thenation--2020-06-17--The Media Isn’t Ready to Cover Climate Apartheid

Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic foreshadow another global disaster , one that will not be eased by a vaccine or masks : the climate crisis .
And like Covid-19 , the calamities of climate change will not be experienced equally .
The wealthy will escape the brunt of environmental destruction , while much of the world ’ s poor will be forced to migrate , fall ill , or die .
The United Nations warned last year that the world is rushing toward “ climate apartheid.
” Climate change will kill 250,000 people every year between 2030 and 2050 by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heat stress alone , and by 2050 , it will displace 140 million people , according to predictions from a 2019 UN report .
In a climate apartheid world , said Philip Alston , the former UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights , “ the wealthy pay to escape overheating , hunger , and conflict , while the rest of the world is left to suffer.
” A similar dynamic appeared in the early days of the pandemic , when many rich New Yorkers decamped to second homes and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others , mostly black , Asian , and Latino men , to deliver their meals .
The question for those of us left in the news business is : Are we prepared to cover a collective threat with such disproportionate impacts ?
If the coronavirus is a test for gauging the media ’ s readiness , the results are discouraging .
Before statistics revealed that the pandemic was killing black and Latino New Yorkers at more than twice the rate of the state ’ s white residents and that infection rates in Navajo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states , one might have thought , based on news coverage , that Covid-19 was mainly a crisis of embarrassing Zoom malfunctions , bored children , and homeschooling nightmares .
Although media attention rightfully covered the lack of vital equipment at hospitals , initial warnings about the underpinning inequalities that would later show themselves in a death count were largely ignored .
On March 19 , shortly before shelter-at-home orders were issued , the Economic Policy Institute estimated that only 16 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of black people nationally could work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of whites and 37 percent of Asians .
A week later , when only 4,700 New York City residents had tested positive for the virus and 121 had died , Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report on the city ’ s frontline workers that showed that about 75 percent were people of color , 60 percent were women , and more than 50 percent foreign born .
His recommendations included providing child care to all frontline workers , making hotels available to minimize risk to family members , and ensuring everyone could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mostly ignored by the city , received little attention , except in a few reports after Stringer ’ s mother died from the coronavirus .
As of early June , about one in every 400 New York City residents have died from Covid-19 , and more than 120,000 people in the United States are infected .
Not only were the most at-risk people usually missing from early reports of the pandemic ; their absence resulted in a distorted narrative of both the threat and the policies needed for mitigation .
Only after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the dead revealed immense disparities did the press start to cover structural and discriminatory factors .
But people shouldn ’ t have to die to receive media coverage .
If climate change is the existential crisis of our time , then it ought to provoke a reckoning for the news media .
More than simply altering the practices of individual journalists or newsrooms , the threat of climate apartheid should challenge the news industry to confront a media worldview that , as we saw with the early pandemic coverage , too easily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , white citizen within a wealthy nation .
“ Along with the country as a whole , the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it , if at all , with white men ’ s eyes and white perspective , ” wrote the authors of the 1968 Kerner Commission report .
Fifty years later , little has changed , as evidenced by a recent memo by Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine to his newsroom : “ We can be faulted for focusing on a white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ majority non-white.
” Defaulting to a white , wealthy worldview in the United States is not limited to national publications .
A team of researchers from the University of North Texas and Southern Methodist University found that coverage by The Dallas Morning News centered coverage on elite whites , who are in the minority in Dallas , while stereotyping the city ’ s majority black and Latino residents .
“ It ’ s not just who ’ s telling the story ; it ’ s from what perspective is being told , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mayborn School of Journalism and one of the study ’ s authors , told me .
There are early signs in newsrooms from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles that the media is beginning to acknowledge the racism and inequity in the industry—part of a nationwide accounting following the killing of black men and women , including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor , by police officers .
Although much of the media scrutiny has centered on the dismal representation of black reporters and editors in journalism , the undercurrent to coverage remains a media worldview @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus Without an understanding of the pervasiveness of this outlook , members of the press risk becoming agents of a worldview that ignores or discounts affected populations and writes off their suffering as a consequence of culture .
Neglecting certain groups of people signals that they are unimportant , an erasure that media scholars call “ symbolic annihilation.
” This became especially obvious with the pandemic when , seemingly overnight , the least paid and most exploited workers were rebranded “ essential workers.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the working class and confront a linked destiny across racial and class lines , the middle and elite classes of New York City now celebrate essential workers with nightly applause .
Yet little has been done to improve their material conditions .
The press ought to be a bulwark against mistaking such superficial gestures of gratitude for action and allowing the affluent to define which people matter and when .
To take another example from the early days of Covid-19 in the United States , when Elmhurst , Queens , was the epicenter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ described a hard-hit “ immigrant neighborhood , ” where 153 languages are spoken and people live in poverty .
None of this was untrue , but by itself , the description told us nothing about the staggering death toll .
In contrast , a Rolling Stone article , one of the precious few to describe systemic issues , reported that Elmhurst was the city ’ s third-most-crowded neighborhood , which made social distancing difficult .
Residents ’ speaking a language other than English doesn ’ t explain the infection rate , but a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noted that the city ’ s text messages about the virus were offered only in English .
Citizenship status is relevant , but requires context : After ICE agents rolled through Queens in an armored vehicle resembling a tank late last year , many immigrants were likely discouraged from seeking help .
As with the pandemic , the framing of climate stories is critically important , and there is a global divide in how the news media covers the crisis .
Last year , researchers at the University of Kansas analyzed press coverage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and found that GDP was the strongest predictor of which climate change facts would be reported .
Coverage in wealthier nations , they discovered , focused on domestic politics , while the media in poorer countries emphasized international relations , environmental degradation , and natural disasters .
Not only does the global crisis look different depending on where one is getting their news , but the worldview shapes whose stories matter .
In rich countries , the media has decided it is not those directly affected by calamity whose accounts should be told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This may explain why the US media fixates on political infighting over the Green New Deal , but pays scant attention to the basics of global warming .
This point of view assigns news value—and awards prizes—to narratives of misery in the wake of climate disasters , but neglects the systems of oppression that drive the devastation .
It deems as newsworthy debates about whether almond or oat milk causes more environmental damage , but not the thousands of people living in a tent city in Puerto Rico following an earthquake .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the complex effects of our crises , covering climate apartheid—and the disparate impacts of a pandemic—requires confronting the perspectives of a news industry in which white journalists make up 80 percent of editorial staff .
It also means dismantling traditional reporting silos : The media needs to abolish the notion that there is a race story , an immigration story , and an environment story , and that each is somehow distinct .
“ We should have more diverse voices and representations overall not just pertaining to a specific beat , ” said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who recently joined a joint partnership between ProPublica and the Texas Tribune .
“ Don ’ t make it a one-reporter thing ; make it part of the coverage of all the sections , not just immigration journalists writing about immigrants or minorities writing about minorities.
” The benefit of reporting across normally separate coverage areas is perhaps clearest at the intersection of climate crisis and migration .
This became apparent to me in December when I came across a toddler crying for his mother in a migrant camp .
I was reporting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are made to wait for their cases in Matamoros , Mexico , under a policy called Migrant Protection Protocols .
Within seconds , his mother appeared , and I asked her why she was here with her son—a question with an immigration framing .
She explained that the smuggler said arriving with a child would ease her way into the United States .
Her answer seemed to confirm assertions by government officials , and amplified by some news reports , that migrants were exploiting policies that protect children by allowing for quicker release @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only how she migrated .
When I asked her why she left El Salvador , the story immediately changed .
