As part of the latest COVID-19 relief package, the federal government has expanded the child tax credit and made it available to all families with children except those with the highest incomes. Families will get US$3,000 per kid ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for younger children. The Internal Revenue Service will deliver half of this money as monthly payments of either $250 or $300 during the second half of 2021 and the rest as a lump sum during the 2022 tax season.

If the government extends this benefit beyond the one year that’s currently funded, as many members of Congress and the Biden administration would like, this policy has the potential to dramatically cut child poverty by as much as 50%.

This kind of arrangement is already the norm in many countries, such as Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. As economists who have spent decades studying poverty, we believe it will have lasting benefits.

Long-term benefits

Many studies conducted in recent years show that lifting children from the burdens of poverty has the potential to improve their health and ability to get a good education.

For example, economist Chloe East found that when low-income families with young kids receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the children are less likely to miss school and more likely to be in good health as they get older.

A team of researchers who assessed the effects of reforms to cash welfare programs conducted in the 1990s similarly found that helping low-income families pay their bills leads to their kids’ doing better at school in the future.

Other studies have looked into what happened when low-income families with children wound up with more money through expansions in the earned income tax credit, or EITC – a benefit paid to workers with low levels of earnings that the government substantially expanded in the mid-1990s.

Researchers have found that this increased income was associated later on with students’ scoring higher on standardized tests and becoming more likely to graduate from high school and go to college, and in early adulthood they are more likely to have a job and earn higher wages.

Another study that one of us conducted with two other colleagues found that babies born to families benefiting from the EITC are healthier overall. Other research found that women who give birth while benefiting from the EITC have better physical and mental health.

And two of us conducted a study that detected better health in adulthood for people whose families benefited from the introduction of the food stamp program when they were children in the 1960s and early 1970s. Similarly, researchers have seen long-term improvements in terms of increased educational attainment among low-income children whose families received a type of basic income paid to members of the Eastern Cherokee tribal government out of casino profits.

When families with young children get access to cash welfare, that support has even been linked to higher earnings in adulthood and longer lives.

An incomplete fix

This entire body of research suggests that the benefits of alleviating poverty are significant when children get more money, food, health care and other resources early on, especially between conception and the age of 5.

To be sure, providing all but the wealthiest families who have children under 18 with extra cash will not begin to do away with all of the inequalities facing children in America. Nor will these payments ensure that all children ultimately have the same shot at good health, a great education or, down the road, opportunities to make a good living.

But we do believe that this policy, especially if it takes hold for the long term, will meaningfully improve millions of children’s lives and give them a much better start in life.

Among other things, it reverses a troubling trend. Since 1990, increases in federal spending aimed at benefiting children, including changes to the earned income tax credit, have often failed to assist the poorest families in a country where 1 in 7 children were languishing in poverty before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – After the U.S. Census Bureau announced preliminary data about congressional district apportionment today, Stand Up America Managing Director Christina Harvey released the following statement:

“As we kick off this very first step in drawing new district lines, it’s important to remind legislators and the public that voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around.

“What’s the best way to make sure they can do that? Passing the For the People Act—historic legislation that would end gerrymandering by creating national standards for drawing fair maps and returning power to independent, citizen-led commissions instead of politicians.

“Our votes should count equally in every single election, no matter our zip code or the party that happens to be controlling the legislature in our state—but today we’re reminded that the rules of redistricting are still rigged in far too many states to empower some voters and silence others.

“With the redistricting process soon to begin, time is of the essence—and Congress must act now before it’s too late.”

Stand Up America first endorsed the For the People Act in 2019 and has since driven over 20,0000 calls to Congress in support of the legislation. Earlier this year, the group announced a nationwide, grassroots campaign to mobilize its community members and the public to pressure the Senate to pass S. 1 without delay and not to let Republican senators block its passage by abusing the filibuster.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

More than 80 House Democrats on Monday urged the Biden administration to fulfill its “commitment to expand and improve Medicare” by including three provisions—broader eligibility, enhanced benefits, and strengthened drug-pricing powers—in its American Families Plan, a social spending and tax reform proposal set to be unveiled this week.

“As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic—the nation’s most acute healthcare crisis in the last century—now more than ever, we must ensure that families and older adults are equipped with the health coverage they need.”
—House Democrats’ Letter

In their letter (pdf) to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the lawmakers—led by Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Joe Neguse (Colo.), and Conor Lamb (Pa.)—wrote that “you have previously expressed commitments to expanding Medicare eligibility, improving its benefits package, and empowering Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies.”

“As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic—the nation’s most acute healthcare crisis in the last century—now more than ever, we must ensure that families and older adults are equipped with the health coverage they need,” the House Democrats continued.

Referring to a recent study conducted by researchers at Stanford University, who identified “a sudden jump in the diagnosis of cancer among individuals who reach the age of 65 due to the fact that many older adults delay care for financial reasons until they have Medicare coverage,” the lawmakers wrote that “lowering the Medicare age would provide immediate coverage for millions of older adults who are still uninsured or underinsured.”

“Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 could enable an additional 23 million people to access Medicare coverage,” the lawmakers added. “Meanwhile lowering the Medicare eligibility to 55 could expand Medicare coverage to over 40 million people. Expanding Medicare to these age groups is critical for addressing inequities in health coverage and access, as communities of color and low-income individuals are disproportionately more likely to be uninsured.”

The House Democrats noted that “there is also a critical need to improve the traditional Medicare benefit to include dental, vision, and hearing.” The letter continues:

According to the Commonwealth Fund, among Medicare beneficiaries, “75% of people who needed a hearing aid did not have one; 70% of people who had trouble eating because of their teeth did not go to the dentist in the past year; and 43% of people who had trouble seeing did not have an eye exam in the past year.” Poor oral health, vision loss, and hearing impairment have been independently linked to numerous negative health outcomes, such as diabetes, cardiovascular issues, depression, and dementia. Lastly, research shows that half of older adults who live alone don’t have enough money to cover even their basic needs. Therefore, it’s past time that we place an out-of-pocket spending cap to traditional Medicare, just as we have already for Medicare Advantage plans and other private insurance plans.

If the federal government were to fully utilize its immense bargaining power to reduce the costs of prescription medications, the lawmakers noted, the proposed Medicare expansion could be funded in part by the savings generated through drug price negotiations with pharmaceutical giants.

“The United States spends, by far, more on prescription drugs than any other country, despite Medicare Part D being the largest purchaser in the world,” the House Democrats wrote. “The Congressional Budget Office estimated Medicare could save over $450 billion and increase revenue by $45 billion over the next decade by requiring Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, we request that the savings achieved by robust Medicare drug-price negotiations be used to make critical expansions and improvements to Medicare, alongside other bold investments in health coverage and affordability.”

The House Democrats’ letter came one day after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and 16 Senate Democrats sent a similar letter to the White House in an attempt to influence the contents of Biden’s soon-to-be-unveiled American Families Plan, the second key component—following the American Jobs Plan, a $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal announced last month—of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda.

Biden’s American Families Plan “calls for devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to national child care, prekindergarten, paid family leave, and tuition-free community college, among other domestic priorities,” the Washington Post reported Saturday. “It will be at least partially funded by about a half-dozen tax hikes on high-income Americans and investors, proposed changes that are already provoking fierce opposition in Congress and on Wall Street.”

With the roughly $1.8 trillion proposal set to be released ahead of the president’s joint address to Congress on Wednesday, “White House officials spent much of the past week making refinements to the plan, showing the enormous pressure they are under to include or discard key items as they attempt to satisfy a range of competing voices,” the Post noted.

According to the newspaper:

In a potential last-minute change, White House officials as of Friday were planning to include about $200 billion to extend an increase in health insurance subsidies through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

Despite pressure from Democratic leadership, White House officials are also prepared to table a measure they had included in earlier drafts aimed at reducing consumer and government spending on prescription drugs, a measure fiercely opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, the people said. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been the key driver in Congress pushing for increased federal subsidies to private insurers under the Affordable Care Act in order to make the program created under the Obama administration more affordable and widely available, but Sanders and other progressive lawmakers have been leading the effort incorporate an expansion of Medicare in the American Families Plan.

Pelosi, however, is aligned with congressional progressives on the need to allow the federal government to rein in Big Pharma’s price-gouging, having recently announced the reintroduction of the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act.

According to the Post, Pelosi is urging the White House to include such a measure in the American Families Plan after it was revealed that the Biden administration is “set to scrap a plan included in earlier drafts of their proposal to include as much as $500 billion in savings from the prescription drug industry.”

Monday’s letter—which includes a wide range of House Democrats, from Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and other progressive stalwarts, to moderates like Golden and Lamb—makes clear that “expanding and improving Medicare is not only good and critically needed policy, it also has support from overwhelming bipartisan majorities of the American people.” 

According to recent polls, nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters are in favor of lowering the Medicare eligibility age, while almost 80% support adding routine dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare.

“Lowering the eligibility age and improving its benefits package would provide immediate and substantial relief for millions of individuals throughout the United States, as well as much-needed long-term security,” the lawmakers wrote. “Now is a historic opportunity to also make an important expansion of Medicare that will guarantee healthcare for millions of older adults and people with disabilities struggling with the health and economic realities of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“We are asking for you to prioritize the expansion and improvement of Medicare in the American Families Plan,” the House Democrats concluded. “We strongly support this investment and stand ready to help your administration make it a reality.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Biden administration has crafted two major legislative packages aimed at making our economy more equitable, sustainable, caring, and better prepared for future crises.

Last month, the president unveiled his American Jobs Plan, which requests about $2.3 trillion over eight years to modernize the nation’s infrastructure, with most of the costs to be covered by a corporate tax rate increase.

The job for progressives is to demand solutions that truly solve the staggering challenges of our time and that leave no one behind.

On April 28, Biden will unveil an American Families Plan, which is expected to include proposals for national child care, pre-K, paid family leave, and tuition-free community college, as well as an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit.

The approximately $1.8 trillion proposal would be at least partially funded by a set of taxes on the wealthy, including a significant increase in the capital gains rate for individuals earning more than $1 million per year. Biden has also vowed to beef up IRS enforcement of wealthy tax evaders.

Most leading progressives have welcomed Biden’s twin proposals while urging the administration and Congress to go further to meet the magnitude of the current moment.

The Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Progressive Change Action Fund issued a statement last week calling the Biden proposals “necessary but insufficient in scale and scope.”

More than 80 organizations, including labor, racial justice, consumer, fair tax, Wall Street reform, and other movement organizations endorsed the statement.

These progressive organizations said Biden’s economic plan “must be scaled up,” noting that it “falls short of the $7 trillion President Biden proposed on the campaign trail and well short of the at least $10 trillion over 10 years (3 percent of GDP annually) suggested by many advocates and experts to meet the extent of our country’s needs.”

The statement also urged the administration to go big in his American Families Plan to include “much-needed provisions on paid leave, child care, housing, drug pricing, Medicare expansion, higher education, immigration, unemployment insurance, poverty-reducing tax credits, and taxes on the wealthy — changes that would lead to greater economic security and opportunity for everyone.”

The fight over the size and scope of the legislation is already heating up in Congress.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Gov. Jay Inslee declared it “a good day in Washington state” after lawmakers on Sunday approved a 7% capital gains tax to fund public education.

Senate Bill 5096 passed in a 25-24 vote, and, according to Inslee, “will help us address our upside-down tax system.”

The measure imposes a 7% tax on the sale of stocks, bonds, or other capital assets where the profit exceeds $250,000. That revenue will “fund K-12 education, early learning, and child care, and advance our paramount duty to amply provide an education to every child in the state,” the bill states.

The raised funds will go to the Education Legacy Trust Account, with an annual cap on those deposits of $500 million. Any additional funds raised will be directed to the Common School Construction Account.

Democrats in the state Senate asserted that tax will hit only about 0.23% of taxpayers and will enable the state “to deliver the critical early learning services and care that our kiddos need for success—throughout school and life.”

The tax is expected to affect about 7,000 of the state’s residents. It has exemptions including all real estate, retirement accounts, livestock, agricultural land, fishing privileges, and family-owned small businesses.

Democratic state Sen. June Robinson, the bill’s sponsor, heralded its passage as an “important step to rebuild our unfair tax code [that] was taken after years of work, years of dialogue, and thousands of voices calling for this policy.”

“We’ve heard that people from every part of our state are ready to move toward a healthier, stronger future together,” said Robinson, “and it’s time for the wealthiest among us to pay their fair share for that future.”

According to the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, which provided research for the legislative proposal, the bill marks “a critical move toward fixing Washington state’s inequitable and racist tax code. It’s even more meaningful because it comes on the heels of another big win toward making our state tax code more progressive, the passage of the Working Families Tax Credit.” The group explained:

This is the most equitable change to Washington state’s upside-down tax code in nearly 90 years. Our regressive tax code currently relies on the people with the lowest incomes to pay the largest percentage of state and local taxes as a share of income. This has been especially damaging to people who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)—because they face higher average tax rates than wealthy white households as a result of racist policies, like redlining and employment discrimination, that have excluded them from access to wealth and opportunity. It has also prevented our state from having necessary resources to adequately invest in the needs of BIPOC communities. ESSB 5096 would be paid for almost entirely by wealthy white people who have benefited from policies and systems that channel resources to them, and it would increase their taxes by a mere 0.9%.

Meanwhile, taxing capital gains will not only increase investment in communities, but it will also help jumpstart our state economy and create nearly 20,000 jobs per year. The tax revenue will also help our state avoid the mistakes of the last recession by providing a permanent replacement for temporary federal recovery funds. This is a commonsense move to ensure there’s long-term funding when federal funding—which is an important bridge to recovery—runs out.

Declaring passage of Senate Bill 5096 a “victory,” the Cascadia Advocate, a publication of the Northwest Progressive Institute, cautioned, “Our work is not done, of course.” The group pointed to a potential legal challenge or “a challenge from the opposition in the form of an initiative to the people for 2021 or (more likely) an initiative to the legislature for 2022.”

For now, the bill now heads to Inslee, who said Sunday that it “has been one of my priorities for years.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – USDA today announced that the agency will be allowing states to provide Pandemic-EBT to low-income families through the summer months. Previously, the Pandemic-EBT program, which provides funds to families whose children qualify for free or reduced-price meals while schools are operating remotely, has been active during the school year only. Funding for the expanded Pandemic-EBT program has been provided through the American Rescue Plan. According to USDA, the program will provide approximately $375 to each of 30 million children to help their families purchase food throughout the summer.

