Ramón Barthelemy, a physics and astronomy education researcher at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was pursuing a seat in the Utah House of Representatives to represent District 24. He challenged 15-year incumbent and fellow Democrat Joel Briscoe for the opportunity to represent more than 43,000 residents of Salt Lake City.

More than 200 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals like Barthelemy are running for office at the state and municipal level this year, more than ever before. Though races at the top of the ticket rightly receive a lot of attention, the results of down-ballot races determine many of the policies that affect people’s daily lives, including how federal policies are implemented at the local or state level.

Barthelemy’s campaign targeted the value of science education and literacy in his district, and he believed his background as a scientist could help increase access to STEM education, improve local air quality, and encourage local students to pursue STEM careers at nearby tech companies.

“I think it is critical, now more than ever, that we have scientists engaged in the political process,” Barthelemy said. “The challenges we are faced with — not just as a state, not just as a country, but as a species — are technical and scientific, and we need technical expertise in order to solve them.”

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Climate change, pollution, ethical technology development, energy independence, the space race, public health: Solving these problems requires a partnership between scientists, who have the expertise to understand these issues, and politicians, who have the resources and influence to enact solutions.

More and more, scientists are choosing to engage more deeply in the political process and run for office themselves.

Though science-based facts are not the be-all, end-all when crafting policy, this engagement brings scientific knowledge and problem-solving skills into legislative chambers at all levels of governance and gives science and its practitioners a greater voice in the political process.

“So many of the big issues that we face as a nation, communities, and world have science at their core.…For us to not be part of [solving these issues] is a huge mistake,” said Kristopher Larsen, who helps manage data collection for Mars missions at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and is a former mayor of Nederland, Colorado.

Why jump in?

Scientists run for office for reasons as varied and individual as the scientists themselves. Some have always felt called to public service and see governance as a way to give back to their communities. Some become concerned that officials have failed to act on climate change or other issues with science-based solutions.

“Whether you care about our nuclear policy, or climate change, or health care, or education, we benefit by having scientists as part of those discussions,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, founder and president of 314 Action, a political action fund that helps scientists run for office in the United States. “Any issue benefits by having scientists at the governing table,” she said.

Still others, including Barthelemy, have grown concerned with rising anti-science and anti-education sentiment in the United States and feel they are in a unique position to combat it. They chose to fight back on politicians’ turf.

“There are a lot of people who believe that science can help us live better lives and that science really does need to be front and center when we’re making public policy,” said Jess Phoenix, a volcanologist, science advocate, and former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. “We have to step up and say, ‘This is wrong. This is right. We have evidence and data to support that,’” Phoenix said. “There’s a whole group of people who really value science, and science needs champions.”

The perceived lack of action to address climate change was one of the issues that drove Naughton, a former chemist, to campaign to represent Pennsylvania’s 8th District in the U.S. House in 2014. Naughton had also grown alarmed by attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the failure to combat gun violence — or even collect data on it — after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

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Evidence-based solutions exist to stop climate change, reduce gun violence, and secure health care, so she felt that the lack of progress on these issues “wasn’t a problem with the science. This was a problem with policymakers. And the only way to fix that was to run for Congress,” she said, and champion science-based solutions in the halls of governance.

The election of Donald Trump and his administration’s perceived efforts to undermine science were what prompted Phoenix to consider a run for office. “When Trump was elected,” she said, “it was a shock to the science ecosystem.” She was alarmed that the Trump administration was not just ignoring the best available science when it came to issues like climate change but also appearing to work counter to the best interests of both the public and the environment.

“That really motivated me to step up and say, ‘Why can’t scientists run for office?’” Phoenix remembered. She announced her candidacy for a seat in the U.S. House representing what is now California’s 27th district at the 2017 March for Science. Although her campaign was unsuccessful — today, the district is represented by Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita) — she has continued her science advocacy by becoming an ambassador for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“People who represent us in government, especially at the federal level, are supposed to be drawn from a wide array of backgrounds,” Phoenix said, “but it’s mainly lawyers and career politicians, and you aren’t seeing janitors and nurses and scientists.”

Larsen, who served as Nederland’s mayor between 2016 and 2022 and is currently a town trustee, took an early interest in politics and got involved in his community while working as a postdoc. He started by joining an advisory board that helps preserve open space and trails, which spoke to his love for skiing, mountain biking, and hiking. “This was my way to get to know how the town works,” he said.

Nederland’s mayor and trustees oversee zoning issues, public works, community engagement, emergency service access, and sustainability efforts. In his small town (population: 1,500), “the politics we do doesn’t end up on the front page of the paper,” he said. Only occasionally do larger crises, like a wildfire or an attempted bombing in town, break the mold.

Facing a divided nation

From the new space race to climate change to COVID-19, science has become more politicized than ever. Some scientist-candidates say their research-based approach is a strength when addressing issues both inside and outside the sphere of science.

When Ben Dewell, a meteorologist and a director of the Stallion Springs Community Service District, first moved into California’s 20th District in 2015, “I didn’t make it known that I was a scientist.” The historically red district was represented by then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). Dewell strongly objected to what he felt was McCarthy putting his loyalty to former President Trump over the interests of his constituents.

Dewell initially ran for office in 2022 to unseat McCarthy, first as a Democrat and then again as a No Party candidate. With the encouragement of his neighbors, he organized a campaign on his own without the assistance of local organizing groups or political action committees. “I was less than grassroots, and to this day, it’s still less than grassroots,” he joked about his campaign. “It’s not even a seedling.”

Although his congressional campaign was unsuccessful, Dewell still feels that his scientific, data-driven way of looking at issues is an asset in his hyperpartisan district, today represented by Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield).

“A lot of people who have come up to me [have] said, ‘I didn’t know you were a scientist. What do you do?’” Dewell said. “And I’ve explained it to them, and they’ve smiled” encouragingly. Dewell also serves on the board of the Eastern Kern Air Pollution Control District that monitors the district’s air quality and is currently running for a seat on the Kern County Board of Supervisors in a November special election.

“It would have been inconsistent for me not to run in service to the same constituency still in need of a logical, rational, nonpartisan voice,” he said. “My ballot designation still includes ‘scientist.’”

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Brianna Titone (D), a geochemist who flipped her Colorado district from red to blue in 2018, felt that her background as a scientist was a real asset to her campaign.

“My district has a lot of engineers and a lot of scientists,” she said. Colorado House of Representatives District 27 represents thousands of people who work at scientific institutions, including the Colorado School of Mines, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a U.S. Geological Survey center.

But as a first-time candidate, a Democrat, and a trans woman running in a red district, Titone was at a disadvantage when pitted against the incumbent GOP candidate. Her experience as a consultant on groundwater flow for the mining industry and a geology software engineer provided a way for her to engage with constituents on familiar ground. “I really relied a lot on my scientific background to talk to my voters,” she said. However, she also acknowledged that public trust of science was greater when she was elected than it is now.

“There is a subset of the population that is distrustful,” Phoenix said. “But what we have found among swing voters is that there is a lot of trust of science, scientists, and expertise in general. And that really bodes well for our country’s future and for scientific candidates.” Although the number has declined since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 73 percent of Americans still have confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.

“For a lot of voters, as crazy as it sounds, [being a scientist] is almost a value statement,” Phoenix explained. “Because people look at scientists as truth tellers, as honest brokers, and that’s really what they want from their elected leaders.”

The scientific consensus

The scientific community has expressed mixed reactions to scientists entering the political arena. Many scientist-candidates recall receiving relieved looks, at best, or negative pushback, at worst, from their fellow scientists.

The feelings of relief sometimes come from scientists who want to have a greater voice in government but are not in a position to run for office themselves, Phoenix explained. Running a campaign for federal office, for instance, requires a significant investment of time and money, and actually holding that office is a full-time career. Running for a local position is less expensive but can be just as time-consuming, and though these positions are often part-time, their lower pay often necessitates holding a second job.

As such, the responsibilities of running for and holding office can discourage scientists (and those in most professional communities) who are early in their career, are seeking tenure, are the primary earner in their household, have family caregiving responsibilities, or experience bias because of their identity.

“Admittedly, I was pretty naive about the process,” Naughton said. Although her congressional campaign was unsuccessful, it led her to found 314 Action, which has helped elect more than 400 scientists to public office at all levels of governance. She wanted to provide scientists with the tools, resources, and knowledge base that she lacked when she first ran for office.

When you want to run for office but lack the privilege, Phoenix said, seeing someone else step up can be a relief.

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“When I tell other scientists I’m running for office,” Barthelemy said, “their eyes get wide, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re doing that. I could never do that. Good luck!’”

Naughton said she sees a generational divide in how scientists react to their colleagues running for office. “Especially among the younger generation, there’s a strong appetite for getting involved in politics,” she said. Among the older generation of scientists, the feeling seemed to be “science is above politics, and therefore, scientists shouldn’t be involved in politics.”

There is some historical basis for that opinion. The U.S. public has not always looked kindly on scientists who have become the face of a scientific issue, whether willingly or not. Consider J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb or Michael Mann and climate change or Anthony Fauci and COVID-19. Scientists have seen many examples where politicians and the public have turned on outspoken colleagues, and some advise students to “stay in their lane,” Naughton said.

“That model has failed us,” Naughton continued, because whereas scientists may be hesitant to enter the political arena, “politicians are unembarrassed and unafraid to meddle in science.”

“Yes, it would be great if we could just be in our bubble doing our work,” Phoenix added, “but unfortunately, that is not the case.”

Entering the arena

Say you’re a scientist with an interest in politics and you care about a particular issue in your community. Is running for office necessarily the answer?

“I’m going to say, flatly, ‘no’ to all scientists,” Dewell said. “I would like to see more pure scientists in there… I would say they should run if they feel like they can make a difference” while remaining objective.

Whether or not a scientist should run for office “would depend on whether I felt that scientist was going to do a good job in the political arena,” said Samuel Bell, a planetary geologist at the Planetary Science Institute and a Rhode Island state senator. What drove Bell (D) into politics was a desire to see the Democratic party fight harder for science funding and use science-based decision-making to craft laws.

Scientists are not a monolith. A scientific background is no guarantee that a person would make a good legislator or be a good advocate for their community or for science. Instead of seeking to become policymakers, many scientists apply their expertise in advisory positions, working in government agencies, or through science advocacy groups to serve their communities. Being elected to office is not the only way a scientist can effect change.

What’s more, politics, just like geoscience, is a specialized field that requires specialized training. Such training programs exist, as do organizations like 314 Action that help scientists overcome barriers to entering politics.