She explained that political upheaval brought on by the new populist president made her living situation dangerous .
The first question centered the story on US immigration politics while the second attempted to understand the context for her migration , which resulted in a more nuanced and complete picture .
The difference between a wealthy worldview and a climate apartheid worldview is brilliantly illustrated in a long-form article from December 2019 by Carlos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ El Faro , which publishes in English and Spanish .
Dada does not identify as an environment reporter .
When I asked him how he was covering the climate crisis , he responded by telling me , “ I cover poverty and violence.
” The piece , “ The Last Journey of Mr. Ngu , ” begins soon after the body of Cameroonian teacher , Emmanuel Cheo Ngu , washes up on a beach after his ill-fated effort to reach Mexico .
Dada retraces Ngu ’ s route , and in following the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he uncovers Guatemala ’ s failure to enforce regulations even as the wealthy expropriate natural resources .
Ngu was escaping political violence in Cameroon , but Dada ’ s story vividly shows how structural factors make the working poor vulnerable to climate change and how that contributed to Ngu ’ s death .
One farmer in Guatemala , Porfirio Escobar , explained that the free trade era of the 1990s ushered in vast banana plantations .
Multinational companies built dams that flooded subsistence crops or diverted water from smallholder farms , often with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dada notes that agribusinesses that service US markets rerouted 50 rivers along the southern coast .
Then , said Escobar , “ Hurricane Stan came and took the little we had.
” In Dada ’ s piece , affected people are not simply sources of emotional stories ; their insights reveal injustices that reach the highest levels of government .
His narrative connects farmers to a company accused by environmental groups and federal agencies of “ ecocide ” and violating labor laws and to an international anticorruption unit investigating the Guatemala ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portrait of economic degradation , social instability , and political corruption that implicates the United States .
It ’ s the opposite of how the New York Times editorial board condescendingly described the same crisis : “ Basket-case governments in several nations south of the Rio Grande have sent a historic flood of migrants to our southern border.
” Few places call for intertwined coverage of public health , climate change , racism , and poverty like the Rio Grande Valley .
With its daisy chain of cities and small towns along the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for now—the last swath of Texas Gulf Coast untouched by oil and gas drilling and its dense web of pipeline infrastructure .
East of the city of Brownsville , a proposed natural gas project threatens to make the region a major source of carbon emissions .
This project will transmute natural gas into liquid form , and when combined with another project further up the Gulf Coast would double the state ’ s natural gas exports to markets in Asia and Europe .
And the Brownsville LNG export terminals , along with others @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , will produce half-a-billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year by 2030 , according to a study by researchers at the University of Texas–Austin .
That ’ s equal to the emissions from 131 coal-fired power plants .
Systemic discrimination , including historic red-lining and segregation , has made black and Latino residents more likely to live within a mile radius of oil and gas sites .
Is Your Favorite News Source Shilling for Big Oil ?
The Valley has the highest rates of poverty in the state , and will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , according to a report by McKinsey .
It is also where the federal government has waived dozens of environmental regulations .
New sections of the wall are planned for Starr County , one of the counties with highest rates of poverty in the state .
Experts say the wall , which runs along the Rio Grande , will aggravate flooding when it traps debris , allowing water to collect behind it .
And the LNG project , according to the government ’ s environmental review study , will have a “ significant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and habitat .
In addition , government approval of the pipeline grants eminent domain authority to companies involved in the project , empowering them to seize public land force private owners to sell their property .
Describing the stakes of the LNG project , Rebekah Hinojosa , the Valley organizer for Sierra Club , told me , “ We are facing these 100-year floods , asylum-seekers who are waiting on the international bridge , the border wall , and the looming LNG project , and it ’ s all connected.
” Covering the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ connections .
Not sticking to traditional beats helped Gus Bova , an immigration reporter for the Texas Observer , come upon the LNG story , which had been ignored by national news outlets and most of the state press .
“ I was basically talking to a lot of activists in the Valley .
When you cover the wall , you end up talking about the environmental damage , and people kept talking about the LNG project , ” he said .
In the September 2019 article , “ Bridge to Nowhere , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ project would create jobs for a region that desperately needed them .
It was the promise of jobs that convinced federal regulators and local officials to support the LNG export terminals .
But by examining industry records submitted to the county , Bova discovered that thousands of the promised construction jobs are temporary and that the permanent jobs for engineers and other skilled professionals would mostly be filled by outsiders .
His reporting was strengthened by approaching local sources as experts about their community , not just characters .
“ How many of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this little town in the Valley ?
” asked Noe Lopez , a fisherman interviewed in the story .
“ Nobody ’ s qualified for shit like that.
” Missing was an explanation that discrimination , among other factors , has meant that only a small fraction of Latinos complete college or that they earn half the median income of whites ; context that challenges a perception of that poverty is an endemic feature of Latino people and the border .
Still , Bova reframed the story from a clichéd hard-hats-versus-habitat piece and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ citing a Texas A & M University report estimating some 6,000 local jobs depend on ecotourism .
By incorporating information from different silos of coverage—border issues , poverty , business , and local government—Bova provided a comprehensive and critical look at the promises and costs of the so-called energy boom .
In November 2019 , the LNG project finally managed to attract the attention of Texas-based publications after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the project .
News reports rightly focused on the dissent by Commissioner Richard Glick , who faulted the commission @ @ @ @ @ @ @ metric tons—minimum—of greenhouse gases that the LNG project would generate .
But greenhouse gases alone don ’ t tell the full climate apartheid story .
Pieces by the Texas Observer and a partnership of three Rio Grande Valley publications—The Monitor , The Brownsville Herald , and the Valley Morning Star—revealed that a similar LNG project 300 miles up the coast in Freeport had turned a beach community into a ghost town .
Construction workers had replaced local families , and the company had bought out homeowners .
Through the prism of climate apartheid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a story of emissions , jobs , and a boom .
It now resembles the migrant trail as described Dada—a narrative of inequity , government complicity with industry , and working people responding to the decisions of those in power .
If the Texas border seems distant from New York City ’ s Covid-19 outbreak or the climate crisis , consider that in response to the pandemic , Texas ’ s governor has allowed oil and gas operators to apply for waivers to exempt them from regulation .
At the same time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shortened the review period for granting waivers .
NBC News reported that the Trump administration has also used the coronavirus crisis to roll back requirements that “ climate change impacts be considered in environmental reviews of most infrastructure projects.
” The pain and consequences of racial injustice can be heard in neighborhoods ravaged by the coronavirus , among the thousands of asylum seekers waiting at the border , in the public outcry over police shootings of black Americans , and amid the backlash to America ’ s largely white newsrooms .
These stories @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the media needs to make these links clear .
Journalists , and not just those on certain beats , should endeavor to reveal how structural racism , indifference , and government policies can make a pandemic , climate change , policing , or any other global catastrophe more lethal for some than others .
As Dada , in his El Faro article , observed about Ngu and other migrants ’ failed journeys north : “ Soon after they died , they began to reveal truths of global dimensions .
”

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Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic foreshadow another global disaster, one that will not be eased by a vaccine or masks: the climate crisis. And like Covid-19, the calamities of climate change will not be experienced equally. The wealthy will escape the brunt of environmental destruction, while much of the world’s poor will be forced to migrate, fall ill, or die. The United Nations warned last year that the world is rushing toward “climate apartheid.”
Climate change will kill 250,000 people every year between 2030 and 2050 by malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress alone, and by 2050, it will displace 140 million people, according to predictions from a 2019 UN report.
