Author: Sharon Zhang

September 2, 2021

It’s Not Just Abortion: Texas GOP Quietly Rolled Back Other Rights on Sept. 1

While the big news from Texas this week was about the Supreme Court upholding the state’s ban on essentially all abortions in the state, a number of other restrictive laws that advance a far right Republican agenda also went into effect the same day.

A total of 666 new laws were rolled out on Wednesday. Many of them, if they had been implemented individually, would have raised the alarm for Democrats and progressives. One law, for instance, criminalizes homelessness by disallowing people without homes from camping in a public location, making the act a misdemeanor with a $500 fine. Another law will make it illegal for people to hire workers for sex, which critics say will only exacerbate dangerous conditions for sex workers.

Many of the laws that went into effect on September 1 were a direct backlash against the Movement for Black Lives that gained momentum across the country over the past year, along with the general movement for racial justice. One bill will create financial penalties for medium to large municipalities that decline their police departments’ budgets yearly.

Another bill that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June bans the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. The scholarly theory, deliberately misinterpreted and politicized by the GOP, is not taught in grade schools. However, the intent of the law is to discourage educators from teaching American history without a white supremacist lens or talking about race in school. It bars teachers from giving “deference” to either side of a conflict while teaching about historical events.

One bill, which again appears to be a backlash against last year’s mass uprisings for racial justice, makes it a felony for protestors to block a road while protesting. This will lead to harsher penalties for left-wing protesters who already face disproportionate punishment and violence from police when they demonstrate.

A law that bans establishments from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine before entry also went into effect on Wednesday after having been signed by Abbott earlier this year. The punishment for requiring vaccinations is especially harsh on businesses: a business could be denied state contracts or even lose their license if they are found requiring customers to be vaccinated.

And then, of course, Texas also implemented a law that essentially overturns Roe v. Wade in the state, outlawing abortions at a point so early in the pregnancy that most people don’t even realize that they are pregnant. It will do untold damage to the millions of people in the state that it affects — especially low-income people who don’t have the wherewithal to go out of state to seek abortion care

Texas Republicans are working on yet more restrictive laws to come, many of them advancing a radical authoritarian agenda.

Abbott called the current special legislative session just so Republicans could pass a number of radical bills that the legislature wasn’t able to pass during the regular session. One is a bill aimed at making it harder for non-white people and people with disabilities to vote. The legislature passed the bill Tuesday, and Abbott has pledged to sign it.

Unsatisfied with just one bill scaring teachers from talking about race in schools, Republican legislators in the special session are advancing yet another supposed critical race theory bill that would remove required civil rights teachings from the curriculum, including writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. and lessons about slavery, white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan being “morally wrong.”

Republicans are also hoping to pass a slate of hateful anti-trans bills that would limit health care access for transgender youth, bar them from participating in sports, and more. The Texas GOP is following a wave of anti-trans laws being passed by Republicans across the country.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 1, 2021

Calls for Expanding Supreme Court Take on New Urgency After Texas Abortion Ban

After a law restricting nearly all abortions went into effect in Texas on Wednesday, progressives began reigniting a call to expand the Supreme Court, saying “millions of lives are at stake.”

The law is the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., to the point where experts have said that it essentially overturns Roe v. Wade in the state. The law went into effect after the Supreme Court didn’t act in rejecting it, as they were expected to do.

Progressives and Democrats have decried the tacit upholding of the law, ripping into the conservative-dominated Supreme Court for its inaction.

Lawmakers like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Mondaire Jones (D-New York) said that the Supreme Court must be expanded in order to fight against and overturn actions by the right-wing justices to undermine abortion and voting rights.

“By refusing to take action before the clock struck midnight, the far-right Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. This isn’t hypothetical — our fundamental rights are being snatched away from under us. We must #ExpandTheCourt,” wrote Jones.

“Has your member of Congress signed on to the Judiciary Act of 2021, which would add four seats to the Supreme Court? If not, what are they waiting for?” Jones wrote in a follow-up tweet, urging followers to call their representatives.

“We must expand and reform the Supreme Court. Millions of lives are at stake,” wrote Bowman. He said the expansion is about several issues at once, saying “It’s abortion rights. It’s voting rights. It’s workers’ rights. It’s civil rights.” and reiterated that adding justices to the Supreme Court is “a matter of life and death” in the tweet.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a criticism of the current Supreme Court from Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman, saying “A Supreme Court where 5 of 6 conservative justices were appointed by GOP presidents who initially lost popular vote and confirmed by senators representing minority of Americans are taking away voting rights and reproductive rights from millions of Americans. This is not democracy.”

Earlier this year, Democrats introduced legislation to add four more justices to the highest court in the land. Introduced by Jones, Markey, and others, the lawmakers and progressives argued that it’s necessary to fight back against Republicans, who have essentially rigged the court in their favor.

Congress has the authority to decide how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. However, the bill currently only has 28 cosponsors in the House and no cosponsors in the Senate.

Rescinding abortion rights, which are under threat on a national level with the current Supreme Court, would have an enormous impact on pregnant people and their families. It would also, as Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) pointed out, be especially pernicious for Black and brown people, as well as poor people.

“I’m thinking about the Black, brown, low-income, queer, and young folks in Texas. The folks this abortion health care ban will disproportionately harm,” tweeted Bush. “Wealthy white folks will have the means to access abortion care. Our communities won’t.”

