Argument preview: Virginia racial gerrymandering case returns to Supreme Court

On March 11, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The issue of gerrymandering will be front and center at the Supreme Court in March. On March 26, the justices will tackle two of the highest-profile cases of the term, involving partisan gerrymandering – the idea that state officials went too far in considering politics when redistricting, by drawing maps that favor one political party at another’s expense. But first, on March 18, the justices will once again tackle another thorny issue: accusations of racial gerrymandering, the idea that legislators relied too much on race during redistricting.

The events giving rise to Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill began back in February 2011, when Virginia’s General Assembly received new data from the 2010 census and started to draw a new map for the state’s House of Delegates. The final map included 12 districts in which 55 percent of the voters were African-American.

The state legislature adopted the map, and Virginia’s governor approved it. At the time, because Virginia had a history of voting problems, it was also required by federal voting laws to obtain federal approval before changing its maps – a process known as “preclearance” – which it did.

But residents of those districts went to court, arguing that the districts were the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. In particular, the challengers alleged, African-American voters had been illegally packed into the districts, diluting their voting strength in nearby districts and making those districts more hospitable to Republicans.

The House of Delegates stepped in to defend the law, and a federal district court ruled against the challengers, who appealed to the Supreme Court. (Redistricting cases are among the small set of cases with an automatic right of appeal to the Supreme Court.) In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the district court had applied the wrong legal standard to the challengers’ claims. The Supreme Court agreed that one of the 12 districts did not violate the Constitution, but it ordered the lower court to take another look, this time using the correct standard, at the other 11 districts.

When the district court reconsidered the case, the court found that race had been the main consideration used to draw each of the 11 remaining districts. Because the legislature had not shown that it needed to aim to have the same percentage of African-American adults in each of the “vastly dissimilar” 11 districts to comply with federal voting-rights laws, the district court concluded, the districts violate the Constitution. This time, the House of Delegates appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case last fall.

There are two main questions in the case. The first issue, which the justices asked both sides to brief, is whether the House of Delegates has a legal right to appeal – known as standing – to the Supreme Court. Because the state officials who were the defendants in the lawsuit did not appeal, the justices would not be able to decide the merits of the case if they determined that the legislature does not have standing.

Virginia Solicitor General Toby Heytens, representing the state officials, argues that the legislature does not have standing. Under state law, he tells the justices, the state’s attorney general – not the legislature – is responsible for representing the state. In this case, Heytens stresses, after several years of expensive litigation, the attorney general decided that the best course of action was not to appeal, but instead to move forward and come up with a new plan that fixes the problems before the 2019 election. Although the legislators may not agree with that decision, Heytens argues, they don’t have the legal power to override it.

The House of Delegates counters that the legislature both created the redistricting plan and defended it in the lower court. Indeed, the House of Delegates notes, the legislature – with the blessing of state officials – also defended the districts during the first round of litigation in the Supreme Court. For the state’s attorney general to argue now, after “years of sitting on the sidelines,” that only he can decide whether to appeal the lower court’s decision to the Supreme Court is “gamesmanship of the worst sort.”

But the challengers, along with the state officials and the federal government, push back. The fact that the legislature was allowed to defend the plan in the lower court does not mean that the legislature has a legal right to appeal to the Supreme Court. To enter the case, they argue, the legislature only needed to have an interest in the case. However, to have the right to appeal, the legislature needs to show an injury from the lower court’s ruling – which it can’t do.

From the House of Delegates’ perspective, it clearly been injured: The district court ordered it either to draw new maps quickly or to hand over the power to draw new maps to a court-appointed expert.

The challengers reject this argument. The legislature was not injured when the lower court struck down the map and ordered it to draw a new one, they contend; that is what “courts routinely do.” To the extent that the legislature is arguing that the court took over its role by having an expert draw the new map, they continue, the legislature has only itself to blame: The court gave the legislature a chance to draw a new map, but the legislature didn’t act.

The second question before the justices is whether the 11 districts are indeed unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

Defending the 11 districts, the House of Delegates explained that when it drew the map, it was operating under “extraordinary time pressure.” Virginia holds its state elections in odd-numbered years, which means that the legislature only had about six weeks after the 2010 census data was released, in early 2011, to “analyze the data, receive public input, collect requests from incumbents, make countless discretionary decisions about how to conduct the map-drawing process, and then” actually draw the map – which needed to be approved by the legislature and the governor and precleared by DOJ in time for the 2011 elections.