In a climate apartheid world, said Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, “the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict, while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” A similar dynamic appeared in the early days of the pandemic, when many rich New Yorkers decamped to second homes and the sheltering-in-place middle class in the city paid others, mostly black, Asian, and Latino men, to deliver their meals.
The question for those of us left in the news business is: Are we prepared to cover a collective threat with such disproportionate impacts? If the coronavirus is a test for gauging the media’s readiness, the results are discouraging.
Before statistics revealed that the pandemic was killing black and Latino New Yorkers at more than twice the rate of the state’s white residents and that infection rates in Navajo Nation were higher than in all 50 states, one might have thought, based on news coverage, that Covid-19 was mainly a crisis of embarrassing Zoom malfunctions, bored children, and homeschooling nightmares. Although media attention rightfully covered the lack of vital equipment at hospitals, initial warnings about the underpinning inequalities that would later show themselves in a death count were largely ignored.
On March 19, shortly before shelter-at-home orders were issued, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that only 16 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of black people nationally could work from home, compared with about 30 percent of whites and 37 percent of Asians. A week later, when only 4,700 New York City residents had tested positive for the virus and 121 had died, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report on the city’s frontline workers that showed that about 75 percent were people of color, 60 percent were women, and more than 50 percent foreign born. His recommendations included providing child care to all frontline workers, making hotels available to minimize risk to family members, and ensuring everyone could access health care. The proposals, mostly ignored by the city, received little attention, except in a few reports after Stringer’s mother died from the coronavirus. As of early June, about one in every 400 New York City residents have died from Covid-19, and more than 120,000 people in the United States are infected. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Not only were the most at-risk people usually missing from early reports of the pandemic; their absence resulted in a distorted narrative of both the threat and the policies needed for mitigation. Only after the death rate shot up and the demographics of the dead revealed immense disparities did the press start to cover structural and discriminatory factors. But people shouldn’t have to die to receive media coverage. Current Issue View our current issue
If climate change is the existential crisis of our time, then it ought to provoke a reckoning for the news media. More than simply altering the practices of individual journalists or newsrooms, the threat of climate apartheid should challenge the news industry to confront a media worldview that, as we saw with the early pandemic coverage, too easily defaults to the perspective of an affluent, white citizen within a wealthy nation.
“Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” wrote the authors of the 1968 Kerner Commission report. Fifty years later, little has changed, as evidenced by a recent memo by Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine to his newsroom: “We can be faulted for focusing on a white subscriber base even as the city became majority non-white.”
Defaulting to a white, wealthy worldview in the United States is not limited to national publications. A team of researchers from the University of North Texas and Southern Methodist University found that coverage by The Dallas Morning News centered coverage on elite whites, who are in the minority in Dallas, while stereotyping the city’s majority black and Latino residents. “It’s not just who’s telling the story; it’s from what perspective is being told,” Tracy Everbach, a professor at the Mayborn School of Journalism and one of the study’s authors, told me.
There are early signs in newsrooms from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles that the media is beginning to acknowledge the racism and inequity in the industry—part of a nationwide accounting following the killing of black men and women, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, by police officers. Although much of the media scrutiny has centered on the dismal representation of black reporters and editors in journalism, the undercurrent to coverage remains a media worldview centered on middle-class and elite whites. Related Article Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus Nanjala Nyabola
Without an understanding of the pervasiveness of this outlook, members of the press risk becoming agents of a worldview that ignores or discounts affected populations and writes off their suffering as a consequence of culture.
Neglecting certain groups of people signals that they are unimportant, an erasure that media scholars call “symbolic annihilation.” This became especially obvious with the pandemic when, seemingly overnight, the least paid and most exploited workers were rebranded “essential workers.” Forced to concede the invaluable service of the working class and confront a linked destiny across racial and class lines, the middle and elite classes of New York City now celebrate essential workers with nightly applause. Yet little has been done to improve their material conditions. The press ought to be a bulwark against mistaking such superficial gestures of gratitude for action and allowing the affluent to define which people matter and when.
To take another example from the early days of Covid-19 in the United States, when Elmhurst, Queens, was the epicenter of the virus, news reports typically described a hard-hit “immigrant neighborhood,” where 153 languages are spoken and people live in poverty. None of this was untrue, but by itself, the description told us nothing about the staggering death toll.
In contrast, a Rolling Stone article, one of the precious few to describe systemic issues, reported that Elmhurst was the city’s third-most-crowded neighborhood, which made social distancing difficult. Residents’ speaking a language other than English doesn’t explain the infection rate, but a March 13 report by The City wisely noted that the city’s text messages about the virus were offered only in English. Citizenship status is relevant, but requires context: After ICE agents rolled through Queens in an armored vehicle resembling a tank late last year, many immigrants were likely discouraged from seeking help.
As with the pandemic, the framing of climate stories is critically important, and there is a global divide in how the news media covers the crisis. Last year, researchers at the University of Kansas analyzed press coverage from 2011 to 2015 in 45 countries and found that GDP was the strongest predictor of which climate change facts would be reported. Coverage in wealthier nations, they discovered, focused on domestic politics, while the media in poorer countries emphasized international relations, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. Not only does the global crisis look different depending on where one is getting their news, but the worldview shapes whose stories matter. In rich countries, the media has decided it is not those directly affected by calamity whose accounts should be told; it’s the politicians’. Related Article Can Psychedelics Treat Climate Grief? Mark Hertsgaard
This may explain why the US media fixates on political infighting over the Green New Deal, but pays scant attention to the basics of global warming. This point of view assigns news value—and awards prizes—to narratives of misery in the wake of climate disasters, but neglects the systems of oppression that drive the devastation. It deems as newsworthy debates about whether almond or oat milk causes more environmental damage, but not the thousands of people living in a tent city in Puerto Rico following an earthquake.
If the policy imperatives are to reflect the complex effects of our crises, covering climate apartheid—and the disparate impacts of a pandemic—requires confronting the perspectives of a news industry in which white journalists make up 80 percent of editorial staff. It also means dismantling traditional reporting silos: The media needs to abolish the notion that there is a race story, an immigration story, and an environment story, and that each is somehow distinct.
“We should have more diverse voices and representations overall not just pertaining to a specific beat,” said Perla Trevizo, a former environmental reporter who recently joined a joint partnership between ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. “Don’t make it a one-reporter thing; make it part of the coverage of all the sections, not just immigration journalists writing about immigrants or minorities writing about minorities.”
The benefit of reporting across normally separate coverage areas is perhaps clearest at the intersection of climate crisis and migration.
This became apparent to me in December when I came across a toddler crying for his mother in a migrant camp. I was reporting on the thousands of asylum seekers who are made to wait for their cases in Matamoros, Mexico, under a policy called Migrant Protection Protocols. Within seconds, his mother appeared, and I asked her why she was here with her son—a question with an immigration framing.
She explained that the smuggler said arriving with a child would ease her way into the United States. Her answer seemed to confirm assertions by government officials, and amplified by some news reports, that migrants were exploiting policies that protect children by allowing for quicker release from detention. But her answer described only how she migrated. When I asked her why she left El Salvador, the story immediately changed. She explained that political upheaval brought on by the new populist president made her living situation dangerous. The first question centered the story on US immigration politics while the second attempted to understand the context for her migration, which resulted in a more nuanced and complete picture.
