By: Christopher Sellers
That screeching sound you hear this Earth Day is the sound of our federal government
making a U-turn on the environment. What a difference a year and an election have
made.
Last April 22, the United States was making notable progress on some of our toughest
environmental problems. Grassroots mobilizations and other forms of pressure helped
nudge America’s political leadership to halt pipelines and craft new policies on climate
change, fracking, and toxics. The rest of the world, even China, was coalescing around
a commitment to curb greenhouse gases, and the Paris accord had been signed into force.
Trump’s electoral victory has changed much of that. As part of Steve Bannon’s agenda for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” Trump’s appointees are sharpening
their axes for environmental agencies and science. Among their targets: Obama’s climate policies, and the EPA’s budget, which they’ve proposed to cut by 31 percent.
It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability,
given that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early
20th century Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments.
In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and
signed many foundational laws. Even during the last Republican administration of George
W. Bush, longtime EPA employees have told me there was considerable if often tacit
support by party leaders. ( Read More...)
Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and the Legacy of Attica
ROBERT CHASE
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon, $35 (cloth)
In September a national network of incarcerated Americans conducted the first-ever
coordinated prison strike against U.S. prison labor. The strike’s manifesto, “Call to Action Against Slavery in America,” declares, “We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves
by ceasing to be slaves.” During the three-week strike, an estimated 24,000 prisoners
in over 29 prisons across at least 23 states refused to work. Facing the threat of
administrative lockdowns and individual punishments, the strike ended within a month
with its demands unmet. Some individual prisoners are continuing the protest through
hunger strikes and disturbances while others are making coordinated plans for future
protests that will include activists outside prison. The strikers’ demands varied
from state to state and included unionization, fair wages, better medical treatment,
access to legal aid, and an end to degrading conditions, including corporal punishment
and prolonged stays in solitary confinement. But the shared goal among all was to
draw attention to the continued use in U.S. prisons of slave labor.
A total laboring prison population of nearly 900,000 people is coerced to work for
a $2 billion-a-year prison industry. The average daily wage is 93 cents. Yet up to
80 percent of these meager wages can be withheld for reasons such as “room and board.”
Four states, all in the South, pay no wages at all: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and
Texas. Indeed, while Texas prisoners work without any pay whatsoever, Texas Correctional
Industries, a for-profit corporation operated by the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice, posted nearly $89 million in profits during 2014.
Click here to read more.
This Is Fear: ICE Raids on Parents and Children
At the end of December, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would being rounding up Central
American immigrants for deportation. This past weekend, the raids began, with parents and children being detained in military-style operations in several
southern and border states. Fear has spread through immigrant communities around the
country.
As a professor of migration studies at Stony Brook University who has researched consequences
of immigration policies for over a decade, I have followed news of this initiative
closely. But I am also an Anglo mom of two on Long Island, in a town with sizeable
communities of Latino immigrants, many of them from Central America. I speak Spanish,
so I talk with Latino immigrants, I listen, I ask. And this is what fear looks like
in my town.
Sunday afternoon, my kids were playing with some kids in the community, blowing off
end-of-holiday break steam. Suddenly, one boy said to me, “Miss Nancy, did you hear
that they are stopping people on the streets, and taking them away? Whole families.
My mom was crying, she’s so scared.” I called his mother. She came to Long Island
13 years ago, and while her husband has papers, she does not. Their kids are U.S.
citizens. Yes, she said, word was out that ICE was in our town, setting up checkpoints
on the roads, knocking on doors, walking through stores where Latinos shop. Everyone
was staying home, terrified.
Click here to read more.