The House of Delegates acknowledges that it considered race when it drew the districts at the heart of this case. Indeed, it notes, it had to do so, because the Voting Rights Act prohibited Virginia from changing its map unless the state could show that the new map wouldn’t make it more difficult for minority voters to elect the candidate of their choice. Therefore, the legislature explains, it set a target of 55-percent African-American voters in all 11 districts to maintain similar levels in the majority-minority districts “that were already above or near that number” – allowing it to comply with both the VRA and “traditional districting criteria.” Therefore, the legislature stresses, although race was a factor, it was not the primary consideration.

Even if race had been the primary consideration, however, the legislature continues, the map is still constitutional as long as the legislature had a good reason to believe that the VRA required it to consider race. This, the legislature asserts, allows it to avoid a Catch-22 scenario, in which a map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander if it puts too many minority voters in a district, but violates the VRA if it puts too few minority voters there.

In this case, the legislature adds, there were good reasons for the legislature to think that each district should be made up of over 50 percent African-American voters, because almost all the districts already had similar populations; under the VRA, the legislature needed to avoid drawing lines that would lower that rate. And even if it arguably could have used a slightly lower target, the legislature suggests, it is enough that it believed in good faith that it was required to use that number to comply with the VRA.

The legislature launches a broader attack on the district court’s decision striking down the 11 districts, calling it a “clear threat to the core sovereign function of redistricting” that “all but eliminates what little breathing room legislatures have to balance the competing demands of the VRA and the Constitution.” Race will inevitably play a role in redistricting, the legislature emphasizes. The only question is “how race should be used, and who should consider it in drawing maps—popularly-elected and politically-accountable legislators or Article III courts and out-of-state special masters.”

The federal government backs the challengers in arguing that the legislature should not be allowed to appeal. However, it tells the justices that if the Supreme Court does reach the merits, it should send the case back for another look because the district court “again failed to perform a holistic analysis of each individual district.” For example, the government observes, the district court attributed “across-the-board significance” to the legislature’s target of having 55 percent of the voters in each district be African-American, without looking at what effect that threshold actually had on a particular district’s boundaries.

The challengers defend the lower court’s decision striking down the 11 districts as “a straightforward application” of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. There is no dispute, they say, that the lines for the districts were drawn with an eye toward guaranteeing that at least 55 percent of each district’s voters would be African-American. Getting to that target was “no easy feat,” they posit; instead, the legislature was required to put aside traditional redistricting criteria and divide up the residents of cities, towns and “even a military base” by race to achieve its goal.

Because race was a primary factor motivating the maps for the 11 districts, the challengers continue, the only way to demonstrate that the legislature had good reason to believe that it was required to use race to comply with the VRA was by showing that it looked into the need to do so, based on the conditions in each district. But the district court in this case found that the legislature had not conducted any analysis at all to determine what percentage of African-American voters each district would have to contain to comply with the VRA.

More generally, the challengers dismiss the legislature’s arguments as excuses, reiterating that “states cannot pass legislation for predominantly racial reasons merely because of the press of time.” And the legislature cannot fail to investigate what percentage of African-American voters was appropriate to comply with the VRA, assume that all 11 districts are alike and then ask for the Supreme Court’s blessing. Such a rule, the challengers say, would be exactly contrary to the Supreme Court’s voting-rights cases.

Even as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral argument on the constitutionality of the current maps next week, efforts to create a new map for the 2019 elections, with the help of a court-appointed expert, are moving forward in the lower court. In January, the Supreme Court rejected the legislators’ request to put those proceedings on hold until it issues its decision – which will likely come in May or June. Meanwhile, the state is scheduled to hold its primary elections in June, with the general election to follow in November.

This post was first published at Howe on the Court.

The post Argument preview: Virginia racial gerrymandering case returns to Supreme Court appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

The Universe According to Hilma af Klint

On March 11, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In January 1906, Hilma af Klint was offered an unusual commission. For years, the Swedish artist had been meeting with four female friends to pray, meditate, and hold séances, in which they attempted to contact a set of spiritual guides they called the High Masters. The women, who dubbed themselves The Five (De Fem), took notes and made automatic drawings during their sessions.

In 1904, the Masters (who had names: Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor) told af Klint of a forthcoming task: a temple should be built and filled with paintings representing the spiritual world. Over the next two years, the guides spoke to the other members of The Five, asking them if they would be willing to undertake the project. All declined. At the start of the new year in 1906, Amaliel offered it to af Klint, who accepted immediately. “This became the great commission, which I carried out in my life,” she wrote.