The difference between a wealthy worldview and a climate apartheid worldview is brilliantly illustrated in a long-form article from December 2019 by Carlos Dada, cofounder of the El Salvador–based El Faro, which publishes in English and Spanish. Dada does not identify as an environment reporter. When I asked him how he was covering the climate crisis, he responded by telling me, “I cover poverty and violence.” The piece, “The Last Journey of Mr. Ngu,” begins soon after the body of Cameroonian teacher, Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, washes up on a beach after his ill-fated effort to reach Mexico. Dada retraces Ngu’s route, and in following the migrant trail along the Guatemala-Mexico border, he uncovers Guatemala’s failure to enforce regulations even as the wealthy expropriate natural resources. Ngu was escaping political violence in Cameroon, but Dada’s story vividly shows how structural factors make the working poor vulnerable to climate change and how that contributed to Ngu’s death.
One farmer in Guatemala, Porfirio Escobar, explained that the free trade era of the 1990s ushered in vast banana plantations. Multinational companies built dams that flooded subsistence crops or diverted water from smallholder farms, often with the tacit support of the government. Dada notes that agribusinesses that service US markets rerouted 50 rivers along the southern coast. Then, said Escobar, “Hurricane Stan came and took the little we had.”
In Dada’s piece, affected people are not simply sources of emotional stories; their insights reveal injustices that reach the highest levels of government. His narrative connects farmers to a company accused by environmental groups and federal agencies of “ecocide” and violating labor laws and to an international anticorruption unit investigating the Guatemala’s US-backed president. What emerges is a portrait of economic degradation, social instability, and political corruption that implicates the United States. It’s the opposite of how the New York Times editorial board condescendingly described the same crisis: “Basket-case governments in several nations south of the Rio Grande have sent a historic flood of migrants to our southern border.”
Few places call for intertwined coverage of public health, climate change, racism, and poverty like the Rio Grande Valley. With its daisy chain of cities and small towns along the US-Texas border, the region is—at least for now—the last swath of Texas Gulf Coast untouched by oil and gas drilling and its dense web of pipeline infrastructure.
East of the city of Brownsville, a proposed natural gas project threatens to make the region a major source of carbon emissions. This project will transmute natural gas into liquid form, and when combined with another project further up the Gulf Coast would double the state’s natural gas exports to markets in Asia and Europe. And the Brownsville LNG export terminals, along with others slated to open in Texas and Louisiana, will produce half-a-billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year by 2030, according to a study by researchers at the University of Texas–Austin. That’s equal to the emissions from 131 coal-fired power plants. Systemic discrimination, including historic red-lining and segregation, has made black and Latino residents more likely to live within a mile radius of oil and gas sites. Related Article Is Your Favorite News Source Shilling for Big Oil? Amy Westervelt
The Valley has the highest rates of poverty in the state, and will be among the hardest hit by climate change, according to a report by McKinsey. It is also where the federal government has waived dozens of environmental regulations. New sections of the wall are planned for Starr County, one of the counties with highest rates of poverty in the state. Experts say the wall, which runs along the Rio Grande, will aggravate flooding when it traps debris, allowing water to collect behind it. And the LNG project, according to the government’s environmental review study, will have a “significant” effect on air, water, and habitat. In addition, government approval of the pipeline grants eminent domain authority to companies involved in the project, empowering them to seize public land and force private owners to sell their property.
Describing the stakes of the LNG project, Rebekah Hinojosa, the Valley organizer for Sierra Club, told me, “We are facing these 100-year floods, asylum-seekers who are waiting on the international bridge, the border wall, and the looming LNG project, and it’s all connected.”
Covering the climate crisis should be about understanding these connections. Not sticking to traditional beats helped Gus Bova, an immigration reporter for the Texas Observer, come upon the LNG story, which had been ignored by national news outlets and most of the state press. “I was basically talking to a lot of activists in the Valley. When you cover the wall, you end up talking about the environmental damage, and people kept talking about the LNG project,” he said.
In the September 2019 article, “Bridge to Nowhere,” Bova punctured the idea that the project would create jobs for a region that desperately needed them. It was the promise of jobs that convinced federal regulators and local officials to support the LNG export terminals. But by examining industry records submitted to the county, Bova discovered that thousands of the promised construction jobs are temporary and that the permanent jobs for engineers and other skilled professionals would mostly be filled by outsiders. His reporting was strengthened by approaching local sources as experts about their community, not just characters. “How many of those jobs are for the people from this little town in the Valley?” asked Noe Lopez, a fisherman interviewed in the story. “Nobody’s qualified for shit like that.”
Missing was an explanation that discrimination, among other factors, has meant that only a small fraction of Latinos complete college or that they earn half the median income of whites; context that challenges a perception of that poverty is an endemic feature of Latino people and the border. Still, Bova reframed the story from a clichéd hard-hats-versus-habitat piece and made the it about economic livelihood, citing a Texas A&M University report estimating some 6,000 local jobs depend on ecotourism. By incorporating information from different silos of coverage—border issues, poverty, business, and local government—Bova provided a comprehensive and critical look at the promises and costs of the so-called energy boom.
In November 2019, the LNG project finally managed to attract the attention of Texas-based publications after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the project. News reports rightly focused on the dissent by Commissioner Richard Glick, who faulted the commission for failing to consider the 9 million metric tons—minimum—of greenhouse gases that the LNG project would generate.
But greenhouse gases alone don’t tell the full climate apartheid story. Pieces by the Texas Observer and a partnership of three Rio Grande Valley publications—The Monitor, The Brownsville Herald, and the Valley Morning Star—revealed that a similar LNG project 300 miles up the coast in Freeport had turned a beach community into a ghost town. Construction workers had replaced local families, and the company had bought out homeowners. Through the prism of climate apartheid, the Valley LNG no longer looks like a story of emissions, jobs, and a boom. It now resembles the migrant trail as described Dada—a narrative of inequity, government complicity with industry, and working people responding to the decisions of those in power.
If the Texas border seems distant from New York City’s Covid-19 outbreak or the climate crisis, consider that in response to the pandemic, Texas’s governor has allowed oil and gas operators to apply for waivers to exempt them from regulation. At the same time, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has shortened the review period for granting waivers. NBC News reported that the Trump administration has also used the coronavirus crisis to roll back requirements that “climate change impacts be considered in environmental reviews of most infrastructure projects.”
The pain and consequences of racial injustice can be heard in neighborhoods ravaged by the coronavirus, among the thousands of asylum seekers waiting at the border, in the public outcry over police shootings of black Americans, and amid the backlash to America’s largely white newsrooms. These stories of inequity stretch across the world, and the media needs to make these links clear. Journalists, and not just those on certain beats, should endeavor to reveal how structural racism, indifference, and government policies can make a pandemic, climate change, policing, or any other global catastrophe more lethal for some than others. As Dada, in his El Faro article, observed about Ngu and other migrants’ failed journeys north: “Soon after they died, they began to reveal truths of global dimensions.”


thenation--2020-06-17--America’s New Uighur Law Is a World First. What Took So Long?

On Wednesday , June 17 , Donald Trump signed into law the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act , which seeks to punish China for “ gross human rights abuses ” against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the country ’ s western Xinjiang province .
It is the first piece of legislation in the world targeting a sprawling , years-long detention campaign in China that experts say constitutes the largest internment of ethnoreligious minorities since the Holocaust .
The bill has been an awfully long time coming .
And the signing comes on the same afternoon that The Wall Street @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s controversial new book in which the former national security adviser describes Trump telling Chinese president Xi Jinping last year “ that Xi should go ahead with building the camps , which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.
” Congress has sent a different message .
“ Today , in this House of Representatives , in a very strong , bipartisan way , we are sending a message to the persecuted that they are not forgotten , ” Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor on May 27 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ deaths from the novel coronavirus crossed 100,000 and as Americans reeled from the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd .
In a season of historic mourning and unrest in this country , troubles on the opposite side of the world might seem temporarily beside the point .