Abortion bans affect nearly everyone, but they harm people of color and poor people the most. People of color are disproportionately criminalized by abortion bans and poor people don’t have the same access to health providers or the resources to travel to places that do provide abortions legally as wealthy people do. When a pregnancy is causing harm or will cause harm to a pregnant person, abortion bans leave disadvantaged populations with nowhere to turn.

Some lawmakers called for passing legislation through Congress that would protect abortion rights. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) called on the passage of a bill last introduced in 2019 that would prevent states from rescinding abortion access or limit access to the vital health care. “We will fight this in Congress with every tool available,” Lee vowed.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 1, 2021

Texas GOP Passes Sweeping Voter Suppression Law: “This Is How Democracy Dies”

Despite weeks of protest by Democrats in the state, Texas Republicans succeeded this week in passing their sweeping voter suppression law, which will make it harder for voters with disabilities and non-white voters in the state to cast a balllot. It now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has vowed to sign it.

The bill has long been decried by Democrats and advocates as a push by Republicans after the 2020 election to draw lines between who is and isn’t allowed to vote. It takes aim at measures that have historically driven turnout from Black and Latinx voters and other disenfranchised groups.

The bill, S.B.1, outlaws drive-through voting, for instance — a method of voting widely used by non-white voters to cast a ballot last year. Drive-through voting, which some counties had rolled out for the 2020 election, was a popular method, with about 1 in 10 early voters in Harris County casting their ballot that way.

Harris County, the state’s most populous county, had also implemented a 24-hour early voting program that officials offered for one day. Republicans also outlawed 24-hour voting in their bill, taking special issue with Harris county’s methods to increase turnout — perhaps partly because the county voted for President Joe Biden by a margin of nearly 30 points in 2020.

The Texas GOP is also creating hurdles for disabled people to vote. Some people with disabilities need another person to assist them in filling out a ballot. But the new bill will create an application process for people assisting others in voting and anyone assisting a disabled voter could potentially face criminal penalties if they perform a misstep.

S.B.1 contains a wide swath of other restrictions as well. For example, it makes it a felony for election officials to send out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications — another direct response to a Harris County initiative — and calls for stricter voter ID requirements for voting by mail. Further, the bill empowers partisan poll watchers who could intimidate voters when they go to cast a ballot and creates a monthly review system to check voter rolls for noncitizens. Though there are few to no documented cases of noncitizens voting in Texas, it did not stop Donald Trump from propagating the lie that it was a widespread problem.

Democratic lawmakers in Texas had fled the state for over a month to deny the legislature quorum and block the bill. But enough lawmakers returned after Republicans voted to threaten them with arrest warrants for the GOP’s marquee bill to pass.

Advocates, journalists and Democrats decried the passage of S.B.1. “The Texas legislature just passed its egregious voter suppression bill,” tweeted University of California, Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Meanwhile, voting rights legislation languishes in the Senate because [Senators Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema refuse to work around the filibuster. This is how democracy dies.”

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo vowed to fight the legislation. “The voter suppression bill has passed the legislature in Texas. We won’t give up now. We will fight this in court,” she wrote on Twitter. “And we will work relentlessly so voters in Harris County, from both parties, can cast a ballot despite these shameless suppression efforts.”

Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement shortly after the bill was passed that he is planning to sign S.B.1 into law, citing spurious concerns about so-called election integrity. Republicans have offered a variety of excuses to implement such widespread voting restrictions in what was already one of the hardest states in which to cast a vote.

But the Texas GOP’s intentions, much like the intentions of Republicans across the country trying to implement similar restrictions, are transparent: They want to make it harder to vote, especially for populations that they perceive to be Democrats, so that they never lose an election again.

After failing to manipulate and then overturn the 2020 election — including attempting to cover up a violent attempted coup — Republicans have all but outright said that their goal is to ensure Republican wins in presidential and down ballot elections.

This statement by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) last year is just one example of countless others made by Republicans across the U.S.: “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

It’s not just voter restrictions that Republicans are pushing, however. Texas Republicans are prepared to pull off yet another gerrymandering session that will turn the tides even further in their favor, after having pulled off an extremely bold partisan gerrymandering map 10 years ago.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 1, 2021

McCarthy Threatens Retaliation Against Telecoms That Comply With Jan 6 Committee

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) on Tuesday may have broken the law when he issued a threat to telecommunications companies that comply with a request by the January 6 committee to preserve and potentially turn over call records relating to the attack, including those of members of Congress.

McCarthy called out Democrats like January 6 committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), claiming that the committee’s request was an attempt to “strong-arm” communications companies.

He also dubiously claimed that it would be illegal for the companies to comply with the government request, leaving them with a threat. “[A] Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law,” he wrote. His office has failed to produce a specific law that the companies’ compliance would violate.

Legal experts disagree with McCarthy’s claim. CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen said Wednesday that “no, there is no law” that the telecommunications companies would be breaking. In fact, Eisen said, it would be illegal if the telecommunications companies destroyed the records or refused to turn them over, as McCarthy suggested they do.

“This is absolutely unjustified by [the] law and it raises serious questions under the House ethics rules,” Eisen said. “It meets the elements of obstruction. It’s a threat. It’s an attempt to stop them, through that threat, from turning over documents. It’s self-motivated, it’s corrupt. McCarthy is worried about what may be in those records on him.”

