Democrats’ climate law set off a wave of energy projects in GOP districts. A backlash followed.

Michael Conroy/AP Photo

Josh Siegel, Kelsey Tamborrino and Jessie Blaeser
Sun, August 13, 2023 


President Joe Biden’s year-old climate law triggered a deluge of clean energy spending in almost every state — and it’s splitting conservatives across rural America.

Some communities are welcoming their slice of the $370 billion pot of federal tax incentives meant to accelerate the development of renewable energy and the deployment of electric vehicles as a way to bring back jobs. Others see the Inflation Reduction Act as a vehicle for boosting Chinese businesses and the reach of their government.

While Republicans on the campaign trail and in Congress regularly bash the law — which Biden signed a year ago Wednesday — as big-government overreach by Democrats bent on killing off fossil fuels, its benefits are disproportionately landing in their communities. And as the measure supercharges efforts to combat climate change, it’s also rekindling economies where people have felt forgotten, potentially softening how some voters view Biden as he seeks reelection.

“We always knew that it would fall across America, not in one particular state or another,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in an interview. “We know that rural areas have been neglected, we know that rural areas have fallen behind, and we wanted to help those rural areas. And if some of those rural areas are red, so be it.”

For the companies that are hoping to reap federal tax incentives as well as state and local sweeteners, Republican parts of the country often look more attractive. Of the 200 project locations that have been announced through July, more than 60 percent are in GOP-held districts, according to a POLITICO analysis.

“Companies are building projects where they will be the most effective and generate the most resources,” said Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, a clean energy industry trade group. “It is no surprise in the Southeast, Upper Midwest, where you have significant amounts of manufacturing capacity, much of which has been idled and left the country.”

As the IRA hits its first anniversary, POLITICO traveled across the nation to examine how the law is playing out in Oklahoma (where the Republican governor is claiming credit for the state’s booming clean energy sector), Michigan (where multibillion-dollar battery projects will generate jobs but are provoking uproars over Chinese ties) and upstate New York (where Republican congressmembers in Biden districts are trying to navigate the politics of the IRA).

MICHIGAN: Green Charter Township and Marshall

Jim Chapman, the Republican supervisor for Green Charter Township, a small rural community an hour’s drive north of Grand Rapids, said he’s received several death threats over a planned $2.36 billion battery component manufacturing facility in the area.

“I accepted the fact that I was going to have to be the lightning rod,” Chapman said in an interview from his office. He is facing a recall effort launched by residents worried about the plant’s sponsor, Gotion, and its links to China.

“Where you have people that are concerned about the Chinese Communist [Party] — they don’t know how to [fight] it in Lansing. They don’t know how to deal with it in Washington. They can deal with it locally,” he said.

Gotion Inc., which recently finalized the purchase of 270 acres in Green Charter Township, is a U.S. subsidiary of Gotion High-tech Co., an international company founded in China.

Residents and some elected officials point to Gotion High-tech documents that include language to “carry out Party activities” in accordance with the Chinese Communist Party.

Chuck Thelen, the vice president of North American manufacturing at Gotion, has insisted there is no such language in the U.S.-based company’s articles of incorporation. Thelen said the Chinese Communist Party has no presence in the North American company.

“The rumors that you’ve heard about us bringing communism to North America are just flat-out fear-mongering and really have nothing based in reality,” he said.

The plant’s backers say the opposition represents just a small minority of residents and argue it will bring much-needed economic growth.

“We desperately need good-paying jobs,” said Carlleen Rose, 69, a local business owner.

But those who oppose the project have a lengthy list of concerns, including a lack of transparency in the process up to this point and potential for air and water pollution stemming from battery materials.

Thelen said the company is currently going through the permitting process for the facility, including the next phase of an environmental study.

“All you gotta do is drive around the community and you’ll see how many people are against it,” said Lori Brock, 58, the owner of a local real estate agency and a horse farm across from the planned site.

“They’re pushing it down our throats,” Brock added. “Why are we giving our tax money to China when we’re almost at war with China? Why aren’t we giving our tax money to an American company?”

That antipathy is shared by local elected officials, including Republican Rep. John Moolenaar, who represents the district.

“Gotion North America is a subsidiary of a company that pledges allegiance to the CCP and I don’t think they should be receiving taxpayer money to build in Michigan,” he said in an interview.

The site’s proximity to a military training center has also raised national security concerns, although the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reportedly determined earlier this year the factory was outside of its jurisdiction.

The project — along with a separate Ford Motor Co. battery facility in Marshall, Mich., that will license technology from a Chinese company — mark a recurring theme of distrust that undergirds some of the manufacturing announcements that are flowing to red districts.

More than 40 percent of the new manufacturing announcements made since the IRA was enacted were led by companies based outside the U.S. or by companies outside the U.S. in partnership with a U.S. company, according to data shared with POLITICO by national business group E2. At least six of those announcements were made by, or in partnership with, a Chinese-based company.

Ford’s planned $3.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park Michigan project two hours south of the Gotion plant is expected to create 2,500 new U.S. jobs.

But its reliance on technology from China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., a large global battery producer, has drawn pushback both locally and in Washington, where Republicans are putting the project under a microscope. Residents have also lodged concerns about the plant's effects on the environment, particularly to the Kalamazoo River, and the loss of farmland.

Ford spokesperson Melissa Miller said there’s “a lot of misinformation” about the Marshall project. Ford, she said in a statement, will own and control the plant with “zero foreign investment” and its Chinese partner’s involvement will be as a licensor of battery cell technology and a service provider on a contractual basis.