But the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act , which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support , bears recognition .
Conflict has simmered for decades in Xinjiang between native Uighurs and the ruling Communist Party , but the current crackdown began in earnest in the spring of 2017 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the unfolding rights abuses ; early reporting documented an extensive high-tech surveillance state , in which all manner of daily minutiae might be cause for arrest—growing a beard , contacting friends abroad , and posting religious content online , for example—with the dubious aim of curbing violent extremism .
By the end of 2017 , authorities were throwing Uighurs in reeducation camps by the thousands , with no pretense whatsoever of due process .
A year passed , and that number had exploded to more than 1 million—possibly as high as 3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ estimate , which is the population of Arkansas and roughly a quarter of all Uighurs in the region .
In the camps , journalists and researchers have documented torture , sexual assault , forced abortions , and death .
Some evidence suggests organ harvesting , which China denies .
Outside the camps , meanwhile , mosques have been bulldozed .
Ethnic Han Chinese minders have moved in with Uighur families at the behest of the government , under a “ Pair Up and Become Family ” program that often finds Han men sleeping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ husbands are detained .
And children—when they are not left to die unattended because their parents have been detained—are corralled into government-run orphanages , where they are educated in the Han Chinese tradition .
How the Covid-19 Lockdown Is Reshaping Uighur Activism The United Nations defines genocide as any “ acts committed with intent to destroy , in whole or in part , a national , ethnical , racial or religious group , ” including killing members of the group , causing them “ serious bodily or mental harm , ” imposing conditions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the group ’ s demise , and limiting births among the group or transferring the custody of children away from the group .
“ All of these actions are being taken against the Uighurs , ” Carl Gershman , president of the National Endowment for Democracy , told me .
And yet , as the months and years ticked by , world governments piddled .
“ There was a collective failure of imagination to understand just what magnitude of human rights violations was coming downstream , ” Sophie Richardson , China director at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And it came at a time when a lot of governments were very poorly prepared to respond to that.
” Europe , rocked by nationalist movements posing an existential threat to the European Union , mustered only reserved and infrequent condemnations .
Muslim-majority countries , meanwhile , were not only silent but in some cases actively supported China ’ s policies , perceivably tied up in Beijing ’ s purse strings .
International organizations proved flat-footed .
After repeated pleas from rights groups for a UN official to visit Xinjiang , for example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was the counterterrorism chief ( a career Russian diplomat ) , which as a matter of optics aligned perfectly with Communist Party propaganda .
Then , in July , 22 UN Human Rights Council member states—not including the United States , because Trump withdrew from the council the month prior—penned a letter censuring China , but in a break from precedent no country ’ s representative would agree to read the letter aloud before the council .
“ Even countries willing to speak out on the issue were still cautious to not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” said Patrick Poon , a human rights researcher in Hong Kong .
In the United States , some officials proved to be regular and reliable backers of the Uighur cause , including some in the Trump administration .
But America ’ s response was tentative in aggregate and the administration was typically unwilling to upset negotiations in the much-hyped trade war .
The Uighur bill was introduced by Senator Marco Rubio in January 2019 .
( “ The time to act is now , ” Rubio said then . )
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , put forth around the same time , which confused proceedings .
The bill further languished as other matters , including Trump ’ s impeachment , consumed Congress—important matters , to be sure , but ones that Uighur advocates suggested would seem minor , in the long arc of history , when set alongside the erasure of a people .
The bill looked ready to pass finally early this year , and then the coronavirus hit .
Of course , a law that comes late is better than no law at all .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Omer Kanat , executive director of the D.C.–based Uighur Human Rights Project , said .
“ Suffering Uighurs all over the world finally received good news.
” The new legislation , for one , compels the president to sanction officials involved directly in Uighurs ’ oppression , including Chen Quanguo , Xinjiang ’ s Communist Party secretary who previously represented Beijing in Tibet and is widely viewed as the architect of the camps .
The sanctions—to be issued under the Global Magnitsky Act , which activists have long said should be invoked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American-held financial assets and bar them from traveling to the United States .
( Richardson , of Human Rights Watch , said that Magnitsky sanctions carry “ a particular stigma , ” because they are tied to human rights violations . )
Provisions of the law further call for US companies to mitigate possibilities that their products are contributing to the situation in Xinjiang or benefiting from forced labor in the region ; for law enforcement agencies to protect Uighurs in the United States from Chinese government harassment ; and for expanded support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government–funded news outlet whose Uighur reporters have been at the forefront of Xinjiang coverage .
However , the long delays might lessen the impact of some aspects of the law , advocates say .
A significant portion of the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act is devoted to reporting requirements , directing the State Department and intelligence agencies , for example , to report on surveillance technology and camp construction in Xinjiang .
“ It ’ s almost too late for that , ” said Adrian Zenz , a researcher whose painstaking data mining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Much of this is water down the river.
” Two years ago , Zenz says , immense government intelligence resources might have gone a long way toward illuminating the scope of oppression in Xinjiang ; instead , it largely took the work of journalists and researchers like himself , which Zenz calls “ a real problem.
” If anything , Zenz says , the oppression in Xinjiang may be entering a new phase , with some camps possibly already in the process of decommissioning and pushing the Uighurs who occupied them into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This bill really should have passed a year ago , ” Zenz said .
“ We don ’ t need to talk about camp construction and the surveillance state anymore .
That ’ s history .
It ’ s a done deal .
We have an ongoing dynamic now.
” As written , the law still leaves room for the president not to implement sanctions if he somehow deems it in the national interest .
Apart from his alleged comments to Xi about the camps , Trump has generally shown minimal interest in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2019 , CNN reported that the US president had pledged to Xi in a phone call that he would keep silent on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong amid trade talks .
And in all this time , Trump has said virtually nothing publicly about Xinjiang .
The new law ’ s shortcomings aside , Rushan Abbas , executive director of the D.C.-based Campaign for Uighurs , expressed optimism that the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act , as a world first , might finally signal a lifting of the floodgates for further legislation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ targeting forced labor in Xinjiang , introduced in March—and elsewhere .
“ We should have similar action , similar lobbying , and we should have sanctions implemented in other countries , ” Abbas said .
Action from other governments was especially critical , she added , to ensure Beijing is not able to frame the new legislation as a matter of routine bickering and bluster between itself and Washington .
Dolkun Isa , president of the World Uighur Congress in Munich , agrees .
“ This isn ’ t only the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ This injustice is everyone ’ s problem .
This is about being on the right side of history .
Being silent is also being complicit .
”

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On Wednesday, June 17, Donald Trump signed into law the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, which seeks to punish China for “gross human rights abuses” against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the country’s western Xinjiang province. It is the first piece of legislation in the world targeting a sprawling, years-long detention campaign in China that experts say constitutes the largest internment of ethno-religious minorities since the Holocaust.
The bill has been an awfully long time coming. And the signing comes on the same afternoon that The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of John Bolton’s controversial new book in which the former national security adviser describes Trump telling Chinese president Xi Jinping last year “that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
Congress, which passed the bill with veto-proof majorities in both chambers, feels differently. “Today, in this House of Representatives, in a very strong, bipartisan way, we are sending a message to the persecuted that they are not forgotten,” Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor on May 27. The bill passed the same day that national deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 100,000 and as Americans reeled from the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd. In a season of historic mourning and unrest in this country, troubles on the opposite side of the world might seem temporarily beside the point. But the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act warrants recognition.
