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion in the state, with a minimum award of ten thousand dollars. The Texas Freedom Caucus, a group of the most conservative state legislators, has threatened to propose a number of additional measures: making it a felony to pay for abortions or abortion-related expenses in another state; criminalizing employers who cover abortion in their health plans. One legislator intends to introduce a bill that would allow district attorneys to prosecute across jurisdictions in abortion cases, after some Texas D.A.s said that they wouldn’t pursue charges against people seeking abortions.
Inside the venue, O’Rourke painted his candidacy in historical terms, invoking the Voting Rights Act, Appomattox, Selma. Fifty years ago, he noted, women in Texas didn’t have the right to an abortion, either. “No one rode to our rescue or saved the day,” he said, pointing out that it was a Dallas woman, known as Jane Roe, and her two Texan lawyers, who took Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court. “And I bet you it’s going to be Texas women today who win it back.”
British national Paul Urey, pictured with his sister (left), shortly before his ill-fated trip to Ukraine. (photo: AP)
Paul Urey was charged with ‘mercenary activities’ by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, who say he died of ‘stress’
Paul Urey, 45, from Warrington, Cheshire, was captured in April by pro-Russian separatists, along with another Briton, Dylan Healey.
The two men were later charged with “mercenary activities” by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), but in July the Russian proxy authorities announced that Urey had died as a result of “illness and stress”.
Late on Wednesday Kuleba wrote on Twitter that Urey’s body had been returned, showing possible signs of torture. “Detaining and torturing civilians is barbarianism,” he posted. “I express my deepest condolences to relatives and close ones of Paul Urie [sic]. He was a brave man who dedicated himself to saving people.”
“Ukraine will never forget him and his deeds. We will identify perpetrators of this crime and hold them to account. They won’t escape justice.”
Urey and Healey, both described as independent aid workers, were captured at a checkpoint while driving to help a woman and two children, according to the non-profit Presdium Network, who were operating in Ukraine but did not employ the pair.
In early May, a handcuffed Urey appeared on Russian state television criticising the British government and criticised British media coverage of the Russia’s invasion.
The following month, Daria Morozova, a representative for the Donetsk occupying authorities, announced Urey’s death.
Urey’s mother, Linda, had previously said that her son had type 1 diabetes, which requires daily insulin. Upon hearing of her son’s death, she wrote on Facebook that she had told them “he was a very sick man”. She said she was very angry, asking, “Why did you let him die? I want answers. Why didn’t you release him?
“I hate you all. I’m absolutely fuming, I really am … Murderers, that’s what you are.”
The Foreign Office summoned Andrei Kelin, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, after Urey’s death. The then foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said she was “shocked” by reports of Urey’s death and that Russia “must bear the full responsibility”.
Healy, and four other foreigners captured in eastern Ukraine, have pleaded not guilty to charges of being mercenaries and “undergoing training to seize power by force”.
They could face the death penalty. The next court hearing in their case is set for October, according to Russia’s RIA Novosti.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to then-president Donald Trump, arrives at the N.Y. District Attorney's Office to turn himself in on Thursday in New York City. Bannon faces a criminal indictment that mirrors the federal case for which he was pardoned by Trump. (photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty)
The organization, launched in 2018, raised more than $15 million after promising to help build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to curb illegal immigration.
"There cannot be one set of rules for everyday people and another for the wealthy and powerful," New York Attorney General Letitia James said Thursday. "We all must play by the same rules and must obey the law. Mr. Bannon took advantage of his donors' political views to secure millions of dollars which he then misappropriated. Mr. Bannon lied to his donors to enrich himself and his friends."
Bannon was indicted on six counts, including two counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy.
The charges were brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office is working with James.
In a statement Tuesday night, Bannon described the state-level prosecution as a part of a wider "weaponization of the criminal justice system" against conservatives.
Bannon claimed the criminal charges are part of an effort to silence him ahead of the midterm election.
"I have not yet begun to fight," Bannon said. "They will have to kill me first."
The indictment closely tracks a case brought against Bannon in 2020 by the U.S. Justice Department. In that case, two of Bannon's co-defendants pleaded guilty, and a third received a mistrial and may be retried.
Bannon pleaded not guilty but was never tried because President Trump pardoned him on his final day in office. The White House said at the time, "Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen."
The next month, The Washington Post reported that the Manhattan district attorney had begun looking at whether Bannon could be charged under state law.
The then-president's pardon covers only federal crimes, not the state crimes with which Bannon has now been charged.
Bannon's lawyers may argue that the charges should be dismissed under New York's double-jeopardy law.
Paul Manafort, another Trump adviser, successfully argued for the dismissal of state charges against him in 2019. But, unlike Bannon, Manafort had been tried and convicted in federal court before he was charged in New York. Like Bannon, Manafort received a pardon from Trump in the final month of his presidency.