“CATL does not and will not have any equity in the plant and will receive zero tax dollars,” Miller said.

On the environmental concerns, she said the company is still designing the plant, but has begun identifying and mitigating potential failures.

Residents in both communities have packed into town meetings over the months and launched Facebook pages devoted to their opposition. The two projects have prompted recall efforts for local officials and in the case of the Marshall project, a citizen-led lawsuit.

“America’s gotta wake up. We’re being taken over,” Debbie Dygert, 71, said in an interview after a recent Green Charter Township board meeting, which devolved into shouting over concerns of China’s influence and claims by some of xenophobia.

Both the Ford and Gotion facilities were applauded by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and are taking advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in state-level incentives, on top of the likely incentives under the IRA.

Quentin Messer, Jr., the CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-state agency, called it “critically important” for Michigan to maintain a foothold in battery manufacturing.

“You always have to make the affirmative case as to why growth and progress are going to be beneficial, and not something to be feared,” Messer said. “And I think that’s something that we understand we have to do and make more explicit to folks.”
OKLAHOMA: Inola and Oklahoma City

Bill McAnally, a self-declared “Trump fan,” was ecstatic when an Italian company, Enel, announced plans in May to spend more than $1 billion — the largest private investment in the state’s history — to build a solar cell and panel manufacturing facility a half-hour drive east of Tulsa.

He owns a diner that is one of the few restaurants around Inola, a town home to 1,500 people, and stands to see sales jump from the influx of new customers.

“It’s a great deal,” said McAnally, 68, since Enel, through its affiliate 3Sun USA, expects to generate 1,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025. “All it does is help my business.”

But when told by a reporter that Enel plans to take advantage of tax credits included in Biden’s climate law, McAnally abruptly changed his tune.

“I don’t support it now,” he said. “The federal government doesn’t need to get involved. We all support bringing in green, but we don’t want to give them all this free money.”

But Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, has no qualms about the IRA incentives that are attracting multinational companies to his state.

“Obviously some of these incentives from the federal government are causing people to look into the U.S. market,” Stitt said in an interview in the state capitol.

In addition to Enel, electric vehicle startup Canoo announced plans in November to manufacture cars in Oklahoma City, where it says it will employ 500 people, as well as battery modules in Pryor.

But Stitt also personally takes credit for attracting clean energy manufacturing, a sector he said dovetails with Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry, low energy costs, ample transportation infrastructure and central location in the country. The state also draws about 40 percent of its power from wind and is home to more electric vehicle fast-charging stations per capita than any other state.

“We’re just trying to be smart,” Stitt said. “All the [research and development] dollars are flowing into electric vehicles. Batteries. So then I’m thinking, let’s go where the puck is headed. Oklahoma doesn’t want to get left behind. We want the jobs.”


At Stitt’s behest, the Legislature approved taxpayer-funded rebates to companies that build facilities and create jobs in the state, including a $180 million incentive package to help lure Enel. It offered $300 million in incentives to Canoo, though the California-based company saw that figure drop after it missed construction targets.

But some in the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation are resisting the push — including Rep. Josh Brecheen, a freshman member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who represents the district where Enel is building its huge solar project.

“Do I want jobs to come to Oklahoma? Yes. Do I want companies to stand on their own and be on an even playing field without taxpayer subsidization? Absolutely,” Brecheen said in an interview where he ridiculed wind and solar energy as “unreliable.”

Rep. Kevin Hern, who represents the larger Tulsa area surrounding the Enel project site, has helped lead GOP efforts to undo Biden’s climate law as chair of the Republican Study Committee, which released a proposal in June to repeal the IRA.

But Stitt doesn’t support repealing the law because companies have already factored in the incentives.

“I would never want to change the rules on someone mid-game,” he said.

Ron Burrows, one of three Republican commissioners for Rogers County, home to a river port in Inola that is set to host the plant, said local political leaders were important in sealing Enel’s decision to locate in Oklahoma.

“Local government is the last welcome mat before they enter the door, and my role is to give them some peace of mind that I’m supportive and not adversarial,” Burrows said.

GOP lawmakers, he said, need to take into account how their actions affect the districts they serve.

“You got to weigh what your belief system is versus what in reality is happening in the community,” Burrows said. “If things get passed outside of what [they] believe in, then [they have] to trust in us to spend that money to the best of our ability and we will grow these rural populations.”
NEW YORK: Kingston

The Hudson Valley has been waiting for an industrial reboot for almost 30 years. And now that Biden’s climate law is offering some flicker of hope, some Republicans are lining up to claim some bit of credit.

With the lucrative IRA incentives on offer, Canadian company Zinc8 Energy Solutions is planning to use a former IBM computer factory to make batteries for EVs and ones that can bolster electric grids, although it hasn’t finalized the site yet.

Having seen the economic engine of the region empty out 7,000 jobs a generation ago, both Democrats and Republicans support bringing the new project to Ulster County.

GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro, who represents the county, acknowledged the federal program is an “exceptionally important tool” in helping draw Zinc8 — despite his joining most Republicans in voting for legislation that would’ve repealed many of the climate law’s clean energy incentives.


In an interview, Molinaro, who is one of Democrats’ top targets in 2024, minimized the importance of his vote, saying the measure was mostly a messaging bill ahead of the debt ceiling fight with Democrats this spring. He insists he would fight to keep the IRA clean energy subsidies intact in the future and that enough Republicans agree.