Democrats are also alarmed about McCarthy’s threat. “I see it as clear obstruction of justice,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) told The Washington Post. Swalwell said that officials should consider referring McCarthy’s threat to the Department of Justice. “He’s telling the telecommunications companies to not honor a lawful subpoena, or there could be some penalty down the line,” Swalwell continued.

While it is known that McCarthy had a call with President Donald Trump on January 6, there is little information on the content of that call. And though nearly eight months have passed since the attack, McCarthy has remained guarded about what he discussed with Trump that day.

The records, which the committee began seeking last week, may shine a light on his fellow Republicans lawmakers too. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also had a phone call with Trump that day; other lawmakers like Representatives Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) have been accused of collaborating with members of the far right in planning the attack.

A spokesperson for the committee said that the group is not fazed by McCarthy’s threat. “The Select Committee is investigating the violent attack on the Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of last year’s election,” the spokesperson said in a statement, per Politico. “We’ve asked companies not to destroy records that may help answer questions for the American people. The committee’s efforts won’t be deterred by those who want to whitewash or cover up the events of January 6th, or obstruct our investigation.”

Republicans have spent the last several months downplaying the violent attempt — which resulted in the death of seven people — to get Congress to reinstate Trump against the will of the voters. The party’s motivations, meanwhile, have remained relatively clear: to obstruct the investigation by every means possible. Trump last week also tried to prevent communications logs related to January 6 from coming out after the committee requested documents from the White House.

Earlier this year, Republicans struck down a bill that would have created a bipartisan January 6 commission, even after Democrats had made several concessions to get them on board. Then, McCarthy attempted to sabotage the House committee, picking questionable figures like avid Trump supporter Rep. Jordan who was fully behind the attempt to overthrow the election results to investigate the attack.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 31, 2021

New Orleans Was Left in the Dark During Ida Because of Natural Gas Plant Failure

As Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans on Sunday leaving destruction in its wake, it knocked out power lines and left the entire city in the dark — in spite of a pledge from a natural gas company to keep the city powered even through severe storms.

As The New York Times reported, Ida showed the weakness of the electrical grid in the area, which is reliant largely on natural gas. Though many power plants were forced to go offline, a new natural gas power plant built by utility company Entergy last year was supposed to have the reliability to keep the city powered through severe heat or storms — or so the company pledged. Entergy sources its energy largely from fossil fuels.

But, as Ida ripped through Louisiana, the storm battered the company’s equipment and brought down all eight Entergy power lines that bring in electricity from out of town. Now, many residents will be left without power for days or weeks while the company works to restore service.

The company blamed the “catastrophic intensity” of the storm for its failure to provide reliable electricity. It has thus far provided no answers for why the entire city — not just some areas — was left in the dark.

Though it’s not true that fossil fuels are as a rule more reliable than clean energy, Entergy has fiercely sold natural gas to lawmakers as a reliable alternative to clean energy sources. In lobbying the city council to allow construction of the company’s new natural gas plant in 2018, a lawyer for Entergy New Orleans said “I’m here to sound the alarm. We are at risk of cascading outages and blackouts.”

Touting its supposed reliability is a common tactic of natural gas producers and the fossil fuel industry. The industry has duped the media and lawmakers with false propaganda about natural gas in efforts to keep fossil fuels’ energy dominance in the U.S.

“Many utilities continue to sell the story that gas is the bridge that we need right now to the clean energy future,” Bill Corcoran, a director of state strategies at the Sierra Club, told The New York Times in 2019. “I think this is about locking in as much as you can now.” New Orleans was embroiled in a fight between natural gas and renewable energy — a fight that fossil fuel companies largely won.

Natural gas has a huge presence in Louisiana, which ranks among the top five states for natural gas production and storage. Though he has since signed a pledge to take the state in a carbon-neutral direction, a natural gas plant built last year had been hailed falsely by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards as a “clean energy” source — another talking point from the fossil fuel industry.

Natural gas is anything but clean, emitting powerful greenhouse gases from the release and burning of methane, which hugely contributes to the climate crisis. Still, natural gas accounts for about a third of the source for electricity in the U.S., and there are few federal policies looking to reduce the country’s reliance on it and other fossil fuels.

As a grim, cyclic result of our dependence on fossil fuel and natural gas, disasters like Hurricane Ida will only grow more frequent and intense long into the future unless the government takes action on the climate crisis.

Natural gas’s relative unreliability — and the unreliability of the U.S.’s electrical grids in general — was on display during another disaster earlier this year, when millions of residents in Texas lost power during a winter storm.

Though Republican Gov. Greg Abbott had come out early in the crisis parroting a prominent climate denier’s talking points about how the massive power outages were due to failures by the state’s wind and solar power sources. But experts later found that the disaster was likely more the fault of natural gas, upon which the state’s independent power grid is reliant, and the utility company’s failure to properly weatherize before the storm.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 31, 2021

HHS Creates New Office to Address Climate Crisis as Public Health Issue

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is creating a new office that will focus on addressing the health impacts of the climate crisis, officials announced Monday.

The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity will focus on treating the climate crisis as the public health threat that it is. The agency says it will have a justice-driven mission, striving to identify communities and populations that are most affected by the climate crisis in the U.S. The office will also work to mitigate the health sector’s contributions to the climate crisis, helping health providers and partners to lower their greenhouse gas emissions to comply with regulatory efforts.