In response to this administrative action, Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a nationwide nonpartisan direct service and advocacy organization, said:

“Expanding the Pandemic-EBT program to the summer is a wise and compassionate decision. It will ease child hunger, reduce the financial burden on parents, and create jobs in grocery stores. We are grateful that USDA recognizes that the most effective and efficient way to get nutritious food to kids during the summer is to provide their parents with the funds to purchase groceries. With programs and policies such as Pandemic-EBT, the child hunger rate in the U.S. will continue to decrease after a year when so many families and children struggled with food insecurity.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Civil rights attorneys today submitted a pair of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the federal government seeking information on the government’s use of force, including the use of pepper spray, to coerce Cameroonian asylum seekers in custody to sign their own deportation paperwork and the subsequent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flights to Cameroon that occurred in the waning days of the Trump administration.

The FOIAs were filed by human rights attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Project South, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and were informed by a grassroots coalition called the Alliance in Defense of Black Immigrants. Obtaining evidence and documentation of the abuses against Black immigrants will be critical to holding the government accountable and preventing future abuses, according to the attorneys. 

“I said I didn’t want to sign a deportation order,” said one of the Cameroonian asylum seekers, identified as D.F., in a civil rights complaint filed with the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG). “I said I am afraid to go back to my country. He [ICE agent] promised me he would torture me.”

“The harm inflicted upon Black immigrants, many of whom have since been deported to dangerous situations, can never be undone,” said Luz Lopez, a senior supervising attorney with the SPLC. “But these abuses cannot simply be swept under the rug with the change in government. If we are to take the new administration at their word that they are creating a more fair and humane immigration system, they must exercise transparency, cooperate with a full investigation, and work to ensure these abuses cannot occur in the future.”

The FOIAs, submitted to ICE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of State, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, request data and records of communication concerning the deportation of Cameroonian immigrants between August 1, 2020 and January 19, 2021.

In that period, immigration advocacy groups filed two civil rights complaints, detailing ICE’s violent and coercive tactics against Cameroonian asylum seekers. The CRCL complaints remain unresolved.

“The government’s mass deportations of Cameroonian and other Black immigrants is inhumane and targeted,” said Samah Sisay, an attorney and Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Black immigrants have consistently resisted their harsh and discriminatory confinement in immigration jails around the country through protests and hunger strikes and the government unlawfully deported them in retaliation for their resistance.”

Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal & Advocacy Director of Project South, said, “The government must atone for the appalling human rights abuses it has committed within its abominable immigrant prison and deportation apparatus. Black asylum seekers, many of whom faced political persecution in their home countries, referred to their deportation as a ‘death flight.’ These crimes against humanity are unforgivable, and we must never allow them to happen again.”

While some of the immigrants described in the complaints were removed from deportation flights, the government deported an unknown number of Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers despite the life-threatening situations they faced in their home countries, despite the fact that many still had pending immigration court proceedings, and despite the pleas from members of the Congress.

“We filed a civil rights complaint against ICE for abusing and torturing men in their detention center and ICE is secretly deporting these key witnesses in an effort to silence survivors and evade any accountability,” stated Sofia Casini, Director of Visitation Advocacy Strategies at Freedom for Immigrants, one of the groups that filed the civil rights complaints last year. “One of the men named in our complaint publicly alleged ICE agents and guards tortured him and, in turn, ICE swiftly placed him on a deportation flight. They moved to disappear him, despite his active OIG investigation taking place. This is part of a longstanding pattern and practice of ICE rapidly deporting key witnesses who have been tortured in their custody. ICE thrives off secrecy. And it’s high time that ICE be investigated and held accountable for these crimes.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Despite the fact that the global gross domestic product fell by nearly 5 percent because of the COVID-19 pandemic, military spending worldwide increased by almost 3 percent, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

SIPRI’s annual assessment released on Monday once again found the United States to be the world’s biggest spender, accounting for nearly 40 percent of overall expenditures. U.S. military spending in 2020 increased by 4.4 percent from 2019.

“The recent increases in U.S. military spending can be primarily attributed to heavy investment in research and development, and several long-term projects such as modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and large-scale arms procurement,” said SIPRI’s Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher with its Arms and Military Expenditure Program. “This reflects growing concerns over perceived threats from strategic competitors such as China and Russia, as well as the Trump administration’s drive to bolster what it saw as a depleted U.S. military.”

Marksteiner’s statement is illustrative of the flimsy arguments used in Washington to justify increasing the U.S. defense budget. 

For one thing, the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal does not have to come anywhere close to the proposed $1.3 trillion over the next 30 years. Part of that plan involves spending nearly $300 billion on nuclear armed missiles, or ICBMs, that we don’t even need (and may even make nuclear war more likely). 

And these “perceived threats” that Marksteiner refers to are just that: perceived—perceived by those who have an interest in creating threats and then selling weapons to counter them with. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Environmentalists and Florida residents voiced concern and outrage Monday as state government officials and the biotechnology giant Oxitec announced plans to move ahead this week with a pilot project that involves releasing up to a billion genetically engineered mosquitoes in Monroe County over a two-year period.

 “EPA has set the lowest possible bar for approving genetically engineered insects and has opened Pandora’s Box for future experiments that will slide through with little investigation.”
—Barry Wray, Florida Keys Environmental Coalition

Presented by local authorities as an effort to control the population of Aedes aegypti—a mosquito species that can carry both the dengue and yellow fever virus—critics warn that the effort’s supposed benefits and its potential negative consequences have not been sufficiently studied.

Responding to news that the first boxes of GE mosquitos are set to be placed in six locations in Monroe County this week, Friends of the Earth noted in a press release that “scientists have raised concerns that GE mosquitoes could create hybrid wild mosquitoes which could worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and could be more resistant to insecticides than the original wild mosquitoes.”

Dana Perls, food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth, called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—which approved the project last May—to “halt this live experiment immediately.”

“This is a dark moment in history,” said Perls. “The release of genetically engineered mosquitoes puts Floridians, the environment, and endangered species at risk in the midst of a pandemic. This release is about maximizing Oxitec’s profits, not about the pressing need to address mosquito-borne diseases.”

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District and Oxitec said late last week that “less than 12,000 mosquitoes are expected to emerge each week” in Monroe Country over a duration of around three months, the initial phase of the experiment.

The stated goal of the project is for Oxitec’s genetically altered, non-biting male mosquitos to mate with the local biting female population, producing female offspring that die in the larval stage before they can spread disease.

As the Miami Herald explained earlier this year: “A ‘death mechanism’ designed into mosquitoes is meant to ensure no viable female offspring will result from the mating, according to Oxitec. The male offspring will pass on the ‘self-limiting gene’ to half of their offspring, said company spokesman Ross Bethell.”

While Oxitec’s CEO claims “strong public support” from Florida Keys communities, the project has sparked protests and pushback from local residents since the proposal was first floated.

“My family’s bodies, blood, and private property are being used in this trial without human safety studies or my consent,” Mara Daly, a resident and local business owner in Key Largo, Florida, said in a statement Monday, Daly expressed concern about being bit by female mosquitoes carrying genetically engineered material.

Barry Wray, executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, added that the “EPA has set the lowest possible bar for approving genetically engineered insects and has opened Pandora’s Box for future experiments that will slide through with little investigation.”

“Everyone should be writing the White House to stop this release until there are regulations and standards that truly protect us,” Wray said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Environmentalists and Florida residents voiced concern and outrage Monday as state government officials and the biotechnology giant Oxitec announced plans to move ahead this week with a pilot project that involves releasing up to a billion genetically engineered mosquitoes in Monroe County over a two-year period.

 “EPA has set the lowest possible bar for approving genetically engineered insects and has opened Pandora’s Box for future experiments that will slide through with little investigation.”
—Barry Wray, Florida Keys Environmental Coalition

Presented by local authorities as an effort to control the population of Aedes aegypti—a mosquito species that can carry both the dengue and yellow fever virus—critics warn that the effort’s supposed benefits and its potential negative consequences have not been sufficiently studied.

Responding to news that the first boxes of GE mosquitos are set to be placed in six locations in Monroe County this week, Friends of the Earth noted in a press release that “scientists have raised concerns that GE mosquitoes could create hybrid wild mosquitoes which could worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and could be more resistant to insecticides than the original wild mosquitoes.”

Dana Perls, food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth, called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—which approved the project last May—to “halt this live experiment immediately.”

“This is a dark moment in history,” said Perls. “The release of genetically engineered mosquitoes puts Floridians, the environment, and endangered species at risk in the midst of a pandemic. This release is about maximizing Oxitec’s profits, not about the pressing need to address mosquito-borne diseases.”

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District and Oxitec said late last week that “less than 12,000 mosquitoes are expected to emerge each week” in Monroe Country over a duration of around three months, the initial phase of the experiment.

The stated goal of the project is for Oxitec’s genetically altered, non-biting male mosquitos to mate with the local biting female population, producing female offspring that die in the larval stage before they can spread disease.

As the Miami Herald explained earlier this year: “A ‘death mechanism’ designed into mosquitoes is meant to ensure no viable female offspring will result from the mating, according to Oxitec. The male offspring will pass on the ‘self-limiting gene’ to half of their offspring, said company spokesman Ross Bethell.”

While Oxitec’s CEO claims “strong public support” from Florida Keys communities, the project has sparked protests and pushback from local residents since the proposal was first floated.

“My family’s bodies, blood, and private property are being used in this trial without human safety studies or my consent,” Mara Daly, a resident and local business owner in Key Largo, Florida, said in a statement Monday, Daly expressed concern about being bit by female mosquitoes carrying genetically engineered material.

Barry Wray, executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, added that the “EPA has set the lowest possible bar for approving genetically engineered insects and has opened Pandora’s Box for future experiments that will slide through with little investigation.”

“Everyone should be writing the White House to stop this release until there are regulations and standards that truly protect us,” Wray said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The pictures coming back from India—and the world’s worst COVID-19 outbreak since the pandemic was declared over a year ago—look more like images from a medieval Black Death plague than anything you’d expect to see in the 21st century. In Delhi and other large cities, parking lots and other open spaces have been overtaken by rows of flaming funeral pyres and heaps of human ashes, as the planet’s second largest nation fails to keep pace with its dead.

“No one in Delhi would have ever witnessed such a scene,” Jitender Singh Shunty, a medical official in that city, told Reuters, as he wept. “Children who were 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old are being cremated. Newlyweds are being cremated. It’s difficult to watch.”

The only thing, arguably, that’s more difficult to watch are the scenes in and around India’s overwhelmed hospitals, where emergency rooms are sites of sheer chaos and the streets outside are packed with the dying, struggling to breathe as administrators plead on Twitter for dwindling supplies of oxygen. One journalist essentially live-tweeted his own death, as his oxygen levels plunged into the 50s (95-plus is normal) and then the 30s—yet hospitals were unable to admit him before he succumbed. Swati Maliwal, a Delhi politician, tweeted that her grandfather had died while waiting outside a hospital. “I kept standing there for half hour and pleading for admission and nothing happened. Shame! Pathetic!”

The numbers are staggering—daily reported cases have spiked over 300,000, a record for any nation in the pandemic, as India reported a daily death count as high as 2,624. But journalists who’ve independently counted those funeral pyres and other indicators say the real toll could be 10 times higher than that. India had raced to reopen—with huge crowds at sporting events, political rallies and religious festivals—when case counts were low in March, and was unprepared for a deadly new variant of the virus. Meanwhile, the nation’s vaccine pace has actually slowed—fewer than 10% of its 1.4 billion people have received a shot—and Indian officials have started begging the United States, the world leader in vaccine innovation and supply, for help.

But so far, the response from the Biden administration to India’s desperate pleas—not to mention global demands for patent waivers that could speed the flow of vaccines to less-developed nations—has been shockingly underwhelming. Things can—and should—change rapidly, but so far the tone-deaf U.S. response more closely echoes the heartless rejection of Nazi-era Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis than the times America found its better angels and raced humanitarian aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti or even an adversary in Iran.

“We have a special responsibility to the American people,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday when pressed on whether the U.S. would lift a ban on importing raw materials for vaccines to India. “It’s, of course, not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated, it’s in the interests of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated.”

No one can deny there has been an urgent need to inoculate America—an epicenter of the world pandemic for more than a year—but at this moment where vaccine hesitancy in Trump-y red states and counties is becoming a bigger U.S. problem than vaccine supply, Team Biden has been painfully slow to switch to a globalist, humanitarian mode. In Price’s words, it’s hard not to hear a phrase that has dragged down our nation since Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

America First.

Take a step back and—with the 46th president about to mark his milestone 100th day in office—we can see a troubling pattern that’s starting to become a bad look for a presidency that’s been quite successful in so many other areas.

In 2020, Joe Biden the candidate promised an anxious electorate that America could again become a moral leader in the world community, even on the difficult questions posed by the fierce urgency of the coronavirus. Last July, when the progressive activist Ady Barkan interviewed Biden and asked him specifically about sharing U.S. breakthrough vaccine technology with the world, the then-Democratic nominee answered, “[Y]es, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.” But more than three months into Biden’s presidency, with India and other countries seeking that patent waiver, the answer so far has been no, no, no, no, no.

If this broken promise sounds depressingly familiar, it should. When 2020 presidential candidate Biden was promising suburban swing voters that he’d restore America’s tarnished image as a beacon of hope for immigrants, he specifically promised a dramatic hike in the annual cap on admitting refugees through political asylum, which Trump had shrunk to an unthinkable low. Since Jan. 20, however, the Biden administration stalled, then said they’d keep the cap at Trump’s abysmal level of just 15,000, then backed off after a progressive outcry—all with the end result that 2021 probably won’t offer much relief to huddled masses seeking American freedom.