Naughton urged scientists not to be discouraged by the challenges of running for office. “We are trying to normalize the idea of public service with science,” she said.

“There are ways to serve your community that don’t require giving up your career or taking a pay cut,” she continued. “A lot of municipal and even state legislative positions are part-time and are meant to be served part-time while you continue with your career.”

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Larsen, too, encouraged scientists to participate more directly in politics. “If you’re not involved, you don’t have a voice,” he said. “Then we’re just leaving it to people who don’t understand science at all to make the decisions for science.”

Still, Bell feels that there’s a lot of overlap in what it takes to be a scientist and what it takes to be a politician. “Politics is very high stakes, just like the sciences, and it’s very competitive, just like sciences,” he said. Neither career pays the most or has the most job security. “It’s important for you to have the [conviction] in what you’re fighting for, in what’s right, the same way as in science,” he said.

But just as a scientist shouldn’t jump blithely into a new research area without doing a literature review, they should do their research before entering politics, Titone advised.

“Don’t set foot in city hall or the state house for the first time after you win an election,” she said. “You should set foot in those places well before that so you have an understanding of what the process is like, how people speak to each other, what some of the topics are, and how they cover them.”

“Then,” she added, “if you have a specific expertise on a specific topic, think about what things that you bring to the table that you can do to help solve some of the problems that are facing your area.”

Science in the governing chambers

But how does being a scientist actually help with being a lawmaker? For most geoscientists, their specific research topic is rarely, if ever, relevant.

Bell, who researches planetary impacts, joked that “there have not been major [impactors] that have struck the state of Rhode Island. And I really hope that that will continue to be the case!”

However, he recalled using his scientific expertise to advocate for a constituent whose home had been damaged by roadwork-driven seismicity. “The unique geology of the neighborhood in which she lived led to a much greater risk of seismic damage than would normally be the case,” he said.

Instead, scientists have found that the generalized skills developed when earning a science degree —critical thinking, asking tough questions, independent learning, collaboration, and teaching others — have served them the most when in office.

Larsen recalled that during his time as Nederland’s mayor, he ran on and spent time in office pushing for wildfire and climate resilience. These were issues in which, as a Mars researcher, he did not have direct scientific expertise but were critically important to the town’s residents. Larsen’s attention to those issues gained him recognition from Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign. He served briefly as a climate adviser for the campaign.

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Bell, too, said that his general scientific training really helped him to understand issues specific to his constituency. His skills allowed him “to punch through and question a lot of the industry propaganda,” for example, when it came to the physics involved in a proposed expansion of a natural gas pipeline in Rhode Island.

A lot of the information about the pipeline was “quite shockingly wrong,” Bell said. “And when it’s dressed up in fancy language from official reports, a lot of people won’t know the difference between totally garbage science and reasonable science.” His research skills helped him ask industry representatives piercing questions, though ultimately, the pipeline expansion was approved.

After several years in office, Titone found that her analytical approach to science-related legislation led her to “really earn the trust of my colleagues because they know that I know technology. I know the lingo. I understand some of the nuance and math,” she said. “Those skills have really helped me explain to people something that’s complex in a way that they can understand it.”

In fact, being a generalist is critical when it comes to making science- and data-driven decisions.

“As senators, we’re called on to legislate on everything under the Sun,” U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), wrote in a statement to Eos. “We cover so much, so quickly, it helps to have some prior knowledge you bring to the table to understand the topics a little deeper.” Hickenlooper, a former geologist with a master’s degree in Earth and environmental sciences, is the only Earth scientist currently serving in the U.S. Senate.

“A facts-first approach is also something every senator should be using,” Hickenlooper wrote. “More scientists in government would help defuse the tensions and partisanship on many issues.”

But gathering facts and following logic are only the first steps to solving problems. Despite dreaming of purely science-based lawmaking, many scientists-turned-politicians have found that they need to balance other factors such as equity and cost when crafting even technical policies. A science-based solution to a problem might be cut and dry (for example, cutting carbon emissions to stop climate change); implementing that solution is often far from straightforward. Incremental progress is often more feasible, if a bit less palatable to a novice politician.

Public office is about doing what’s best for your community, Larsen said, and that means collaboration and cooperation, two critical skills for a scientist. “In mainstream news, politics is laid out as a very adversarial thing. It’s always red versus blue, right versus left. Pick your dichotomy,” he said. “But when you actually are in it and trying to get things done, it’s finding the compromise and finding the ways to do something that’s going to work for as many people as possible and make progress.”

“Fighting is the first thing I had to unlearn,” he added.

Eos repeatedly reached out to several GOP politicians with STEM backgrounds for this article but did not receive any replies.

Science’s champions

Though Barthelemy lost his June 25 primary challenge, he reflected that the process gave him a new stage to talk to people about STEM education, air quality in Salt Lake City, and the drying of the Great Salt Lake. Despite the election’s outcome, he found it to be a valuable experience.

“I think it’s critical to just even be part of the conversation so we can increase the discourse on the importance of science and also the importance of scientific literacy amongst the population,” Barthelemy said.

Regardless of your scientific background or political leanings, “when you get elected, you have to represent everyone, even the people who disagree with you,” Phoenix said. “And if you’re a scientist, that means people who think that what you work on is baloney.”

“Political parties are not mentioned anywhere in the U.S. Constitution,” Dewell noted. “Science is.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From the lab to the legislature: STEM professionals run for political office on Oct 12, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos.

Between tomorrow and Friday, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) will host a weapons bazaar that ought to be called “The Merchants of Death”.

The times for these merchants are positively bullish, given that total global military expenditure exceeded US$2.4 trillion last year, an increase of 6.8 percent in real terms from 2022.

The introductory note to the event is mildly innocuous:

“The Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition is the premier platform for interaction between defence, industry and government of all levels, to meet, to do business and discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the global land defence markets.”

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The website goes on to describe the Land Defence Exposition as “the premier gateway to the land defence markets of Australia and the region, and a platform for interaction with major prime contractors from the United States and Europe”.

At the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre in 2022, the event attracted 20,000 attendees, 810 “exhibitor organisations” from 25 countries, and ran 40 conferences, symposia and presentations.

From 30 nations, came 159 defence, government, industry and scientific delegations.

Land Forces 2024 is instructive as to how the military-industrial complex manifests. Featured background reading for the event involves, for instance, news about cultivating budding militarists.

Where better to start than in school?

School military ‘pathways’
From August 6, much approval is shown for the $5.1 million Federation Funding Agreement between the Australian government and the state governments of South Australia and West Australia to deliver “the Schools Pathways Programme (SPP)” as part of the Australian government’s Defence Industry Development Strategy.

The programme offers school children a chance to taste the pungent trimmings of industrial militarism — visits to military facilities, “project-based learning” and presentations.

Rather cynically, the SPP co-opts the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) aspect of government policy, carving up a direct link between school study and the defence industry.

“We need more young Australians studying STEM subjects in schools and developing skills for our future workforce,” insisted Education Minister Jason Clare. It is hard to disagree with that, but why weapons?

There is much discontent about the Land Forces exposition.

Victorian Greens MP Ellen Sandell and federal MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt wrote to Premier Jacinta Allan asking her to call off the arms event.

The party noted that such companies as Elbit Systems “and others that are currently fuelling . . . Israel’s genocide in Palestine, where 40,000 people have now been killed — will showcase and sell their products there”.

Demands on Israel dismissed
Allan icily dismissed such demands.

Disrupt Land Forces, which boasts 50 different activist collectives, has been preparing.

Defence Connect reported as early as June 4 that groups, including Wage Peace — Disrupt War and Whistleblowers, Activists and Communities Alliance, were planning to rally against the Land Force exposition.

The usual mix of carnival, activism and harrying have been planned over a week, with the goal of ultimately encircling the MCEC to halt proceedings.

Ahead of the event, the Victorian Labor government, the event’s sponsor, has mobilised 1800 more police officers from the regional areas.

Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines did his best to set the mood.

“If you are not going to abide by the law, if you’re not going to protest peacefully, if you’re not going to show respect and decency, then you’ll be met with the full force of the law.”

Warmongering press outlets
Let us hope the police observe those same standards.

Warmongering press outlets, the Herald Sun being a stalwart, warn of the “risks” that “Australia’s protest capital” will again be “held hostage to disruption and confrontation”, given the diversion of police.

Its August 15 editorial demonised the protesters, swallowing the optimistic incitements on the website of Disrupt Land Forces.

The editorial noted the concerns of unnamed senior police fretting about “the potential chaos outside MCEC at South Wharf and across central Melbourne”, the context for police to mount “one of the biggest security operations since the anti-vaccine/anti-lockdown protests at the height of covid in 2021–21 or the World Economic Forum chaos in 2000”.

Were it up to these editors, protesters would do better to stay at home and let the Victorian economy, arms and all, hum along.

The merchants of death could then go about negotiating the mechanics of murder in broad daylight; Victoria’s government would get its blood fill; and Melbournians could turn a blind eye to what oils the mechanics of global conflict.

The protests will, hopefully, shock the city into recognition that the arms trade is global, nefarious and indifferent as to the casualty count.

Dr Binoy Kampmark lectures in global studies at RMIT University. This article was first published by Green Left and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Foreign investment officials from the State Council’s National Development and Reform Commission visited Shanghai and the northern province of Shaanxi from July 9-12, according to an official announcement from the foreign investment department dated July 16.

The move comes as the ruling Chinese Communist Party holds its secretive third plenary session at a Beijing hotel amid promises of “reforms” that will kickstart the country’s flagging economy amid an ongoing exodus of foreign capital.

China posted a lower-than-expected GDP growth rate of 4.7% year-on-year in the second quarter of this year, missing an expected growth rate of 5.1%, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday.

Foreign direct investment in China fell by nearly 29.1% in the first half of this year to 498.91 billion yuan (US$68.7 billion), compared with the first half of 2023, according to figures from the Ministry of Commerce.

The officials “visited and investigated foreign-invested enterprises and conducted one-to-one exchanges and discussions, actively promoting our country’s foreign investment policies,” the announcement said.

Officials were also able to “gain a deep understanding of the current problems and difficulties faced by foreign-invested enterprises ... actively respond to their key concerns, and further boost the confidence of foreign-invested enterprises,” it said.

‘Just putting on a show’

Zhang Shengli, a former analyst at a Shanghai securities company who worked for Midea before the pandemic, said he doesn’t expect the current leadership under Xi Jinping to come up with measures to address the exodus of foreign investors, however.

“This third plenum of the Central Committee is just putting on a show for the people,” Zhang said. “They say stuff that sounds good, but will it really be implemented?”