Conflict has simmered for decades in Xinjiang between native Uighurs and the ruling Communist Party, but the current crackdown began in earnest in the spring of 2017. Initially, there was little clarity about the unfolding rights abuses; early reporting documented an extensive high-tech surveillance state, in which all manner of daily minutiae might be cause for arrest—growing a beard, contacting friends abroad, and posting religious content online, for example—with the dubious aim of curbing violent extremism. By the end of 2017, authorities were throwing Uighurs in reeducation camps by the thousands, with no pretense whatsoever of due process. A year passed, and that number had exploded to more than 1 million—possibly as high as 3 million, according to one Defense Department estimate, which is the population of Arkansas and roughly a quarter of all Uighurs in the region.
In the camps, journalists and researchers have documented torture, sexual assault, forced abortions, and death. Some evidence suggests organ harvesting, which China denies. Outside the camps, meanwhile, mosques have been bulldozed. Ethnic Han Chinese minders have moved in with Uighur families at the behest of the government, under a “Pair Up and Become Family” program that often finds Han men sleeping in the beds of Uighur women whose husbands are detained. And children—when they are not left to die unattended because their parents have been detained—are corralled into government-run orphanages, where they are educated in the Han Chinese tradition. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Covid-19 How the Covid-19 Lockdown Is Reshaping Uighur Activism Andrew McCormick
The United Nations defines genocide as any “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including killing members of the group, causing them “serious bodily or mental harm,” imposing conditions on life that would otherwise contribute to the group’s demise, and limiting births among the group or transferring the custody of children away from the group. “All of these actions are being taken against the Uighurs,” Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, told me.
And yet, as the months and years ticked by, world governments piddled. Current Issue View our current issue
“There was a collective failure of imagination to understand just what magnitude of human rights violations was coming downstream,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human rights Watch, explained. “And it came at a time when a lot of governments were very poorly prepared to respond to that.”
Europe, rocked by nationalist movements posing an existential threat to the European Union, mustered only reserved and infrequent condemnations. Muslim-majority countries, meanwhile, perceptibly tied up in Beijing’s purse strings, were not only silent but in some cases actively supported China’s policies.
International organizations proved flat-footed. After repeated pleas from rights groups for a UN official to visit Xinjiang, for example, one finally did in June 2019—but it was the counterterrorism chief (a career Russian diplomat), which as a matter of optics aligned perfectly with Communist Party propaganda. Then, in July, 22 UN Human Rights Council member states—not including the United States, because Trump withdrew from the council the month prior—penned a letter censuring China, but, in a break from precedent, no country’s representative would agree to read the letter aloud before the council. “Even countries willing to speak out on the issue were still cautious to not be singled out by the Chinese government,” said Patrick Poon, a human rights researcher in Hong Kong.
In the United States, some officials proved to be regular and reliable backers of the Uighur cause, including some in the Trump administration. But America’s response was tentative in the aggregate and the administration was typically unwilling to upset negotiations in the much-hyped trade war. The Uighur bill was introduced by Senator Marco Rubio in January 2019. (“The time to act is now,” Rubio said then.) There was another, similar bill, however, put forth around the same time, which confused proceedings. The bill further languished as other matters, including Trump’s impeachment, consumed Congress—important matters, to be sure, but ones that Uighur advocates suggested would seem minor, in the long arc of history, when set alongside the erasure of a people. The bill looked ready to finally pass early this year, and then the coronavirus hit.
Of course, a law that comes late is better than no law at all. “It is a historic moment,” Omer Kanat, executive director of the D.C.–based Uighur Human Rights Project, said. “Suffering Uighurs all over the world finally received good news.”
The new legislation, for one, compels the president to sanction officials involved directly in Uighurs’ oppression, including Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s Communist Party secretary who previously represented Beijing in Tibet and is widely viewed as the architect of the camps. The sanctions—to be issued under the Global Magnitsky Act, which activists have long said should be invoked in this case—would freeze those officials’ American-held financial assets and bar them from traveling to the United States. (Richardson, of Human Rights Watch, said that Magnitsky sanctions carry “a particular stigma,” because they are tied to human rights violations.) One Man’s Journey One Uighur Man’s Circuitous Journey to Safety Andrew McCormick
Provisions of the law further call for US companies to mitigate possibilities that their products are contributing to the situation in Xinjiang or benefiting from forced labor in the region; for law enforcement agencies to protect Uighurs in the United States from Chinese government harassment; and for expanded support to Radio Free Asia, a US government–funded news outlet whose Uighur reporters have been at the forefront of Xinjiang coverage.
However, the long delays might lessen the impact of some aspects of the law, advocates say. A significant portion of the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act is devoted to reporting requirements, directing the State Department and intelligence agencies, for example, to report on surveillance technology and camp construction in Xinjiang. “It’s almost too late for that,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher whose painstaking data mining was essential in exposing the camps. “Much of this is water down the river.” Two years ago, Zenz says, immense government intelligence resources might have gone a long way toward illuminating the scope of oppression in Xinjiang; instead, it largely took the work of journalists and researchers like himself, which Zenz calls “a real problem.”
If anything, Zenz says, the oppression in Xinjiang may be entering a new phase, with some camps possibly already in the process of decommissioning and pushing the Uighurs who occupied them into various forms of forced labor. “This bill really should have passed a year ago,” Zenz said. “We don’t need to talk about camp construction and the surveillance state anymore. That’s history. It’s a done deal. We have an ongoing dynamic now.”
As written, the law still leaves room for the president not to implement sanctions if he somehow deems it in the national interest. Apart from his alleged comments to Xi about the camps, Trump has generally shown minimal interest in human rights in China. In October 2019, CNN reported that the US president had pledged to Xi in a phone call that he would keep silent on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong amid trade talks. And in all this time, Trump has said virtually nothing publicly about Xinjiang.
The new law’s shortcomings aside, Rushan Abbas, executive director of the D.C.-based Campaign for Uighurs, expressed optimism that the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, as a world first, might finally signal a lifting of the floodgates for further legislation in the United States—including a new bill targeting forced labor in Xinjiang, introduced in March—and elsewhere. “We should have similar action, similar lobbying, and we should have sanctions implemented in other countries,” Abbas said. Action from other governments was especially critical, she added, to ensure Beijing is not able to frame the new legislation as a matter of routine bickering and bluster between itself and Washington.
Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uighur Congress in Munich, agrees. “This isn’t only the United States’ problem,” he said. “This injustice is everyone’s problem. This is about being on the right side of history. Being silent is also being complicit.”


thenation--2020-06-17--How Bill Barr Became Trump’s Generalissimo

On the afternoon of June 1 , as President Donald Trump raged about the Black Lives Matter protests outside his gates , reporters noticed a familiar figure in Lafayette Park across from the White House .
William Barr , Trump ’ s attorney general , was scoping out the scene with top military and law enforcement officers .
It was an ominous sight , coming just hours after the president promised the nation ’ s governors that “ we will activate Bill Barr and activate him strongly.
” 1 What happened next would transform the outcry and anger about racial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and his white nationalist agenda .
Over the next few days , starting with Barr ’ s brazen order to clear the park , Washington experienced an unprecedented military operation and occupation .
Nearly 8,000 troops from the Army ’ s National Guard and an astounding array of federal security forces and intelligence assets were assembled to confront the protesters.2 With US military leaders hesitant to use their troops against Americans , Barr has emerged as Trump ’ s wartime consigliere—an attorney generalissimo for the times .
There are few people in Washington @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to presidential power , mixed with fealty to the institutions of government control , have long been hallmarks of Barr ’ s career.3 “ You can rise fast when you ’ re willing to tell your boss whatever he wants to know , ” says Michael German , a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years in the FBI before leaving in 2004 .