Before joining the Trump campaign in 2016, Bannon rose to prominence as an executive at Breitbart, a right-wing website.
District Attorney Bragg and Attorney General James have experience bringing oversight to Trump and his dealings. They cooperated on an investigation that resulted in criminal tax evasion and conspiracy charges against the Trump Organization and its former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, in 2021. Weisselberg has pleaded guilty.
The Trump Organization is scheduled to be tried starting in October.
READ MORE
ADDED AS A FOOTNOTE:
Key Trump campaign donor steps back from supporting president’s 2020 election bid
Mr Mercer also helped staff the now-president for the White House by providing three key employees for Mr Trump: Citizens United President David Bossie as deputy campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his campaign CEO.
REBEKAH MERCER RAISED SPECTER OF “ARMED CONFLICT” IN 2019 BOOK
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
excerpts:
Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.
Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
Parler network founder claims GOP donor, others defamed him
excerpt:
The document identifies Mercer, daughter of major Trump donor Robert Mercer and a benefactor for the conservative site Breitbart News, as the founding investor in Parler. It said Matze was the founding developer. It said the site name derives from the French word for “to speak.”
An attendee wears a QAnon shirt before a campaign rally for President Trump. (photo: Logan Cyrus/Bloomberg)The former president is actively courting QAnon supporters on social media and at his rallies.
It’s no accident that QAnon supporters are using the former president’s social media platform, Truth Social. Appealing to them was an explicitly stated strategy to build out its user base.
Media Matters senior researcher Alex Kaplan chronicled efforts by CEO and former congressman Devin Nunes and one-time board member and Trump administration official Kash Patel to court the community, including the early promotion of an account that appeared to be emulating the pseudonymous author, “Q”—the heart of the QAnon movement.
Truth Social has verified 47 QAnon-promoting accounts with more than 10,000 followers each, according to an analysis by NewsGuard. By Kaplan’s count, Trump has used his Truth Social account on the platform to boost at least 50 distinct QAnon-supporting accounts to his more than 4 million followers.
Kaplan, in a phone interview, said QAnon content “plays a significant role in Truth Social’s ecosystem” and that Trump’s sharing of content from QAnon accounts since the FBI executed a search of Mar-a-Lago echoes his history of doing the same on Twitter before he was banned. Trump had shared posts from QAnon accounts prior to the FBI search, but Kaplan said the saturation of such content on his Truth Social feed has been particularly high since the search.
“There always seems to be a correlation between the amount of times Trump is amplifying QAnon accounts and periods where I’d say he’s under stress,” Kaplan told The Daily Beast. “QAnon accounts are usually ones that are giving him praise and reassurances, which I’m sure he likes.”
Being a man who values devotion to himself above all else, Trump surely appreciates an online community that imagines he is a kingly figure engaged in a clandestine battle against his perceived enemies. And even as broad swaths of the movement have evolved from cracking riddles left in one of the internet’s many cesspools, they continue to churn a steady flow of nonsense for Trump and his defenders to pluck and deploy in a smokescreen they hope will separate them from any semblance of accountability.
Last month, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that contained an audio track that QAnon believers and researchers believed was titled “WW1WGA”: an unmistakable catchphrase of the conspiracy movement. A Trump spokesperson disputed the identification of the song, telling Vice News that the song was actually one called “Mirrors” by composer Will Van De Crommert. Experts said the songs were identical, though Vice reported that “Mirrors” was uploaded online a year before its QAnon-titled copy. Regardless, the QAnon community on Truth Social declared the video as proof that the Q author was who they thought they were. Kaplan said that between the video and Trump’s repeated sharing of content from QAnon accounts, the conspiracy theory’s followers are “noticing this [pattern] and taking it as a sign” they’ve been right all along.
True believers think Q was a high-level government official with insights into an imagined secret plan for Trump to thwart political, intelligence, business, and entertainment leaders orchestrating global downfall and engaging in satanic forms of child sex abuse. Forensic linguists and documentarians would grow to suspect that Ron Watkins, notorious for his role as an administrator on the forum board where Q posts were found for most of the author’s active time online, was actually responsible for at least some of the posts.
Since debuting in 2017, Q went on to post thousands of cryptic messages that formed the foundation for a vivid tapestry of conspiracy theories that would help drive several people to criminal acts, including violence, kidnapping, terroristic threatening, murder, and participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The movement built around Q posts gained so much traction that the FBI would identify it by name in a 2019 memo about threats extreme conspiracy theorists posed to national security.
In spite of those readily apparent dangers, Trump and his family members, lawyers, and notable political allies have all cozied up to the conspiracy theory movement’s supporters in some form.