He said the key to boosting China’s economy lies in improving relations with the rest of the world, citing the reform and opening up policies of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.

“How did reform and opening up come about in 1979? It was about giving foreign investors [preferential] treatment, so they were willing to come in,” he said. “Foreign investors aren’t going to be fooled by insignificant concessionary policies now.”

He said the current leadership is far more interested in enriching itself than in improving the lives of the majority.

“You expect these powerful people to go against their own interests and give preferential treatment to foreign companies and ordinary people?” Zhang said. “The Communist Party wants to be a dictatorship ... so it can plunder the entire country.”

A lawyer based in the southern province of Guangdong who gave only the pseudonym Li Ming for fear of reprisals said state media articles lauding Xi Jinping as a “reformer” in the mold of Deng Xiaoping are just sloganeering.

“We have a saying about two layers that means that what these slogans say are totally disconnected from what the government actually does,” Li told RFA Mandarin. “That includes attracting foreign investment.”

He cited the disconnect between China’s claims to be opening up the service sector on the one hand and the national obsession with espionage and “national security.”

“China has an anti-espionage law that runs entirely counter to its claim to open up the service sector to attract foreign investment,” Li said. 

‘A huge chasm’

China’s Ministry for State Security in January arrested the head of a foreign consultancy as an alleged British spy, with one newspaper warning that there are “007s” everywhere in real life.

Huang’s is the latest in a string of arrests of foreign nationals and raids on foreign consultancies that come in the wake of amendments to China’s Counterespionage Law in 2023, which has been criticized by investors for its vague definition of what exactly constitutes espionage.

The visits to foreign-invested companies came as the State Council announced it would temporarily open up healthcare and travel services in several major cities to foreign-invested companies, who will be allowed to run non-profit medical and elderly care facilities and travel agencies in six cities including Shenyang, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

Foreign equity ratio restrictions on value-added telecom services like app stores and internet service providers have also been removed in Shenyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Chengdu, according to an official announcement.

Financial journalist Wang Jian said the move, the first loosening of foreign investment curbs in three years, amounted to “plenty of thunder but no rain.”

“It’s related to the sharp drop in foreign investment in China, and shows how serious the overall economic situation has become,” Wang told RFA Mandarin in a July 16 interview.

“The measures ... are scattered, the areas that apply are narrow, and they're really only suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises,” he said. “It’s aimed at sending out a positive signal ahead of the third plenum, but it won't have much effect.”

“Without substantive political reform, there can be no real opening up of the economy,” Wang said.

A resident of the southwestern city of Chongqing who gave only the nickname Mag for fear of reprisals said many ordinary people in China are only too aware of the disconnect between official slogans and official action.

“It feels like there’s a huge chasm between our government and leaders and ordinary people,” Mag said. “They live our lives and we live ours.”

“Everyone knows they’re better at talk than action,” he said. “If you want money, you have to fight for it yourself.”

“It doesn’t matter how many policies they bring in – they’re never going to actually benefit people like us,” Mag said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kitty Wang for RFA Mandarin.

Te Whatu Ora’s new winter health plan fails to address workforce shortages and staff burnout in Aotearoa New Zealand, frontline healthcare workers say.

The organisation launched its 24-point plan on Wednesday, saying it would help hospitals and GPs cope with an expected surge in patient demand over the coming months.

Under the plan, people with minor ailments will be able to be assessed by a pharmacist and given free or subsidised medication in line with if they had visited their GP.

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Family doctors will also be able to refer patients for X-rays and ultrasounds in a bid to reduce hospital admissions.

Regional and national escalation plans will be in place to help improve hospital capacity by “diverting resources and patients within and across regions to support under-pressure facilities”.

But a doctor from Middlemore Hospital’s emergency department, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said while diverting patients and resources sounded “good in theory”, there needed to be the staff available to deliver that plan.

There was so much burnout among doctors and nurses, she said.

“You can’t flog a dead horse.

Staff ‘not available’
“In practice these escalation plans involve going through a checklist of different resources that can be provided to help, but you then find out they aren’t available — due to staffing issues.”

A nurse from the hospital’s ED agreed chronic workforce shortages would prevent many of the proposals ever working.

“It all sounds all great, but where is Te Whatu Ora finding all the staff to do these things and how are they going to do it in a healthcare system that is already understaffed and in crisis?”

Giving pharmacists a greater role to play could also be problematic as they were also busy and were not trained to diagnose patient ailments, the nurse said.

In February, Te Whatu Ora identified Middlemore Hospital as one of eight national ‘hotspots’ needing extra support before the winter flu season.

Former chairperson Rob Campbell admitted the workforce shortages plaguing Middlemore’s ED would not be addressed in time for the flu season.

It followed comments from frontline healthcare workers who said the hospital’s ED was haemorrhaging staff and they were concerned about its ability to function during winter.

‘Doing what we can’
In a statement, Te Whatu Ora (Counties Manukau) interim lead of hospital and specialist services Dr Vanessa Thornton said while there had been growth in staffing numbers nationally, it needed to continue to grow its workforce.

“We know that pressure from shortages across our workforce is being felt on the frontlines of our health system. We can’t fix those shortages quickly – but are doing what we can to alleviate pressure and get more staff into our hospitals and other services.”

She said that includes making it easier for internationally qualified staff to work here and assisting qualified nurses to return to practice.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. It is published by Asia Pacific Report in collaboration.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Across the country, the illogical priorities of the right have become more and more glaring. And nowhere is this worse than in Tennessee, where conservatives have banned books and drag shows but have done nothing to protect kids from what is now their most likely cause of death: gun violence. Instead of addressing this crisis, after the mass shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville on March 27, the Republican-led legislature expelled from its chamber two Black freshman Democrats in their twenties—Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones—for daring to demand common-sense gun control.

That this was a partisan act, a racist act and an antidemocratic act is undeniable. But it was also a desperate and ultimately futile act, one that could lead to positive change in the future.

Nothing could be more revealing of the fragility of the GOP than these expulsions. Republican legislators could have engaged with Pearson and Jones on the issues, but instead they chose to deploy the one weapon at their disposal: a House supermajority that would do their bidding. It was a battle they won in a contest they’re increasingly losing with the wider public.

The Republican Party, today, is swimming against the current on climate change, voting rights, racial equity, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and, of course, gun safety. It’s infuriating that Tennessee’s legislature has refused to curtail access to firearms, even in light of the state’s high rate of gun violence, agony over the Covenant School shooting and recent polls that show state residents want more safety measures. The unpopularity of this position couldn’t be more clear—hundreds of protestors have flooded the Capitol building to demand action.

The young lawmakers will be back, and behind them will be an entire cohort of passionate young progressives.

But Tennessee is not alone. The same motive driving the state’s conservative lawmakers to resist change is also driving gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Republican efforts to pack the courts, voter suppression laws from Idaho to Georgia and a stubborn adherence to the Big Lie. That motive is fear, because the conservative power structure that held sway for so long knows its days are numbered.

Unlike past generations, millennials are not becoming more conservative as they age. Why? We millennials and Gen Zers have watched our elders invade Iraq, crash the economy, deny climate change and elect Donald Trump as president of the United States. Now, we’re living with the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s repeal and are demanding an alternative path and different leaders.

There is now an international spotlight on Jones and Pearson and their courage. Civil rights organizations are rallying at their side. While Jones has already been reinstated by county officials (and it’s likely that Pearson will soon be readmitted as well), both will need to run in special elections later this year to fully regain their seats.

Their ouster is a classic Pyrrhic victory for Tennessee Republicans. The short-term “win” of expelling Reps. Jones and Pearson is overshadowed by the scorn they’ve brought on their conservative clique. The young lawmakers will be back, and behind them will be an entire cohort of passionate young progressives that are now fired up and galvanized.

And that’s why we have so much hope today. Our call now, whether we are young or not, is to do all we can to hold the line on our democracy until this rising generation fully takes the reins. Represenatative Gloria Johnson, the white lawmaker who stood with Pearson and Jones in their protest of gun violence but was not expelled, is a model for this solidarity. We commend her.

The Tennessee legislature thought it could stem the tide of change. Instead, it may have turned that tide into a tsunami.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by London Lamar.

Indonesia’s Papua police chief Inspector-General Mathius D Fakhiri has called for action to ensure that “security disturbances” in the Puncak Jaya highlands do not widen in the face of escalating attacks by pro-independence militants.

“For Puncak, we will take immediate action,” he said.

According to General Fakhiri, attacks by the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) had happened repeatedly since early 2023.

• READ MORE: Other Papua security reports

A number of attacks had caused casualties with soldiers, police, and civilians.

General Fakhiri urged civilians not to travel to places far from the observation of security forces, both the police and the Indonesian Military (TNI).

“I have also called on TPNPB members to immediately cooperate with all stakeholders, while providing security guarantees so that security disturbances do not recur,” General Fakhiri said.

Cited incidents
He cited these “disturbances” in Puncak Regency:

• On January 23, 2023, an armed group shot dead a motorcycle taxi driver on the Ilame Bridge, Wako Village, Gome District.
• On January 24, 2023, armed groups attacked a member of the Indonesian military (TNI) at Sinak Market, Sinak District.
• On February 18, 2023, armed groups burned down a house and engaged in a shootout with security forces in Ilaga.
• On March 3, 2023, armed groups attacked a TNI post and shot dead one TIN soldier and a civilian in Pamebut Village, Yugu Muak District. However, TPNPB claimed that the civilian was shot by security forces.
• On March 22, 2023, armed groups shot dead a motorcycle taxi driver at the Kimak road junction, Ilaga District.

General Fakhiri also reminded his forces not to respond excessively to the burning of houses and the Gome District Office, Puncak Regency, Central Papua Province last Tuesday.

Arson ‘a strategy’
According to him, such arson was a strategy of the militants to provoke the security forces into pursuing them

“I ask the officers in the field not to respond excessively. Because usually the motive for the West Papua National Liberation Army armed group to burn is hoping that the officers will respond and then be shot at,” General Fakhiri said.

“I have reminded every rank, if there is an incident in the afternoon or evening do not respond immediately. Wait for the afternoon, then respond and carry out crime scene processing,” he said.

General Fakhiri said that the series of incidents in several vulnerable areas was motivated by an attempt to show the existence of each armed group.

He considered that the various attacks were uncoordinated.

“That’s why I hope the authorities in the field can scrutinise them well. Except for the incidents in Nduga and Lanny Jaya, of course it is of more concern, because it can interfere with the efforts of the authorities to rescue the Susi Air pilot who is currently still being held hostage by the Egianus Kogoya group,” he said.