The Biden pattern is becoming clear. When a policy clearly and directly aids the American middle class—relief checks, child tax credits, building roads and fixing bridges—Team Biden is all in, willing to leverage his thinnest of Democratic majorities in Congress to get the large-scale programs they feel the nation needs. But policies aimed at restoring America’s global citizenship—admitting refugees, or foreign aid to end a global pandemic—that are easy to bash with Fox News chyrons or by the GOP loons who wanted to form an “America First” caucus seem to have Biden and his top advisers terrified of the “optics.” Playing that angle—let’s not watch a Fox-fired flap over vaccine aid, or the border, kill our chance at an infrastructure bill—is a political strategy. But it’s not a moral one, and a Biden brand of “America First Lite” will undermine him in the long run.

Seeing people dying in the streets of India should be the wake-up call. And in the present crisis, there are ways to quickly help a South Asian ally that make sense and won’t seriously hamper our push to crush COVID-19 in the United States. Specifically:

Vaccine doses. Currently the United States is sitting on a large stockpile—at least 20 million to 30 million doses, maybe more—of the AstraZeneca vaccine that’s been approved for use in India and 70 other nations, even though its maker hasn’t even applied for emergency U.S. approval as the nation aims for full vaccination by the summer. So far, the Biden administration has resisted calls to transfer these doses, or others, even as America moves toward oversupply.

Raw material. India is actually the world’s largest overall manufacturer of vaccines, but production of COVID-19 shots has lagged for a lack of raw materials. Again, the United States has a surplus, and, again, the Biden administration has failed to take action to change that status quo under the Defense Production Act that requires our domestic firms get these materials first. “By stockpiling vaccines & blocking the export of crucial raw materials needed for vaccine production, the United States is undermining the strategic Indo-US partnership,” Milind Deora, a politician from Mumbai, tweeted last week.

Patent waivers. More broadly, vaccine production and shots administered could ramp up worldwide if the Biden administration—and our allies in Europe and elsewhere, who tend to follow our lead—agree to a waiver from the World Trade Organization, or WTO, to free the intellectual property rights to the vaccines. So far, the U.S. default position of protecting the interests of our wildly profitable Big Pharma giants has trumped our moral duty to the world.

It’s bad enough that Biden isn’t living up to his campaign promises. But the failures on global coronavirus policy—if they persist—will have real-world consequences. In the short run, watching COVID-19 spiral out of control in India or—heaven forbid—elsewhere will also hurt Americans in material ways, dragging down the world’s economy and maintaining travel restrictions, etc. The long-term implications could be worse. Ironically, the State Department’s Price’s cold rejection of sharing vaccine ingredients came on the same day Biden was holding a summit seeking global cooperation on reducing carbon pollution, a life or death matter for Planet Earth. But why should other nations listen when Biden plays deaf on COVID-19 aid?

More depressingly, this debacle shows that kicking Trump out of the White House hasn’t fully lifted America out of the brain fog that he and his 74 million or so supporters have brought down on our nation. Trump’s shock victory in 2016 around “Build the wall!” xenophobia clearly has made Team Biden gun-shy about taking down the psychological walls that we’ve erected the last five years. But boasts that “America is back!” will sound empty until they find that courage.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay this way. On refugees, the Biden administration was quick to at least announce a change in direction when progressives and other everyday folks spoke out and said maintaining Trump’s policies was unconscionable. Now it’s time to do the same on the crisis in India and other nations.

Indeed, the second I completed a first draft of this column, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced a new aid package for India that includes some raw material and money to produce 1 billion doses by the end of the year. That’s a good start, but we could do much more. I strongly urge the Biden administration to use America’s extra doses, our resources and our know-how to stop the deaths and the devastation, and I hope that all good Americans will join me.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Capping off a month that has already featured more than 40 mass shootings across the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a National Rifle Association-backed challenge to a New York state gun control law—triggering new calls for Democrats to urgently “expand the court.”

Slate staff writer Mark Joseph Stern, who covers courts and the law, pointed out in a series of tweets Monday that “this case is likely to pave the way to the Supreme Court declaring a constitutional right to concealed public carry, overriding many state and local restrictions on the ability to bear concealed arms in public.”

“Congress and the White House can prioritize court expansion, adding liberal justices to prevent the current six–three majority from eradicating gun safety laws. Or they can watch as the majority exacerbates the nation’s epidemic of gun violence by imposing a vision of the Second Amendment that data has indicated leads to more handgun-related homicides,” Stern added in an article Monday. “The choice has never been so clear. And the stakes can be measured in human lives.”

The potentially landmark case, according to SCOTUSblog, “will be argued in the fall, with a decision expected sometime next year.”

The justices’ decision to take up the case comes just weeks after President Joe Biden announced six initial actions to begin tackling the nation’s “gun violence public health epidemic” and signed an executive order to establish a 36-member commission that will analyze arguments for and against reforming the high court.

Shortly after Biden’s move to create a commission—which controversially includes George Mason University Law School professor and Federalist Society contributor Adam White—Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) joined with Reps. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) to introduce a bill to expand the court by four seats, bringing the total to 13. If passed, the Judiciary Act of 2021 would allow Biden to restore a left-leaning majority, depending on his appointments.

After the court’s announcement about the gun case, progressives reiterated support for expanding the nation’s top court.

Referencing recent shootings and demands for stricter gun laws at the federal level, Elie Mystal, The Nation‘s justice correspondent, wrote in late March that “regardless of the outcome in Congress, the conservative-controlled Supreme Court will not allow us to have commonsense gun regulation, let alone any ambitious, progressive legislation to get guns off the streets, like they do in other countries that don’t have mass shootings every other day.”

Mystal continued:

Democrats (and Americans who don’t want to be shot to death) lost the gun battle when [then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky] stole a seat on the court in 2016. They lost the war when [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may her memory be a blessing, didn’t live until January 20, 2021. There is no new gun regulation or reform that can survive six bloodthirsty conservatives on the Supreme Court, just like there is no way to “win” a game of Russian roulette when there are six bullets in the revolver.

In fact, far from upholding whatever newly passed law that’s ineffectual enough to survive a filibuster (you know, the same filibuster Democrats refuse to kill), the Supreme Court is poised to go in the other direction and dismantle what gun regulations we already have.

Sharing the piece in a pair of tweets Monday, Mystal wrote that “Democrats COULD put 10 more justices on the court to STOP THIS MADNESS… but nooo, Democrats want to pass gun reform *legislation* as if there a chance in hell this Supreme Court would uphold anything coming out of the Biden administration.”

Noting the impact of Biden’s predecessor appointing three justices in his single term, Demand Justice executive director Brian Fallon issued a warning to policymakers on Monday: “Expand the court or let [former President] Donald Trump’s justices make our mass shooting epidemic even worse.”

This case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, will address whether the state’s denial of two men’s applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment. New York state law requires anyone who wants a license to carry a handgun outside their home to show a “proper cause.”

“California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have similar laws,” reported the New York Times, citing gun rights groups. “Federal appeals courts have generally rejected challenges to such restrictions,” including the 2nd Circuit in this case, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

After Amazon waged an aggressive propaganda and intimidation campaign to successfully stave off unionization at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama earlier this month, the labor movement and its allies are now making progress in an effort to pass landmark legislation that would give workers across the country a fair shot at forming a union.

Passed by the Democratic-led House of Representatives in March and supported by President Joe Biden, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would dramatically reform labor law in the United States. Among other measures, it would prevent private-sector employers from using the kinds of underhanded anti-union tactics recently on display in Bessemer, and would also strengthen unions by banning right-to-work laws. And now just three Democratic senators stand in the way of it coming to the Senate floor for a vote. 

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) is spearheading a campaign to get the legislation to President Biden’s desk, backed by a coalition that includes 180 unions, 50 state labor federations and building trades councils, environmental groups like the Sunrise Movement and progressive advocacy networks like Indivisible. 

When the House sent the PRO Act to the Senate last month, the bill had the endorsement of all but five of the 50 senators who sit on the Democratic side of the aisle— West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Maine’s Angus King, Virginia’s Mark Warner, and Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema. 

But in just the past week, amid growing grassroots pressure, King and Manchin have signed on as co-sponsors. They reversed their position in large part thanks to a massive phone-banking drive organized by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which so far has made over 525,000 calls and sent 134,000 texts in the five senators’ home states. 

King’s office was reportedly ​“inundated” with phone calls about the PRO Act in the weeks before he decided to change course, as was Manchin’s. As one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate and a key swing vote, Manchin’s about-face is particularly significant for the campaign.

“The PRO Act has bipartisan support from the American people. We believe the pace of our campaign reflects that,” said IUPAT general vice president Jim Williams. ​“We’re glad that Senator Manchin and Senator King have come on board in the last week and we fully anticipate the remaining senators will in the near future.”

With Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pledging to bring the PRO Act to the Senate floor if it boasts 50 co-sponsors, only three Democratic senators now stand in the way of advancing the historic labor law reform: Warner, Kelly and Sinema.

Warner, the second wealthiest senator after Mitt Romney, received nearly $45,000 in campaign contributions from Amazon executives including Jay Carney and Dave Clark in the most recent election cycle. For her part, Sinema recently drew the ire of progressives after voting against the $15 minimum wage with an enthusiastic ​“thumbs down.”

Kelly—a former astronaut and Sinema’s fellow Arizonan—is up for reelection in 2022. He voted in favor of the $15 minimum wage and supports some progressive legislation like the For the People Act, which would expand voting rights. Winning Kelly’s support for the PRO Act is considered especially crucial, since it is widely believed Sinema won’t get on board before he does.

If Kelly, Sinema and Warner are successfully pressured into co-sponsoring the bill, its most likely path to the president’s desk would be through reforming the filibuster—a move endorsed by the AFL-CIO that Biden recently came out in favor of. Short of that, the legislation would need the support of at least ten Republican Senators to pass, which is highly unlikely.

Demonstrating his commitment to the PRO Act, Biden has included it as part of his $2.2 trillion infrastructure package, which Senate Democrats may attempt to pass through budget reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian, however, could scuttle the effort by saying that labor law reform should not be passed through reconciliation, the same problem that helped stymie the $15 minimum wage in February.

Well aware of these obstacles, the coalition to pass the PRO Act is preparing to ramp up the pressure. The AFL-CIO is planning a week of action beginning April 26 and culminating on May Day, which will kick off a summer of organizing and mobilizing to get the legislation across the finish line. Organizers say over 1,000 events to demand passage of the PRO Act are scheduled all over the country as part of the week of action, including rallies, town halls and car caravans. 

“We’re going to dig our heels in and get to work,” Williams said. ​“Our coalition will continue to mobilize the working class in this country to fight for the PRO Act.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Last week, 40 world governments gathered to participate in the Biden Administration’s first step onto the international climate stage. The Leaders Summit on Climate took place on April 22nd- 23rd. The summit saw global heads-of-state make big promises on carbon emission reduction, but the biggest red flag from climate activists is the overall lack of explicit commitments to stop financing fossil fuel projects, one of the key areas to transition away from fossil fuel energy. 

Global: Agnes Hall, Global Campaigns Director at 350.org said:

“There can be no meaningful climate action if world leaders don’t make a decisive move to keep all fossil fuels in the ground. It’s one thing to make climate goals, but governments simply can’t afford to keep on funding the flames by pouring money into subsidizing coal, oil, and gas. The Biden Summit is a critical meeting of world leaders ahead of COP26 this November. Talk of “net-zero” emissions won’t cut it: we demand more from our world leaders than the false promises, false solutions, and empty negotiations we heard at Biden’s Climate Summit. The task now is to hold politicians to their lofty words,  and to do that the global climate movement needs to keep up the pressure on our governments at home as well as on the international stage to take urgent action now to reduce carbon emissions and ensure a Just Recovery from the global COVID-19, economic and climate crises by creating a sustainable, fossil-free world ”. 

Pacific: 350.org Pacific Managing Director Joseph Sikulu said:

“In a world recovering from COVID-19 and the climate crisis, governments need to quickly divest from the fossil fuel industry and begin investing in a just recovery for all. Countries with high emissions, such as the United States and Australia, must stop subsidizing oil, gas and coal and direct their investments toward clean and just renewable energy so that we can limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees.

To date, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not announced a concrete plan to reduce emissions. Instead, he thinks that fossil fuel companies can solve the climate crisis, which is a massive irony. The Summit is an excellent opportunity for him and other leaders to look on the leadership of the Marshall Islands – the only Pacific island nation present. Australia must recognize that they have few options: either catch up by COP26 or remain a climate laggard who contributes to climate disaster.”

Japan: 350.org Japan Finance Campaigner Eri Watanabe said:

“This goal is highly insufficient if we want to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the warming of the Earth to 1.5 degrees. I strongly urge the Japanese government to set a more ambitious target with a minimum of a 62% reduction from 2013’s emissions. This is based on research published by Climate Action Tracker.

This target may be higher than previously at a 26% reduction, but if we look closely – this is a numbers game1. Compared to the United Kingdom’s and European Union’s targets, which are 78% in 2035 and 55% in 2030 respectively compared to emission levels in 1990, Japan’s target is much lower.

When the Paris Agreement was signed, we agreed that there were “common but differentiated responsibilities” across the world. As the world’s fifth-highest emitting country with a large number of historic emissions, Japan owes the world a carbon debt. This makes it necessary for our country to reduce as much carbon emissions as possible — or more than half of 2010’s emissions in order to be a solution to the climate crisis. We must start urgently setting bold and ambitious targets, and strengthening the measures necessary to achieve them. 

One of the policies urgently needed is a rapid phase-out of coal infrastructure. Another to direct Japanese banks to rule out fossil finance. Japan is the biggest lender to the global coal industry, and they must cut the flow of money to reduce their emissions.

Only if Japan government walks the talk, can they show climate leadership.”

Bangladesh: 350.org Organizer Shibayan said:

“We are heartened by the Chair’s response and his ambitious goals of targeting a 100% renewable transition by 2050. For Bangladesh to have a just recovery from the twin crises of COVID-19 and climate change, this transition away from coal must exclude gas, and bring about a Green New Deal focusing on clean and just energy such as solar and wind. At the upcoming Leaders Summit for Climate, we hope to see countries that have built their wealth based on fossil fuels such as the US working hand in hand with the most affected countries such as Bangladesh. World leaders must start cooperating and sharing resources to combat the climate crisis. They need to act now, while there is still time.”

Africa: Landry Ninteretse, the Africa Director of 350.org said:

“During the virtual summit, the world’s major economies will share their efforts to reduce emissions during this critical decade to keep a limit to warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.