The 43-year-old artist prepared for months and then began making The Paintings for the Temple. She continued, working on and off, for nine years. In all, she created 193 paintings that are divided into series and further subdivided into groups, with numbered and often pictorial progressions. The works are colorful, schematic, abstract, and filled with geometric shapes, fluid forms, and cryptic language. Some stretch as tall as ten feet; others measure barely a foot wide. Cosmic and primordial, mysterious yet deeply moving, they are nothing short of astonishing. And more than a third of them can now be seen at the Guggenheim Museum, in Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, the most significant exhibition ever devoted to the artist in the United States.

The show opens with a gut punch: temple paintings from a group titled The Ten Largest, hanging side by side along the walls of an alcove gallery just off the Guggenheim’s main ramp. The towering works (exact sizes vary, but they’re all around 10.5 feet high and just shy of 8 feet wide) represent the stages of life: There are two for childhood, two for youth, four for adulthood, and two for old age. Each phase has a corresponding background color: blue, orange, purple, and pale pink. Constellations of rounded shapes and swirling lines, and bits of cursive writing, float against the backgrounds in those same colors, as well as harmonious shades of yellow, green, black, and white. Much of the imagery suggests natural and biological forms, like flowers, clitorises, and planets, but in other places, circles and squares just represent themselves. The picture planes are flat but undeniably kinetic—all the elements look as though they might shake loose and start drifting at any moment.

Even by today’s standards, The Ten Largest are unique in the way they mix the iconographies of scientific charts and occult diagrams with a kind of geometric abstraction that, in contrast to the prevailing trends of the Western canon, we might call “soft edge.” But these paintings were made in 1907. In 1907, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky hadn’t yet published On the Spiritual in Art, his landmark treatise on nonobjective painting, nor made his first abstract work. Neither had Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian, the men considered the other pioneers of abstraction, made theirs. In 1907, none of the modern art being shown—and as far as we know, created—in Western countries looked anything like The Ten Largest. This is what makes the series, and af Klint’s work more generally, so breathtaking: It demonstrates completely different possibilities for what art can be. And it was made more than 100 years ago, by a woman.

Contrary to what the spirit guides and the proto-abstraction might suggest, af Klint was a classically trained artist. Born into a prominent family of naval officers and raised mostly in Stockholm, she attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which gave her shared studio space in a neighborhood central to the city’s art scene after she graduated in 1887. In fact, the studio was located just upstairs from Blanch’s Art Salon, where Edvard Munch had a show in 1894. Af Klint was clearly attuned to the developments of modernism, while she made and exhibited realist portraits, landscapes, and studies of nature. (She also did scientific drawing, co-illustrating a book on horse surgery in 1900.)

Some of her naturalistic works are on view at the Guggenheim, just beyond the gallery containing The Ten Largest. They include delicately rendered watercolors of flowers and lifelike drawings of women, as well as an oil painting, “Summer Landscape” (1888), that suggests an aptitude for rendering light. It’s hard to believe that these traditional, if thoughtful, works are by the same artist as The Paintings for the Temple.

Not only that, but she sometimes made them around the same time. The story of af Klint’s artistic development does not progress along a straight line. Even as she plunged into her spiritual paintings, which she displayed publicly only once in her lifetime, she continued to create and exhibit naturalist art. The 1914 Baltic Exhibition, a sort of world’s fair in Malmö, included abstractions by Kandinsky, but af Klint opted to show her realist side.

Her reluctance to share her more radical art may have had something to do with a meeting with Rudolf Steiner. Af Klint was an ardent seeker who looked to many religions and belief systems, including spiritualism, Christianity, Theosophy, and Steiner’s creation, Anthroposophy, for knowledge about the universe. In 1908, she met Steiner and invited him to visit her studio, where he looked at some of her temple works. She explained that she had made them as a medium, by channeling the Masters, who guided her to paint. Steiner was critical of both the approach and the art. After the visit, af Klint ceased painting almost entirely for four years. During that time she also cared for her mother, who had gone blind.

When she did begin again, she worked differently, now driven by a voice within and asserting more agency over her compositions, as Steiner had urged her to. Still, she continued to make partially or wholly abstract series whose shapes seem to contain the secrets of the world. A gorgeous trio of altarpieces from 1915 radiates cosmic, religious energy from its golden circles and divided triangles. Perhaps because of Steiner, however, she knew the world wasn’t ready to receive them. In 1932, in one of the many notebooks she used to meticulously catalogue her art, af Klint wrote that all the works annotated with certain symbols should not be opened until 20 years after her death.