“History will judge us for the actions we take today to protect our world and our health from climate change. The consequences for our inaction are real and worsening,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in a statement. “We’ve always known that health is at the center of climate change, and now we’re going to double-down on a necessity: fighting climate change in order to help protect public health in our communities.”

The new office is created in compliance with President Joe Biden’s all-of-government approach to the climate crisis, which orders agencies to come up with their own ways to address and mitigate the climate crisis. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy called the new office “a fight for our health that ensures no community is left behind” in a statement.

The office will be relatively small for now, with HHS requesting just $3 million in funding from Congress for the next year. As Becerra told Politico, however, the office will play a central role in climate-related decision making and environmental justice initiatives for the agency.

In a press release, the agency cited a World Health Organization estimate that the climate crisis will cause an additional 250,000 deaths a year worldwide starting in 2030, though that estimate is likely to be extremely conservative. A study this year, for instance, found that 5 million deaths a year can be attributed to the climate crisis.

Climate change is, indeed, a large contributor to public health issues. Increased drought and heat, and worsening extreme weather events are a huge and growing threat. Air pollution from activities like burning fossil fuels, ground-level ozone due to higher temperatures and even things like pollen and mold are getting worse due to the climate crisis and global warming.

A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council this year found that not only is the climate crisis also a crisis of public health, but it’s also extremely costly for the U.S. health system. Air pollution and climate change cost the country a staggering $820 billion yearly in health costs, a figure that’s only going to grow as the climate crisis continues to worsen, largely unmitigated.

Though everyone is affected by climate change, Black and brown communities and poor communities suffer the most. Redlining and racist permitting policies for fossil fuel infrastructure creates environmentally hostile conditions for poor, nonwhite communities — to the point where there is, for instance, a community in New York named “Asthma Alley” and one in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” for their disproportionate numbers of residents afflicted by those health problems.

Those public health impacts compound, too: asthma sufferers are at a greater risk of dying due to COVID-19, for instance. Long-term exposure to air pollution, even for non-asthma sufferers, has also been shown to have negative impacts on a person’s ability to survive COVID.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 31, 2021

750,000 Households Facing Eviction If Congress Doesn’t Act, Says Goldman Sachs

A new analysis from finance firm Goldman Sachs finds that if Congress doesn’t act soon to pass an eviction moratorium, 750,000 households could face eviction in the fall and winter.

The investment bank estimates that between 2.5 and 3.5 million people in the U.S. are significantly behind on rent, which collectively adds up to an estimated $12 billion to $17 billion.

The Goldman Sachs estimate is more conservative than a Census Bureau estimate from last week that said about 1.3 million people could be facing eviction within just the next two months. Still, both of those estimates should serve as a wake-up call for Congress, which has dragged its feet and refused to pass an eviction moratorium, even as hundreds of thousands of families are threatened with imminent homelessness and destabilization.

Part of the reason for the multibillion dollar rent debt is due to the failure of state governments to distribute tens of billions of dollars in rental aid given to them by the federal government. Lawmakers approved $46.5 billion to be disbursed to states to help residents with rent payments during the pandemic, but only about 11 percent of it has been distributed as of last week.

Of about 2.8 million households that applied for rental assistance, The New York Times reported last week, only about 500,000 have reported receiving funds, and 700,000 applications have been rejected. Many renters who are behind on rent payments, meanwhile, haven’t applied for the program. This could be due to states not publicizing the rental assistance or creating complicated application systems for renters.

Conservative justices in the Supreme Court recently shot down the Biden administration’s latest eviction moratorium extension, which was spurred by progressive lawmaker Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). The justices cruelly argued that the eviction moratorium couldn’t be upheld because it could be a slippery slope to other government assistance programs like food and internet aid.

The moratorium was set to protect renters until October, but the Supreme Court decision has put a huge swath of renters at risk of immediate eviction. If Congress fails to pass another eviction moratorium, the country could be facing a wave of mass evictions, advocates have warned.

While the evictions could have a small impact on the economy, Goldman Sachs writes “The implications for Covid infections and public health are probably more severe.” Indeed, part of the reason for the eviction moratorium is to help stem community spread of COVID.

More importantly, however, the eviction moratorium has helped prevent 1.55 million evictions, the Biden administration estimated in July. Evictions have an enormous psychological and financial impact on people and are a major contributor to homelessness.

On Friday, over 60 House Democrats signed a letter to the Democratic leadership pleading for them to bring to a vote and pass a new eviction moratorium, codifying it into law. Led by progressive lawmakers Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Cori Bush (D-Missouri), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), and others, the letter argues that the legislation is crucial to help Americans survive the pandemic and beyond.

“Millions of people who are currently at risk for eviction, housing insecurity, or face becoming unhoused desperately look to their elected representatives to implement legislation that will put their health and safety first and save lives,” the letter writers said.

They face long odds of passing a moratorium through Congress, however. Democrats in the House shot down the idea in July, just before the moratorium was about to end for the first time.

It’s unclear whether or not there would be more support this time — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-New York) pointed out at the time, the Democrats had only a couple of days to draft and pass the legislation before it expired, with little notice from the Biden administration.