“ Barr spent a lot of time working in these agencies , so his knowledge of how they operate is helpful to using them in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a deep look into Barr ’ s career exposes a deep commitment to what Dick Cheney called “ the dark side ” —the insidious world of covert operations , executive action , and mass surveillance .
Moreover , his experiences in the national security state and the private telecommunications industry reveal a man who has operated at the pinnacle of America ’ s privatized intelligence system since the dawn of the digital age.5 As attorney general for President George H.W .
Bush in 1992 , Barr authorized one of the nation ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Department of Justice ( DOJ ) program , first disclosed by USA Today in 2015 , was a giant database that “ amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.
” The bulk collection system was operated secretly by the DOJ ’ s Drug Enforcement Agency ( DEA ) until it was suspended in 2013.6 The DEA program “ ultimately became a model for the NSA ’ s phone records collection program , ” which the agency used to collect the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American citizens after 9/11 , the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU ) wrote last year in a critical analysis of Barr ’ s career.7 Barr was part of the NSA spying program , too , not as a government official but as a top executive with Verizon , the company formed from a merger with NSA contractor GTE , where Barr worked for many years .
Like Cheney , who was instrumental to the NSA ’ s secret operation , Barr seems to know every lever of power available to a president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ DOJ did not respond to questions about Barr ’ s career . )
8 William Barr is one of four sons of Donald Barr , a former member of the Office of Strategic Services , the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency .
In 1968 , he enrolled at Columbia University , where his father taught for many years .
There , he had his first experience in confronting the American left when a group of radicals seized campus buildings to protest Columbia ’ s role in gentrifying black neighborhoods and the university @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Defense Analysis.9 The Institute is a military think tank that , according to an insider ’ s account of the Columbia struggle , developed weapons for the counterinsurgency wars the United States was fighting in Vietnam and across the world .
Barr hated the protests .
In a recent profile , the historian Paul Cronin remembered Barr as part of a gang of upper-class thugs called the “ Majority Coalition ” that physically fought and threatened anti-war demonstrators.10 From Columbia , Barr went straight into the CIA , where he worked from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assistant legislative counsel .
After a stint working on domestic policy for President Reagan , he joined the first Bush administration , where he rose from deputy AG to attorney general .
He quickly became known as a determined advocate for the expansive use of presidential and military power .
This was also his entrée into the early surveillance state , which began with the domestic spying program he ordered at the DEA.11 In 1993 , Barr was hired as general counsel and executive vice president of GTE , the world ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1999 with Bell Atlantic , it was renamed Verizon , and Barr stayed on as general counsel , where he remained until 2008 .
This period of his career—where he made the bulk of his $ 40 million fortune—is typically described as a shift toward antitrust and industry regulation issues.12 But that ’ s only part of the story .
When Barr joined GTE , he also became counsel for GTE ’ s government services division .
Created in 1984 , it had become , through a series of acquisitions , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , providing secure communications systems to the Army , Navy , and Air Force as well as the NSA .
Barr hinted at GTE ’ s classified work in 1996 , when he testified before a hearing of a commission on “ the roles and capabilities ” of US intelligence after the Cold War.13 “ There ’ s never been a greater need for a robust intelligence capability in this country than now , ” he said .
“ I would include not only the function of collection of intelligence , but also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strong covert action capability.
” It was an illuminating choice of words , because both “ collection ” and “ covert ” were key to one of the programs that Barr inherited when he took over in 1993.14 In 1989 , GTE ’ s government unit was tapped by NSA ’ s Operations Directorate to develop a digital storage system for voice communications collected by NSA listening posts .
At the time , of course , the NSA ’ s secret work and its system of global surveillance were little known to Americans.15 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the largest Automated Data Processing contract to date for NSA at that time , ” says Tom Drake , the prominent whistle-blower , who worked on the project as a contractor and later exposed corruption at an NSA program run by military giant Science Applications International Corporation .
( See “ Obama ’ s Crackdown on Whistleblowers , ” The Nation , March 2013 . )
16 Drake was hired by GTE in 1989 and soon discovered that MINSTREL ’ s costs were out of control .
The award was for $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of cost overruns , NSA ended up spending closer to $ 250 million.
” 17 Much of that , he believed , was due to outright fraud .
Moreover , the program didn ’ t work , forcing the NSA to keep extending the contract .
When Drake asked a top GTE executive about its failure to deliver MINSTREL on time , he said he was told that “ we ’ re under no obligation to show anything—all we need to show is best effort.
” 18 In 1991 , disgusted at what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his complaints to the Pentagon ’ s Office of Inspector General as well as GTE ’ s general counsel—Barr ’ s immediate predecessor .
“ That ’ s how I became a whistle-blower , ” Drake told me .
“ This is where , to my horror , I really began to appreciate how run amuck the military-industrial complex had become.
” 19 MINSTREL , which was just one of the contracts GTE held with the NSA , was eventually canceled , partly because of Drake ’ s IG complaint .
In 1996 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s merger with General Dynamics Information Technology ( GDIT ) .
Following its recent acquisition of CSRA Inc. , GDIT is now one of the nation ’ s five largest intelligence contractors , with a strong presence at the NSA.20 After he moved from GTE to Verizon , Barr turned his knowledge of the mechanics of intelligence collection to domestic surveillance .
In 2001 , the phone giant was one of a handful of companies that participated in Stellar Wind , the massive warrantless-surveillance program launched by the George W. Bush administration.21 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Verizon allowed the NSA without any court approval to intercept the contents of Americans ’ phone calls and emails and to vacuum up in bulk the metadata associated with Americans ’ phone calls and internet activities , ” the ACLU wrote in 2019.22 Military Leaders Have an Extraordinary Choice to Make as the Nation Protests Some of Barr ’ s hard-line policies on dissent may have come into play in recent weeks .
On May 31 , he activated a network of 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to confront what he called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ anarchistic and far left extremists ” using “ Antifa-like ” tactics .
“ Basically , this was Barr ’ s attempt to mollify Trump , ” said German , the former FBI agent.23 Meanwhile , reports that surveillance drones and airplanes were observed over both Minneapolis and Washington have sparked concerns in Congress that federal agencies might be conducting illegal surveillance .
In response , on June 11 , a top Pentagon official informed the House that none of the collection agencies , including the NSA , had been asked by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or inappropriate intelligence activities.
” 24 With Barr in charge , there ’ s a good possibility that the DEA might be up to its old tricks again .
On June 2 , Buzzfeed News obtained a memorandum from the agency ’ s acting administrator , Timothy J. Shea , stating that the DEA had been granted “ sweeping new authority to “ conduct covert surveillance ” of the protests .
That prompted Representative Jerrold Nadler , the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee , to ask Barr to “ immediately rescind ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unwarranted and antithetical ” to civil rights.25 Meanwhile , the protests in Washington continue day after day , and the crossroads near the White House where Barr ’ s security forces attacked demonstrators and reporters has been named Black Lives Matter Place .