It took a lot longer than that. Hilma af Klint died in 1944, at the age of 81. Her abstract work wasn’t shown publicly until 1986, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included some of her paintings in the exhibition The Spiritual in Art. As Daniel Birnbaum, the director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, recounts in the Guggenheim catalogue, “the reaction to that very first exhibition was one of enthusiasm but also of confusion and skepticism.” The critic Hilton Kramer was especially dismissive, writing of af Klint’s paintings, “To accord them a place of honor alongside the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Kupka … is absurd. Af Klint is simply not an artist in their class, and—dare I say it?—would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.”

The reaction this time around has been better. Most critics have acknowledged and celebrated af Klint’s vision, even if they don’t quite know what to make of it. But I can’t help thinking we’re still not quite ready for her—a woman who defied some of the crucial binaries that our culture stubbornly upholds. Af Klint was a trained artist who was also self-taught; she was insider as well as an outsider. She studied science and spiritualism. She made art as well as illustration. And in her art—often in the same series—she used figuration and abstraction, prizing neither one as a culminating achievement but rather drawing on both as they suited her needs.

Much of the debate and discussion around af Klint, at least in art circles, has centered on the question of whether she “got there first”—whether she made abstract paintings before the men. It seems obvious that she did, just not in a way we’ve been told counts as legitimate. A critical establishment that prizes rationalism and male ego is ill equipped to recognize the achievements of a woman who sought a higher purpose beyond herself. Never mind that Kandinsky also conceived of art as a means of spiritual expression. Or that Mondrian was also an adherent of Theosophy. Af Klint is dismissed as a “mystic” (according to one anecdote in the catalogue), because to accept her as an artist would mean having to revise the definition of who gets to be one.

It would take careful study of the more than 2,600 pages of writing she left behind—lexicons explaining the meanings of the letters in her paintings, notebooks cataloguing her work, book manuscripts—to begin to grasp what af Klint was trying to tell us, her future viewers. But you don’t need that esoteric knowledge to stand before her paintings and feel their challenge: to put aside what you’ve been taught and open yourself up to an unfamiliar and more expansive way of seeing the world.

Judging U.S. War Crimes

On March 11, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Chelsea Manning, who bravely exposed atrocities committed by the U.S. military, is again imprisoned in a U.S. jail. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2019, she was incarcerated in the Alexandria, VA federal detention center for refusing to testify in front of a secretive Grand Jury. Her imprisonment can extend through the term of the Grand Jury, possibly 18 months, and the U.S. courts could allow formation of future Grand Juries, potentially jailing her again.

Chelsea Manning has already paid an extraordinarily high price for educating the U.S. public about atrocities committed in the wars of choice the U.S. waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chelsea Manning was a U.S. Army soldier and former U.S. intelligence analyst. She already testified, in court, how she downloaded and disseminated government documents revealing classified information she believed represented possible war crimes. In 2013, she was convicted by court martial and sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking government documents to Wikileaks. On January 17, 2017, President Obama commuted her sentence. In May of 2017, she was released from military prison having served seven years.

“Where you stand determines what you see.” Chelsea Manning, by virtue of her past work as an analyst with the U.S. military, carefully studied footage of what could only be described as atrocities against human beings. She saw civilians killed, on her screen, and conscience didn’t allow her to ignore what she witnessed, to more or less change the channel. One scene of carnage occurred on July 12, 2007, in Iraq. Chelsea Manning made available to the world the black and white grainy footage and audio content which depicted a U.S. helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. Twelve people were killed, including two Reuters journalists.

What follows is part of the dialogue from the classified US military video footage from July 12^th:

US SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.

US SOLDIER 4: Let me know when you’ve got them.

US SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.

US SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!

US SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.

US SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.

Amy Goodman described the next portion of the video:

AMY GOODMAN: Minutes later, the video shows US forces watching as a van pulls up to evacuate the wounded. They again open fire, killing several more people, wounding two children inside the van.

US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

US SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?

US SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.

US SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?

US SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!

US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

US SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.

US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

US SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

US SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV —- or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

US SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

US SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.

US SOLDIER 1: Come on!

US SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.

US SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.

US SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.

US SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about twelve to fifteen bodies.

US SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha!