New Zealand hostage pilot Phillip Merhtens was captured by a TPNPB group on February 7 and has remained a captive since.

Meanwhile, the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) has claimed that Indonesian authorities have arrested 32 Papuans taking part in fund-raising for the Vanuatu tropical cyclones.

Republished from Tabloid Jubi with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“Waldport man in jail on second-degree attempted murder, 9 other charges” Nov. 14, 2022

All cases of women who are in a relationship — my friend was in this abusive marriage almost 5 years — who return to the abuser (in his case, verbally and economically abusive, to the point of triple woman hating and keeping bank accounts in his name, including keeping the vehicles and house in his name) are different on many nuanced levels, but they all have that case of Stockholm Syndrome, that case of once being full of chutzpah, but something inside them has caused them to not see the destruction of a killing inside their boyfriend or husband.

The case is meandering in the judicial system. The public defender (my money, tax payers’ money) can get extensions on this case. More discovery. The grand jury indicted the guy three days after the attempted suffocation and other charges. He’s not out, and the DA forwarded a 5 year prison plea (down from a lot more time if convicted by 12 member of a jury and the book thrown at him). However, this guy is such a narcissist and know-it-all, he is probably conjuring up all sorts of machinations.

In the end, the victim, my friend, is in hyper-vigilance even though both of them have no family or friends or any roots at all in Oregon. He’s in jail, and while his mother hired a private investigator to go fishing for character witness statements, the bottom line is what happened Nov. 12 is on the criminal justice record.

Yet, today, more crap, more bogged down systems. Over 26 cases heard by one judge from 9 to 11 am. Many have been given extensions for more time to have paperwork and evidence forwarded. It is a bogged down system of judicial inertia and lawyer lagging.

She’s divorcing him, so that is a separate case, again, heard today, but forwaded on for more extension, and because this guy is in jail, things get slowed down.

She got a restraining order approved with a measley $1000 payment to keep the hous in order, but the previous judge failed to initial that section of the Protection Order, and so she is back filing another one. He did not contest the first one, but now he is contesting this exact same one, under the orders of his mother, or someone. The judge warned that if he gave any statements in this protective order that it could have some bearing on his criminal case.

That’s messed up, this judge giving this fellow legal advice. Told him to plea the Fifth.

So, here we have a divorce, civil protection order and criminal trial.

She’s got her green card, and she finally has a counselor working with her on domestic violence with C-PTSD as the main issue. Her father from Canada visited and so too did her sister. For years my friend did not tell them about the full extent of this guy’s abuse.

I know the judicial system, but each new year, the system gets further bogged down, and the public defenders as a group are in crisis — not enough money made and absolute triple the caseload which should be allowed.

Broken broken broken. Remember Ross Perot, and NAFTA and that famous (among other things) statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two-way street, it would create a “ giant sucking sound ” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico?

Think of Capitalism as that broken broken broken sound. As in broken down to our bones broken by over policing, over taxing, over burdened, over worked, and under represented to include that tearing sound of social services safety nets frayed and almost immolated. Broken!

So here we are, no, with May 3 set for a settlement conference? This is something initiated some 26 years ago, since the court systems are broken and clogged, so now, this guy did not accept the plea, and so the judge stated that she will schedule the criminal case for trial, but a settlement conference is possible, so the ADA and the PD agreed to meet. The courtroom would be a neutral one (sic) and a judge would hear the strengths and weaknesses in both the prosecution’s and the defense’s cases. The defendent would be there in orange jumpsuit and shackles, and my friend would be there too.

A bargaining game, a sort of please settle (plea dice throwing) theater between the DA’s office and his Public Defender. Imagine that. All this time, all the time deputies came out, served a warrant on him, all the jail paperwork, the court paperwork, all the money paid for judges, clerks, ADAs, support staff, all the cops and all the infrastructure keeping this dance going.

Very hard indeed for someone, my friend, who is getting counseling now, after having one counselor who just stopped answering phone calls (that’s medical abandonment, but that’s a civil matter, yet another labyrith to course through).

Healing is a singularly tough thing in Capitalism when money buys power, representation, creates all the bells and whistles, etc., for the rich.

Ahh, broken criminal justice system 101.

Here, from Cindy Sheehan, an example of the criminal injustice system and the medical injustice system killing an elderly woman who was having a stroke. This is what needs defending, this broken, corrupt, polluted society? If you do not hate the thought of Zelensky in yet another photo op, yet more trillions to that country, then you are subhuman, like the Ukrainian leadership and Nazified military. Here, read this an weep:

I really don’t have too many words for this horrid event.

This poor lady apparently had a stroke and broke her ankle, and she was asked to leave the hospital, but she couldn’t.

So, what happened then? The compassionate (Nazis) workers at the hospital took pity and decided to treat her? Nope, they called the gestapo, I mean police, and she died in their custody.

Wait, I do have words—-remember during the past three years when we, the ones who rejected the Devil Juice, or rejected the dirty face nappies—were told that we were going to “kill Meemaw,” even if we were those Meemaws?

Remember when we were told that we could not go see our loved ones in hospital, or nursing facilities, so they had to die alone to prevent us from killing them? Or, grandparents and grandchildren were separated, not by miles, but by government diktat?

We live in Garbage Land where the Garbage People’s hospitals don’t heal, they kill, and where law enforcement doesn’t protect us, it protects the killers!

Don’t go to the hospital? We know that thousands of people were killed by stasi-protocol during the “pandemic” and counted as Covid deaths.

What if we lived somewhere other than Garbage Land and this poor woman could have been the one to call law enforcement and they would have come to help her and force the ER to treat her? Fuck.

I am distraught over this, but how many times does something like this happen off-camera? (Sheehan)

Oh heck, I can end this short diatribe with the end of the English Major. Sure, I got a couple of those degrees. Sure, not all in these humanities departments are stalwarts, but compared to STEM folk, who will do any Eichmann thing to make bucks, to have job stability, to keep in the slipstream of the American Dream, they are not bad. Drugs, chemicals, applications, drones, rockets, surveillence tools, missiles, propaganda, all those amazing things that have intended and unintended consequences, so making bank means keeping silent, so STEM are the quiet ones, the scientists and technologists and engineers who for the most part keep their mouths shut — for a price, a Bargain, Faustian Bargain!

According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. (source)

“Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? by Nathan Heller

Imagine, forever chemicals in all living things. Science. STEM!

A new analysis finds that more than 330 species of animals across the globe – from polar bears to squirrels – carry in their bodies a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS.

Known as “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down as many others do, the substances have been linked in humans to risks for cancer, low birthweights, weakened childhood immunity, thyroid disease and other health problems.

Research has already shown that 99% of Americans have PFAS in their bodies. But this report released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group shows more than 120 different forever chemicals were found in the blood serum or bodies of birds, tigers, monkeys, pandas, horses, cats, otters and other mammals.

Over 12,000 products have this shit in them. And the diseases? Studies have linked PFOA to kidney and testicular cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments in highly contaminated communities such as Parkersburg, West Virginia. Very low doses of PFAS in drinking water have been linked to immune system suppression including reduced vaccine efficacy and an increased risk of certain cancers, studies have found. PFAS are linked with reproductive and developmental problems as well as increased cholesterol and other health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You will not see some efficient, for-by-with-because of We the People judicial system holding to account these monster companies, again, companies that depend on, well, S.T.E.M. students. The humanities? Well, it is more than “just” English lit majors. In fact, if done right, the entire college and K12 systems would be integrating languages, arts, history, writing, literature, anthropology, and of course music, dance, theater and philosophy and ethics and so much more into an across the curriculum template, but instead, we have this sickness for more more more to keep the engines of capitalism going, a predatory and casino capitalism which is now bio-security, security, surveillance capitalism going. Until we have this disjointed and bizarre religion of science and engineering and technology as some panacea for the crumbling American empire.

Without the “A” in STEAM, all we have are Eichmanns from a different mother. Arts.

And it all comes down to those in STEM who don’t give a shit about discourse, debate, history, knowledge outside their fucking field of intended and unintended dirty consequences. I have said this a hundred times in hundreds of articles, it all comes down, now, to that Freudian slip, that dirty man, Edward Bernays:

It’s not like they even hide their intent. The notorious World Economic Forum has been forthcoming about their plans for the rest of us. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, even wrote a book about it, titled “Covid-19: The Great Reset.”

Within his vision of how society should be engineered going forward, Schwab’s stand on “stakeholder capitalism” sounds altruistic at face value. But what he doesn’t mention is that his vision includes the same group of elites controlling even more aspects of our lives. Envisioning themselves as “trustees of society” they will continue to profit from the results of that expanded control. He recently publicly stated at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:

“What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” explaining how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”

This concept does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling…

These elite decision makers don’t hide their hypocrisy either. When these elite groups meet to discuss (our) future, they often talk about how we (the Masses) need to reduce our carbon footprints. No mention that they arrived to their mountaintop retreat meetings individually, in their own private jets, (no jet-pooling for them!) wasting more resources in one event than the average person ever could or would in their day to day lives..

Like it or not, or believe it or not, social engineering is not new. For those who don’t believe in or understand the concept of social engineering, I suggest watching the 2002 BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” about the life of Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995).

It’s fascinating, enlightening and to be honest, more than just a bit creepy.

Bernays, the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was almost single-handedly responsible for re-purposing the concept of “propaganda” in America into “Pubic Relations.” Sounds much more innocent, doesn’t it?

In his first campaign, he was recruited by President Woodrow Wilson to Wilson’s Committee on Public Information created in 1917. Wilson tasked Bernays with intentionally using propaganda to influence the American population to willingly engage in World War I. (source)

Until we are here, where judges still wear black robes, and where the systems deem us as children, or as sheep. This courtroom was with a judge who treated the people on the other end of the phone line (it gets phoned in now, injustice) like imbeciles or children. Bernays is the monster of the century. That 2002 documentary is rough and out of favor now, but telling.

Students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know what they need to know.

— Gregory Petsko.

STEM will do shit for humanity. Truly. Listen to my interview of Gregory Petsko, “Science and the Arts/Humanities: A Marriage Made in Heaven” — scroll down:

https://paulhaeder.com/podcast/podcast-2/

We talked about this essay, “Save university arts from the bean counters” by Gregory Petsko Nature volume 468, page1003 (2010) Scientists must reach across the divide and speak up for campus colleagues in arts and humanities departments, says Gregory Petsko.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday connected the spate of recent train derailments in the United States to Wall Street-backed cost-cutting and other policy decisions that have decimated the rail industry's workforce and compromised safety for the sake of larger profits.