The Democrats are also up against real estate firms that have poured millions into lobbying to stop the eviction moratorium. The lobbying against the moratorium has not stopped despite the fact that many of these real estate groups have reported solid earnings this year.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 30, 2021

Education Department Investigating Five States With Mask Mandate Bans

The Department of Education announced on Monday that it is launching an investigation into five states that have implemented mask mandate bans, claiming that such bans could pose a danger to students’ health.

The investigation by the department’s civil rights office will look into Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah, where Republican lawmakers have barred school districts from implementing mask mandates. In their probe, the department will seek to determine whether the bans have violated the law in discriminating against students who are more susceptible to COVID-19.

“The Department has heard from parents from across the country – particularly parents of students with disabilities and with underlying medical conditions – about how state bans on universal indoor masking are putting their children at risk and preventing them from accessing in-person learning equally,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement. “It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve.”

In a press release on the investigation, the department says that it is not looking into other states with mask bans because those bans aren’t currently being enforced uniformly. Indeed, bans implemented by the Republican governors of Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Arizona aren’t currently enforced because of court decisions, school districts’ refusals to comply, legislative restrictions, or a combination of several factors. The Education Department will instead continue to monitor those four states for potential violations, it said.

The investigation is part of an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to crack down on governors — Republicans, largely — who are making returning to in-person schooling more hazardous for children, their families, and staff.

In their press release, the Education Department said that the investigation was part of an effort by the agency to comply with an order from President Biden earlier this month that directed Cardona to “assess all available tools in taking action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law” to ensure that in-person schooling amid COVID can remain safe.

Letters sent to state heads of schools from the Education Department cite concerning statistics about child COVID rates and research showing that masks are largely effective at preventing spread of the virus, despite the personal opinions of Republican leaders.

While many schools were not open for in-person instruction full-time through last year, the Biden administration has taken steps to encourage schools to reopen. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, following a threat that President Donald Trump made last year, threatened this month to withhold funding from schools if they implement a mask mandate in defiance of his ban.

Some Republicans like Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa falsely claim that masks are bad for children psychologically, implying that those imagined effects could be worse than a child or their family members contracting and potentially dying of COVID-19. Right-wing pundits and lawmakers have been trying to say, without evidence, that children are negatively harmed by having to wear a mask, but research has shown that if there are negative effects from mask-wearing on children, they are negligible.

Other Republicans like South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster falsely claim that there’s evidence that schools are safe havens from COVID, although no such evidence exists.

The first few weeks of the school year have so far shown that this is anything but true. COVID cases have spread like wildfire among children as schools return to in-person education. Pediatric hospitalizations due to COVID have shot up to record highs over the course of this month and dozens of children have died.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 30, 2021

US COVID Hospitalization Rate Tops 100,000, Highest Since Winter’s Peaks

Hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have topped a two-week average of 100,000, according to the New York Times. This is the highest rate of hospitalizations due to COVID recorded in the U.S. since last winter, when rates reached record highs.

As mask mandates and restrictions have lifted over the past months, hospitalizations have increased exponentially. They reached lows in June, but in July, they began rising again. Over the course of about two months, average hospitalization rates went from a one-week average of around 17,000 to over 100,000.

The highest COVID hospitalization rates recorded in the pandemic so far occurred in January 2021, following the winter holidays. Over 137,000 people were hospitalized on average then.

Fortunately, however, infections seem to be slowing down. While hospitalizations have been rising steadily, the number of cases appears to be reaching a peak. But the U.S. isn’t in the clear yet — deaths due to COVID are still on the rise, reaching new highs after rates had dipped early in the summer.

High hospitalization rates have been overwhelming hospitals across the country. In some places, especially at large hospitals serving urban areas, they have been forced to transfer COVID patients to facilities in other towns, sometimes far away, to receive care. In Southern states with low vaccination rates, meanwhile, hospitals are running out of oxygen.

“Normally, an oxygen tank would be about 90% full, and the suppliers would let them get down to a refill level of 30-40% left in their tank, giving them a three- to five-day cushion of supply,” Donna Cross, senior director of facilities and construction for health care improvement company Premier, told CNN. “What’s happening now is that hospitals are running down to about 10-20%, which is a one- to two-day supply on hand, before they’re getting backfilled.”

Supply issues and shortages have especially become a problem in Florida, where the pandemic is worse than it ever has been. Since the end of July and through August, hospitalizations nearly tripled as the Delta variant ripped through the state. Overall, Florida is doing worse than nearly every other state on several metrics, with the highest number of cases and highest number of people hospitalized per 100,000, at 106 and 77, respectively.

The situation is so dire that the mayor of Orlando had to ask residents to conserve water so that the city could keep supplying oxygen to patients. Despite all of it, though, Gov. Ron DeSantis has been holding firm against vaccine and mask mandates, causing his approval ratings to plummet.

High hospitalization numbers across the U.S. are particularly concerning because they are happening despite over half of the country being fully vaccinated, suggesting that the cases would be even higher if there were no vaccines to inoculate against the virus. Researchers in July found that the U.S.’s vaccine campaign has saved around 279,000 lives and prevented about 1.25 million people from being hospitalized.

Indeed, cases have risen precipitously since rates of vaccination slowed and politicians began lifting mask and social distancing mandates. Vaccines are being administered at a rate of about 886,000 doses a day, down from averages of over 3 million earlier this year. Meanwhile, as of the beginning of July, all states except for Hawaii had fully reopened, and only a handful of states have reimplemented COVID guidelines.