Democracy Now, in the same segment, asked former U.S. whistleblower Dan Ellsberg for comments about releasing the video. “What were the criteria,” Ellsberg asked, “that led to denying this to the public? And how do they stand up when we actually see the results? Is anybody going to be held accountable for wrongly withholding evidence of war crimes in this case…?”

Chelsea Manning’s disclosures also led to public awareness of the Granai massacrein Afghanistan. On May 4, 2009, Taliban forces attacked U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan’s Farah province. The U.S. military called for U.S. airstrikes on buildings in the village of Granai. A U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber was used to drop 2,000 lb. and 500 lb. bombs, killing an estimated 86 to 147 women and children. The U.S. Air Force has videotape of the Granai massacre. Ellsberg called for President Obama to post the videotape rather than wait to see if Wikileaks would release it. To this day, the video hasn’t been released. Apparently, a disgruntled Wikileaks employee destroyed the footage.

Were it not for Chelsea Manning’s courageous disclosures, certain U.S. military atrocities might have been kept secret. Her revelations were also key to exposing U.S. approval of the 2009 coup against the elected government in Honduras and U.S. dealings with dictators and oligarchs across the Middle East, which helped spark the Arab Spring rebellions.

Prior to her arrest in 2010, Chelsea Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth, regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Chelsea Manning’s principled and courageous actions provide guidance for us to control our fears. We must seek an end to war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and other areas where the U.S. terrifies and kills civilians.

Tucker Carlson isn't planning to apologize for some really sexist things he told Bubba the Love Sponge

On March 11, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is refusing to apologize for misogynistic remarks he made — including calling women “extremely primitive” and “basic” — on a conservative radio talk years ago.

On Sunday, Media Matters for America published a compilation of comments Carlson made between 2006 and 2011 during various appearances on a conservative talk radio show called “Bubba the Love Sponge.” In the conversations, Carlson bashed feminism, called Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “whores,” and praised men who think that their wives are possessions.

By the next morning, the hashtag #FireTuckerCarlson had gone viral.

“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago,” Carlson, who’s had his own talk show on Fox News since 2016, tweeted on Sunday night. “Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

In one 2009 conversation with host, Bubba “the Love Sponge” Clem, Carlson, 49, railed against a case involving polygamist cult leader, Warren Jeffs, who was convicted on felony rape charges for arranging marriages between men and underage girls.

“Arranging a marriage between a 16-year old girl and a 27-year old man is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her,” Carlson said. “That’s bullshit.” (Jeffs was also found guilty of sexually assaulting 12 and 15 year old girls.)

In another conversation from 2006, Carlson said that feminists “just need to be quiet and kind of do what you’re told.” He also described women as “extremely primitive.”

“They’re basic. They’re not that hard to understand” Carlson told Bubba, who’s infamous for his role in the Hulk Hogan sex tape scandal and resulting lawsuit that ultimately bankrupted news website, Gawker.

Tucker and Bubba also discussed a 2008 campaign ad by Sen. John McCain, which sought to portray then-Sen. Barack Obama as a vapid celebrity. The ad compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Bubba and his co-host said that the ad made Obama seem like an “Uncle Tom” — a derogatory caricature to suggest a black man who’s subservient to white people. The co-host, referring to Spears and Hilton, said that the ad seemed to imply that “these two young white girls are going to be dating a black man.”

“So they’re trying to say that he’s [Obama’s] coming for your pristine white daughters but putting two of the biggest white whores in America?” Carlson asked before being cut off by the host.

In another clip, Carson said that he feels “sorry for unattractive women.”

And in yet another, Bubba asked, “What’s better than hockey, weed, and whores?”

“There’s no Canadian woman you’d want to pay to sleep with,” Carlson replied.

And finally, Carlson said, “Anybody who answers ‘my trophy wife is my favorite possession’ is my hero.”

Carlson is no stranger to controversy; he’s been accused of peddling far-right or white nationalist conspiracy theories on air. He even lost advertisers following a segment last December, in which he claimed that immigrants made America “poorer and dirtier.” Last September, Carlson also asserted that the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were evidence of the “left’s war on old, white men.”

Cover image: Tucker Carlson, host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” poses for photos in a Fox News Channel studio, in New York, Thursday, March 2, 2107. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

FBI and New York City Regulators Search Offices of Private Trash Hauler

On March 11, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Kiera Feldman for ProPublica

The FBI and New York City regulators raided the corporate offices of a major private trash hauler last week, the latest sign of trouble for an industry under fire.