"When rail companies reduced their workforce by 30% under orders from Wall Street, bad things happen—like the dangerous derailments in Ohio and Michigan," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, wrote on social media. "Rail companies not only must provide seven days of paid sick leave to workers, they must stop skimping on safety measures."

The toxic crash in East Palestine, Ohio has drawn greater scrutiny to a widely adopted model known as Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which rail workers have said is at least partially to blame for the derailment and broader crises across the industry. Under PSR, The New York Times explains, rail companies focus on "running rigid, consistent schedules, streamlining processes and routes, and cutting back on equipment and employees."

According to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, Class I railroads—including Norfolk Southern, the company at the center of the derailments in Ohio and Michigan—have collectively slashed their workforces by 29% over the past six years, terminating roughly 45,000 employees including safety personnel.

An analysis conducted by USA Today earlier this month found that while "catastrophic events involving trains and chemicals may be uncommon, [hazardous material] cargo violations caught during inspections of rail shippers and operators appear to be climbing."

"Over the last five years, federal inspectors have flagged 36% more hazmat violations compared with the five years prior—and fines for those are up 16%.," the outlet noted.

One Norfolk Southern employee told Motherboard this week that train derailments and other rail disasters are "going to keep happening if regulators continue to allow this business model to ravage our nation's freight rail system in the pursuit of profit."

"My fear is that these corporations have so much money and political influence that nothing is going to change," the worker added.

"Secretary Pete Buttigieg must heed rail workers' calls and implement common-sense regulations to ensure this never happens again."

In addition to fighting to deny their increasingly exhausted workers paid sick leave, Norfolk Southern and other hugely profitable Class I rail carriers have lobbied aggressively against regulatory changes aimed at enhancing industry safety practices.

The Norfolk Southern train cars that derailed in East Palestine were not being regulated as hazardous, despite carrying a known carcinogen that was later released into the air.

"After rail industry donors delivered more than $6 million to GOP campaigns, the Trump administration—backed by rail lobbyists and Senate Republicans—rescinded part of [a] rule aimed at making better braking systems widespread on the nation's rails," The Lever reported earlier this month. "Specifically, regulators killed provisions requiring rail cars carrying hazardous flammable materials to be equipped with electronic braking systems to stop trains more quickly than conventional air brakes."

In the wake of the East Palestine derailment, progressive lawmakers have ramped up pressure on U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to take steps to more strictly regulate railroads as he suggests—incorrectly—that federal law is preventing him from doing so.

"The train derailment in East Palestine is an ecological and humanitarian disaster caused by a predatory rail industry that constantly puts profit over people," Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said Thursday. "Secretary Pete Buttigieg must heed rail workers' calls and implement common-sense regulations to ensure this never happens again."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The retirement age in Fiji is now 60 but people can withdraw their superannuation savings when they turn 55, says Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.

He said this in response to queries from the media in Suva.

People who were leaning towards retiring at 55 posted concerns on social media platforms after the government recently announced it had extended the retirement age to 60.

The Prime Minister said the decision to withdraw Fiji National Provident Fund (FNPF) savings at 55 or 60 was entirely up to each individual.

“Fifty-five is the FNPF age,” Rabuka said.

“They can receive some of it or they can take it out at 55 — or if they want to leave it in until 60, they can do that.”

While addressing the Nadi Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently, Deputy Prime Minister Viliame Gavoka said that increasing the retirement age from 55 to 60 would help stem the “brain drain” of qualified and experienced Fijians for opportunities abroad.

Felix Chaudhary is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

But as the Western megadrought sucks more and more water out of these channels, farmers and water managers across this part of Oregon are struggling. Though still effective at delivering water, these century-old systems are highly inefficient. Central Oregon’s soil is sandy and porous. For every gallon of water diverted, upwards of 50 percent can seep into the ground or else evaporate into a sky made increasingly thirsty by rising global temperatures. 

“You more or less have to double the amount of water you take out of the river, because you lose half of it going down this ditch,” said Steve Johnson, manager of the Arnold Irrigation District, southeast of Bend, Oregon.

Now, central Oregon’s irrigation districts are racing to implement a relatively simple, but expensive solution to save water — one that also has the potential to create a new source of clean electricity. All they have to do is turn their ditches into pipes. 

“Wherever you have irrigation operations, there’s this opportunity,” said Johnson. “Each district is going to be a little bit different, each state’s going to be a little bit different, but generally, the principal’s the same. You have 100-year-old infrastructure that needs to be modernized.” 

For Johnson and his neighboring districts, irrigation modernization has primarily meant one thing: converting open-air irrigation ditches into pipelines. After about five years of conducting technical studies, environmental assessments, and developing engineering plans, the Arnold Irrigation District is going to start replacing 12 miles of its primary canal with a pipeline later this year. The project is expected to save 11,083 acre-feet of water per year, or enough to fill more than 5,500 olympic-sized swimming pools. 

In the neighboring Three Sisters Irrigation District, which spent the last two decades converting more than 90 percent of its canals to pipelines, the benefits are clear.

Three Sisters now reports saving 110 acre-feet of water per day during irrigation season, which is enough to fill 55 olympic-sized swimming pools every day. “We haven’t had to do what other places have done, which is either turn the water off entirely, or turn the water off every other week,” said Sarahlee Lawrence, an organic farmer in the district. 

Because of those savings, water managers are able to keep more water in the Whychus Creek, which supplies the district. “Not too many years ago, it would run dry during the irrigation season, and this is important habitat for salmon and trout,” said Dave Moldal, senior program manager at the Energy Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that is helping to fund similar projects around the state. “Now because of irrigation modernization, it flows year round.”

In Three Sisters, the pipelines also helped the district and farmers cut energy costs, which is a key reason Moldal and the Energy Trust got involved. The nonprofit is funded with ratepayer fees collected by private utility companies, and exists to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in Oregon. Because the Whychus Creek flows at a higher elevation than the farms in the Three Sisters district, as the water flows downhill, it becomes pressurized. That means that farmers who used to have to pump water out of their ditches can just tap into the pipeline, eliminating a major energy expense. Lawrence said she is saving thousands of dollars on electricity.

The Energy Trust is also helping irrigation districts pursue a second opportunity — installing small hydroelectric turbines inside of these pressurized water pipelines that generate power. The nonprofit has supported three hydropower projects in Three Sisters, which are expected to produce about 4 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, or enough to power about 370 homes.

Moldal said that the ability to develop in-conduit hydropower depends on two factors. The first is geography. If there’s not enough of a drop in elevation between where the water is diverted and where it’s used, there won’t be enough pressure in the pipes to generate electricity. The second is economics. In Oregon, the electricity generated by these small turbines doesn’t command a high enough price on the energy market to cover the costs. Energy Trust is paying these small hydro producers the difference, because part of its mandate is to support the development of renewable energy.

“The physics of it only gets you halfway,” said Moldal. “You also have to have an energy market that works.”

There are thousands of miles of irrigation canals across the west that are ripe for modernization. While pipelines may be an option in many areas, they aren’t the only solution. In central California, the Turlock Irrigation District recently announced a pilot project to cover part of its canal system with solar panels, which will reduce evaporation and generate clean energy. Some districts have looked to lining their canals with impervious materials, like concrete, to prevent seepage. But in a 2019 survey of irrigation districts, respondents reported that about 72 percent of their canals remain unlined. Cost was the most frequently cited reason.

With help from the Energy Trust and other funders, the Arnold Irrigation District has already spent close to $150,000 on preliminary plans and reports required before it could start construction on its new system. The 12 miles of pipeline are expected to cost another $35 million — $26 million of which will be covered by federal funding through the Department of Agriculture’s Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Program. 

But Johnson said that today, with new infusions of government money from last year’s Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, and the recent Inflation Reduction Act, there’s an opportunity to accelerate this work around the country.

For Johnson, a lot is riding on the new pipeline. His district has had to turn off water to farmers in late July or early August for the past three years instead of letting it flow through to October. The scarcity of water has driven up the price of hay, causing livestock farmers to sell off some of their herds. “If you don’t modernize, if you don’t start improving the system, then that’s gradually what’s going to happen for most of the people that live in your irrigation district,” said Johnson. “It’s all gonna just start dwindling away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Oregon, farmers are revamping century-old irrigation canals to stem water loss on Sep 20, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

On Sunday, White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein told CNN that Biden would pursue his climate agenda “with or without Congress,” using executive orders to reduce emissions despite obstruction from Congress. Also on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont suggested Manchin had never been “serious” about supporting Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill, which would have included nearly $570 billion to combat climate change through tax credits and investments. 

The push comes after news broke late last week that Manchin, who holds millions of dollars in coal investments and received more than $400,000 in donations from the energy industry in one fundraising quarter last year, said he was opposed to passing climate policies, as well as tax increases on the wealthy needed to fund them, as long as inflation remains high. 

Although Manchin announced his opposition to Build Back Better in December, he had left open the possibility of a stripped-down deal that still contained some climate provisions in return for abandoning other Democratic priorities, like paid family and medical leave and child care benefits. But Thursday’s reports of his resistance to any climate action immediately seemed to scuttle the latest round of negotiations over budget reconciliation, the Democrats’ preferred method for passing climate policy without Republican support. 

Though Manchin later said he would wait to see what inflation looks like at the end of July before making a decision on the bill, Biden quickly pledged to take “strong executive action” on climate change — even as he visited Saudi Arabia in an attempt to secure commitments to increase oil production. He said in a statement on Friday that his actions would “create jobs, improve our energy security, bolster domestic manufacturing and supply chains, protect us from oil and gas price hikes in the future, and address climate change,” while not specifying what those actions might be.

This latest blow to Biden’s climate agenda came after a decision by the Supreme Court to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, although the EPA still has other avenues under the Clean Air Act to tackle emissions from energy sources like coal-fired power plants. At the same time, projections show that the US is running out of time to meet Biden’s goal of slashing emissions by 50 to 52 percent by the end of 2030 compared to 2005 levels, according to the Washington Post. 

Manchin’s refusal to support climate legislation comes after one of the hottest Junes on record, as a record-breaking heat wave settles over Europe. Temperatures in the United Kingdom were expected to reach as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday and Tuesday, prompting Britain to issue its first-ever extreme heat warning, while wildfires raged in Spain, France, and Portugal. More than 1,000 people have died during the most recent heat wave in Portugal and Spain alone. 

Legislators and activists urged the president to take immediate steps like ending fossil fuel leases on federal lands and declaring a climate emergency. On Twitter, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said that “with legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode.” He had earlier pushed for a “robust social cost of carbon rule,” which would require executive agencies to calculate the damages from continued carbon dioxide emissions when considering any new actions or initiatives. 

The Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action organization, suggested using the Defense Production Act to accelerate the transition to renewable energy as well as ending permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure. 

“Our democracy is broken when one man who profits from the fossil fuel industry can defy the 81 million Americans who voted for Democrats to stop the climate crisis,” Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash said in a statement. “Biden must declare a climate emergency, and do everything in his executive power to stop the climate crisis immediately. That’s the only way he can salvage his presidency and save our generation.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Without Congress, what can Biden do to stem the climate crisis? on Jul 19, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Diana Kruzman.

While gender equality in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields has improved in recent decades, globally, less than 30% of researchers are women, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In the United States, women make up just 28% of those working in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) industries.

At the Innocence Project, we are lucky to have several female scientists from all different backgrounds on our team. Each brings their unique perspective to the work of our policy, research, and legal teams, and helps ensure that everything we do is rooted in science.

Today, in solidarity with all women working in STEM fields and the young girls who dream of becoming scientists, we’re sharing the powerful stories of four inspiring female scientists at the Innocence Project.

Susan Friedman, senior staff attorney

Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Susan Friedman conducting a direct examination of a DNA expert via Zoom on behalf of Innocence Project client Robert DuBoise. (Image: Casey Brooke Lawson/The Innocence Project)

Advice to women and girls: Find what you love and don’t let anyone stand in your way or persuade you that you aren’t smart enough, good enough, or capable enough to do it.

I was always a super curious kid. I loved figuring out how things worked. But I think what really lead me into science is that my mom passed away when I was very little — I was 6 — and I didn’t really understand what happened to her at the time. That led me to really want to learn about science and, initially, about cancer development. I wanted to help people through science.

In high school, I was in a special science program that was predominantly male. And so when I was going to college, I made a purposeful choice to go to a women’s college, Mount Holyoke. I was really lucky in that most of my professors in college were these really smart, badass women with PhDs from Harvard, and all my classmates were smart, and I felt like women could do anything and everything.

I went to graduate school at Mount Sinai Medical School and then law school thinking I would either do something in health care like work for the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) or regulatory work around pharmaceuticals. I didn’t think I would be a criminal defense attorney.

During my first year of law school, the National Academy of Sciences released a major report on forensic science and it just totally blew my mind. Because of my background as a biochemist, I had done DNA testing and all of that stuff, and I got really into the report. It just shocked me that there had been such a lack of science in the criminal legal system. I was hooked.

I think having that science background has been a tremendous help and makes me a better lawyer because almost every case that I litigate involves DNA evidence or other evidence like fingerprints. So I’m always reading scientific studies and looking at the data, and it’s a huge benefit to have a science background because it’s alarming how few people in the criminal legal system actually understand the science.

It’s getting better now, but when I first got out of law school, I was really surprised that there are people prosecuting people using DNA evidence without actually understanding what that evidence means. And frequently what that meant is that they would accidentally misstate the evidence. But I think the reality is that if you are going to work in the criminal legal space, then you have an ethical obligation to understand these concepts and human biology, you need to take continuing legal education, you need to read the papers, take classes, and engage with the material.

Sarah Chu, senior advisor on forensic science policy

Sarah Chu, Innocence Project senior advisory on forensic science policy, with her daughter (Image: Courtesy of Sarah Chu)

Advice for women and girls: Don’t second guess what you’re passionate about and if STEM is what excites you, try to seek mentors who are like you, and if you can’t, take advantage of any mentorship opportunities you have.

Growing up my parents kind of set the expectation that I would either become a doctor or an engineer. In Taiwan, my mom was a physics and calculus teacher and my dad was a nuclear engineer. Then we moved to the Silicon Valley, so growing up I was surrounded by people in the tech sector, and there was kind of an expectation that you were going to do something STEM-related.

But I knew from an early age that I would have to work hard to do that. When I was in elementary school, my mom went back to school to get an engineering degree to get into a second career. And one night I saw her crying because a professor told her she was taking up a seat that should have been a man’s. He said he was reserving A’s in his class for the men because they were the ones who were going to do something with their degrees.

My mom told me that as a woman, and as an Asian person, that I would need to work twice as hard to be considered on equal par with a white man in the world. She went on to excel in her field, and what I really learned from her was to be persistent and to not let my own insecurities or imposter syndrome get in the way of taking advantage of an opportunity, because a man wouldn’t.

I started off pre-med and then I realized I really couldn’t stomach the gory stuff. So I thought then my path would be getting a PhD and doing research, and I joined a plant lab. There I had the formative experience of discovering something that contradicted general knowledge about how plants respond to droughts. I think at most labs, the principal investigator would have just told me I did the experiment wrong as an undergrad. But the postdoc I was working with said let’s do a few more repetitions, and we eventually realized we were finding something new. And so we got to publish a paper establishing our methodology and technique.

That experience really stuck with me and that really gave me a framework for thinking about forensic science in my work now. In forensic science, we have these disciplines where there’s a sense of what the science is, but it’s so important to actually do the testing and to validate those methods because it impacts people’s lives.

After that I worked in epidemiology, where I realized that what I love is developing knowledge and being at the cutting edge of something and doing something that impacts people. For a while I taught chemistry and physics in the New York City school system, but when I understood the challenges that my students were facing every day — like having to take care of four younger siblings or dealing with traumatic interactions with law enforcement — I thought that demanding that they turn in worksheets and homework was so secondary to all that.

I wanted to find a way to use my science degree and to do advocacy work that would make their lives better. Science has been my tool for realizing my passion for criminal justice reform. In order to do justice in this system, people in the criminal legal system need to understand the science, and we’re starting to see that with judges taking a more sophisticated look at evidence and how public defender offices across the country now have forensic units.

It can be so easy to dismiss something when you don’t understand it, but today with where we are that can no longer be what we do in the system.

Glinda Cooper, director of science and research

Glinda Cooper, Innocence Project director of science and research

My job is really about making sure that our research is sound. That the data that we use is sound and accurate and that we apply the principles of science to our work. I think people have a tendency to cherry-pick data — it’s kind of human nature to hone in on the part that makes sense to you. But what we work hard to do is make sure that we’re comprehensive in our approach to looking at a study. It’s important to be aware of everything that data or a study is showing, that there is nuance — and that’s not just in science, but information, politics, everything.

But what I love about science is that it’s concrete. There are formulas, there are laws about nature and how it works, like gravity. I just find that very satisfying.

When I went to college, I wanted to major in chemistry and there were no women faculty members. The only female graduate students were nuns and it was like this message that you could only be in science if you forwent any other kind of relationship. There were professors that would make derogatory comments about women in large lecture halls and they were just accepted — no one even blinked an eye.

I went on to work in epidemiology, which actually generally has a lot more women. I think a lot has changed in 30 years and I hope that it’s a different environment for women studying science today, and that we don’t take that progress for granted.

Vanessa Meterko, research manager

Vanessa Meterko, Innocence Project research manager (Image: Courtesy of Vanessa Meterko)

Advice for women and girls: The essence of science is curiosity. Embrace your curiosity and just try things.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a detective and obviously I’m not that today, but I think the desire behind that was an interesting in solving mysteries and I think that science is a way to do that — to solve mysteries of the natural world or human behavior.

I went to grad school and studied forensic psychology where I studied the phenomena of false confessions and I was really fascinated by that. After that I joined the Innocence Project team, almost 10 years ago, where my work is essentially using science to advance justice.

On a day-to-day basis that means collecting and organizing information about wrongful conviction cases — so literally reading through police and laboratory reports and trial transcripts and post-conviction motions and pleadings to understand patterns of wrongful convictions. And I also keep track of the academic literature around things like false confessions and cognitive biases in police investigations so that our work can be informed by the latest research.

I think this research is really important in explaining things that are hard for people to understand. Like I think it’s hard for people to wrap their head around why someone would falsely confess to something horrific that they didn’t do, but when you break it down to some of the underlying principles of psychology and what’s happening it becomes a lot easier to understand how it happens and why it happens more often that people think.

There are so many different ways we can contribute to advancing fairness and equity in the justice system, and scientists really are a part of that, and I think that’s important for people to know.

Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, black birdwatcher Christian Cooper was thrust into the national spotlight after a white woman he encountered in New York’s Central Park called the police after he asked that she leash her dog in accordance with park rules. (Dogs can disturb sensitive ecosystems and have contributed to the extinction of at least eight bird species.) “An African American man is threatening my life,” she can be heard saying to a 911 operator in a now-viral video.

The police did not arrest Cooper. Instead, his accuser ended up widely condemned on social media for her behavior. “She went racial,” Cooper said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “There are certain dark societal impulses that she, as a white woman facing in a conflict with a black man … thought she could marshal to her advantage,” he said.

Cooper’s experience renewed calls by many nature-lovers of color for wider visibility. We caught up with experts (and Grist Fixers) Corina Newsome, Jason Ward, and Jose Gonzalez to ask: How can green spaces become more inclusive? What strategies and projects might make people of color more comfortable being outdoor explorers?

The following responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Corina Newsome, co-organizer of #BlackBirdersWeek, graduate student at Georgia Southern University

#BlackBirdersWeek is our big initiative to kind of shed light on the way white supremacy has manifested itself in the lives of black people who are outside, whether they’re wildlife biologists, outdoor scientists, or just people who are enthusiastic about exploring the outdoors. The root of that feeling of not belonging is the same root that results in the terror black people experience at the hands of police officers and any other number of ways that oppression has manifested itself.

Because so much attention was paid to what happened to Christian Cooper it was a perfect time to let the world know that that was not an isolated experience. Even though there are probably more than 30 birders in my Black AF in STEM group, I’m always the only person of color — and especially the only woman of color — when I’m out birding. A lot of what happens to black women and black men is very similar. But I think that black women do bear the worst brunt of systemic racism and sexism at the same time. So intentionally seeking out diverse female voices in the STEM space is key. When white people see me out in nature, it’s like they see me as an outlier or a surprise instead of thinking I belong there just like them. So we want to provide visibility and representation to black people to say, “You are not actually alone.”

One belief that needs to be uprooted is the culture and expectation of “neutrality” in outdoors organizations. There’s this idea that if you bring blackness into a conversation, you’re being political and you can’t talk about that. But the thing that many organizations don’t realize is that race is something only privileged people can choose not to think about — race does not impact their ability to survive, it does not impact their ability to live in peace. Organizations need to realize that neutrality is a form of oppression; it is oppression of voice.

Visibility matters. Rejecting neutrality matters. I have already been so encouraged by the people I’ve seen online following #BlackInNature. It’s provided me so much peace.