Researchers are saying that they expect over 100,000 more deaths due to COVID from August to December 1 if the pandemic continues as it has been, largely unabated among the unvaccinated save for some places that have reimplemented mask mandates. One hundred thousand deaths was once deemed by the New York Times to be “an incalculable loss,” but now the U.S. approaches a new grim milestone as it nears 640,000 deaths — and counting.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 30, 2021

Climate Crises Converge as Wildfire Burns West and Hurricane Pummels South

Hurricane Ida made landfall in Southern Louisiana on Sunday as one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. It has knocked out power to the hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans and over 1 million in Louisiana and has caused at least one death so far.

Scientists say that the climate crisis has, without a doubt, made Ida more intense as higher water temperatures offshore act as fuel to a hurricane’s fire. Greenhouse gases resulting from human activity have contributed to a rise in average water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 20th century. The category 4 storm has so far blown entire roofs off buildings, devastated the Louisiana town of Jean Lafitte, and overwhelmed hospitals already filled with COVID patients.

Ida’s storm surge was so strong as it made landfall that the hurricane actually reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, something that experts say is extremely rare. With the threat of levee failure hanging over Louisiana, the hurricane, since downgraded to a tropical storm, is headed into Mississippi.

Though many residents evacuated the region before the storm, many others, unable to evacuate, have been left behind. Some people simply cannot afford the costs associated with seeking shelter out of the storm or may not have reliable access to transportation out of the area, such as a car. Other populations, such as incarcerated people, have no choice either way.

As Ida blasted through Louisiana, the climate crisis intensified blazes across the country. Wildfire Caldor has engulfed hundreds of homes in its wake as it has moved across eastern California in the past two weeks. It now threatens Lake Tahoe, where residents on the California side have been ordered to evacuate.

The Caldor fire has been particularly hard to contain. Firefighters have pushed back their estimated date for containment of the fire to September 8. As the Caldor fire blazes on, the Dixie Fire, just 65 miles to the North, is well into its second month of burning. At nearly 50 percent containment and with over 770,000 acres burned so far, the Dixie Fire is the second-largest fire in California history, beaten only by the August Complex fire from last year.

California’s weather has become drier for longer periods over the past decades as global warming and climate disruption have lengthened the wildfire season and pushed winter rains further and further back in the year. It has wreaked havoc on the state, where six of the seven largest fires in the state, including the Dixie Fire, have occurred over the past year or so.

It’s unclear if all of these disasters were caused directly by the climate crisis, but they were surely fueled by it. As climate scientists warn of dire consequences if the world continues on its current path, the western part of the U.S. has experienced record heat waves, making July 2021 the hottest month in recorded history on Earth.

The converging climate disasters come as officials struggle to contain the pandemic scouring the country and contend with massive unrest in Afghanistan: Two crises that may seem unrelated but have actually been exacerbated by the climate crisis. Climate change helps spread infectious diseases, scientists have warned for years. There’s evidence that air pollution, including that of burning fossil fuels, has worsened COVID outcomes for frontline communities living in areas that bear the brunt of increased air pollution. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban has exploited the economic devastation and serious resource shortages brought on by the twin effects of drought and flooding caused by climate change to successfully overthrow the government that was propped up by the U.S.

Climate unrest has been on full display through this year and the last. But nearly all of these problems exacerbate each other, solidifying the so-called threat multiplier effect of the climate crisis.

California, for instance, cruelly forces incarcerated people to be on the frontline of firefighting when the wildfire season rolls around, paying them such absurdly low rates that it has been likened to slavery. But, with so many prisons ravaged by the pandemic, the state has had fewer incarcerated bodies to help fight the fires, making it harder to contain the blazes as they rage on.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 27, 2021

Texas House Speaker Warns Democrats Not to Say “Racism” in Election Bill Debate

Texas’s Speaker of the House warned representatives in the Texas State House on Thursday night not to use the word “racism” when debating the Republicans’ voter suppression bill..

Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, started debate on the bill by saying “the chair would appreciate members not using the word ‘racism’ this afternoon,” according to the Houston Chronicle. He insisted that it was a matter of respect.

Republican legislators in Texas have been objecting to claims that their voter suppression bill, or S.B. 1, is racist. The bill has been slammed by voting rights advocates and Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) as the “Jim Crow 2.0” for its prohibitive voting requirements and overtly racist voting restrictions.

In April, the Houston Chronicle reported that GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “you’re in essence calling us racist, and that will not stand,” in response to these Democratic criticisms of the bill’s racist effects.

The chamber advanced the bill 79 to 37, with only one Republican voting no. It is expected to pass in a floor vote on Friday, after which it goes back to the Texas State Senate, where senators can pass the new bill or reconcile differences between a similar bill previously passed by the chamber.

If passed, the bill would ban 24-hour and drive-through voting, voting options that have been championed as expanding access in nonwhite communities. It would make it harder for people with disabilities to vote by restricting the ability of those who help them turn in their ballots. And, among a slate of other restrictions, it would also bar local election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, with the aim of restricting mail-in voting.