Chances are good that the new title will last much longer than Barr ’ s ugly legacy of providing legal cover for Trump , arguably the most hated president in the city ’ s history.26

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On the afternoon of June 1, as President Donald Trump raged about the Black Lives Matter protests outside his gates, reporters noticed a familiar figure in Lafayette Park across from the White House. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, was scoping out the scene with top military and law enforcement officers. It was an ominous sight, coming just hours after the president promised the nation’s governors that “we will activate Bill Barr and activate him strongly.”1
What happened next would transform the outcry and anger about racial injustice into a national uprising against Trump and his white nationalist agenda. Over the next few days, starting with Barr’s brazen order to clear the park, Washington experienced an unprecedented military operation and occupation. Nearly 8,000 troops from the Army’s National Guard and an astounding array of federal security forces and intelligence assets were assembled to confront the protesters.2
With US military leaders hesitant to use their troops against Americans, Barr has emerged as Trump’s wartime consigliere—an attorney generalissimo for the times. There are few people in Washington more suited for this task: Servility to presidential power, mixed with fealty to the institutions of government control, have long been hallmarks of Barr’s career.3
“You can rise fast when you’re willing to tell your boss whatever he wants to know,” says Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years in the FBI before leaving in 2004. “Barr spent a lot of time working in these agencies, so his knowledge of how they operate is helpful to using them in an aggressive manner.”4
In fact, a deep look into Barr’s career exposes a deep commitment to what Dick Cheney called “the dark side”—the insidious world of covert operations, executive action, and mass surveillance. Moreover, his experiences in the national security state and the private telecommunications industry reveal a man who has operated at the pinnacle of America’s privatized intelligence system since the dawn of the digital age.5 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann ‘No Intel’ The FBI Finds ‘No Intel Indicating Antifa Involvement’ in Sunday’s Violence Ken Klippenstein
As attorney general for President George H.W. Bush in 1992, Barr authorized one of the nation’s first domestic spying operations. The Department of Justice (DOJ) program, first disclosed by USA Today in 2015, was a giant database that “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.” The bulk collection system was operated secretly by the DOJ’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) until it was suspended in 2013.6
The DEA program “ultimately became a model for the NSA’s phone records collection program,” which the agency used to collect the domestic calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens after 9/11, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote last year in a critical analysis of Barr’s career.7 Current Issue View our current issue
Barr was part of the NSA spying program, too, not as a government official but as a top executive with Verizon, the company formed from a merger with NSA contractor GTE, where Barr worked for many years. Like Cheney, who was instrumental to the NSA’s secret operation, Barr seems to know every lever of power available to a president willing to use them. (The DOJ did not respond to questions about Barr’s career.)8
William Barr is one of four sons of Donald Barr, a former member of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1968, he enrolled at Columbia University, where his father taught for many years. There, he had his first experience in confronting the American left when a group of radicals seized campus buildings to protest Columbia’s role in gentrifying black neighborhoods and the university’s close ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis.9
The Institute is a military think tank that, according to an insider’s account of the Columbia struggle, developed weapons for the counterinsurgency wars the United States was fighting in Vietnam and across the world. Barr hated the protests. In a recent profile, the historian Paul Cronin remembered Barr as part of a gang of upper-class thugs called the “Majority Coalition” that physically fought and threatened anti-war demonstrators.10
From Columbia, Barr went straight into the CIA, where he worked from 1973 to 1977 as an analyst and assistant legislative counsel. After a stint working on domestic policy for President Reagan, he joined the first Bush administration, where he rose from deputy AG to attorney general. He quickly became known as a determined advocate for the expansive use of presidential and military power. This was also his entrée into the early surveillance state, which began with the domestic spying program he ordered at the DEA.11
In 1993, Barr was hired as general counsel and executive vice president of GTE, the world’s third-largest telecommunications network. After GTE merged in 1999 with Bell Atlantic, it was renamed Verizon, and Barr stayed on as general counsel, where he remained until 2008. This period of his career—where he made the bulk of his $40 million fortune—is typically described as a shift toward antitrust and industry regulation issues.12
But that’s only part of the story. When Barr joined GTE, he also became counsel for GTE’s government services division. Created in 1984, it had become, through a series of acquisitions, one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, providing secure communications systems to the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as the NSA. Barr hinted at GTE’s classified work in 1996, when he testified before a hearing of a commission on “the roles and capabilities” of US intelligence after the Cold War.13
“There’s never been a greater need for a robust intelligence capability in this country than now,” he said. “I would include not only the function of collection of intelligence, but also my view that we need a very strong covert action capability.” It was an illuminating choice of words, because both “collection” and “covert” were key to one of the programs that Barr inherited when he took over in 1993.14
In the mid-1980s, GTE’s government unit was tapped by NSA’s Operations Directorate to develop a digital storage system for voice communications collected by NSA listening posts. At the time, of course, the NSA’s secret work and its system of global surveillance were little known to Americans.15 ‘Outside Agitators’ Stop Blaming ‘Outside Agitators’ for America’s Problems Jeet Heer
MINSTREL, its code name, “was the largest Automated Data Processing contract to date for NSA at that time,” says Tom Drake, the prominent whistle-blower, who worked on the project as a contractor and later exposed corruption at an NSA program run by military giant Science Applications International Corporation. (See “Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers,” The Nation, March 2013.)16
Drake was hired by GTE in 1989 and soon discovered that MINSTREL’s costs were out of control. The award was for $144 million, “but with lots of cost overruns, NSA ended up spending closer to $250 million.”17
Much of that, he believed, was due to outright fraud. Moreover, the program didn’t work, forcing the NSA to keep extending the contract. When Drake asked a top GTE executive about its failure to deliver MINSTREL on time, he said he was told that “we’re under no obligation to show anything—all we need to show is best effort.”18
In 1991, disgusted at what he’d seen, Drake took his complaints to the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General as well as GTE’s general counsel—Barr’s immediate predecessor. “That’s how I became a whistle-blower,” Drake told me. “This is where, to my horror, I really began to appreciate how run amuck the military-industrial complex had become.”19
MINSTREL, which was just one of the contracts GTE held with the NSA, was eventually canceled, partly because of Drake’s IG complaint. In 1996, Barr helped orchestrate the government unit’s merger with General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). Following its recent acquisition of CSRA Inc., GDIT is now one of the nation’s five largest intelligence contractors, with a strong presence at the NSA.20
After he moved from GTE to Verizon, Barr turned his knowledge of the mechanics of intelligence collection to domestic surveillance. In 2001, the phone giant was one of a handful of companies that participated in Stellar Wind, the massive warrantless-surveillance program launched by the George W. Bush administration.21
“Under Barr’s watch, Verizon allowed the NSA without any court approval to intercept the contents of Americans’ phone calls and emails and to vacuum up in bulk the metadata associated with Americans’ phone calls and internet activities,” the ACLU wrote in 2019.22 Related Article Military Leaders Have an Extraordinary Choice to Make as the Nation Protests Andrew McCormick
Some of Barr’s hard-line policies on dissent may have come into play in recent weeks. On May 31, he activated a network of 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to confront what he called the “violent agenda” pursued by “anarchistic and far left extremists” using “Antifa-like” tactics. “Basically, this was Barr’s attempt to mollify Trump,” said German, the former FBI agent.23
Meanwhile, reports that surveillance drones and airplanes were observed over both Minneapolis and Washington have sparked concerns in Congress that federal agencies might be conducting illegal surveillance. In response, on June 11, a top Pentagon official informed the House that none of the collection agencies, including the NSA, had been asked by the White House “to undertake any unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities.”24
With Barr in charge, there’s a good possibility that the DEA might be up to its old tricks again. On June 2, Buzzfeed News obtained a memorandum from the agency’s acting administrator, Timothy J. Shea, stating that the DEA had been granted “sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” of the protests. That prompted Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to ask Barr to “immediately rescind” the authorities, which he called “unwarranted and antithetical” to civil rights.25
Meanwhile, the protests in Washington continue day after day, and the crossroads near the White House where Barr’s security forces attacked demonstrators and reporters has been named Black Lives Matter Place. Chances are good that the new title will last much longer than Barr’s ugly legacy of providing legal cover for Trump, arguably the most hated president in the city’s history.26