Jason Ward, host of the YouTube series Birds of North America

Like Christian Cooper, I’m also a black birder. If this were a normal kind of year, I would be at the tail end of spring migration, ramping down from a month’s worth of intense traveling from one birding festival to another. It’s a time I usually love. But of course, with COVID, traveling is not possible. I have been one of the people who have turned to social media to keep the ball rolling on this issue.

Watching the Cooper video on social media, it shed light on the fact that no matter how strong and how confident you are, when you have certain interactions with certain people, it’s scary. Currently, white birders make up 80 percent of the birder population. And so there are birders who are prejudiced and racist and put political affiliations above just conservation. Black birders feel like we’re not a part of the community. So we wanted to change that scenario.

A few years ago I created the virtual group Black AF in STEM as a place for black people involved in science and wildlife to come together, collaborate on projects, vent, and just be themselves. It’s where we came up with the idea to start #BlackBirdersWeek to call attention to how many of us are out here. It wasn’t hard to get the National Audubon Society on board — they came to us! The American Birding Association and National Wildlife Federation joined in because there is a hunger for our stories as black birders.

I’m trying to not only change the narrative and get our voices and our opinions out there; I’m also trying to make the pathway a little easier for the next generation of birders who want to express their passion and love for the outdoors but may feel like it’s not a field that they can enter. We hear from a lot of local Audubon chapters across the country that say, “Our doors are always open — anyone who wants to come in can join us.” Well, that’s not enough. When it comes to diversity and inclusion, you have to be intentional — and consistent.

When I go into schools to talk with students about the outdoors, I take my spotting scope with me and set it up on a bluebird or a hawk at perch. Their faces just light up. And I’ve heard people say, “Well, I gotta have my mom buy me a pair of binoculars for Christmas!” And this is the impact that can be achieved when you hire people of color.

We just want to make it a little easier for the next generation to kind of take the reins and be the amazing rockstars that they’re intended to be.

Jose Gonzalez, founder of Latino Outdoors

Being in allyship and even in accomplish-ship with the black community means that Latinx communities also have to address their internalized anti-blackness in the form of colorism and favoring the white aesthetic. Before making any statement in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, people have to recognize the differences that exist in our experiences in relation to nature and the outdoors. Enjoying these places means creating a welcoming and safe environment for everyone.

I used to frame outdoor experiences around four Ps: people, place, process, and policy. People-to-people interactions can lead to conversations that white people need to have with themselves; that black, indigenous, and people of color need to have with ourselves; and that we all need to have together. Those connections are key to defining who “belongs” outdoors.

For place, it’s recognizing that there is both the ecological and natural landscape beauty of a place but also the human systems that come with it — that is where denying communities of color access to the recreation and health benefits comes into play.

Process is acknowledging that enjoying the outdoors doesn’t have to look like the single white hiker with the granola bar and expensive backpack and hiking boots. I’m looking at the outdoors industry to see how they can step up to show that they value the black experience for what it is, rather than what it needs to become in order for people to be considered outdoorsy. It’s something we have to pay attention to and celebrate, rather than think that the way to enjoy the outdoors is by fitting into the white norm of how we should engage and recreate with nature.

Policy changes are possible as a result of the kind of advocacy we are seeing ramp up at this moment. #BlackBirdersWeek is an example of black leadership responding to the Cooper incident, along with the death of George Floyd. We have to be able to consider that joy even alongside the pain and while still centering the black experience in all this.

The national discussion about the movement to privatize America’s public schools has mostly focused on the issues of charter schools and school voucher schemes. But a growing number of parents, teachers, and public school advocates, as well as experts in academia, are increasingly warning about another form of school privatization.

You don’t hear very much about this form of privatization in national forums and mainstream news outlets, but it’s being talked about in places like Chesterfield County, Virginia, which borders state capital Richmond.

At a public assembly in Chesterfield in September 2019, an audience gathered to view the movie “Backpack Full of Cash,” a feature-length documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon that exposes how charters and vouchers financially endanger public schools and redistribute resources and students in inequitable ways.

Yet the panel discussion that followed the film quickly veered away from talking about charters and vouchers when one of the panelists, middle school teacher Emma Clark, called the audience’s attention to “a different offshoot of the privatization movement. The privatization we’re seeing here in Chesterfield is through CTE.”

CTE, Career and Technical Education, is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education or voc-ed, only in the souped-up version, course offerings emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

But in communities like Chesterfield, STEM-related CTE curriculum is increasingly being created not by educators but by big businesses such as Amazon, Cisco, and Ford.

And Virginia’s embrace of a business-driven CTE goes beyond the rewriting of the curriculum. It’s about sorting children, schools, and whole communities into education destinies that are firmly welded to labor markets determined by industries.

Education or Class Sorting?

Melissa McKenney, a parent who lives in nearby Henrico County, is particularly wary of a new effort to carve up the state into regional labor markets, based on the needs of businesses in specific areas of the state, and align education opportunities in those regions with the needs of employers.

The effort, led by Growth & Opportunity (GO) Virginia, a highly influential business-led economic development initiative, sections the state into nine distinct regions, each with its own set of prioritized economic development clusters based on major employers located in the region.

For instance, Region Seven, where the new Amazon headquarters will be located, has for its “priority industry clusters”: computer services, cybersecurity, consulting services, financial services, engineering services, life sciences, and research organizations. Region One, in the southwestern part of the state, which has a much higher unemployment rate due in large part to the shutdown of coal mines and manufacturing businesses, has for its priority industry clusters advanced manufacturing, agriculture and food and beverage manufacturing, information and emerging technologies, and energy and minerals.

The intent, as McKenney sees it, is to align the public school curriculum in each region to industry priorities and then “track every student into some kind of education program based on the regional specifications,” she said. “So students in coal country, where Dominion Energy is big, will get tracked into energy career pathways” while students in the northern portion of the state are groomed for the IT industry, said McKenney.

Chesterfield parent Kathryn Flinn is concerned that the heavy footprint of business in each region will narrow the options for students. “When Dominion Energy needs line workers, they’ll push for a course on how to be a lineman for Dominion Energy,” she argued. Her preferences are that students have more course options, not fewer, and that people determining curricular offerings should have backgrounds in education, not just in business.

Even if the curriculum is of better quality than what these parents anticipate, the imposition of these labor market zones makes it clear to educators what the objective of their work is, Clark told me in a phone interview. “In a state like Virginia where privilege has long played a role in determining children’s futures, the expectation seems to be to steer students into programs that others have determined they are ‘suited’ for,” she said.

Traditional voc-ed in the U.S. has a notorious history of directing children from low-income households into education courses that are not in the college preparatory curriculum. That practice, known as tracking, has been “repeatedly found to be harmful to students enrolled in lower tracks and to provide no significant advantages for higher-tracked students,” according to a research review by the National Education Policy Center.

Parents I spoke with in Virginia are worried their state is reviving the practice of tracking—only with levels and pathways related to jobs and industry.

“Parents should be worried about having their children tracked for a specific kind of education starting in middle school,” McKenney said. “You could be putting them into a track that in a few years they aren’t interested in anymore.”

“Sure, some students may eventually want to work for Cisco,” said Chesterfield parent Sara Ward about a Cisco-specific networking course offered in her area. “But what if you want to learn about computer networking but don’t want to work for Cisco? Or what happens if you complete the program and get hired by Cisco, but Cisco fires you?”

McKenney also pointed out that children in regions that prioritize CTE programs who either decide not to enter or fail to get into a specific track early in their education could be shut out of opportunities down the road. “Children of color are often the ones not identified for certain tracks or discouraged from entering a track,” she noted.

Indeed, vocational academies in Loudon County that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited in February 2019 have been criticized for underrepresenting black students. And the tech workforce generally is overwhelmingly white and Asian, reports Wired magazine, noting that the racial diversity of Amazon employees is unknown because the company does not report the demographics of its tech workers.

‘One of the Biggest Problems Facing U.S. Education’

Virginians are also concerned about their state’s commitment to invest $1.1 billion into creating a “tech-talent pipeline,” a pledge the state made to seal a deal with Amazon for the company to build its new East Coast headquarters in Arlington. What concerns parents in Chesterfield and elsewhere in the state is not only the massive amount of public money that will be spent on training workers for the tech industry but also the intentions of the architect who is guiding the effort.

The consensus view is that the point person most responsible for the wooing of Amazon’s HQ2 to Virginia was Stephen Moret, the president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, an appointed policy body created by the Virginia General Assembly to support development and expansion of the state’s economy.

When Moret talks about education, he uses the term “talent development” for businesses. He writes in an article for Brookings that “Virginia has taken several big steps toward implementing” a “new learning/earning ecosystem… to better navigate the labor market” for both employers and workers.

A big part of that ecosystem is “aimed at supporting the growth of Amazon’s headquarters operations in Arlington as well as tech companies around Virginia,” reports Virginia Business.

Moret’s own career path may also be a concern to those who are familiar with the type of leadership that has dominated business-friendly education policy for decades.

According to Virginia Business, after attaining a graduate business degree from Harvard, Moret served a stint at McKinsey & Company, known for its profit-first and cost-cutting ethos. In an interview with Development Counsellors International, Moret explained that he also hired McKinsey to help with landing the Amazon HQ.

From McKinsey, Moret went to lead the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce and then to working for the state as secretary of economic development under former Governor Bobby Jindal.

During Jindal’s tenure, Louisiana jumped wholesale into the school privatization agenda, expanding a school voucher program statewide and overseeing a doubling of student enrollments in charter schools.

Moret backed Jindal’s 2012 education budget that expanded school vouchers, and he successfully pushed for a bill that allowed companies that donate real estate or a building to a charter school to become a corporate partner of the school and thereby guarantee their employees’ children enrollment in the school, “saying it could be an important tool to recruit new businesses to Louisiana,” according to the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report.

The marriage of business interests with education policy has been “one of the biggest problems facing U.S. education,” according to Kenneth Saltman, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who spoke with me in a phone call. He believes business-led efforts to remake schools have resulted in incentives and changes that are damaging and undermining to the purpose of education.

“At the very core of the issues,” he stated, “is the question over what public schools are for. There’s an old debate over the purpose of schools as preparation for work versus the purpose of schools as preparation for children to become adults who are capable of self-governance and full public participation.”

‘A Wall Between Schools and Business’

The problem with aligning business interests too closely with education, said Saltman, is that often the influence of business seeks to take education back to an agenda about teaching the basics rather than about more abstract goals of schooling.

As Clark sees it, the same people pushing the Virginia tech-talent pipeline are the same people who’ve been insisting that schools would improve if they operated more like businesses. “These are the same people who call my students ‘products,’” she told me. “The same people who forget that my students are human and are complicated.”