“When you grow up living along the Hudson River and seeing businesses contaminate and leave, you grow up understanding the value of protecting our natural resources, and building the next generation of industry in a sustainable way,” he said. “I embraced that well before most folks in elected office in Hudson Valley.”

But Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, who represents the neighboring 18th Congressional District, had no sympathy for Molinaro’s political predicament.

“You can’t sit there passively,” said Ryan, whose grandfather worked for IBM for 36 years before a restructuring shuttered the site. “We need people to champion [IRA tax credits] and block terrible public policy [to repeal it] at exactly the wrong moment.”

Ryan, who was Ulster County executive before being elected to Congress in 2022, and other local officials had begun taking action to revitalize the site. But the passage of the IRA was “like jet fuel,” Ryan said.

New York has also offered a grant of up to $9 million to Zinc8 to locate in the state, and the company is receiving a $10 million bond from the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency to help acquire machinery and equipment.

Local officials are cognizant of challenges that remain to ensure Zinc8’s success in Ulster County, which has seen previous efforts to redevelop the former IBM site fail, including a hollowed out workforce, which they are seeking to bolster through training programs with local schools and community groups.

“We literally don’t have the trained workers,” said Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger, a Democrat. “But now we have this enormous opportunity to turn it into a real hub for the new green economy.”

Grant Schwab contributed to this report.

America’s Proto-Fascist Red Scare of 1917-21

BY PAUL STREET

 AUGUST 10, 2023
Facebook

Twitter\Reddit\\\Emai

Is This Tomorrow?, a 1947 anti-Communist comic book via Wikimedia Commons

Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York: Mariner, 2022).

As American as Cherry Pie

Those who think that fascism is impossible in the United States thanks to the nation’s supposed splendid and “exceptional” record of freedom, democracy, equality, decency, and respect for the rule of law[1] might want to read up on the vast dark undersides of American history. Slavery happened here, for two and a half centuries. Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, and terrorism happened here for nearly a century. Native American removal and genocide happened here over three centuries.  Mass Black ghettoization took place in the last century and remains intact today. Racist mass arrest, imprisonment, and criminal branding has been happening for more than half a century.

From its genocidal and slave-based origins through its recurrent bloody repression and oppression of workers and radicals, its savage levelling and privatization of North American forests and prairies. its building of a giant authoritarian corporate system, its manufacture of vast urban Black ghettoes, its creation of a globally unmatched racist mass incarceration system, its ongoing police state brutalization of its minority populations,  its construction of a giant mass murderous and racist global empire, its direct and indirect murder of tens of millions of world citizens, and its creation of a massive surveillance state at home and abroad, the real, by means glorious record of “the American experience,” properly examined, suggests that in many ways fascism is, like violence, to paraphrase the 1960s Black radical H. Rap Brown, “as American as cherry pie.”[2]

As the heralded Black novelist Toni Morrison observed in a 1995 Howard university speech titled “Racism and Fascism,” “America has often preferred fascist solutions to political problems.”[3]

On the Brink, 1917-21

Fascism can’t happen here? It kind of did between 1917 and 1921, when the First World War and the Russian Bolshevik (socialist) Revolution provided “patriotic” pretext for American federal, state, and local government and right-wing anti-labor, anti-radical, and racist vigilantes to arrest, terrorize, beat, incarcerate, torture, and murder US pacifists, leftists, feminists, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, civil libertarians, and trade unionists from coast to coast. As Adam Hochshild shows in his remarkable latest book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York: Mariner, 2022), the nation teetered on the brink of a proto-fascist dictatorship during and after the war. Armed white mobs torched Black churches and business and levelled whole Black communities, killing hundreds of African Americans.  The federal 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act and state-level versions of these draconian bills were used by prosecutors and judges to throw thousands into prison for voicing real or perceived opposition to the war. The US Army joined state militias, local gendarmes, vigilantes, and private detectives in bloodily repressing labor strikes driven by wartime inflation and labor demand.  Local police red squads and a new federal police state including a new Military Intelligence bureaucracy and the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the notorious anti-radical Federal Bureau of Investigations [FBI]) and a censorial US Post Office combined with white nationalist outfits like the American Protective League and the American Legion to decimate the once radical US Left,  including the Industrial Workers of the World  and the Socialist Party. The US Departments of Justice Department and Immigration Bureau deported hundreds accused of leftist and antiwar sentiments.

Some of the repression Hochschild recounts reads like dark comedy: three German-Americans in Cincinnati convicted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts after the local Citizens Patriotic League hired private detectives who put a wire in a shoemakers’ shop to record them privately saying that the war was making “somebody rich;” a Boston Symphony conductor arrested on the pretext that his musical score contained secret messages to the German military; the arrest of playwright Eugene O’Neil because someone worried that the sun reflecting off his typewriter on a Cap Cod beach was actually O’Neil sending coded messages to German submarines.

But there’s little funny about the bigger and ugly story told in American Midnight. Pacifists and socialists swept up into local jails and military concentration camps during and after the war were beaten, stabbed, shackled to prison bars on their tip toes, jerked around with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, and immersed in human waste. Some were subjected to “the water cure,” the precursor of contemporary waterboarding– an insidious form of torture developed by US interrogators in the imperial subjugation of the Philippines earlier in the century. Members of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World were beaten, tarred and feathered, and driven out into the wilderness to be dumped with warnings to never return to the industrial towns from which they were kidnapped. The veteran IWW organizer Frank Little was dragged from behind the back of a car and hung to death on a railway bridge outside Butte, Montana.

Talk about “fascist solutions to political problems”!

“Blacks Lived in Fear”…“Many Dead Bodies Were Thrown in the Mississippi River”

As so often in United States history, the worst violence was inflicted on Black people.  Here is one the many horrible stories told in American Midnight:

“The military made sure that, even in uniform, Blacks lived in fear.  At Camp Dodge, in Iowa, for example, all men stationed there were ordered to witness the hanging of three Black soldiers who had allegedly raped a young white woman…The 3,000 troops of the all-Black 92^nd Division in training at the camp were deliberately placed in the front ranks before the specially  constructed gallows.. ‘All were unarmed,’ reported one eyewitness, ‘while the white soldiers and officers were armed with rifles and revolvers.’ Horror-stricken, Black men who had hoped that serving in the military might led to a better life found themselves forced to watch what looked all too much like a lynching…It was a …shattering experience… ‘The cries of the condemned men echoed and echoed {a local newspaper reported]. Soon the shrieks of Negro soldiers, unwilling and terrified spectators, driven into a hysterical state, added to the sickening scene.’” (American Midnight, p. 115)

Lynchings? Hochschild describes many examples of that terrible practice deployed against Black Americans during and after the war (see pages 107-08, 114, 115, 138, 250-52).  He also records the lynching of a German American socialist coal miner (Robert Prager) in Illinois (pp. 157-58) and the attempted lynching of “Omaha’s unusually enlightened mayor, Edward Smith,” for trying to intervene against a white, Omaha, Nebrasksa, mob that burned down a courthouse containing a Black man accused of raping a white woman in the summer of 1919.

Omaha was the scene for one the many “white riots” – racist pogroms – that took place in more than two dozen US during the “red summer” of 1919. “The worst violence of all,” Hochschild notes:

“was in Phillips County, Arkansas. The killers included American Legion members who joined a sheriff’s posse, other vigilantes from outside the county, and 550 federal troops. There were at least 103 known Black deaths, but some estimates put the total number at double that or higher. One reason nobody could completely pin down the toll, in an echo of what happened in East St. Louis two years earlier, is that many dead bodies were thrown in the Mississippi River…The Justice Department made no move to investigate the leaders of the white mobs that instigated almost all the killings, instead looking for signs of IWW or Bolshevik influence among Black protesters” (p. 255).

American Midnight’s epilogue mentions a soul-chilling anti-Black pogrom in which white vigilantes and local authorities burned down Tulsa, Oklahoma’s unusually large and prosperous Black business district.  The fiery carnage left “more than 1,400 business and homes covering 35 blocks…in charred, smoking ruins” in late May and early June of 1921. The death toll reached 300, with nearly all the victims Black. “The National Guard arrested 4000 Black people, keeping many as long as eight days.  No whites were taken into custody.” The cause was a spurious claim that a Black man had threatened a white woman. Reflecting the fascist spirit of the Red Scare times, the Los Angeles Times actually reported that “Bolshevik propaganda was the principal cause of the riot.”  (pp. 355-56).

Personalities

Part of what makes Hochschild a popular author is his skill penchant for putting key individual faces on his narratives.  Accordingly, American Midnight is loaded with biographical sketches of numerous key personalities in wartime and Red Scare America: the quasi-messianic Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who campaigns while incarcerated for voicing antiwar in 1920; the brilliant anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, deported by the fiercely anti-radical US Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer; the young J. Edgar Hoover, future longtime anti-radical head of the FBI, who earns his fascist chops as a workaholic anti-radical Justice Department official during and after the war; the reactionary Quaker Palmer, who turn his anti-radical and deportation campaign into the basis for a failed Democratic Party presidential candidacy; the great feminist socialist Kate Richard O’Hare, incarcerated alongside Goldman; the proto-fascist warmonger and US Army general Leonard Wood, a close friend of his fellow arch-militarist and racist authoritarian Theodore Roosevelt, and a former US commander in the Philippines, who brutally suppressed coal and steel strikes, runs an internment camp that tortures pacifists and other war opponents, and seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 1920; the masterful agent provocateur Leo Wendell, who infiltrated the IWW under the name “Louis Walsh;” US Army Major Ralph Van Deman, who uses his experience of systematically identifying and cataloguing Filippino “insurgents” to create US Military Intelligence, a high-powered surveillance agency that tracked down radicals and war opponents; the racist Postal Commissioner Sindey Burleson, who banned leftist, anti-war, and civil rights literature from the mails; Louis Post, the progressive Assistant Secretary of Labor, who Hochschild lauds for cleverly and effectively opposing the anti-red and anti-immigrant scare, helping bring it to an end in 1921.

Hochschild naturally spills a lot of ink on the wartime president Woodrow Wilson, who was elected with significant progressive support but turned a blind eye to the savage repression and racist bloodshed that took place in the US and after he brought the nation into the European war.  Wilson is depicted spending months in Europe soaking up British and French adoration while  obsessively trying to advance his League of Nations while his own country slipped into a proto-fascist “midnight.” Wilson endures his final two years in office crippled by a stroke, kept out of the public eye and bitterly disappointed as the US Senate refuses to ratify American enlistment in doomed scheme make World War I “the war to end all wars.”

One Century Hauntingly Apart

The margins of my copy of American Midnight are full of exclamation points and comments like “holy shit,” “JFC,” “wow,” “ugh,” and the like.  I thought I already knew most of what I needed to know about the proto-fascist madness let loose across the United States after Wilson brought the nation into the Great War,  but Hochschild’s book suggests had only scratched the surface of this horrific episode.

American Midnight’s epilogue rightly notes that the presidency and politics of the Ku Kux Klansman’s son Donald J. Trump mirrored and channeled “the forces that blighted the America of a previous century:….rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, Red-baiting, fear of subversive ideas in school, and much more,” all buttressed “by the appeal of simple solutions: deport aliens, forbid critical journalism, lock people up, blame everything on those of a different color or religion” (pp. 356-57). In an especially incisive reflection, he notes that violent and angry veterans of earlier US wars against North American Indigenous people and the people of the Philippines played key roles in right wing repression during and after WWI “just as …veterans of later Asian counterguerrilla wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have helped fill the ranks of new camouflage-clad armed militia groups” (p.357).

“Far From Perfect”

America at Midnight is a tour de force.  It’s an at once engaging, brilliant, and chilling book – essential reading for anyone who wants a truthful account of United States history in the last century. Still, the volume should not be exempted from criticism by those more radically inclined like the present writer. Hochschild should not have held back from describing the repression and violence he recounts as fascist, a term that applies with accuracy to the Trumpism that he rightly links to the “American midnight” of 1917-21. Given his penchant for biography and the importance he rightly gives to anti-Black racism in this volume, Hochschild should have noted that President Wilson was a white supremacist who deepened the racial oppression that has defined so much of American history by: failing to confront Jim Crow disenfranchisement and terror; screening the despicable anti-Black  movie  Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915;  dismissing Black activists; and actively segregating the federal government. He might also have noted how centrally Wilson’s postwar vision for inter-imperialist peace was framed as a response to the Russian Revolution’s call for international proletarian and peoples’ socialist revolution,

Hochschild fails to give US left radicals their due. Louis Post certainly deserves the high praise Hochschild gives him for fighting back against the nativist Red Scare from within the federal bureaucracy, but far more valiant and exemplary were the radicals who went to jail in opposition to a mass-murderous capitalist-imperialist war they knew to be rooted in the competition for world markets, raw materials, colonies, investment outlets, and power between the world’s leading capitalist states. Debs, Goldman, O’Hare, and others who defied the state by militantly opposing the capitalist-imperialist war deserve top heroic billing. They endured incarceration and, in Goldman’s case, exile, for their properly radical politics.

Finally, Hochschild’s following comment near the end of his book is far too mild: “America’s version of democracy is far from perfect…”  Far from perfect?  Seriously? Please: America’s version of democracy has always been fraudulent cover for a de facto capitalist class dictatorship. The famed American novelist Henry Miller said something much closer to the truth at the height of World War II: “Our democracy has been the worst democracy that has ever been tried out. It has never had anything to do with freedom, has never been anything more than a name…” (Henry Miller, “Murder the Murderer,” June 25, 1944.)

“Our [non-]democracy” needs to be radically replaced by something at least partly along the lines of what Debs and other early 20^th Century US radicals advocated – revolutionary socialism.  Capitalism and its evil twin imperialism have brought the world to the precipice of environmental and epidemiological extermination and terminal thermonuclear war while hatching new forms of fascism that now pose grave threats to humanity. Hochschild may be correct to note that “most Americans have seldom dreamed of a [socialist] revolution,” but he’s wrong not to add that this is a problem requiring rapid correction. Americans had better  start dreaming and organizing for such a revolution soon, for US-led capitalism-imperialism is bringing the human experiment to a conclusion at an ever-accelerating pace.

An earlier version of this review appeared on The Paul Street Report.

Endnotes

+1.  This soothing, “American exceptionalist” idea lay at the heart of the dramatic political advertisement in which the corporate Democrat and twice-failed presidential Joe Biden announced his bid to run against Trump in the spring of 2019:

‘Charlottesville, Va., is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. We know it by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” We’ve heard it so often, it’s almost a cliché. But it’s who we are.

Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued, and a brave young woman lost her life.

And that’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were “some very fine people on both sides.” Very fine people on both sides?

With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.

I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation. I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are…Folks, America’s an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth, it guarantees that everyone is treated with dignity and gives hate no safe harbor. It instills in every person in this country the belief that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it.

That’s what we believe. And above all else, that’s what’s at stake in this election.

We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville. Even more important, we have to remember who we are. This is America.’

+2. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Douglas Blackman, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008); Ward Churchill,  A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001); Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007);  Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, and Jobs (Chicago: Chicago Urban League, October 2002), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/theviciouscircle.pdf ; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: New Press, 2012); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Wolin, Democracy Incorporated; Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2005); Robert W. McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997); David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2014); Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton University Press, 2008); Carol Boggs, Fascism Old and New: America at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2018); Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1991); Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Paul Street. “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony,” Common Dreams, February 22, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/22/world-will-not-mourn-decline-us-hegemony;  Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).  Adolph Hitler (who named his early WWII train “Amerika”) and his fellow top Nazis seemed to agree with H Rap Brown’s judgement. Their racist, eugenicist, and Social Darwinian project was inspired to no small degree by the history of American genocide, slavery, continental conquest, and Jim Crow segregation, whose grisly record of racist lynching was alive and well when Hitler seized power in Germany. The United States’ racial separatism and terror policies and practices provided role models for Hitler and other European fascists, who also admired American mass production methods and the potent means of thought- and feeling-control developed by American advertisers and Hollywood. European fascism was Americanism to no small degree. Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws were based on the Jim Crow model to no small extent. See James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Ira Katznelson, “What America Taught the Nazis,”  The Atlantic, November, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/; Becky Little, “How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow,” History, August 16, 2017, https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow.

+3. Toni Morrison, “Howard University’s 128^th Anniversary,” C-Span, March 3, 1995, https://www.c-span.org/video/?63683-1/howard-university-128th-anniversary

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

US Supreme Court won’t block a ruling favoring a Native American man cited for speeding in Tulsa


The U.S. Supreme Court is seen on Thursday, July 13, 2023, in Washington. 

(AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

August 4, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday left in place a lower court ruling that invalidated a speeding ticket against a Native American man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, because the city is located within the boundaries of an Indian reservation.

The justices rejected an emergency appeal by Tulsa to block the ruling while the legal case continues. The order is the latest consequence of the high court’s landmark 2020 decision that found that much of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa, remains an Indian reservation.

Justin Hooper, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, was cited for speeding in 2018 by Tulsa police in a part of the city within the historic boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. He paid a $150 fine for the ticket, but filed a lawsuit after the Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. He argued that the city did not have jurisdiction because his offense was committed by a Native American in Indian Country. A municipal court and a federal district court judge both sided with the city, but a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision.

There were no noted dissents among the justices Friday, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a short separate opinion, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he said that Tulsa’s appeal raised an important question about whether the city can enforce municipal laws against Native Americans.

Kavanaugh wrote that nothing in the appeals court decision “prohibits the City from continuing to enforce its municipal laws against all persons, including Indians, as the litigation progresses.”

Federal Commission Concludes Nationwide Tour Gathering MMIP Testimony in Billings, MT

• Yahoo News

(photo: The Bureau of Indian Affairs)

BY ELYSE WILD 

 

JULY 27, 2023

On July 26th, the Not Invisible Act Commission (NIAC) wrapped up its final stop on a seven-city nationwide tour gathering testimony from Native Americans affected by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis. 

This week’s hearing took place in Billings, Montana, where Tribal officials, Native leaders, law enforcement and government officials convened for a panel discussion and to bear witness to testimony from MMIP survivors and family members. The hearing was also live streamed.

The hearing opened with a prayer and moment of silence, followed by an invitation for those in attendance to speak the name of a missing or murdered loved one. Names were spoken aloud for ten minutes.

Among those testifying was Carrisa Heavyrunner, whose 22-year-old daughter Mika Westwolf (Blackfeet) was killed in a hit-and-run on March 31 on Highway 93 near Arlee, Montana. Despite the Montana Highway Patrol identifying the driver as Sunny K. White, no arrests have been made in Westwolf’s death.

Heavyrunner told Billings news station NonStop Local that the lack of urgency from law enforcement is slowing healing for Native American communities affected by the MMIP crisis.

“You can’t heal if you’re not able to be seen and be heard,” Heavyrunner said. “That’s why I wanted to help these women share their stories about their loved ones that they lost… We gotta keep Mika’s name and other MMIP families and victims out there because everyone tends to forget things so easily nowadays. We’ve gotta keep the momentum going.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average. Lack of jurisdictional clarity, lack of collaboration between law enforcement bodies, and systemic apathy have led to thousands of unsolved cases in Indian Country. While there is no comprehensive data on MMIP, the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are 4,200 unsolved MMIP cases have gone unsolved. The oldest MMIP case profile on the BIA’s public MMIP database dates back to 1969. 

Montana is home to twelve Tribal Nations and ranks among the states with the highest number of MMIPs in the nation, according to a report from the Urban Indian Health Institute. 

The 37-person Not Invisible Act Commission was launched in 2020 by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo). The commission is tasked with developing recommendations on improving intergovernmental collaboration on violent crimes in Indian Country and providing resources for survivors and victims’ families. Information and testimony gathered at the hearings will be part of the commission’s final report to Secretary Haaland, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Congress in October. 

The commission will hold a nationwide virtual hearing on Aug. 1 and 2. Registration for the hearing can be found here. 

Not Invisible Act Commission to Hear Testimony on MMIP in Montana

• Yahoo News

Interior Sec. Deb Haaland (Photo/File)

BY GRACE TERRY, CONTRIBUTING WRITER 

 

JULY 12, 2023

The Not Invisible Act Commission will hold its final in a series of public hearings on July 25-26, 2023, at the Billings Hotel and Convention Center, 1223 Mullowney Lane, Billings, MT, from 9:00 – 5:00 pm MT.

Native community members who are survivors of or have been impacted by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) crisis are invited to attend to share their testimony. Those who wish to attend the hearing must register at here. 

Those unable to attend the hearing in person can submit written testimony, recommendations, or questions to the Not Invisible Act Commission at: NIAC@ios.doi.gov. Include the following in the subject line: “NIAC Testimony” or “NIAC Question.”

In October 2020, the Not Invisible Act of 2019 was signed into law as the first bill in history to be introduced and passed by four U.S. congressional members enrolled in their respective federally recognized tribes. The four were led by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) during her time in Congress.

The act was a response to the longstanding crises of MMIP and human trafficking (HT). The purpose of the act is to increase coordination in identifying and combating violent crime within Native lands and against Native Americans.

In accordance with the act, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary Haaland established the Not Invisible Act Commission. The Commission is a cross-jurisdictional advisory committee composed of both federal and non-federal members. These include law enforcement, Tribal leaders, federal partners, service providers, family members of missing and murdered individuals, and survivors. 

Since April, the Commission has been holding field hearings in Tulsa, Anchorage, Flagstaff, Minneapolis, and Albuquerque, some of the communities most affected by the MMIP crisis. The Billings, MT, hearing later in July is the final hearing. Similar to earlier hearings, the Billings event will provide a forum for law enforcement, subject-matter experts, organizations, State/Tribal task forces, advocates, survivors/families, and others to offer testimony directly to the Commission. Trauma-informed mental health support will be available on-site with optional follow-up support as needed. 

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco emphasized, “The Justice Department is steadfast in our pledge to work with Tribal governments in preventing and responding to the violence that has disproportionately harmed Tribal communities. And we are committed to listening and being responsive to what our partners have to say.”

In a June 8, 2023, letter to Tribal leaders, Secretary Haaland said, “Only with the collective participation of all our communities will our missing, murdered, or trafficked relatives and friends no longer be invisible.” 

Carmen O’Leary (Cheyenne River Lakota) of Eagle Butte, SD, is the Executive Director of the Native Women’s Society of the Great Plains. According to O’Leary, “It is important to our community that the people have input, whether it is by contributing a personal story, offering a possible solution to address the problem, or helping to identify gaps in the (prevention/enforcement/service) system. The actions of the (Not Invisible Act) Commission will impact resources available to address MMIP issues for a long time.”

Findings from hearings and written testimony will shape the Commission’s final report to Secretary Haaland, Attorney General Garland, and Congress. This report is required by October 2023 and will include recommendations for how to improve intergovernmental coordination, bolster resources, and establish best practices for State/Tribal/Federal law enforcement to challenge the tragic epidemic of MMIP violence and human trafficking.

Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese is a member of Nambé Pueblo and senior policy advisor for Native American affairs at the White House. At the June 28 Not Invisible Commission hearing in Albuquerque, she acknowledged the victims and families present at the hearing and how critical their testimony is to create solutions to the crisis.

“These hearings are so important,” Hidalgo Reese said. “Neglect and invisibility are too often the cause or enable violence in our communities ... we need to understand this problem from every angle. We need to explore every possible solution, so we need to hear from all of you.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average. Layered jurisdiction, lack of collaboration between law enforcement bodies, and systemic apathy have led to thousands of unsolved cases in Indian Country. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are 4,200 unsolved MMIP cases.

Secretary Haaland made the following statement when the schedule of hearings was announced in February 2023, “This work requires each of us to face our own trauma, to relive unimaginable pain, and visualize a future in which our loved ones are safe, and our communities have closure. We’re here for our children, grandchildren, and relatives we have yet to meet. This work is urgently needed and requires all of us to work collaboratively. I am so grateful to the Commission for the work they are doing and the lasting impact they will have.”

The Commission will hold a national, virtual field hearing in August. 

This long-running lawsuit is the latest dispute over Oklahoma tribal relations

Molly Young, Oklahoman
Tue, July 18, 2023 

Oklahoma's tribal gaming industry paid the state $200 million in exclusivity fees over the last year ending in April. A central agreement between the state and tribes, known as the model gaming compact, spells out how much tribal gaming operations must pay in exchange for exclusive gaming rights in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond wants to take the lead in representing the state in a long-running tribal gaming lawsuit. But Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office says he has no plans to hand over the reins.

Drummond called defending the federal suit a “waste of state resources” and asked for approval to enter the ring and end the case in a June 16 letter to legislative leaders. Stitt’s general counsel told lawmakers in his own July 11 letter that Drummond has no standing.

The legal dispute is the latest clash among Oklahoma’s top elected officials over tribal relations.

Stitt has had rocky relationships with many tribal governments since 2019, when he challenged the central state-tribal gaming compact as unfair. Drummond took office in January and has often split from Stitt on key issues involving tribes, which he has described as economic engines for the state.

Both contend their approach to the federal lawsuit is what’s best for Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in June that he has spent many hours meeting with tribal leaders during the first months of his four-year term, which started in January.

More: Oklahoma tribes urge lawmakers to override governor's latest veto
What to know about the case, and the gaming compacts in Oklahoma

The case currently centers on the legal standing of standalone gaming compacts the governor negotiated with the Comanche and Otoe-Missouria nations. Four other tribes with sizable gaming arms — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Citizen Potawatomi nations — sued in 2020 to stop the agreements from taking effect outside the model gaming compact.

The model gaming compact sets the framework for Las Vegas-style gaming in Oklahoma and gives tribes exclusive rights to operate those facilities in exchange for paying the state a specific cut of revenues. Oklahoma collected $200 million through the agreement from May 2022 through April.

Oklahoma’s highest court ruled the outside compacts signed by Stitt were invalid. Federal gaming regulators did not directly reject the deals, though, which has prompted the legal fight over their future.

The governor clearly acted outside state law when he signed the deals on behalf of the state, Drummond said in his letter. “The Oklahoma Legislature did not approve of or authorize Governor Stitt to bind Oklahoma to these compacts,” Drummond wrote.

His letter to lawmakers was first reported by the online news outlet NonDoc and later provided to The Oklahoman by the attorney general’s office. It was addressed to House Speaker Charles McCall and Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat. Drummond wrote that he believed legislative sign-off would give him the strongest argument to enter the case on Oklahoma’s behalf.

More: A law pressured tribes to give up land in 1898. It doesn't give Tulsa power today, court rules

McCall replied June 26, saying the attorney general already has the power needed to enter the case. “If you, as attorney general, deem it in the best interest of the state of Oklahoma for you to intercede in this litigation, then I and the citizens would expect you to do so,” McCall wrote. “The House will not interfere in that decision.”

A spokesperson for Treat said he is still reviewing the attorney general’s letter, as well as the July 11 response from Stitt’s attorney, Trevor Pemberton.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sought to rework the model state-tribal gaming compact in 2019. Courts overruled his effort, but are still sorting out the future of separate deals he signed with some tribes.

Oklahoma’s attorney general cannot “unilaterally assume representation of the governor,” Pemberton wrote. He said professional conduct rules and legal precedence bar Drummond from doing so.

“The Oklahoma Supreme Court long ago made clear that, where the governor and the attorney general are at odds over a litigation objective, the governor’s decision prevails under the state’s constitutional framework,” Pemberton wrote in the letter, which the governor’s office provided to The Oklahoman. A spokesperson for the governor declined to comment further on the legal dispute.

More: McGirt v. Oklahoma, 3 years later: How police work on the Muscogee Nation reservation

In his letter, Pemberton pushed back against Drummond’s description of the lawsuit as protracted, noting that the tribal nations who sued could end the proceedings by dropping the case. He also contested Drummond’s assertion that the governor has hired “several Washington, D.C. and New York City law firms” to defend the case.

Pemberton said one such law firm is now leading the case with help from lawyers from a second law firm in Oklahoma City. Court records show the local firm is Ryan Whaley.

In response to Pemberton’s letter, Drummond said he is not trying to represent Stitt, but the state, to end a costly legal fight. “The Oklahoma Supreme Court has issued two opinions that make it clear the governor had no authority to enter into the compacts he is seeking to enforce,” the attorney general’s office said in a written statement.

Drummond has not said if he will move to enter the case without the formal legislative approval he requested. A spokesperson for McCall said his stance is unchanged after receiving Pemberton’s letter.

A different compact dispute is front and center for lawmakers. The Legislature passed a pair of bills in May to renew the state’s tobacco and car tag compacts with tribal nations through 2024. Stitt vetoed the measures in June. The Senate’s first veto override vote failed. Senators plan to vote again July 24.

More: What tribal leaders in Oklahoma are saying about a key Supreme Court decision

Molly Young covers Indigenous affairs. Reach her at mollyyoung@gannett.com or 405-347-3534.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Gaming lawsuit ignites disagreement over tribal relations in Oklahoma

Trans Mountain pipeline expansion likely to send more Canadian oil to US, not Asia

Story by By Nia Williams •

A pipe yard servicing government-owned oil pipeline operator Trans Mountain is seen in Kamloops© Thomson Reuters

(Reuters) -The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) was meant to unlock Asian markets for Canadian oil, but analysts and traders said those barrels now will probably land on the U.S. West Coast as Asia gobbles up Russian oil that is cheaper due to sanctions from Western countries after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.


An Indigenous-led rally against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in Vancouver© Thomson Reuters

Asia's heavy crude refining market is roughly nine times the size of California's, but the geopolitical upheaval means Canada will struggle to reduce its reliance on its No. 1 oil customer, the United States.

The troubled C$30.9 billion ($23.5 billion) TMX project, bought by the Canadian government in 2018 to ensure it got built, is finally nearing completion more than a decade after it was first proposed as an expanded gateway to Asia.

Western sanctions on Russian crude following its invasion of Ukraine have upended those plans. Russia has been flooding Asian markets with cheap Urals and ESPO crudes. Canadian barrels will struggle to compete, analysts and traders said.

TMX next year is due to start shipping an extra 590,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude early from Alberta to British Columbia's Pacific Coast, where it will be loaded onto tankers for export.

"We think a disproportionate amount of those volumes are going actually to PADD 5 (the U.S. West Coast), staying within North America instead of Asia," said John Coleman, principal analyst of North American crude markets at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Related video: Pipeline Transport and Refineries Update (KJRH Tulsa, OK)

Everything that you need to know as that cleanup continues.

Duration 1:39  View on Watch

Chinese oil refiners PetroChina and Sinopec have bought and processed Canadian heavy crude in the past.

Their purchases are based on relative affordability, trade sources said. Russia's Urals crude produces higher volumes of fuel and is significantly cheaper than heavy Canadian barrels, said one Calgary-based crude trader.

Another Canadian trader said regulatory delays and environmental opposition have also made TMX less lucrative for producers than it could have been a few years ago.

"A lot of our lunch has been eaten by the Russians and Middle Eastern countries like Iraq," he said.

HEAVY CRUDE DEMAND

Trans Mountain's original pipeline currently ships around 300,000 bpd of mainly light crude to the U.S. West Coast, with BP's Cherry Point refinery and HF Sinclair Corp's Puget Sound refinery among the main customers for Canadian imports, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

The expanded pipeline will transport mostly heavy oil, said Skip York, chief energy strategist at Turner, Mason & Company, and the strongest demand will likely come from refineries in southern California that are set up to process heavy sour crude.

The deep discounts on Russian crude are temporary, said York, and more TMX barrels may head to Asia and displace some Middle Eastern barrels once Western sanctions against Moscow eventually lift.

"Today every crude in Asia is having a hard time competing with Russian crude," York said. "But diluted bitumen ought to compete fairly well against Arab heavy, and will compete against Basra heavy."

($1 = 1.3146 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nia Williams in British Columbia, additional reporting by Florence Tan in Singapore; Editing by David Gregorio)