Hallmark language used by QAnon supporters has receded on mainstream social media platforms, but many of the communities and influencers that brought its theories to life remain intact on alternative ones, now including Truth Social. Even as the community largely moved beyond its obsession with the musings of Q, causing some writers to erroneously identify the movement as dead, followers of the theories have remained energized and active. Some have set their gazes above their keyboards, choosing to run for office or involve themselves in a nationwide election denialist movement that has captured the loyalty of nearly half of Republican nominees on the ballot this fall. One influencer explicitly hopes to influence elections this year.
Throughout his presidency, Trump dodged every chance to distance himself from the QAnon crowds that obsessed over his every hand motion and turn of phrase. “I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” he told reporters in the White House briefing room in 2020. When asked about QAnon again during a town hall interview with NBC News, Trump refused to say the theory was false and claimed he didn’t know about it before saying he heard its believers “are very strongly against pedophilia.” The former president’s recent and reinvigorated embrace of the movement’s supporters should expose how vapid those dismissals were.
Trump’s business partners welcomed them onto his platform, and it's apparent that he likes what he sees.
It’s beyond time to retire whatever plausible deniability may have been afforded to Trump’s fondness for his most conspiratorial supporters. It’s right in front of our faces, in a place called Truth.
Pregnant woman held in Alabama jail for months to 'protect' fetus. (photo: Henrik Sorensen/Getty)
The jail is somewhat notorious in the state.
The woman, Ashley Banks, was arrested on charges of chemical endangerment of her fetus. She admitted she had smoked pot the day she learned she was pregnant, around six weeks into the pregnancy. Despite being ordered to attend rehab, the rehab center refused to take her, saying she didn’t meet a level of need that would warrant treatment. This left her stuck in jail, even after she developed a pregnancy complication that left her bleeding for weeks.
After a certain point, Banks alleged, she had to sleep on the floor. She spent those three months living in unsanitary and stressful conditions—conditions that increase the risk of pregnancy complications—despite not yet being convicted of any crimes. (In addition to the marijuana, she was arrested for having an unregistered gun and for failing to appear in court for an earlier property theft charge.) She continued to sleep on the floor until she was released by a judge in late August.
She’s not alone. According to AL.com, this Etowah County bond condition has affected a number of other women. The Etowah County Detention Center typically holds several pregnant and postpartum women in jail in these prenatal “chemical endangerment” cases, despite the higher rates of miscarriages for incarcerated women. The National Advocates for Pregnant Women told AL.com it had found more than 150 such cases in the county since 2010. And far from “protecting” women or their in utero offspring, families have complained that the jail could be considered a higher-risk place for drug abuse, given the stress and depression inmates face. At least one person has died from a suspected overdose at the Etowah County jail.
Had these women not been pregnant, they would have been able to post bail and leave. But Alabama has a history of placing pregnant women in a different legal category. Chemical endangerment laws that apply to women who have used drugs during a pregnancy can carry stiff penalties; According to AL.com, if the pregnancies result in a miscarriage or stillbirth, women can face up to 99 years in prison.
According to the AL.com article, another woman, Hali Burns, tested positive for drugs during her pregnancy and was arrested after giving birth. After she was sent to jail, she had to stuff paper towels into her pants to cope with the bleeding. Two months later, AL.com reported, Burns remains in the hospital following her medically risky postpartum period.
Alabama is not known for having the most humane incarceration system, but the Etowah County Detention Center has had a particularly dark history. Some of the allegations inmates have directed at the center over the past couple decades include unusually long stays, poor medical care, and no access to any outdoor spaces. The most common complaint, though, has been of malnourishment. A number of people who went through the jail complained of barely edible food, sometimes rotten, expired, or even “insect-infested.” Some said they had gotten food poisoning. Others claimed to have lost significant amounts of weight. One person told AL.com at the time that “salads were made with rotten lettuce, we had beans every day and noodles with no taste.” Others recalled eating porridge and bread.
In 2018, AL.com reported that the sheriff of Etowah County had pocketed around $1.5 million from a fund meant to feed inmates. The sheriff, Todd Entrekin, had not violated state law as it was written—the Depression-era law was meant for a time when the sheriff and his wife were personally responsible for feeding inmates—but it soon became apparent that he had cut corners with meals, possibly in order to purchase a beach house. Entrekin was voted out of office after the reporting came out.
Many of the inmates who suffered through poor conditions at the Etowah County jail were stuck in immigration purgatory. From 1997 until March of this year, Etowah County served as a detention center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This helped the institution’s finances: By around 2011, the jail had become profitable for the sheriff, with federal funding swelling to match the growing immigrant population. In recent years, an average of 300 ICE detainees were held in the jail at a time, with the federal government paying $45 per inmate per day.