“1.5 degrees is our global beacon for climate action. The safety and wellbeing of millions of Africans depend on keeping below it. But it is slipping from our grasp and we need to urgently halve global emissions by 2030, which means that we need to limit fossil fuel consumption and stop new developments such as the EACOP and Mozambique LNG projects that threaten this climate ambition.

Fixing the climate crisis requires more than simply cutting carbon; we need bold action that prioritizes alternative sources of energy that meet the needs of the people and accelerate investments in real climate solutions with the aim of driving a fast and sustainable transition away from fossil fuels.”

 Canada: Amara Possian, Canada Campaigns Director with 350.org said:

“The problem with Justin Trudeau’s new climate pledge can be summed up in two words – fossil fuels. Neither Trudeau’s new climate plan, nor his budget, nor this new climate promise include a plan to tackle soaring emissions from tar sands, fracking and other fossil fuel expansion that makes Canada the only G7 country whose emissions have gone up since signing the Paris Agreement. Canada needs to cut our emissions at least 60% by 2030 and pass legislation like a Just Transition Act to make sure we meet our Paris commitment and leave no one behind.  

“Since Justin Trudeau won’t act at the pace and scale of the climate emergency, we need the NDP and the Greens to form a Climate Emergency Alliance ahead of the next election to push Canada to set ambitious targets and follow-through with the policies to meet them. It’s not too late for Canada to do what’s necessary, but we can’t afford four more years of Trudeau’s status quo.” 

United States: Natalie Mebane, U.S. Policy Director of 350.org said:

“On Day 1 in office, Biden canceled Keystone XL. Now he must follow through on his promises and do the same with Line 3, the Dakota Access pipeline, and all new fossil fuel projects. A 50% emissions reduction falls short of the United States’ fair share and should be seen as the floor, not the ceiling. Ambitious climate action requires keeping all fossil fuels in the ground. Biden must show the world that the U.S. is serious about tackling the climate crisis at scale, centering communities most impacted, and creating millions of good, green jobs in the process.” 

Brazil: Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org, based in Curitiba, said:

“Bolsonaro lied when he said that Brazil is at the forefront of the climate efforts. It may have been true someday, but not in his government, which has been consistently attacking the policies and state agencies necessary to stop deforestation and lead the energy transition. He talked much about the past achievements of Brazil and too little about the future, not to mention that in the present, his environmental record is a disaster.”

“In the days before the Climate Summit, there was an impressive flow of open letters and social media campaigns in Brazil asking President Biden not to close any agreement with President Bolsonaro without hearing the Brazilian civil society first, and it seems to have worked. There is a very justified concern, based on the current attitude of the Brazilian government towards the environment, that no matter what the Bolsonaro government promises, it will be just empty words, and that an agreement with the US would end up endorsing the destruction of the Amazon and other biomes.”

“Brazil has the potential to be a global leader in the efforts to solve the climate crisis, and in fact it has been a very important voice in this conversation for many years, since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. However, the Bolsonaro government shrank Brazil’s ability to take climate action, by dismantling major policies against deforestation in the Amazon and threatening conservation in Indigenous Lands and Protected Areas. The key to take Brazil back to its leading role in the climate efforts is to empower and support the civil society, especially Indigenous leaders, and strengthen community-based solutions as opposed to ignoring or even encouraging the irresponsible expansion of mining and agribusiness, as President Bolsonaro has been doing”, said Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org. 

Argentina: Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner said:

“What stood out in President Fernández’s speech was the fact that he did not mention any change in the government’s policies of investment in the expansion of oil and gas extraction in the Vaca Muerta area. Taxpayers’ money has been subsidizing a highly ineffective and environmental harmful operation, which benefits a few foreign companies and brings no development to the country or even the region where it is based. These billion dollars wasted every year in fossil fuels should be redirected to policies of energy transition, that are able to create more jobs in a moment when Argentinians desperately need it”, said Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner in Argentina.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Let’s acknowledge at the outset that corporate liberal media—owned and sponsored by the mightiest economic forces in our society—have increased their talk about race and racism in recent years, especially since the rise of Trump. 

They’ve even learned to throw around the phrase “systemic racism”—while avoiding scrutiny of the corporate systems that propel and reinforce racism. 

The view of the world projected by such coverage is typically that of victims without victimizers. Although it’s acknowledged that Black people and other people of color are consistently at the bottom of the caste system, there’s no examination of the powerful interests that put them there—the profiteers who, for so many generations, have had their knees on the necks of poor people of color.

Chauvin has played a useful role for corporate media—a rare villain who could be identified and named, a symbol of deadly racism in news outlets that are structured to refrain from identifying the economic forces responsible for far more hardship and death in communities of color than Chauvin could ever inflict.

Enter killer-in-uniform Derek Chauvin. 

Let me be clear that I’m heartened by the media coverage of George Floyd’s murder, and even more heartened by the mass protests that erupted in the wake of that murder. But Chauvin’s willful, sadistic, public execution of a handcuffed Black man ended the beloved life of a single individual. 

At the same time, Chauvin has played a useful role for corporate media—a rare villain who could be identified and named, a symbol of deadly racism in news outlets that are structured to refrain from identifying the economic forces responsible for far more hardship and death in communities of color than Chauvin could ever inflict. 

Even before COVID, for example, we knew that the profit-driven U.S. healthcare system was causing the premature deaths of people of color, with substandard care leading to 260 premature African-American deaths every day by one estimate. Mainstream media will occasionally show us the victims of inadequate healthcare, but they never identify the villains—those powerful corporate interests that have lobbied so hard for so long to ensure that we live in the only “advanced” country on earth without universal health coverage.

 If you watch the network newscasts on ABC/NBC/CBS and count the commercials, you’ll notice that the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry is the number 1 sponsor.

Let’s turn from healthcare to housing. We have a homeless crisis far worse than any other advanced industrial country. Gentrification in major cities disproportionately causes the evictions of people of color. Our longstanding housing crisis was made worse by the “Great Recession” begun in 2007, which most affected homeowners of color and African Americans in particular—a disaster sparked by a handful of greedy Wall Street firms and their allies in Washington. 

Unlike Chauvin, not one of these Wall Street criminals was given a televised trial. Corporate media sometimes showed us the victims of the housing crisis, but hardly ever their victimizers—and the policymakers behind the Great Recession, like Robert Rubin, are still served up as media experts today. 

Wall Street banks aren’t just major sponsors of news media. They’re also major donors to politicians of both parties, heavily to Democrats. So are big urban real estate interests responsible for gentrification—donating to Democratic officials who might criticize “systemic racism” while consistently enabling it.

Black, Latinx and Native American communities are the ones hit hardest by pollution, cancer-causing refineries, and extraction. Death and disease have flourished, but the polluting corporations responsible don’t go on trial—and mainstream media rarely name the politically-connected perpetrators. Indeed, oil and gas companies have long been major sponsors of media, including “public broadcasting,” and coverageoften reflects that coziness. 

With his knee on George Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin became a symbol of racism for mainstream media, but he’s a mere symptom of the deadly problem of systemic racism. 

The main perpetrators and beneficiaries of systemic racism—whether in healthcare, housing, environmental pollution, employment, education or criminal justice—include powerful corporations that sponsor news outlets that have aimed a bright spotlight at this killer cop.     

It’s no surprise those corporations don’t get the mainstream media spotlight they deserve.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, worldwide military spending rose to nearly $2 trillion in 2020, according to an analysis published Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Global military expenditure in 2020—estimated to have reached $1.98 trillion—was 2.6% higher than in 2019 and 9.3% higher than in 2011, according to SIPRI’s new report (pdf). A 2020 bump in military budgets was observed in Africa (5.1%), Europe (4.0%), the Americas (3.9%), and Asia and Oceania (2.5%). The Middle East was the only regional exception, where there was a 6.5% decrease in military spending in the 11 countries for which data is available.

SIPRI researcher Diego Lopes da Silva told AFP that last year’s growth in world military expenditure, which coincided with a 4.4% decline in global gross domestic product, was unexpected.

“Because of the pandemic, one would think military spending would decrease,” he said. “But it’s possible to conclude with some certainty that Covid-19 did not have a significant impact on global military spending, in 2020 at least.”

Given that military spending continued to escalate during an economic downturn, SIPRI found that the “global military burden,” or military expenditure as a share of GDP, grew from 2.2% to 2.4%—the largest annual increase since the 2009 financial crisis.

A substantial percentage of global military spending in 2020 was driven by a handful of countries. According to SIPRI’s analysis of the data, 62% of the world’s military expenditure was attributable to just five countries—the United States, China, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom. 

When the military budgets of Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea are added to the tally, these 10 countries accounted for $1.48 trillion, or 75%, of the world’s total military expenditure last year.

With a military budget of $778 billion in 2020, the U.S. alone was responsible for 39% of the world’s total military expenditure last year.

Although other top spenders all increased their military budgets last year—China (1.9%), India (2.1%), Russia (2.5%), and the U.K. (2.9%)—the U.S. continued to lead the surge in militarism, spending 4.4% more in 2020 than in 2019.

Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher at SIPRI, said in a statement that three consecutive years of increased U.S. military spending “reflects growing concerns over perceived threats from strategic competitors such as China and Russia, as well as the Trump administration’s drive to bolster what it saw as a depleted U.S. military.”

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, according to the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project. In addition, military spending accounts for more than half of the federal discretionary budget, even as U.S. voters support reallocating a portion of the Pentagon budget to healthcare, education, housing, and renewable energy.

SIPRI noted in its report that while “military spending rose globally, some countries explicitly reallocated part of their planned military spending to pandemic response, such as Chile and South Korea,” which is precisely what U.S. campaigners have been urging President Joe Biden and Congress to do.

Despite growing demands made by progressive lawmakers and activists to redirect funds from the Pentagon to impoverished communities nationwide to promote human and environmental flourishing, Biden earlier this month requested an even bigger military budget than the one approved last year.

While the White House has been provided with specific proposals for how to slash the Pentagon budget and actually improve national security, Lopes da Silva said the Biden administration “has not given any indications that it will reduce military spending.”

As Carley Towne, co-director of the anti-war group CodePink and coordinator of the Defund the Pentagon campaign, stressed last month, “Cutting the Pentagon budget and reinvesting in the needs of our communities is not only morally necessary, it’s also urgent if we’re going to address the biggest threat that faces our planet: climate change.”

“The Pentagon is the world’s single largest consumer of oil and one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters,” Towne added. “If we’re going to take the future of our planet seriously, we need to cut the Pentagon budget now.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

On May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021—the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the date Joe Biden has chosen for the same—as, in essence, the very moment when its teenage years will be over.

The military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

In all that time, Washington has been fighting what, in reality, should have been considered a fantasy war, a mission impossible in that country, however grim and bloody, based on fantasy expectations and fantasy calculations, few of which seem to have been stanched in Washington even so many years later. Not surprisingly, Biden’s decision evoked the predictable reactions in that city. The military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

The latter began the day before the president even went public when, in a major opinion piece, the Washington Post’s editorial board distilled the predictable platitudes to come: such a full-scale military exit, they claimed, would deprive Washington of all diplomatic influence and convince the Taliban that it could jettison its talks with President Ashraf Ghani’s demoralized U.S.-backed government and fight its way to power. A Taliban triumph would, in turn, eviscerate democracy and civil society, leaving rights gained by women and minorities in these years in the dust, and so destroy everything the U.S. had fought for since October 2001.

By this September, of course, 775,000-plus Americans soldiers will have served in Afghanistan (a few of them the children of those who had served early in the war). More than a fifth of them would endure at least three tours of duty there! Suffice it to say that most of the armchair generals who tend to adorn establishment think tanks haven’t faced such hardships.

In 2010 and 2011, the Obama surge would deploy as many as 100,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon states that, as of this month, 2,312 American soldiers have died there (80% killed in action) and 20,666 have been injured. Then there’s the toll taken on vets of that never-ending war thanks to PTSD, suicide, and substance abuse. Military families apart, however, much of the American public has been remarkably untouched by the war, since there’s no longer a draft and Uncle Sam borrowed money, rather than raising taxes, to foot the $2.26 trillion bill. As a result, the forever war dragged on, consuming blood and treasure without any Vietnam War-style protests.

Not surprisingly, most Americans know even less about the numbers of Afghan civilians killed and wounded in these years. Since 2002, at least 47,000 non-combatants have been killed and another 43,000 injured, whether by airstrikes, artillery fire, shootings, improvised explosive devices, or suicide and car bombings. A 2020 U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan notes that 2019 was the sixth straight year in which 10,000 civilians were killed or wounded. And this carnage has occurred in one of the world’s poorest countries, which ranks 187th in per-capita income, where the death or incapacitation of an adult male (normally the primary breadwinner in a rural Afghan home) can tip already-poor families into destitution.

So how, then, can the calls to persevere make sense? Seek and you won’t find a persuasive answer. Consider the most notable recent attempt to provide one, the Afghanistan Study Group report, written by an ensemble of ex-officials, retired generals, and think-tank luminaries, not a few of them tied to big weapons-producing companies. Released with significant fanfare in February, it offered no substantive proposals for attaining goals that have been sought for 19 years, including a stable democracy with fair elections, a free press, an unfettered civil society, and equal rights for all Afghans—all premised on a political settlement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

Still Standing After All These Years

Now, consider Afghanistan’s bedrock reality: the Taliban, which has battled the world’s most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas. The U.S., its NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces have indeed killed some 50,000 Taliban fighters over the years, including, in 2016, its foremost leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor. In 2019-2020 alone, several senior commanders, also members of the Taliban’s shadow government, were killed, including the “governors” of Badakshan, Farah, Logar, Samangan, and Wardak provinces. Yet the Taliban, whose roots lie among the Pashtun, the country’s historically dominant ethnic group, have managed to replenish their ranks, procure new weapons and ammunition, and raise money, above all through taxes on opium poppy farming.

It helps that the Taliban continues to get covert support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence service, which played a pivotal role in creating the movement in the early 1990s after it was clear that the leaders of the Pakistan-backed Pashtun mujahedeen (literally, those who wage jihad) proved unable to shoot their way into power because minority nationalities (mainly Uzbeks and Tajiks) resisted ferociously. Yet the Taliban has indigenous roots, too, and its success can’t be attributed solely to intimidation and violence. Its political agenda and puritanical version of Islam appeal to many Afghans. Absent that, it would have perished long ago.

Instead, according to the Long War Journal, the Taliban now controls 75 of Afghanistan’s 400 districts; the government rules 133 others, with the remaining 187 up for grabs. Although the insurgency isn’t on the homestretch to victory, it’s never been in a stronger military position since the 2001 American invasion. Nor has the morale of its fighters dissipated, though many are doubtless weary of war. According to a May U.N. report, “the Taliban remain confident they can take power by force,” even though their fighters have long been vastly outmatched in numbers, mobility, supplies, transportation, and the caliber of their armaments. Nor do they have the jets, helicopters, and bombers their adversaries, especially the United States do, and use with devastating effect. In 2019, 7,423 bombs and other kinds of ordnance were dropped on Afghanistan, eight times as many as in 2015.

Tallying Costs

As 2019 ended, a group of former senior U.S. officials claimed that the Afghan campaign’s costs have been overblown. American troops killed there the previous year, they pointed out, amounted to only a fifth of those who died during “non-combat training exercises” and that “U.S. direct military expenditures in Afghanistan are approximately three percent of annual U.S. military spending” and were decreasing. It evidently escaped them that even a few fatalities that occur because a country’s leaders pursue outlandish objectives like reshaping an entire society in a distant land should matter.

As for the monetary costs, it depends on what you count.  Those “direct military expenditures” aren’t the only ones incurred year after year from the Afghan War. Brown University’s Costs of War Project, for instance, also includes expenses from the Pentagon’s “base budget” (the workaday costs of maintaining the armed forces); funds allotted for “Overseas Contingency Operations,” the post-9/11 counter-terrorism wars; interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war; the long-term pensions and benefits of its veterans; and economic aid provided to Afghanistan by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Do the math that way and the price tag turns out to be so much larger.

But even if you were to accept that 3% figure, that would still total $22 billion from the $738 billion fiscal year 2020 Pentagon budget, hardly chump change—especially given the resources needed to address festering problems on the home front, including a pandemic, child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and an opioid epidemic.

Nation-Building: Form vs. Substance

Now, consider some examples of the “progress” highlighted by the proponents of pressing on. These would include democratic elections and institutions, less corruption, and inroads against the narcotics trade.

First, the election system, an effective one being, of course, a prerequisite for democracy. Of course, given the way Donald Trump and crew dealt with election 2020 here in the U.S., Americans should think twice before blithely casting stones at the Afghan electoral system. In addition, organizing elections in a war-ravaged country is a dangerous task when an insurgency is working overtime to violently disrupt them.

Still, each of Afghanistan’s four presidential elections (2004, 2009, 2014, 2019) produced widespread, systematic fraud verified by investigative reporters and noted in U.S. government reports. After the 2014 presidential poll, for instance, candidate Abdullah Abdullah wouldn’t concede and threatened to form a parallel government, insisting that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, had won fraudulently. To avert bloodshed, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a power-sharing deal that made Abdullah the “chief executive”—a position unmentioned in the Afghan constitution. (Incidentally, elections to the national legislature have also been plagued by irregularities.) Although USAID has worked feverishly to improve election procedures and turnout, spending $200 million on the 2014 presidential election alone, voting fraud remained pervasive in 2019.

As for key political institutions, which also bear American fingerprints, the respected Afghanistan Analyst Network only recently examined the state of the supreme court, the senate, provincial and district assemblies, and the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC). It concluded that they “lacked even the minimum independence needed to exercise their constitutional mandate to provide accountability” and aggravated the “stagnation of the overall political system.”

The senate lacked the third of its membership elected by district assemblies—the remaining senators are appointed by the president or elected by provincial assemblies—for a simple reason. Though constitutionally mandated, district assembly elections have never been held. As for the ICOIC, it had only four out of its seven legally required commissioners, insufficient for a quorum.

When it comes to the narcotics trade, Afghanistan now accounts for 90% of the world’s illicit opium, essential for the making of heroin. The hectares of land devoted to opium-poppy planting have increased dramatically from 8,000 in 2001 to 263,000 by 2018. (A slump in world demand led to a rare drop in 2019.)  Little wonder, since poppies provide destitute Afghan farmers with income to cover their basic needs. A U.N. study estimates that poppy sales, at $2 billion in 2019, exceeded the country’s legal exports, while the opium economy accounted for 7% to 11% of the gross domestic product.

Although the U.S. has spent at least $9 billion attempting to stamp out Afghanistan’s narcotics trade, a 2021 report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded that the investment had next to no effect and that Afghan dominance of the global opium business remained unrivalled. The report didn’t, however, mention the emergence of a new, more insidious problem. In recent years, that country has become a major producer of illegal synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, both cheaper and more profitable than opium cultivation. It now houses, according to a European Union study, an estimated 500 meth labs that manufacture 65.5 tons of the stuff daily.

As for the campaign against corruption, a supposed pillar of U.S. nation-building, forget it. From shakedowns by officials and warlords to palatial homes built with ill-gotten gains by the well-connected, corruption permeates the American-installed system in Afghanistan. 

Though U.S. officials have regularly fumed about the corruption of senior Afghan officials, including the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, the CIA funneled “tens of millions” of dollars to him for years (as he himself confirmed). Investigative reporting by the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock revealed that many notorious warlords and senior officials were also blessed by the Agency’s beneficence. They included Uzbek strongman and one-time First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of murder, abduction, and rape, and Mohammed Zia Salehi, the head of administration at the National Security Council under President Karzai.

In 2015, a U.S. government investigation revealed that $300 million earmarked to pay the Afghan police never actually reached them and was instead “paid” to “ghost” (non-existent) officers or simply stolen by police officials. A 2012 study traced 3,000 Pentagon contracts totaling $106 billion and concluded that 40% of that sum had ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, government officials, and even insurgents.

According to SIGAR’s first 2021 quarterly report to Congress, one U.S. contractor pled guilty to stealing $775,000 in State Department funds. Two others, subcontractors to weapons giant Lockheed Martin, submitted nearly $1.8 million in fraudulent invoices, while hiring local employees who lacked contractually required qualifications.  (They were asked to procure counterfeit college diplomas from an Internet degree mill.)

And lest you think that this deeply embedded culture of corruption in Afghanistan is a “Third World” phenomenon, consider an American official’s recollection that “the biggest source of corruption” in that country “was the United States.”

Hubris and Nemesis Strike—Yet Again

While writing this piece, a memory came back to me. In 1988, I was part of a group that visited Afghanistan just as Soviet troops were starting to withdraw from that country. After a disastrous 10-year war, those demoralized young soldiers were headed for a homeland that itself would soon implode. The Red Army had been sent to Afghanistan in December 1979 by a geriatric Politburo leadership confident that it would save an embattled Afghan socialist regime, which had seized power in April 1978 and soon sparked a countrywide Islamist insurgency backed by the CIA and Saudi dollars that spawned a small group that called itself al-Qaeda, headed by a rich young Saudi.

Once the guerillas were crushed, so Soviet leaders then imagined, the building of a modern socialist society would proceed amid stability and a shiny new Soviet-allied Afghanistan would emerge. As for those ragtag bands of primitive Islamic warriors, what chance did they stand against well-trained Russian soldiers bearing the latest in modern firepower? 

Moscow may even have believed that the Kabul government would hold its own after the Soviet military left what its new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” The Afghan president of that moment certainly did. When our group met him, Mohammed Najibullah Ahmadzai, a burly, fearsome fellow who had previously headed the KHAD, the country’s brutal intelligence agency, confidently assured us that his government had strong support and plenty of staying power. Barely four years later, he would be castrated, dragged behind a vehicle, and strung up in public.

The Politburo’s experiment in social re-engineering in a foreign country —no one said “nation-building” back then—led to more than 13,000 dead Soviet soldiers and perhaps as many as one million dead Afghans. No two wars are alike, of course, but the same vainglory that possessed those Soviet leaders marked the American campaign in Afghanistan in its early years. The white-hot anger that followed the 9/11 attacks and the public’s desire for vengeance led the George W. Bush administration to topple the Taliban government. He and his successors in the White House, seized by the overweening pride theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had long ago warned his fellow Americans about, also believed that they would build a democratic and modern Afghanistan.

As it happened, they simply started another, even longer cycle of war in that unfortunate country, one guaranteed to rage on and consume yet more lives after American soldiers depart this September—assuming Biden’s decision isn’t thwarted.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The United Nations will release a report next month on methane, calling for a reduction in emissions of the main component of natural gas to play a greater role in fighting the climate crisis—a step that could result in relatively rapid benefits for public health and the climate, according to scientists.

The report, which will be released by U.N.’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the U.N. Environment Program in the coming weeks, follows a pledge by U.S. President Joe Biden to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 50 to 52% below 2005 levels.

“If we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades.”
—Dr. Drew Shindell, Duke University

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, a study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed that both carbon and methane emissions rose in 2020 to levels unseen on the planet in more than three million years—despite the slowing of economic activity due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Recent studies suggest that the amount of methane released each year from oil and gas production, mainly from leaks in infrastructure, have been underestimated in the past while releases from cattle ranching and other sources may have been overstated.

Methane emissions could plummet by 45% by 2030 with a concerted effort to reduce the gas by the fossil fuel, agricultural, and waste sectors, according to the New York Times, which obtained a detailed summary of the U.N. report. That reduction would help keep the planet from warming by nearly 0.3°C by the 2040s.

As it stands, methane emissions are projected to rise through at least 2040, according to the U.N., and the report states that expanding the use of natural gas—which proponents have claimed is a cleaner and safer alternative to oil and coal—is not compatible with keeping the heating of the planet at or below 1.5°C.

Author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben called the upcoming report a “crucial study” for its clear-cut message about natural gas.

The fossil fuel industry is in the unique position of being able to quickly effect change, according to the U.N. Because methane lasts in the atmosphere for only about a decade after its release—unlike carbon, which lasts for hundreds of years—cutting methane emissions now could help to meet midcentury targets for fighting the planetary emergency. 

“It’s going to be next to impossible to remove enough carbon dioxide to get any real benefits for the climate in the first half of the century,” Drew Shindell, the study’s lead author and a professor at Duke University, told the Times. “But if we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades.”

While much of the focus in discussions about halting the climate crisis has revolved around carbon, methane warms the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as carbon does over a 20-year period.

The U.N. reports that slashing methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector could prevent more than 250,000 premature deaths and more than 750,000 hospitalizations each year starting in 2030. Methane is also responsible for the loss of more than 25 million crops per year, the Times reported. 

The report comes days after U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a co-author of the Green New Deal, called on Biden to include specific language regarding methane in the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC), or its commitment to greenhouse gas reduction under the Paris climate agreement.

“Momentum is building for international action to curb dangerous methane pollution and mitigate the immediate threat of accelerated global warming,” Markey wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to cement its position as a global leader through robust methane reduction targets and strategies.”

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on reversing former President Donald Trump’s regulatory rollback regarding methane emissions.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In the face of rising public pressure, the Biden administration on Sunday partially lifted export controls on raw materials for coronavirus vaccines in an effort to help India combat a surge that is overwhelming hospitals and threatening to derail nascent inoculation campaigns in developing countries.

While welcomed by progressives who have been pushing the Biden administration to shift critical resources to India—which is experiencing the worst Covid-19 wave in the world—the White House is facing calls to take more sweeping action by supporting an international effort to suspend coronavirus vaccine patents, a move advocates say would allow India and other countries to quickly ramp up production.

“This is a start. But not nearly enough,” U.S. healthcare activist Ady Barkan said Sunday in response to the Biden administration’s decision to relax an export ban that was preventing India from obtaining key materials for the production of its Covishield vaccine.

“President Biden promised that intellectual property law would not block the Global South from producing the vaccine,” Barkan added. “He must keep his word. Millions of lives depend on his choice.”

In an interview with Barkan during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden vowed to not let intellectual property (IP) barriers prevent other countries from mass producing coronavirus vaccines.

“It lacks any human dignity, what we’re doing,” Biden said of his predecessor’s refusal to participate in global vaccination initiatives. “So the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.”

However, since taking office in January, the Biden administration has upheld Trump’s opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal to temporarily waive sections of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a step that would allow generic manufacturers to replicate vaccine formulas and bolster global supply.

Thus far, the vast majority of vaccine doses have been administered in rich and upper-middle-income countries as production remains largely under the control of a small number of pharmaceutical companies.

The Revolving Door Project (RDP), a government watchdog group, said Sunday that the Biden administration’s new effort to supply India—which more than 70 nations rely on for vaccines—with key raw materials as well as therapeutics, test kits, and ventilators is “an encouraging first step.”

But RDP argued that in order to “truly bring an end to global pandemic’s carnage in India and the rest of the Global South,” Biden “must go further and support the TRIPS waiver to lift IP restrictions on Covid-19 vaccines and treatment.”

Several U.S. members of Congress, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), echoed that call during a virtual event on Friday as the World Trade Organization prepares to consider the waiver proposal once again next month.

“We have the tools to save human lives, and those tools should be readily available to all people,” said Sanders. “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The consensus is that the current pandemic will be with us for a long time to come. We will enter a period of intermittent outbreaks of COVID-19, whose precise characteristics are yet to be defined. There are no clear rules governing the interplay between our immune system and the mutations of the virus. We will have to live with uncertainty, however dramatic the advances in contemporary biomedical science.

Yet we know a few things for sure.

We know that the recurrence of pandemics is related to the dominant model of development and consumption, and to the associated changes in climate; to the pollution of seas and rivers and to the deforestation of forests.

We know that the acute phase of this pandemic—the possibility of severe contamination—will only end when 60-70% of the world’s population is immunised.

We know that this task is hampered by worsening social inequalities within and between countries, combined with the fact that Big Pharma does not want to give up patent rights on vaccines. Vaccines are already seen as the new liquid gold, succeeding oil, the liquid gold of the 20th century.

We know that state policies, political cohesion around the pandemic and public behaviour are decisive. The degree of success depends on the combination of epidemiological surveillance, infection reduction through containment, the effectiveness of the hospital back-up, better public knowledge about the pandemic and attention to special vulnerabilities.

Mistakes, negligence and even necrophiliac intentions on the part of some political leaders have given rise to forms of death-by-health policies that we call social Darwinism: the elimination of disposable social groups because they are old, because they are poor or because they are discriminated against for ethnic, racial or religious reasons.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

For more than 40 years, arguments against “dark money” have lost at the Supreme Court. Now, however, the Court could reinforce the growing influence of this type of secret funding for political campaigns.

“If the Americans for Prosperity Foundation wins at the Supreme Court, every nonprofit that launders dark money for corporations or the wealthy will rely on this new case to keep the dark money sources under wraps.”

In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Rodriquez, to be argued on April 26, the justices will consider the right to confidentiality for donations to nonprofits. It could have significant implications given how corporations and wealthy individuals hide their role in politics by routing their money through opaque nonprofits.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation and another nonprofit argue in the case pending before the Supreme Court that California has no interest in knowing who their major donors are — which is consistent with a type of argument has been made in other campaign finance cases throughout the years involving donor disclosure. And for more than 40 years in the campaign finance context, these arguments have lost, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the disclosure of donors behind political campaigns and political ads is constitutional. The Supreme Court ruled this way in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, and it came to the same conclusion in McConnell v. FEC in 2003, in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, and in McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014.

The Supreme Court has said in these campaign finance cases that disclosure in such contexts is justified by three state interests. The first two are the voter informational interest in knowing who is bankrolling candidates and the anti-corruption interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption, since criminals are less likely to commit a crime in broad daylight. The third is the anti-circumvention interest in enforcing other aspects of campaign finance, such as hard money limits or the ban on donations from foreign nationals.

However, Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a slightly different case because it doesn’t arise in the campaign finance context. Instead, in this case, the California is regulating charities which solicit money in California to ensure that they are not defrauding the public. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation argues that an old line of cases known as NAACP v. Alabama protects it from having to reveal its donors to the state, even on a confidential basis. (Under current law, California doesn’t disclose the identities of donors to the public.)

In the original NAACP case from 1958, the Supreme Court recognized that if Alabama had the names of local NAACP members, it could put African Americans at risk of harassment. And if anything, that “harassment” language undersold the risks that Black Americans faced in the Deep South in the 1950s for being known as active members of the group. In 1951, for example, Harry T. Moore and his wife were killed in a Christmas Day bombing of his home because he was believed to be the secretary of the NAACP’s Florida chapter. (Moore had, in fact, already left the organization when he was killed.) His murder has never been solved. Even after the 1958 case was decided, murders of NAACP leaders continued. In 1963, Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the organization, was shot in his driveway. And in 1965, George Metcalfe, another NAACP leader from Mississippi, was killed in a car bombing.

In other words, the NAACP, as a nonprofit organization, made a valid point in the 1958 case when it argued that naming names presented a palpable threat of harassment. In its ruling, the Supreme Court decided that NAACP members had a First Amendment right to association that protected them from Alabama’s prying.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation is arguing that it, too, will be subject to harassment and that it has a First Amendment right to keep its donors confidential from the state of California. The organization won this argument in the district court, while California won on appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

According to Open Secrets, the political arm of APF, the Americans for Prosperity Action PAC, spent $60 million in the 2020 election cycle. According to Issue One, Americans for Prosperity is one of the top 15 dark money groups. Because they are opaque it’s not clear what the exact relationship is here.

There are plenty of things to distinguish the context of the NAACP in the 1950s and 1960s and the Americans for Prosperity today. According to Source Watch, both AFP entities were originally funded by the Koch brothers, Charles and David. David Koch died in 2019. The Kochs at the time of David’s death were two of the richest Americans alive — to the tune of as much as $100 billion. By comparison, the NAACP during the 1950s and 1960s was a scrappy nonprofit with many poor individuals as members. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and diamond encrusted Rolexes.

The problem is that if the Americans for Prosperity Foundation wins at the Supreme Court, every nonprofit that launders dark money for corporations or the wealthy will rely on this new case to keep the dark money sources under wraps. And that’s bad news for our democracy.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to colonize outer space to save humanity, but they couldn’t care less about protecting the rights of workers here on earth.

Musk’s SpaceX just won a $2.9 billion NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Bezos.

“The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity—in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds.”

The money isn’t a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7 billion. Bezos, $197.8 billion. Together, that’s almost as much as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.

And the moon is only their stepping-stone.

Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the continued survival of our species.

“If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars,” he tweeted.

Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. He envisions “very large structures, miles on end” that will “hold a million people or more each.”

But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.

Last spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeting “FREE AMERICA NOW,” Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it safe to do so. Almost immediately, 10 Tesla workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least 450 Tesla workers had been infected.

Musk’s production assistants, as they’re called, earn $19 an hour—hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk is virulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.

Bezos isn’t treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks – often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour, but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the U.S. median family income. And no paid sick leave.

Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned they’d have to pay union dues (untrue – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.

Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the country’s fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.

The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.

If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.

The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17^thcentury, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.

The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity—in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of today’s super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.

But as earthly hazards grow—not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality—escape will become more difficult. Bunkers won’t suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.

I’m grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish they’d set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.  

It’s understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But there’s really no escape. If they’re serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working humans here on terra firma.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Phoenix Robles and Dorcas Monari hug after Robles stopped to protect Monari. Photo: Nick Pfosi/Reuters

Derek Chauvin’s been convicted – guilty, guilty, guilty, deeply – but the carnage persists. Since his trial began, police have killed at least 64 more people, totalling over three killings a day; more than half of the dead are black and Latino, among them 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant and 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Little wonder, then, that during the past few weeks, as people of color have had to painstakingly confront and re-live their “collective, ancestral trauma,” the rates of those suffering mental health distress have soared, while the rates of white people haven’t changed. So it was that with Chauvin’s trial still underway last week, a lone pained black woman in crisis abruptly sat down in the street in Brooklyn Center, Minn., near where Daunte Wright was shot and killed. A gathering storm of hostile cops soon turned up. So did Phoenix Robles, a fierce 36-year-old activist and photographer with a social work degree who was driving to a George Floyd memorial when she saw the tense scene, felt the protective need to stop, and started filming. “How you doing, sis? You okay?” she called gently to Dorcas Monari, collapsed in the street. Monari barely shook her head no. “Can I sit with you?” asked Robles. A muted nod yes. Robles walked closer, and asked why Monari was sitting there. “For George Floyd,” she murmured. Robles turned to the circle of hovering cops. “We’re having a mental health crisis, so please do not do anything,” she called to them. “I want to talk to her.” Then she sat with Monari, excoriating the police for their abiding abuses.

“I recognized she was in a state of distress (and) I knew why, so in that moment I just wanted to focus on her,” Robles, who has stepped into volatile situations before, explained later. “When I got out of that car, I knew I was either going to get them away, or one of us was going to die today” – or land unjustifiably in state custody. To protect and provide a safe space for victimized or traumatized women, says Dr. Ajita Robinson, “There’s a collective pause we have to be willing to take” – which Robles was doing in all her righteous rage. “How can you require someone who is in pain to be polite when they’re simply asking you to stop harming them?” she said. “You don’t get to make that request.” Robles “met (Monari) as a human being first,” without judgment, she said; in contrast, rather than ask what the distraught Monari needed, the cops showed up in force, treated both women as hostile, and were taken aback when the women responded in kind. Robles also aimed her fury at a cluster of “complicit” black bystanders watching and filming, but not joining them. “She is protesting for your black lives,” she shouted. “More people should be out on the street with her to protect black women.” Online, her show of solidarity and compassion resonated for many – “God bless this warrior protecting our sister” – though others found her approach too inflammatory. Still, it worked: After about 15 minutes, the confused police retreated. Once they melted away, the two women tearfully embraced; later, Robles said Monari shared her own experiences of police brutality. “We helped her hold that space for a few hours, because that’s what she wanted to do,” she said. “And our model is, when a black woman speaks, listen.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

“Not a surprise. But terrifying nonetheless.”

That’s how Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein responded Sunday to news that India had requested—and Twitter had agreed—to have numerous tweets critical of the Modi government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic blocked from the popular social media platform.

The Indian news outlet Medianama was the first to report the situation on Saturday, followed by Buzzfeed in U.S. press. According to Medianama‘s reporting by Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru:

Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised India’s handling of the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. These tweets, which are now inaccessible to Indian users of the social media website, include posts by Revanth Reddy, a sitting Member of Parliament; Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and two filmmakers, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das.

Deep and Chunduru confirmed that several people who had their postings blocked were informed by Twitter what was coming ahead of the move and that the decision was based on a request made by the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In response to request, a Twitter spokesperson sent Medianama the following statement:

When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only. In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they’re aware that we’ve received a legal order pertaining to the account. We notify the user(s) by sending a message to the email address associated with the account(s), if available. Read more about our Legal request FAQs.  The legal requests that we receive are detailed in the biannual Twitter Transparency Report, and requests to withhold content are published on Lumen.

India is currently experiencing a serious surge in Covid-19 cases—averaging over 300,000 new daily cases over the last week and oxygen supplies running low and hospitals overwhelmed—as Modi’s handling of the pandemic has come under significant scrutiny from both within the country and from abroad.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, reported Buzzfeed on Saturday,

also restricted dozens of tweets that criticized Modi or shared pictures of India’s overflowing crematoriums and hospitals, in addition to a tweet from the Indian American Muslim Council, a Washington D.C-based advocacy organization of Indian American Muslims. That group shared a Vice story about the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage attended by hundreds of thousands of Indians earlier this month, and which turned into a super spreader event.

“While hundreds of thousands of Covid patients are literally gasping for breath, the government’s alacrity in pressuring Twitter to block tweets critical of its handling of the crisis shows the administration’s moral compass continues to point in a direction that is shamelessly self-serving,” the Indian American Muslim Council said in a statement.

Rana Ayyub—a journalist who has been writing dispatches from India for the Washington Post, TIME magazine, and other outlets—reacted with scorn Sunday to the latest reports, tweeting:

“I’m sorry,” wrote epidemiologist and health economist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, “but Modi’s authoritarian government can go to hell if they dare to silence the true human suffering” now taking place in India.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men and most powerful philanthropists, was the target of criticism from social justice campaigners on Sunday after arguing that lifting patent protections on Covid-19 vaccine technology and sharing recipes with the world to foster a massive ramp up in manufacturing and distribution—despite a growing international call to do exactly that—is a bad idea.

“[Bill Gates] acts like an optimist but has a truly dismal vision of the world.”
—writer Stephen Buryani

Directly asked during an interview with Sky News if he thought it “would be helpful” to have vaccine recipes be shared, Gates quickly answered: “No.”

Asked to explain why not, Gates—whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth—said that: “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done—moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India—it’s novel—it’s only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all.”

The reference is to the Serum factory in India, the largest such institute in the country, which has contracts with AstraZeneca to manufacture their Covid-19 vaccine, known internationally as Covishield.

The thing that’s holding “things back” in terms of the global vaccine rollout, continued Gates, “is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trial on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”

Critical advocates for robust and immediate change to intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccines, however, issued scathing indictments of Gates’ defense of the status quo.

Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, one of the lead partner groups in an international coalition calling for WTO patent waivers at a crucial meeting of the world body next month, characterized Gates’ remarks—and the ideological framework behind them—as “disgusting.”

“Who appointed this billionaire head of global health?” asked Dearden. “Oh yeah, he did.”

Journalist Stephen Buryani, who on Saturday wrote an in-depth Guardian column on the urgent need for the patent waivers and technology sharing, offered a similarly negative view of the billionaire’s “awful” arguments against sharing the vaccine technology.

Gates, charged Buryani, “acts like an optimist but has a truly dismal vision of the world.”

During the Sky News interview, Gates said it was “not completely surprising” that the richest nations like U.S., U.K., and others in Europe vaccinated their populations first. He said that made sense because the pandemic was worse in those countries, but said he believed that “within three or four months the vaccine allocation will be getting to all the countries that have the very severe epidemic.”

Watch the full interview:

Offering his interpretation of what Gates was actually throughout the interview, Buryani paraphrased it this way: “We can’t make more vaccines, we can’t compromise profits, we can’t trust poor countries with our technology, and they’ll get their scraps after we eat.”

“The poverty of vision from [Gates] and other ‘leaders’ has been astounding,” added Buryani. “Smallpox, Polio, both had joined-up responses that shared knowledge and technology across the world. We’re happy to let the *pharma* market sort out the biggest crisis of our lifetimes. Totally on autopilot.”

While public health experts agree that developing nations may not have the current know-how or capacity to produce advanced vaccines at scale, they argue that is also the result of policy choices that governments and others have made. Earlier this month 66 organizations called on the U.S. to initiate a global vaccine manufacturing program that, in tandem with patent waivers and recipe sharing, would pave the way for ramped up capacity.

“The U.S. government has helped produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for people living in the U.S., on a relatively short timeline. The same is needed—and within reach—for all countries,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, at the time. “The key missing ingredient is ambitious political leadership, to end the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.”

Meanwhile, in a detailed online social media thread earlier this month, journalist and activist Cory Doctor stated that while numerous “people helped create our ‘Vaccine Apartheid,’ the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological ‘philanthropic’ foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.”

Doctorow also pointed people to a feature in The New Republic by Alexander Zaitchik earlier this month which details Gates has long used his “hallowed foundation” and position as the “world’s de facto public health czar” to defend the intellectual property regime that is now central to the fight between those defending “Vaccine Apartheid” on the one hand and international campaigners fighting for a “People’s Vaccine” that would unleash the life-saving inoculations from their corporate masters in the pharmaceutical industry.

According to Zaitchik:

In April [of 2020], Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.  

How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.

Quoted in the piece is James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, which studies public policy and intellectual property as it intersects with public health and the drug industry. Love explains just how powerful the influence of Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been in curtailing the conversation around I.P. and vaccines.

“If you said to an ordinary person, ‘We’re in a pandemic. Let’s figure out everyone who can make vaccines and give them everything they need to get online as fast as possible,’ it would be a no-brainer,” Love told TNR. “But Gates won’t go there. Neither will the people dependent on his funding. He has immense power. He can get you fired from a U.N. job. He knows that if you want to work in global public health, you’d better not make an enemy of the Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on I.P. and monopolies. And there are a lot of advantages to being on his team. It’s a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people.”

Back at the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020, said Love, “Things could have gone either way, but Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained.” That, argues, was crucial in terms of what has happened since.

As Doctorow also suggests in his exploration of the issue, the fix was in from the beginning in terms of intellectual property and the Covid-19 pandemic and nobody should take seriously Gates’ argument that there’s simply not enough time to make lifting patent protections a priority at this point.

“Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may NOW be too late,” tweeted Doctorow. “Because of my bad ideas THEN, it’s too late NOW.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Ahead of Wednesday’s presidential address to a joint session of Congress, 17 senators Sunday sent a letter to President Biden asking him to include proposals to expand Medicare in his forthcoming American Families Plan. 

“We write to ask that, as part of the American Families Plan, you propose reducing the Medicare eligibility age, expanding Medicare benefits to include hearing, dental, and vision care, implementing a cap on out-of-pocket expenses under traditional Medicare, and negotiating lower drug prices,” the senators wrote. “We have an historic opportunity to make the most significant expansion of Medicare since it was signed into law. We look forward to working with you to make this a reality and, in the process, substantially improve the lives of millions of older Americans and persons with disabilities.”

The letter was led by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and signed by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

Read the letter here.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Well, it’s started. The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available then there are people willing to take them.

Most of this so-called “vaccine reluctance” is driven by pure politics.

Donald Trump’s visceral hatred of Joe Biden, who beat him like a drum in the last election, and the Republican party’s commitment to raw power over anything that may help Americans, have brought us this crisis.

If Trump, Fox and the GOP can convince the people who follow them that they shouldn’t get vaccines, they can prevent President Biden from getting this pandemic under control. 

If they can prevent Biden from getting the disease under control, they also prevent him from getting the economy back in shape.

And—Bingo!—if they prevent him from getting the economy back in shape, Republicans see victories in the 2022 midterm elections and might even take back the White House in 2024. 

This is their simple but brutal math, and they frankly don’t care who it kills. The more the better, in fact, because chaos hurts the (Democratic) party in power. After all, they’ve already shown us they’re willing to kill a half-million Americans just to try to win the last election.

And, as village idiot and GQP Senator Ron Johnson said yesterday as he was discouraging general consideration of vaccine documentation, “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point when you better impose it, you’re going to shame people, you’re going to force them to carry a card to prove that they’ve been vaccinated so they can just stay in society? I’m getting highly suspicious of what’s happening here.”

Right. It’s just a public health emergency that’s killed a half-million Americans. No big deal for rich Republicans.

So it’s up to us to blow up their plan. And if enough of us take one small, simple step we may be able to pull it off. Here’s how:

I’m calling restaurants, bars, stores, and other places of business that I’ve patronized over the past couple of years. Taking it slow, just one or two a day. Casual.

My conversation goes something like this:

Me: “I see we’re getting close to the point where the economy can open back up. I’m so excited about coming back to your (restaurant, store)! I love your (mention dish or product so they know I’m a real customer)! I just wanted to make sure, first, that you’re requiring proof of vaccination before you let people in?”

Them: “We don’t have any specific policy about that, but you’re more than welcome to come. All of us who work here are vaccinated!”

Me: “Well, let me give you my name and phone number and you can call me if you decide to change your policy. For at least the next year, I’m only going to patronize businesses that require proof of vaccination to get in the door. Even though I’m vaccinated, I don’t want to be exposed to someone who’s not and who might be carrying around one of those weird variants.”

Them (usually sounding a bit rattled): “I’ll be sure to tell the manager that you called…”

This can work.

The primary imperative of every business is something called “differentiation.” When I taught marketing and ran an advertising agency in Atlanta, I’d always ask, “What makes you different from your competitors? What is it you’re offering that they aren’t or can’t? Simply put, ‘what is your unfair competitive advantage?’”

More often than not, the answer to that question became the focus of a great marketing campaign.

America is experiencing a mind-boggling amount of pent-up demand right now. People want to go out and eat, drink, celebrate, dance and buy things. But many, almost certainly a majority, want to do so safely.

So, if even a small but meaningful percentage of businesses decide it’s good marketing to cater exclusively to people who’ve taken the time and trouble to get vaccinated, it’ll create a social and economic pressure that will begin to wear down those folks Republican politicians and Fox News have convinced that the virus is no big deal.

But big deal or no, they still want to get into the restaurant! And that could get us to the 75%-85% vaccinated herd immunity threshold we need for a safe country regardless of Trump’s or Johnson’s inane sputtering or Tucker’s smarmy “questions.”

Back in the 1980s a dear friend of mine, Tom Larsen, owned one of the finest high-end restaurants in Boston, The Pillar House. Every restaurant in town at that time had both smoking and no-smoking sections, but Tom was committed to serving extraordinary food in a clean environment where you could actually smell and taste the flavors his chefs so meticulously curated. 

So in 1986 he banned all smoking at The Pillar House, even in the bar and the bathrooms: his was the first consequential restaurant in Boston, and one of the first in the nation, to do so.

I remember when he made the decision. We discussed it quite a bit, in fact. I was fully expecting he would lose business, but instead, as word spread, his business continued to grow! 

The restaurant got enormous publicity (it was picked up by the AP nationwide!), their non-smoking customers became fanatically loyal, and the few hard-core smokers they lost were insignificant to their business.

As an added bonus, restaurants around the country, reading about Tom’s experience, started emulating him. Non-smoking restaurants became a thing in 1986, and within a few years became the norm. Even Boston’s Newton-Wellesley Hospital went smoke-free, the first hospital to do so in the area, citing Tom’s restaurant as an example.

There are a lot of us out here who don’t want to be exposed to GOP- and Fox News-maskholes and the viruses they may be carrying.

They’re this generation’s version of the selfish smokers in the 1980s, and we’re the health-concerned non-smokers. We would very much like safe spaces to enjoy shopping, dining or other activities without smoke or germs being blown on us by inconsiderate people.

For businesses looking for a competitive edge, this “let’s all live” marketing prescription is the opportunity of the decade!

And with just a few simple phone calls, you can help make it happen.

This piece initially appeared on The Hartmann Report.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The tragedy that occurred in Washington, DC., on January 6, 2021 was described by commentators as one of the darkest moments in our national experiment with democracy.

As has been well documented, the violent incursion of the Capitol by thousands of white nationalists, armed militiamen, and a who’s who of MAGA-faithful was sparked by widespread, yet false claims about a stolen election, promoted for months by the most powerful man in the world in his public pronouncements and his social media channels. These lies found a reliable echo chamber in the right-wing corporate media ecosystem—Fox, affiliates of Sinclair Broadcasting, One America News, and a countless array of local and national voices that rhetorically agitate listeners every day on political talk radio. Nevertheless, it was social media that received the majority of the public backlash after the riot.

The resulting poll numbers showing upwards of 80% of the Republican base believing the 2020 elections were rigged against Donald Trump should not be surprising. It is the lucrative dividend of a recurring investment in an apocalyptic narrative by right wing media that began more than three decades ago, one that explicitly indicts the “corrupt” liberal establishment for its unpatriotic assault on fundamental U.S. values. The belief that Satan-loving Democrats, “femi-Nazis,” tree-hugging environmentalists, the Clinton family, and a good chunk of black and brown folks will unrepentantly take over the country someday—unless righteous, freedom-loving Americans stand up and fight—has been the relentless mantra of the most extreme yet successful commentators of the right, including the late Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Levin and countless others who were unleashed by the deregulatory media policies of Ronald Reagan. The commercial success of their uncompromising, hyper-partisan approach, loose on facts but heavy on rage, was eventually emulated on prime-time cable, specifically on Fox News in the 1990s, filling what its defenders described as a market demand to “counter-balance” the “liberal” news media. In other words, the current disconnect from reality by a large percentage of the population should not be seen as a phenomenon resulting strictly from what today is erroneously called “fake news.” In many ways, given the history of our media regulatory policy, we should have seen this political crisis coming long ago.

True, the storming of the Capitol by Trump-inspired mobs marked a new low-point in the downward trajectory of our decaying political culture, and although the collapse of our democratic system did not fully materialize on that January day, clearly there is still potential for more damage to occur and things to get worse in the foreseeable future. But maybe there is a silver lining in the current crisis: the sudden realization amongst a broad cross section of the U.S. public that the rupture in our public sphere is so profound, we will never recover from it, unless we fundamentally shift our way of communicating to one another, and take steps to address the structures that have the United States “drowning in lies.”

It’s useful to use the broader concept of the “Public Sphere” in demonstrating how advocates of the anti-regulation, pro-corporate, consumer-driven commercial system—in the name of free speech and anti-government intrusion in the media—essentially got what they asked for in today’s political and cultural crisis manifested most visibly in the rise of “fake news.” The growing emergency engulfing our media system, which is characterized by a brutally tribal distrust of the institution of journalism and a complete collapse of open spaces for deliberative dialogue and engaged debate based on verifiable actions, scientific evidence, and rational, reasoned arguments, ie, the public sphere, allows for propaganda, “fake news,” and outright lies and distortions to dominate the public discourse and shape our politics.

This is not simply about responding to the explosion of so-called “fake news”—that is, the troll-driven, deliberately false, often hateful implicit and explicit narratives flooding social media and inevitably echoed by the traditional, “legacy” media channels of cable networks, newspapers, and talk radio. Our problems stem from something much bigger. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the entire market-based model of communication that is considered sacred in the U.S., which since its consolidation in the 1930s, has had a gradual but consistent corrosive effect on the nation’s public sphere.

For 100 years, an array of scholars, educators, journalists, regulators and media reform activists has warned us about the potential threats that the hyper-commercial, for-profit, market-based media system posed to democratic communication. Their concerns have been coupled by an open and consistent call for a public service-oriented media system in the U.S. that would function as a guarantor of a sustainable, vibrant democratic political culture where deliberative dialogue about the major issues facing the nation would be the foundation of our collective welfare. Unfortunately, their warnings have been ignored, muted or openly rejected by assertions of corporate executives, media titans, and politicians that free market principles must be at the heart of our media policy, even as evidence of the market’s failures are all around us. Media scholar Victor Pickard calls them “structural pathologies” that prioritize “profit over democratic imperatives,” leading to an embrace of dangerous politics in the interest of capturing audiences.

I make this observation not to ignore the unique, very dangerous levels of misinformation that we’re now susceptible to today due to the exponential rise of social media as a vehicle to disseminate straight up lies on such a wide scale. Clearly, the nefarious practice of spreading conspiracy theories, false information, and hate speech through these new channels have detrimentally impacted many aspects of our everyday lives in ways we could not have imagined even ten years ago, when, as Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times, “the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens.”

Given its rapid proliferation in recent years, building critical defenses around these contemporary practices and understanding how they are employed by individuals and organizations in their daily mobilizing campaigns is essential for democracy to have a chance for survival. Studying the way people/audiences/publics receive and eventually process this false information could serve as an antidote to the venomous torrent of harmful messages that permeate social media, creating our contemporary “crisis of knowledge.” It is not hyperbole to say protecting oneself from these unscrupulous message creators is a matter of life and death, as we saw clearly with the massive levels of dangerous disinformation, ie “fake news,” that was distributed almost daily during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The growing calls for government regulation of the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, from both the left and the right, are a reflection of how urgent the situation is.

But I would cautiously argue that the call for stronger regulatory mandates on social media tech giants may need to extend to all of our mass communication systems, including our broadcast and cable services. In many ways, we’re seeing history repeat itself when officials today warn of the excessive power these tech companies have accumulated, something media reformers of the early 20th Century argued about the emerging networks. In focusing so much of our attention today on tech giants and social media, we avoid raising questions about the other ubiquitous media firms that for too long have had a free reign to do whatever they want in the name of open markets and a free press. Any attempt at government regulation of these powerful entities was always and is still considered to be free speech blasphemy, the first steps towards tyranny—that is, state control over a free press, free expression, and a free people.

In staunchly advocating in defense of the invisible hand of the marketplace as the primary guarantor of a free, open and democratic media system—and thereby wholeheartedly opposing any regulations on their business model—the earliest commercial broadcast networks such as Westinghouse, RCA, and CBS, perhaps unknowingly, laid the groundwork for the tribal media culture we are harvesting today, one where “fake news” is embraced as truth by gullible audiences, and the fundamental values and practices of journalism are viewed as suspect and untrustworthy. The aggressive anti-regulation stance taken by the large, national (and later transnational) corporate media conglomerates since the 1930s, in defense of an elusive marketplace of ideas and freedom of speech, eventually unleashed a number of processes, concrete policy decisions, and regulatory actions that were considered necessary for the corporate bottom line, (ie profits), but not so good for strengthening the democratic communication system needed to nurture a viable, vibrant public sphere.

From the commercial system’s complete dependence on advertising as the fuel that keeps the news/culture/information engines running—forcing media firms to deliberately shape content to attract eyes and ears—to the eventual consolidation of the broadcast media into an entrenched oligopoly made up of a few powerful networks; from the high ownership concentration that we saw emerge in the 1980s and 90s leading to a dramatic reduction in localism in radio, to the rescinding of even benign broadcast regulations on content like the Fairness Doctrine in the name of free speech rights of broadcasters; from the systematic dismantling of local, national and global news divisions and other cost-cutting measures designed to increase profits for shareholders, to the shuttering of hundreds of local newspapers across the country due to dropping ad revenue, proponents of the market model of media have argued that government regulation of mass communication would not be necessary because the public interest will be served best by private entities responding to people’s demands and desires: in other words, give the people what they want.

Neither the proponents nor the vocal critics of the laissez faire system of media policy could have envisioned the exact delivery mechanism of today’s “fake news.” Afterall, who would have thought 100 years ago—or even fifty years ago—that we would all have a hand-held apparatus in our pocket strategically designed to connect us—indeed addict us—to everything in the world that we liked, embraced, were curious about, or had some kind of ties to, through video, images, audio, and text, a device in many ways much more powerful than a printing press or radio tower? It’s “give the people what they want” on digital steroids, allowing captivated audiences to come back for more and more, on demand, without any filters or gatekeepers, while allowing them to share this content to thousands, if not millions of like-minded consumers.

As I mentioned, the advocates of the media reform movement were sounding the alarm bells about the commercial market model being consolidated in the 1930s because they understood that viewing news, public information and other media content as a consumer product no different than deodorant soap or breakfast cereal was a recipe for undemocratic outcomes that could be just as problematic for free speech as it would be in a more totalitarian context. These same, basic concerns were raised by other voices again and again, in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and even more recently, although they were consistently drowned out by the deep pockets and loud objections of the corporate capitalists running our media industries.

There is considerable literature based on historical research of the public record by a number of media scholars who have examined the development of the broadcast industry in the United States which draws attention to these unheeded warnings and demands. For example, there was the legislative fight over the Communications Act of 1934 that ultimately favored the commercial broadcasters over the media reform advocates and educators that were highly critical of the growing commercialism of the airwaves. Media historian Robert McChesney describes in great detail how the commercial market model of broadcasting was not a given when radio first emerged in the 1920s as a powerful new electronic medium. He demonstrates how there was a large movement among educators in particular who viewed radio as an essential tool for public education and strengthening democratic discourse. They warned of the threats that democratic communication faced by a media system built solely on the profit motive.

By the 1940s, an activist FCC attempted to introduce some standards for public interest broadcasting through its report Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees, known popularly as “The Blue Book.” It was an open call to require radio broadcasters to abide by a number of public service requirements in order to maintain their licenses. In the end, it was rejected by industry and its allies in Congress as “censorship” of radio led by, as Packard recounts, “sophomoric professors, selfish special interests, power-crazed bureaucrats, and irascible legislators.”

In 1944, the so-called Hutchins Commission was convened to look into the function and responsibilities of the U.S. press. After three years of comprehensive interviews with representatives of the news industry, including advertisers, editors, journalists, and the public, the commissionoutlined a series of recommendations that recognized the need for the press to provide public service content for the community to clarify societal goals and values. It was a recognition of the important function a mass communication system in any country plays in developing a culture of public deliberation and participation in matters of common concern, that is, building citizenship. The commission’s recommendations were also wholeheartedly rejected by the corporate interests that made up our news media.

The gutting of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s by President Reagan was perhaps the best-known policy decision of the past four decades that favored big business principles over even limited regulation of the public airwaves, resulting in a dramatic shift in the media marketplace of ideas. Backed by conservative political leaders, the commercial broadcasters convinced the anti-big government Reagan Administration to terminate existing measures aimed at making sure broadcasters would cover important issues in the communities they serve, and provide a broad range of perspectives in that coverage. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine opened the floodgates for the rise of political talk radio, dominated for 35 years by right wing voices who in many ways set the stage for the mainstreaming of the unpresidential political discourse of Donald Trump.

The deregulatory approach continued in the next several administrations, culminating with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, signed bylaw by President Clinton, which permitted corporations to amass large numbers of local newspapers and news stations, giving unfettered access to almost every household in America to massive, transnational corporations with no strings attached vis a vis public service principles or outcomes. Ironically, much of this was justified by regulators who argued new technological advances like the internet made earlier ownership restrictions moot. Under George W. Bush, regarding the topic of media ownership, the FCC said it was not “particularly troubling that media properties do not always, or even frequently, avail themselves to others who may hold contrary opinions,” arguing without irony that “nothing requires them to do so, nor is it necessarily healthy for public debate to pretend as though all ideas are of equal value entitled to equal airing.”

In examining the history of the U.S. media over the past 100 years, it is apparent that any regulatory initiative designed to put public service principles into action vis a vis broadcasters, newspapers, and other media platforms was received by commercial interests with considerable suspicion if not outright scorn, thereby giving the upper hand to those who argued for market-based principles to be the guiding light of the major media. In the process, the opportunity to build a media infrastructure conducive to a culture of true public deliberation and reflection on a wide scale about important matters of the day was jettisoned in favor of market principles built on laws of supply and demand.

Today, there is a growing chorus of scholars from both the left and the right arguing something that has always made U.S. policymakers and industry leaders feel uncomfortable. As Emily Bazelon described in an expose in the New York Times Magazine in October 2020, “perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the very best way.” Bazelon points to other democracies that have taken distinct approaches from the U.S. to the issue of government regulation of the media, arguing that “despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain more democratic,” and “have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort out what’s true from what’s not,” allowing those publics to make informed decisions about important issues of public concern.

Relatively speaking, the commercial constraints (dare I say restrictions) on the free and open delivery of news and public information have been given lip service in the broader literature in the United States. Almost universally, the market model comes out on top of the debate as to which system is more democratic, a public or private model. But today, as our politics drift into these unchartered waters, we are suddenly openly contemplating an overhaul of the social media giants, confronting them about how they monitor and/or police content on their platforms, as well as how they monetize this content. Is it not time we begin asking the same questions of political talk radio and prime-time cable channels, who up to now have avoided any public scrutiny for the damage they’ve caused to our politics? Should we not demand more from our news publishers and nightly news producers who, despite facing growing economic challenges due to competition from new, digital platforms, still have tremendous abilities to reach the public on a massive scale?

Clearly there are many questions to consider in trying to justify this kind of scrutiny. For one, would a media system based on a public interest model result in a different public response to “fake news” as we understand it today in the U.S.? In such a system, would audiences, ie, the public, have built-in defenses, as Bazelton argues, to sort out what’s true from what’s not after decades of exposure to this kind of media content? In countries where public interest broadcasting models do exist, is fake news having less of a detrimental impact on the political culture as it is having in the U.S. today? I think the jury is still out on this, but the question warrants further attention to see how audience response to fake news is impacted by the political culture that emerged within a public service system. We would also need to examine approaches to motivated reasoning and political beliefs, and research on cognitive consistency, selective exposure and how people deal with information at odds with their own belief systems.

But in the end, to understand where we are today in the U.S., we cannot continue to point the finger at one set of factors while ignoring a long trajectory of undemocratic practices that have been promoted and embraced wholeheartedly by the corporate media establishment and their good friends in government. We were warned about the dangers of such a system decades ago. After seeing the events unfold in Washington on January 6th, 2021, I believe now is as good a time as ever to start paying attention to it once again.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Over-indebtedness, and the policy trends fueling it, have devastating impacts on people’s lives. This essay argues that there is a mutual reinforcing relationship between booming levels of household and sovereign debt and the systematic deprivation of human rights around the world — which is why protecting these rights must be a core principle of debt justice.

“The harms to human dignity caused by over-indebtedness—whether individual or public—must be understood as a consequence of unjust policies which violate human rights.”

On the one hand, governments face pressure to minimize public expenditure and to minimize levels of taxation. Rounds and rounds of tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals concentrate wealth (and power) and strain government budgets. Governments resort to borrowing on disadvantageous terms and conditions leading to unsustainable sovereign debt levels that squeeze their fiscal space even further. The stranglehold that high debt burdens have placed on the fiscal space of low and middle income countries has had dire consequences for their ability to respond to the COVD-19 pandemic.

On the other, lack of access to essential goods and services, coupled with financial deregulation, leads to predatory lending as households need to borrow more and more to maintain their standard of living — including covering their healthcare bills. Excessive interest rates, abusive contractual terms, criminalization of debtors and harsh collection practices become a burden, quickly turning into a never-ending cycle of debt and personal, family and social tragedies for many. This puts their rights to health, housing, food and other economic and social rights in even greater jeopardy. A deterioration in wellbeing is a common consequence. Vulnerability to exploitation is another.

Human rights standards provide a clear and relevant framework for our vision of debt justice

Economic and social rights — enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in widely ratified international treaties and in constitutions around the world — entitle everyone to the material conditions essential for dignity, freedom and wellbeing. This includes conditions of life and conditions of work, as established by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By bridging “lives” and “livelihoods”, economic and social rights connect the spheres of production and of social reproduction.

Specifically, these rights guarantee that essential services such as healthcare and education are accessible, affordable, and of good quality; that opportunities for decent work are available; and that adequate living standards—underpinned by rights to food, water, housing and sanitation—are achieved for all. They envision a world in which the goods and services human beings need to live with dignity are not commodities, but entitlements to which everyone should have access without having to go into burdensome debt.

These rights guarantee much more than a minimum level of basic subsistence. Their “full realization” must be “progressively” achieved: they set a floor, not a ceiling. They demand continuous improvement and must be guaranteed for all, prioritizing the needs of disadvantaged groups facing systemic and intersectional forms of discrimination. These entitlements impose corresponding obligations on governments to “respect” peoples’ rights (treating people fairly and humanely); to “protect” peoples’ rights (taking action to prevent, investigate, and punish abuses committed by others, notably the private sector); and to “fulfill” peoples’ rights (taking steps to facilitate access to the goods and services necessary to realize rights and providing those goods and services when people can’t otherwise access them).

Committing to these standards of action means that guiding economic activity is a legitimate and expected role of government

The realization of economic and social rights cannot be left to the whims of an unregulated market. It demands an active role for government in providing public goods and essential services that deliver for everyone, not just those who can pay; in mobilizing the “maximum available resources” for this purpose, including through responsible government borrowing; in redistributing resources to support the care work performed in households, including through comprehensive social protection schemes; and in regulating the conduct of the private (financial and non-financial) sector to protect the rights of workers, consumers, and communities affected by their business.

In practice, these obligations are routinely flouted by governments across the world. The policy trends that have accompanied the spread of neoliberal globalization include the commodification, privatization and financialization of public goods and essential services. The role of government in public provisioning has been drastically reduced—often at the behest of international financial institutions. Even in the pandemic, the World Bank is still financially supporting the private health sector instead of strengthening the public health system, for example.

This gap is filled by market-based, individualized solutions for those who can afford them: private hospitals, private childcare, private schools, private insurance, private pensions, private care homes. Labor market flexibilization and rollbacks in social protection—accelerated by years of austerity—make these services affordable to fewer and fewer people. Booming household debt is the result. The scale and seriousness of the economic and social rights violations that lead to, or are a consequence of individual or household indebtedness, illustrates that financial inclusion cannot be a proxy of improving living conditions.

It is clear that poverty and inequality, in a context of increasing financialization of public goods and essential services, push people into private debt. For this reason, the harms to human dignity caused by over-indebtedness — whether individual or public— must be understood as a consequence of unjust policies which violate human rights. And to protect those rights, we must stand behind clear and universal principles: needs trigger duties not debt; our lives are not commodities; our livelihoods must be secure, not securitized.

This essay is part of the series “A Vision of Debt Justice” of Progressive International’s Debt Justice Blueprint.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As campaigners worldwide continue their efforts to unleash live-saving vaccine patents and technology from the profitable control of major pharmaceutical corporations this week, new reporting by The Intercept details the “army of lobbyists” Big Pharma has aimed at U.S. lawmakers in order to kneecap the global push to lift intellectual property through a waiver at the World Trade Organization.

“We have multiple safe and effective vaccines, what we lack now is the political will to increase their supply and facilitate the distribution of these vaccines everywhere.”
—Abby Maxman, Oxfam AmericaIn a story published Friday, journalist Lee Fang cites “newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021” to reveal that “over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver” of patent protections at the WTO—a push led by India and South Africa and backed by the World Health Organization, over a hundred nations, and public health experts and justice advocates worldwide.

According to Fang’s reporting:

Pharmaceutical lobbyists working against the proposal include Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.

Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.

In response to the revelations, Heidi Chow, senior policy and campaign manager for the U.K.-based Global Justice Now, called the corporate lobbying blitz fighting against increased vaccine production “utterly disgusting and immoral” amid a global pandemic that has already claimed north of 3 million lives worldwide.

“Millions continue to die because pharma monopolies have created vaccine scarcity in the global south,” tweeted Chow. “We need a #PeoplesVaccine.”

Shailly Gupta, communications adviser to the Access Campaign with Doctors Without Borders, which advocates for a global system in which vaccine technology is made universally available to the world’s poorest nations, also shared Fang’s story as she bemoaned the “pandemic profiteering” it represents.

On Friday, as Common Dreams reported, Sen. Bernie Sanders led other U.S. lawmakers in Congress in a demand to the Biden administration to back the WTO waiver as they presented a petition signed by over 2 million people.

“We have the tools to save human lives, and those tools should be readily available to all people,” said Sanders during an online event Friday. “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

Abby Maxman, president and CEO Oxfam America and who also participated in the event, said, “We have multiple safe and effective vaccines, what we lack now is the political will to increase their supply and facilitate the distribution of these vaccines everywhere.” President Biden, she urged, “must seize this historic opportunity to mobilize vaccine access to all by supporting the WTO proposal by South Africa, India, and others to temporarily waive intellectual property rights related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to encourage generic manufacturing in their own markets.”

But even as the international movement for the WTO waiver has gained steam, including in the U.S., Fang reports how the effort “has encountered fierce opposition from leading drug companies, who stand to lose profit and who fear that allowing a waiver would lead to less stringent IP enforcement in the future.”

In a column for The Guardian on Saturday, science and environmental writer Stephen Buranyi argues the intransigence of the wealthy nations “seems mind-bogglingly shortsighted.” According to Buranyi:

The world desperately needs coronavirus vaccines. About 430m doses have been produced so far this year, enough for about 215 million people. And of the doses already given, about half have gone to the richest 16% of the world’s population. Covax, the World Health Organization initiative to transfer vaccines to nations in need, has delivered just 38m doses. According to analysis by the Center for Global Development and the Economist, nations in the global south may not reach widespread vaccination until 2023.

The situation is dire, and we need more vaccines. At the moment, there is no worldwide joined-up effort to expand production. As incredible as it sounds, after all the public money that went into vaccine development, making and distributing them has been left entirely up to the market. Each company has its own—totally secret—recipes and supply chains, and they insist no other approach is possible.

But public policy experts like Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), have endlessly explained that alternative approaches are both available and possible, but that Big Pharma interests continue to block the political pathway to achieving them.

“With the pandemic costing millions of lives around the world and costing our economies trillions in lost output,” Baker wrote earlier this month, “we really should be asking whether the current system serves us well in producing vaccines, tests, and treatments. Incredibly, public debate is so dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and its allies that we are primarily seeing celebration of the system’s dubious claims to success, rather than discussions of the ways in which system was and is failing us in addressing the pandemic.”

As political activist Lauren Steiner tweeted in response to Fang’s reporting, pharmaceutical giants who are blocking patent waivers that could save millions of lives and help bring a much faster and comprehensive end to the Covid-19 pandemic “should change their name from the health care industry to the death industry.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.