Texas Democrats had fled the legislature in July to block a special session in which Texas Republicans planned to pass the voter suppression bill, anti-trans laws, and more. In an effort to force a vote on the voter suppression law, Texas House Republicans earlier this month voted to arrest their Democratic counterparts if they didn’t return to the state.

Democratic lawmakers pointed out the bill’s implicit and explicit racist effects in debate on Thursday night.

“The courts have pointed out over and over and over again: intentional discrimination against African Americans, intentional discrimination against Latinos, intentional discrimination against people of color. These are not my words. These are three federal courts across this country making 10 findings of that intentional discrimination,” said Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat.

Hinojosa was referencing past court rulings against Texas election law, including a 2012 ruling finding that Texas lawmakers didn’t comply with the Voting Rights Act when drawing district maps that cycle. “Intentional discrimination against people of a different race…” Hinojosa said. “Is that racism?”

Phelan interjected, saying, “we can talk about racial impacts with this legislation without accusing members of this body of being racist.” Hinojosa pointed out that she hadn’t accused any one lawmaker as being racist.

Democrats expressed frustration and anger over Phelan’s attempted ban on discussing racism in the chamber. “Wow. The Speaker just asked us to not use the word ‘racism’ during debate today,” wrote Democratic Rep. Erin Zwiener on Twitter. “SB 1 will harm the freedom to vote for all Texans, but it will disproportionately impact people of color. That’s racist, no matter how you dress it up. Period.”

“One Republican has already filed an amendment to put the ‘Souls to the Polls’ provision that would limit black churches voting on Sunday morning back in the bill. It’s racist,” Zwiener continued. “Coddling R legislators who are uncomfortable about how this bill hurts people of color is not our job.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 26, 2021

Explosive Report Says Dark Money Fueled Centrist Dems’ Objections to $3.5T Bill

New investigations by The Intercept have revealed that the group of Democrats who have been trying to obstruct the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill have ties to billionaire-funded dark money group No Labels, which offered two representatives in the group hundreds of thousands of dollars to advance their agenda.

The group of conservative Democrats who were dead set on obstructing the Democratic leadership’s plan to ensure that the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill was passed through Congress offered one reason for their campaign: they simply wanted to ensure that the bipartisan infrastructure bill was seen as a win for President Joe Biden, they said.

They painted their stance as though their push had nothing to do with the reconciliation bill, which contains plans to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations. “Time kills deals,” they argued in an op-ed earlier this week, saying that progressives and Democratic leadership were holding the infrastructure bill “hostage.”

But The Intercept has uncovered that the group’s members may have darker reasons for their opposition to the timeline proposed by Democrats and the White House.

On Thursday, the publication revealed that No Labels essentially bribed members of the group to help advance the appearance of the group’s “Unbreakable Nine” label. No Labels reportedly offered to raise $200,000 for Representatives Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Georgia), and Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) if they cancelled their appearances at a fundraiser held by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) last Saturday.

Ultimately, Bordeaux attended the fundraiser, but Gonzalez cancelled his appearance. Both a spokesperson for Gonzalez and No Labels have denied that there was an agreement to fundraise separately for the lawmakers.

The reason behind the offer was that No Labels wanted the group to provide a united front against Pelosi’s agenda to pass the bills concurrently. No Labels, meanwhile, is against the bill because of its proposals to hike taxes on the rich, reports The Intercept.

“The larger package includes significant tax increases on the private equity barons and other wealthy individuals who fund No Labels, and the group has unleashed a flood of money in order to stop it,” wrote The Intercept.

The Intercept writes that No Labels may be opening the Democrats up to participating in potentially illegal actions with the dark money group’s offers. “On the question of whether accepting campaign funds as a ‘reward’ for the right vote on the infrastructure bill would break the law, a Congressional Research Service summary explains that accepting such money could indeed be off-limits, if it was given because of how they voted.”

The group had taken a victory lap on Tuesday, after Pelosi made a small concession to pass a rule ensuring a floor vote on the infrastructure bill by September 27, despite the fact that it wasn’t much of a win for the conservative Democrats. They gathered in a large Zoom meeting with dozens of No Labels donors to celebrate their win.

“You should feel so proud, I can’t explain to you, this is the culmination of all your work. This would not have happened but for what you built,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), the group’s leader, told the representatives and the donors on the call. “It just wouldn’t have happened — hard stop. You should just feel so proud. This is your win as much as it is my win.”

No Labels, as well as the conservative lobby group U.S. Chamber of Commerce also indirectly revealed what is likely the true reason for the group’s opposition to the reconciliation/infrastructure plan earlier this week. Both praised the conservative Democrats not for moving up the timeline for the infrastructure bill, but for supposedly separating the infrastructure and reconciliation bills.

“The Unbreakable Nine have now broken this link [between the two bills] as Pelosi can no longer use the infrastructure bill as leverage to force Democratic moderates to vote for a reconciliation bill,” Liz Morrison, co-executive director of No Labels, wrote in a private memo to allies, The Intercept discovered.

Though none of the members of the group have said outright that this was their motivation, it would make sense that they didn’t want to come out directly against the reconciliation bill; Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have caught flack from fellow Democrats, progressives and the media in recent months for their stated opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag for the reconciliation package despite its popularity among the public and their party.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 26, 2021

Ilhan Omar Urges Pardon for Daniel Hale, Who Leaked Air Force’s Drone Program

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) is calling on President Joe Biden to pardon Daniel Hale, a former Air Force analyst who was sentenced to prison last month after pleading guilty to espionage.

In her letter, sent to the White House on Thursday, Omar argues that Hale’s actions didn’t cause any direct harm to individuals in the U.S. and that his sentencing is more of a reflection of a Trumpian will to silence whistleblowers than it is about his crime.

Hale began leaking information during the Obama administration, which declined to prosecute him, she pointed out. “It wasn’t until 2019, under President Trump, that he was indicted. We are all well aware of the severe consequences of the Trump Administration’s chilling crackdown on whistleblowers and other public servants who they deemed insufficiently loyal,” Omar wrote, noting that she takes leaks of classified information seriously. “I believe that the decision to prosecute Mr. Hale was motivated, at least in part, as a threat to other would-be whistleblowers.”

Omar continued, saying that the intelligence made public by Hale should have been declassified to begin with. “The information, while politically embarrassing to some, has shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows.”

In 2015, Hale leaked the truth about the U.S.’s drone program in the Middle East to The Intercept. The public learned that the Air Force had been routinely killing civilians with drone strikes, which the U.S. had sold as necessary to keep American troops out of danger in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in the region. Nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes, according to the leaks, were of “unintended targets.”

The drone program existed before Barack Obama took office, but Obama had ramped up the practice, according to intelligence leaked by Hale. Before the leak, the drone program had been shrouded in secrecy from even the most savvy investigative journalists.

Before he left office, Obama put in new requirements for reporting civilian deaths in counterterrorism programs, but the Trump administration quickly revoked those requirements.

“I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless,” Hale said in court last month. The information he leaked “was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs,” he said. Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison, and was being kept in inhumane conditions as of late July, when he was transferred to a Virginia prison.

Omar pointed to a letter that Hale had written before his sentence in which he outlined what he felt was a moral obligation to make the information public and his struggle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain,” he wrote of the first drone strike he ever witnessed. “Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions.”

Omar said that Hale’s reasoning for his actions shows why the leak was necessary, calling his letter “deeply moving” and his motivations “profoundly moral.” While the legality of his actions have been decided, Omar said, the moral judgment from the White House remains.

“As you frequently say, the United States should lead not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example. I implore you to read Mr. Hale’s letter to the judge in full, and I believe you will agree that he was motivated by the same thing,” Omar wrote. “Acknowledging where we’ve gone wrong, and telling the truth about our shortcomings, is not only the right thing to do, but also an act of profound patriotism.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 26, 2021

Sanders Says He Won’t Let Centrists Shrink $3.5T Bill: “I Already Negotiated”

For a while this summer, it looked as though all was right among Democrats in Congress after an agreement was reached to support one thing: the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). But, in recent weeks, conservative Democrats have slowly come out against it, in one way or another, and are slated to put up a fight against its price tag as committees begin drafting the bill.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) has been the most vocal in her opposition, saying last month (and reiterating recently) that she opposes the $3.5 trillion price tag, and that it’s not up for debate. Sinema has been widely criticized for her stance — a month ago, she was the first Democrat to come out against it — but she is steadfast in her opposition. Her conservative ally in the Senate, Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), has also said that he has “serious concerns” over the price tag for the bill.

Sanders, however, is determined to keep the price tag — and he, too, says it’s not up for debate. “I already negotiated. The truth is we need more,” he told Politico in an interview Wednesday. “The needs are there. This is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending.”

Sanders is in the middle of a tour of midwestern Republican-leaning states to sell voters on the reconciliation bill. The bill enjoys majority support among the public, including the support of nearly all Democrats, according to a recent poll.

The GOP “understand[s] that what we’re doing is enormously popular, that the American people are sick and tired of the government working overtime for the wealthy and the powerful,” said Sanders. “The contrast is pretty clear. And we’re gonna win that.” He thinks that the popularity of the bill and its ambitious proposals will help the Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections.

The Vermont progressive has become somewhat of a tour de force since President Joe Biden took office, allying closely with the White House. Progressive policies like the ones Sanders pushes are generally popular among the public, after all.

“Trust me, there are a lot of differences in the Senate among the Democrats,” Sanders said. “But at the end of the day, every Democrat understands that it is terribly important that we support the president’s agenda. And most of these ideas came from the White House.” But, he also pointed out that the Democratic majority in Congress is extremely slim.

Indeed, many of the proposals in the reconciliation bill, which was advanced recently by both the House and the Senate, are taken from Biden’s original infrastructure proposal from the spring. Provisions like raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for the bill and a federal paid family leave program were included in the reconciliation bill after conservative Democrats and Republicans cut them out of the bipartisan infrastructure package.

Today, the infrastructure bill is only as large as it is because of Sanders’s influence, lawmakers said in July. He had originally proposed a $6 trillion price tag, which more moderate Democrats had negotiated down. “Bernie Sanders is like a human embodiment of shifting the Overton Window,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), said in July. “We wouldn’t be there without him putting out $6 trillion.”

On the current price tag, then, there’s no backing down again for the senator, or for progressives in the House. “[E]very single thing” in the plan is of crucial importance, he told Politico, like the child tax credit extension and Medicare expansion. At the end of the day, the price tag is “non-negotiable” for him, Sanders said.

Sanders will have to contend with some of the most stubborn conservatives in the Democratic caucus — Manchin, