June, 20 2018, 12:00am EDT
Earthjustice Condemns Inhumane Treatment of Migrant Families
People fleeing violence and poverty should not be criminalized.
WASHINGTON
The following is a statement from Earthjustice President Trip Van Noppen:
"Families belong together and they certainly do not belong in cages. Earthjustice condemns the Trump administration's inhumane policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents. This policy should never have been enacted as it dehumanizes the most vulnerable among us and ignores the fact that every human being should be treated with dignity and respect. Migrants are fleeing desperate conditions in their home countries. They should not be denied their right to claim asylum and the right to remain together with their families. Medical experts say that forced separation can cause incalculable health trauma and that toxic stress induced under this policy could impede brain development. Reports that children are being denied the comfort of human touch is tantamount to torture.
Our policies should reflect our values as Americans and the administration's latest shift to force families into indefinite detention runs counter to those values. The cruel, morally repugnant policy changes are a violation of human rights and unfortunately reflective of some of the ugliest chapters of America's history: slavery, Japanese internment camps and the forced removal of Native American children from their families. We are better than this. We call on all Americans to stand in alliance with migrant families and demand an end to family separation and indefinite detention."
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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Dark Money-Backed 'No Labels' Drops Third-Party Presidential Bid
One observer quipped that No Labels was calling it quits "to spend more time with their lobbyists."
Apr 04, 2024
Less than a month after No Labels announced it would nominate a "unity ticket" for the 2024 presidential election, the group said Thursday that it is abandoning its longshot third-party White House bid.
"No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House," the group said in a statement. "No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down."
As Common Dreams reported last month, No Labels—whose own leader has admitted is "not in it to win it" but rather to "give people a choice"—has poured millions of dollars in dark money contributions into a quixotic run that critics like MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting warned could "swing the election to Donald Trump," the twice-impeached former Republican president and presumptive GOP nominee, 91 federal and state criminal charges notwithstanding.
No Labels had floated former Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a failed 2024 GOP presidential contender, as possible "unity ticket" candidates. However, the group ultimately found no takers.
Top No Labels donors include billionaire and multimillionaire Trump supporters like Nelson Peltz, private equity executive Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, and former 20th Century Fox CEO James Murdoch. Louis Bacon, the billionaire CEO of hedge fund Moore Capital Management, donated $1 million each to No Labels and the Republican Party after giving the maximum allowable contribution to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, formerly one of the conservative Democrats in Congress and now an Independent.
Even with all that financial backing, No Labels' path to the ballot has been dubious. MoveOn has urged states to investigate the group for allegedly misleading voters through deceptive canvassing methods that result in their disenfranchisement.
The U.S. two-party system has been criticized for monopolizing political power at the expense of democracy and voter choice by actively working to thwart all viable third-party and independent candidates. However, political pragmatists note what they say is the folly of running unwinnable races.
"Third-party candidates are the fools gold of this election," MoveOn said on social media, adding that neither No Labels nor conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy "have ballot access in all 50 states and mathematically cannot win."
"They can only play spoiler," the group added.
However, while Democrats and Republicans often automatically gain ballot access, the two parties are largely behind state laws that create often insurmountable barriers for third-party and independent challengers.
Other progressives also welcomed the news of No Labels' withdrawal—but with a warning. Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, quipped on social media that No Labels was quitting "to spend more time with their lobbyists."
"Billionaires pump millions into No Labels, and in return, their politicians push policies that transfer wealth from the working-class back to billionaires," she added. "Just because they aren't running a presidential candidate doesn't mean they aren't still a serious threat to democracy."
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'Every DA... Should Follow Suit': Prosecutor Seeks to Commute County Death Sentences
District Attorney Jeff Rosen "is taking an important step to confront racism in the criminal legal system," said Smart Justice California.
Apr 04, 2024
In a potential model for other U.S. officials, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, "once a prosecutor who believed in capital punishment and one who rejects association with the progressive prosecutor movement, has been quietly preparing to ask courts to change the penalties of 14 men from his county who are waiting for that ultimate sentence to be carried out."
That's according toLos Angeles Times columnist Anita Chabria, who exclusively reported on the California prosecutor's efforts, inspired by learning about how the death penalty connects to the country's long history of killing and oppressing people of color.
As Chabria wrote:
In most cases, he wants the court to re-sentence these men (Santa Clara has no women on death row) to serve life without parole. But in a few separate cases, already completed last year, he has requested that they be given the chance of freedom.
Why? An inherent racism in our justice system handed down from slavery to mass incarceration and capital punishment, he cites as a main reason.
"[W]e are not confident that these sentences were attained without racial bias," his office wrote in a motion to courts expected to be filed in coming days in multiple cases. "We cannot defend these sentences, and we believe that implicit bias and structural racism played some role in the death sentence."
"Rosen's unprecedented move (he is the only prosecutor in California to have made such a blanket request, and the only one I could find nationwide) has gone largely unnoticed. But it represents a new battleground in the fight over the death penalty," she asserted. "While many prosecutors around the state and the nation have stopped the use of the death penalty moving forward, Rosen is the first to look back and answer the question—with collective action—If it isn’t fair now, how could it have been fair then? "
The Santa Clara County district attorney previously pursued capital punishment in four cases—including one in which the jury ultimately found the man innocent in June 2020. A month later, Rosen announced he would no longer seek death sentences.
In a 2021 piece for The Appealarguing that Rosen should not be California's next attorney general, retired deputy public defender Michael Ogul wrote that "as someone who witnessed Rosen's attempt to execute an innocent man firsthand, his policy change is nothing more than a brazen attempt to selfishly further his political ambitions."
Rosen has said he changed his position on capital punishment after trips to the
Legacy Sites, a museum, memorial, and sculpture park in Alabama that "invite visitors to reckon with our history of racial injustice in places where that history was lived." They were created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal group that represents clients sentenced to death and condemned to die in prison.
"We cannot ignore that the death penalty's roots stretch back to slavery and the lynchings that continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation," Equal Justice USA CEO Jamila Hodge said in a statement Thursday, welcoming Rosen's new resentencing effort. "As lynchings diminished, executions surged. Every time we end the death penalty or stop executions, we chip away at centuries of racial injustice."
The Ella Baker Center also celebrated the development, saying: "The death penalty is rooted in a legacy of racism—from the execution of enslaved people, to the terror and lynching of Black people, to the criminal legal system of executions we have today. We must end it."
Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times columnist that Rosen's "highly significant" move could push other prosecutors to reconsider capital punishment, rather than just reviewing specific cases.
"There is nothing, nothing that these cases have more in common than racial discrimination, whether we are talking about privileging white victims, meaning seeking the death penalty in white crime, or disadvantaging Black clients," Semel said.
In California, over a third of death row inmates are Black and a quarter are Latinx. None of them face imminent executions, thanks to a statewide moratorium imposed in 2019 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat reelected in 2022 after a failed recall attempt.
Rosen's initiative notably comes while "California is sliding back toward a tough-on-crime attitude, driven largely by an increase in organized retail [theft] and the fentanyl crisis," as Chabria pointed out Thursday in a separate Times piece about Newsom.
The governor—who "dismantled the death chamber and promised to do away with death row as a segregated (and expensive) cellblock," as Chabria detailed—is barred from running for a third term and considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection in November, campaigned on ending the death penalty at the federal level, but that lacks the support it would need to pass the divided Congress. He endured intense criticism in January over the U.S. Department of Justice pursuing the death penalty for a mass shooter serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The presumptive Republican nominee is former President Donald Trump, whose first term featured a "killing spree" in which the federal government executed 13 death row inmates. During a Tuesday campaign rally, Trump said that if elected, "I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk ensuring that anyone who murders a police officer will receive immediately the death penalty."
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2023 Was '2 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back' for Tropical Forest Loss
"Steep declines in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia show that progress is possible, but increasing forest loss in other areas has largely counteracted that progress," one expert said.
Apr 04, 2024
An annual accounting of global deforestation, released Thursday, shows that political will can make a significant difference when it comes to protecting vital ecosystems and the Indigenous and local communities that depend on them—but that policymakers in many regions are not taking enough action to save tropical forests.
The data, gathered by the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discover Lab and published on the World Resources Institute's (WRI) Global Forest Watch program, found that primary tropical forest loss in 2023 decreased by more than one-third in Brazil and nearly 50% in Colombia after both countries elected leaders who championed conservation policies. However, on the global level, these declines were offset by increased deforestation in other countries.
"The world took two steps forward, two steps back when it comes to this past year's forest loss," Global Forest Watch director Mikaela Weisse said in a statement. "Steep declines in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia show that progress is possible, but increasing forest loss in other areas has largely counteracted that progress. We must learn from the countries that are successfully slowing deforestation."
"This year's forest loss numbers tell an inspiring story of what we can achieve when leaders prioritize action, but the data also highlights many urgent areas of missed opportunity to protect our forests and our future."
All told, 3.7 million hectares of primary tropical forests were felled last year at a rate equivalent to 10 soccer fields per minute. While tropical deforestation decreased by 9% in 2023 compared with 2022, the overall deforestation rate has held steady when compared to 2019 and 2021. Tree clearing released 2.4 metric gigatons of climate pollution into the atmosphere, which is nearly half of the U.S.'s yearly emissions from burning fossil fuels.
"Forests are critical ecosystems for fighting climate change, supporting livelihoods, and protecting biodiversity," WRI President and CEO Ani Dasgupta said in a statement.
Global Forest Watch focuses on the tropics because more than 96% of human-caused deforestation occurs there. However, the climate crisis contributed to making 2023 a devastating year for global tree loss, which rose 24% due to record-breaking wildfires in Canada's boreal forests.
"That is one of the biggest anomalies on record," University of Maryland researcher Matt Hansen toldReuters, adding, "It's a big deal, and it's a cautionary tale for climate impacts to fire."
In the tropics, Brazil managed to cut primary deforestation by 36%, the lowest level in the country since 2015. The country moved from being responsible for 43% of tropical deforestation in 2022 to 30% in 2023.
The decline coincided with the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who replaced former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro oversaw record deforestation as he prioritized exploitative industries over forest protections and Indigenous rights. Since taking office in early 2023, Lula has reversed course by promising to end deforestation by 2030, ramping up enforcement efforts against illegal forest clearing, rolling back anti-environmental measures, and recognizing new Indigenous territories.
"We're incredibly proud to see such stark progress being made across the country, especially in the Brazilian Amazon," Mariana Oliveira, who manages the Forests, Land Use, and Agriculture Program for WRI Brazil, said in a statement.
In Brazil, Amazon forest loss decreased by 39%, though deforestation increased in the vulnerable and vital Cerrado and Pantanal ecosystems.
"We still have a very long ways to improve and sustain the efforts, and I hope today's release energizes the national and subnational governments in Brazil—and governments around the world—to build on this momentum rather than using it as an excuse to slow down," Oliveira said.
The other 2023 success story was Colombia, which curbed primary forest loss by 49%. This reversal followed the election of left-wing President Gustavo Petro Urrego, who took office in August 2022 with Vice President Francia Márquez, a Goldman Environmental Prize winner. After a 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, other armed groups and other opportunists moved into territories they had vacated, increasing forest loss. Petro has prioritized conservation in negotiating peace agreements with these other armed groups.
"The story of deforestation in Colombia is complex and deeply intertwined with the country's politics, which makes 2023's historic decrease particularly powerful," WRI Colombia natural resources manager Alejandra Laina said in a statement. "There is no doubt that recent government action and the commitment of the communities has had a profound impact on Colombia's forests, and we encourage those involved in current peace talks to use this data as a springboard to accelerate further progress."
Despite the good news out of Brazil and Colombia, upticks in deforestation in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Laos counteracted that progress on the global level. In Bolivia, forest loss rose by 27% to reach the greatest loss on record for a third consecutive year. A little over half of this was due to fires that spread more readily because of climate-fueled drought, while the rest was due to the expansion of agriculture, particularly soy. Agriculture was the main force behind deforestation in Nicaragua—which cleared 4.2% of its remaining primary forest—and Laos, which saw record loss of 47%.
Deforestation rates also continued to creep upward in Congo at 3% in 2023. This is concerning because the Congo rainforest is the last tropical forest that reliably acts as a carbon sink, and because of its importance to local communities.
"Forests are the backbone of livelihoods for Indigenous people and local communities across Africa, and this is especially true in the Congo Basin," Teodyl Nkuintchua, the Congo Basin strategy and engagement lead at WRI, said in a statement. "Dramatic policy action must be taken in the Congo Basin to enact new development pathways that support a transition away from unsustainable food and energy production practices, while improving well-being for Indigenous people and local communities as much as revenues for countries."
The new data comes as world leaders have six years to meet their promise, made at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021, of ending deforestation by 2030. However, WRI found that nearly 2 million more hectares were cleared in 2023 than would be consistent with meeting that goal, Mongabayreported.
WRI global forest director Rod Taylor told reporters that the world was "far off track and trending in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing global deforestation."
WRI's Dasgupta said: "The world has just six years left to keep its promise to halt deforestation. This year's forest loss numbers tell an inspiring story of what we can achieve when leaders prioritize action, but the data also highlights many urgent areas of missed opportunity to protect our forests and our future."
Taylor added that the rest of the world could not rely on individual leaders like Lula or Petro, but should take steps to encourage deforestation such as making it more profitable to preserve forests than to clear them, making sure global supply chains are deforestation free, and protecting the land rights of Indigenous peoples.
"Bold global mechanisms and unique local initiatives together are both needed to achieve enduring reductions in deforestation across all tropical front countries," Taylor said.
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