It is unclear what the authorities were seeking at the offices of Five Star Carting, but the investment firm that owns the hauler, GPB Capital Holdings, said it has been cooperating for months with a joint federal and city inquiry. The city’s private trash industry is overseen by the Business Integrity Commission, or BIC, which is tasked with rooting out corruption and other misconduct in an industry once dominated by organized crime.

“Recently, we have been cooperating with inquiries from various authorities and the visit on February 28, 2019 from the FBI and the New York City Business Integrity Commission, while unscheduled, was a part of that process,” a spokesperson for GPB Capital said in a statement. “We will continue to cooperate with inquiries and are confident that as we move forward our portfolio companies are stable and well positioned for the future.”

Formed in 2002 by brothers Anthony and Nino Tristani, Five Star Carting is the third-biggest hauler in New York City, where each business must hire its own private trash company to handle commercial waste. Last year, ProPublica reported on Five Star’s troubled labor and safety record, including a $400,000 settlement in a wage-related class-action lawsuit. Records showed that government inspections found unsafe trucks with faulty steering and brakes at Five Star.

Five Star’s operators did not respond to detailed questions about the hauler’s record or the search of its corporate offices in Manhattan.

In 2017, the New York-based investment firm GPB Capital acquired Five Star Carting, now known as GPB Waste NY. InvestmentNews reported in December that GPB Capital was the target of investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. over the accuracy of its disclosures to investors. In September 2018, the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts announced a similar investigation. It remains uncertain if last week’s raid of Five Star was part of those probes or a separate issue.

On March 1, GPB Capital CEO David Gentile wrote a letter to investors: “For many months we have been taking steps to strengthen our business including enhancing our oversight and auditing practices. Recently, we have been cooperating with inquiries from various authorities and have been producing requested documents on a rolling basis.”

The FBI, SEC and BIC did not respond to requests for comment. Ray Pellecchia, a spokesman for FINRA, said, “We don’t comment on or confirm the existence of investigations.”

GPB Capital’s director of waste strategy is Rod Proto, former president and COO of Waste Management, who was fired in 1999 and then charged with insider trading by the SEC. In 2003, Proto agreed to pay a $3.7 million fine as well as to a five-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company. GPB Capital did not respond to questions about Proto’s role in the firm.

ProPublica has spent the last year investigating the world of private trash collection in New York City. By day, New York’s residential garbage is picked up by municipal workers. But come nightfall, private haulers collect the commercial trash, often working at breakneck speeds with few protections for workers. The reporting has shown many companies have troubled labor and safety records, with their trucks regularly ordered off the roads after failing federal inspections. It has uncovered the operations of so-called independent unions at many companies, outfits that workers and mainstream unions regard as sham operations working on behalf of the company owners to cut sweetheart deals that lock employees into jobs with low wages and poor benefits.

Like many major haulers, Five Star has a deal with an independent union, LIFE 890, which is currently the subject of a federal grand jury investigation. ProPublica found that two men connected to LIFE 890, including an officer of the union, are former trash company owners who were barred from the industry years ago.

Officials with LIFE 890 have not responded to repeated inquiries from ProPublica, including requests for comment on the grand jury investigation.

The New York City Council has launched an investigation of the BIC, the agency that oversees the industry. And last week, the council passed legislation that it says will improve work conditions and bolster labor protections in the industry, giving the BIC authority to directly police the unions at private trash companies.

Legislators and advocates have also been pushing a proposed plan for what is known as zoned waste collection, a broader reform of the private trash industry that is supported by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio. In November, the city’s Department of Sanitation released the outlines of a plan that would divide the city into 20 waste collection zones, with three to five companies per zone. Proponents of the plan argue that it would allow the city to hold companies to higher labor, safety and environmental standards.

Zoning legislation could be introduced as early as this spring.

Five Star has been a funder of New Yorkers for Responsible Waste Management, an industry lobbying arm formed in 2016. The group has waged a half-million dollar fight against the zoning proposal, saying it is unnecessary, would limit competition and would raise prices for thousands of businesses. NYRWM’s executive director, Kendall Christiansen, did not respond to questions about Five Star’s record but said the company was not currently a member of the trade group. Five Star’s most recent contribution to NYRWM was on Dec. 17, according to 2018 state lobbying disclosures.

“It is precisely because of companies like GPB/Five Star that New York City is undertaking wholesale reform of the private carting industry,” said Sean Campbell, president of Teamsters Local 813. “They have long been one of the industry’s worst actors, driving down wages and safety conditions for sanitation workers.”