For these reasons and others, Saltman would prefer there was “a wall between schools and businesses.” Businesses don’t really pay a significant percentage of taxes that support schools, he argued. “They take a lot more out than they put in.”

Tech companies are notorious non-contributors to local schools. Microsoft has for years avoided paying taxes in Washington state, where it is based, by setting up a subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, which has no corporate tax, according to an investigation by Washington-based KNKX. That tax dodge may have shortchanged Washington schools by $8 billion, based on at least one estimate KNKX found.

In its successful bid for the Amazon headquarters, Virginia gave $750 million in tax incentives to the company over the next 15 years. New York was prepared to give the company even more—$1.2 billion in tax incentives. Local public outcry resulted in the New York deal falling through.

From these two cities plus Nashville, where the company also has a new facility, Amazon was standing to gain more than $2.2 billion in tax incentives—money that would be withheld from public coffers that pay for education and other services.

“There’s also a very long history of businesses looking for ways to have free worker training centers,” Saltman added, “and a history of looking at schools as places where the goals of commercialization can be realized, either by selling stuff to schools or making money off what schools provide to businesses.”

Examples of businesses acting more like predators than partners in their relationships with public schools have been numerous and well-publicized.

And Amazon’s relationship with Virginia is already walking a precariously fine line between partner and predator.

At the same time that its HQ deal was going down, Amazon debuted new partnerships with four Virginia school districts to adopt the company’s AWS Educate program. According to a local business news outlet, “participating school districts will incorporate AWS Educate resources into their dual enrollment programs, allowing high school students to enroll for college classes that include the curriculum, as well as provide cloud credentialing for teachers.”

AWS Educate is “Amazon’s global initiative to provide resources for educators and students and build skills in cloud technology,” according to Silicon Angle.

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which is a product that schools can buy. “The AWS Cloud frees schools and districts from the distractions of managing infrastructure … so they can focus on students,” the company’s marketing pitch goes. “From back-end data management to virtual desktops, AWS offers tools so that every student gets the attention they need to thrive.”

The AWS division “generated $25 billion in sales last year—roughly the size of Starbucks,” according to a 2019 New York Times article, “and is Amazon’s most profitable business” with contracts from huge companies in retail, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, real estate, and other industries.

With Amazon’s ability to use AWS Educate as an entrée into a school district’s curriculum and teacher professional development programs, the company can create a relationship with the schools to sell its lucrative data storage contracts, which are the company’s “main profit driver,” according to Investopedia. Loudoun County, one of the school districts that adopted AWS Educate, has also inked a deal with AWS cloud services to transfer student data to the cloud and virtualize student desktops. “All of the backend infrastructure and computer power is in AWS,” a Loudoun school official says in a blog post announcement on the AWS website.

Saltman and the Virginia parents I spoke with point out that pairing AWS Educate with its cloud services gives Amazon a business model in which, potentially, students and teachers learning how to work in the cloud would generate the data for the company’s for-profit operation. “When students are a captive audience and the curriculum is oriented to producing data… that’s [potentially] a form of child labor,” Saltman said.

Clark sees this development as a “step further” in the predatory relationship between the private sector and public schools. “People who have money and power have been able to manipulate the tax structure, so they don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes to support schools. Now they get to come into struggling schools and take more money out by selling them products.”

Priorities Are Out of Whack

In a state with a history of being fiscally conservative, it’s surprising that so little concern is being expressed by public officials about the costs of the new tech education infrastructure.

While most of that money is to be spent initially on higher education initiatives, the trickle-down effect of more than doubling the number of tech graduates in the state requires huge investments in K-12 as well. Of the $1.1 billion the state is putting into its tech-talent pipeline, $25 million is expected to flow to new K-12 computer science programs.

“Building the tech-talent pipeline starts with a public K-12 system that includes an integrated STEM and computer science curriculum at every grade for every student,” says a statement by NOVA, a public partnership of communities in the northern part of the Commonwealth. NOVA has also partnered with Amazon Web Services to roll out associate and bachelor degree programs in cloud computing in community colleges and universities across the state.

Fairfax County, the largest school district in the state, has already announced its intention to double its tech pipeline in 20 years. According to Virginia Business, the CEO of the county economic development office said, “That effort has to start in pre-K.” And GO Virginia is prepared to match up to $410,000 in funding for what the county can spend to “fill the tech-talent pipeline.”

Grants from GO Virginia totaling $2.4 million have gone to Chesapeake and Loudoun County schools to invest in computer education.

Virginia Is for Learners, another state-sponsored initiative, has put funding into a network of teams from school divisions in Virginia across the state who will work on aligning schools to workforce needs.

State legislators from both political parties have complied by passing tech pipeline-related bills including one that requires the state to develop an online dashboard showing state and regional labor market and workforce statistics and one eliminating the “stigma associated with” CTE. A new bill would allow individuals to use their 529 accounts, tax-free savings set aside for college, to cover the costs of workforce training and credentialing programs. And another new bill will require students in grades six, seven, and eight to complete at least one semester-long or year-long computer science elective course or introduction to technology course.

All this splurging on tech talent has left many Virginians thinking their state has its education priorities way out of whack.

In the Education Law Center’s annual report card on school funding, it gave Virginia a D on funding adequacy (the cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), C on the fairness of the distribution (how funds are spread to districts with high levels of student poverty), and D on the state’s effort in the context of its overall economy (the level of investment in K-12 public education as a percentage of state wealth).

A 2019 analysis by Davis Burroughs for the independent news outlet the Dogwood reported that state funding for Virginia K-12 schools in the 2018–2019 school year is 9.1 percent per student less than it was 10 years before that. Because Virginia schools “receive $430 million less for support staff” than they did 10 years ago, school social workers, custodians, and psychologists have been drastically reduced.

Due to an aging school infrastructure—60 percent of Virginia schools are more than 40 years old—many schools are now in deplorable condition, but the state is short of an estimated $18 billion it would cost to renovate older schools.

A 2018 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in 2016, Virginia was spending 33 percent less than in 2008 on “school capital” projects, such as building new schools or renovating existing ones.

Chesterfield schools have acute infrastructure needs including deteriorating, unhealthy conditions in some of the district’s schools and overcrowded classrooms that push students into temporary trailers. Five schools have tested positive for the bacteria that can cause Legionnaire’s disease. An outside consultant the district hired to conduct a facilities assessment concluded the school system “had about $50 million in ‘immediate’ major maintenance needs, which he defined as ‘failure is imminent, if it has not failed already.’”

Burroughs quoted findings from an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute that put the state at 48th on the list of most underpaid teachers—behind only Washington and Arizona. “In the last four years, the weekly pay of Virginia teachers has fallen 31 percent behind the pay of other college-educated workers in the state,” he wrote. Consequently, Burroughs continued, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) found that “the turnover rate for Virginia K-12 educators is higher than 44 states and the District of Columbia.”

A December 2019 report from the Virginia board of education asserted schools were plagued by “teacher shortages, under-funding, and ‘persistent achievement gaps,’” according to a local CBS affiliate. The report counted 900 unfilled teaching positions in the state.

In September 2018, with classes already started, Chesterfield still found itself short 27 teaching positions.

A big problem with funding, LPI’s report found, is that more of the burden for financing schools—51 percent on average—falls on the shoulders of local communities, thereby making it much more difficult for lower-income districts to finance school improvements and address rising costs.

Funding from the state has fallen “8 percent per student for the 2018-2019 school year… compared to 2009-2010” according to the report from the Virginia board of education. Schools have had to do more with less by cutting nearly 379 staff even though about 55,000 more students are enrolled in the system. A greater proportion of those students are also the costliest to educate. In the last 10 years, Virginia schools have added 31 percent more economically disadvantaged students, 23 percent more English learners, 164 percent more students identified with autism, and 34 percent more students with another kind of health impairment.

Virginia parents I spoke with hailed a recent change in the direction of state education funding, especially since the election of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and a resurgence in Democratic membership in the state assembly. But the state still has a long way to go.

Reinforcing Inequity

When faced with criticism of the expanded role of businesses in education and the culture of fiscal austerity that characterizes school funding, free-market advocates push back by calling the public education system inefficient. They also claim that those who point to inadequate public school funding and problems of educating more kids in poverty as “overwhelming barriers” are making “excuses” for incompetence.

Many free-market advocates point to stagnation in test scores and rising costs as proof that educators are poor managers of the public school enterprise, and they argue for a greater presence in the classroom because they are the “largest… consumer” of the “products” produced by schools—an unfortunate metaphor since the word “consume” literally means to “use up.”

In a manifesto-like document put out by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2011, authors Frederick Hess and Whitney Downs (both of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.) liken school districts to “troubled firm[s],” and they argue that “as business leaders know, if you head into a troubled firm with the attitude that your most important job is to be nice, you may not get very far.”

In testosterone-laden prose—the word “tough” appears 14 times—Hess and Downs advise business leaders, “Working with school districts or policymakers doesn’t mean carrying their water,” and, “Be a partner, not a pawn.” Their framing of the relationship between business and education as a “partnership” and “two-way street” strikes educators as deeply hypocritical. How often do corporate executives invading the education sphere solicit the advice of teachers before pushing their demands on schools?

When educators say, as Clark did during her panel remarks, “Sometimes what’s good for companies and what’s good for kids overlap, but sometimes those things will be at odds,” they should be taken seriously.

And it’s entirely reasonable to suggest, as McKenney told me, that “because money is a strong motivator, it’s alright to frame the conversation about whether business involvement in schools is about profit.”

Not everyone is going to agree with Saltman’s call for a “wall” between business and education. But we should heed his counsel that when considering an education that prepares students for the economy, we should ask, “What kind of economy do we want? We live in a world in which economic inequality and marginalization… [are] getting worse. We don’t want schools that reinforce this. If we want schools that prepare students for work, what kind of work are we talking about? Are we talking about preparing them for whatever jobs businesses want to give to them? Or do we want to prepare them to operate in an economy that’s more democratic?”

And when Amazon announces, as it did in early 2018, that it has invested another $50 million to boost computer science education, taken steps to “grow its footprint in classrooms across all grade levels in America,” and rolled out a new comprehensive program to promote computer science from “kindergarten to career,” we should be wary.

“These are the very same companies that have structured our economy in ways that keep my students in poverty,” Clark explained. “And now they’re going to come into my school and tell me they want to sell me something that will create equal opportunity for my students? I find the whole idea of that disgusting.”

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and is the second of a two-part series on Career and Technical Education (CTE). Click here to read part one.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.