In March, citing “a long history of serious deficiencies identified during facility inspections,” ICE announced it would no longer send detainees to Etowah. Before that happened, one immigrant alleged that he was placed in solitary confinement for two months because he asked for a COVID test. He was not alone in feeling the jail was not taking COVID seriously enough, and for pregnant women, that concern carries extra urgency. Medical professionals urged the facilities not to hold pregnant women, given the higher rates of complications and even miscarriage that come with COVID.
Google and Amazon workers are planning a multi-city protest on Thursday over the companies' $1.2 billion contract with Israel. (photo: Stephen Lam/Reuters)
#NoTechForApartheid claims the technology will assist in state violence against Palestinians.
The protest movement, No Tech For Apartheid, asks Amazon Web Services and Google to cancel their contract to provide Israel with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other technology on the grounds that it will be used to assist in state violence against the Palestinian people. Under the terms of their contract, known as Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon Web Services are providing the Israeli government and military with cloud computing technology.
“By doing business with Israeli apartheid, Amazon and Google will make it easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land,” No Tech For Apartheid’s website states.
In recent years, Israel has come under increasing pressure over its treatment of the Palestinian people, which many describe as apartheid.
Neither Amazon nor Google responded to emails seeking comment Wednesday morning.
The protest comes on the heels of the resignation of former Google employee Ariel Koren. Koren spent more than a year publicly organizing against Project Nimbus.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Koren resigned from Google over what she described as retaliation against her for speaking out. An internal investigation by Google and a separate inquiry by the National Labor Relations Board reportedly found no wrongdoing on the part of the company.
“Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights—to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear,” Koren wrote in a letter regarding her resignation.
Coinciding with her resignation, 15 other Google employees—all but two anonymously—shared audio testimony reiterating Koren’s calls for the company to stop working with Israel over its treatment of Palestinians and what they described as its “anti-Palestinian bias.”
In a statement to the Times, a Google spokesperson insisted that the company prohibits retaliation.
“We thoroughly investigated this employee’s claim, as we do when any concerns are raised,” Google spokesperson Shannon Newberry reportedly added.
According to a press release from advocacy group the Worker Agency, Amazon and Google employees protesting Project Nimbus will be joined by Palestinian and civil society activists as well as community members.
The protest is the latest development in an ongoing effort to pressure the companies to stop working with Israel. Last year, hundreds of employees from both companies anonymously signed a petition urging them to cancel Project Nimbus.
“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes, and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court,” they wrote.
No Tech For Apartheid reports that over 1,000 employees of the companies have now signed that petition.
The protests are to take place at Google’s offices in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, and Durham, North Carolina on Thursday afternoon. Koren is to attend the protest in San Francisco.
A burnt area in the Amazon rainforest at the Mapinguari National Park in Porto Velho, on the border of the states of Rondonia and Amazonas, northern Brazil, Sept. 1, 2022. (photo: Douglas Magno/Getty)
“The tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the region,” the report concludes. “Brazil and Bolivia concentrate 90% of all combined deforestation and degradation. As a result, savannization is already taking place in both countries.”
Savannization refers to the changing of a forested area into a savanna, or plains with few to no trees. The report, Amazonía Against the Clock, outlines issues in the Amazon rainforest across nine countries. Transformation is already evident in 34% of the Amazon located in Brazil and 24% of the rainforest in Bolivia. The tipping point is also near for 16% of the forest in Ecuador, 14% of the Colombian Amazon and 10% of the rainforest in Peru. These are the countries with the highest rates of transformation of the Amazon rainforest and are at the highest risk of not recovering.
The report was created by the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. The findings reveal that only two countries, Suriname and French Guiana, have more than 50% of their portions of the Amazon still untouched. In the other seven countries, about 2% to 25% of their portions of the rainforest have been lost, 26% to 43% of their parts of the forest are intact, and the rest of the land has experienced some level of degradation but is not yet lost.
Although the report expresses some dire concerns, there is hope. Collectively, there’s still a chance of saving 80% of the Amazon by 2025, but this target is crucial to safeguarding the rainforest. It will be difficult, too, as only 74% of the original forest remains today, The Guardian reported.
To meet this goal, the report authors note four major efforts that need to happen, including 1) respecting Indigenous rights, 2) keeping biodiversity in mind, 3) reducing deforestation from agriculture, mining, oil blocks and other drivers, and 4) forgiving debt of Amazonian countries to improve economies and reduce reliance on extractive activities.
“Amazon Basin countries are urged to declare a state of emergency and immediately halt the expansion of destructive industrial activities, government policies, and harmful public subsidies that enable further forest destruction,” reads a declaration for preserving the remaining rainforest, which was created by Indigenous leaders. “Industrialized nations must recognize their role in climate change and channel all resources needed to guarantee a just transition for those who inhabit the biome and for their own citizens. The time for action is now.”
Interested individuals, communities, municipalities, and other parties can sign the declaration here.
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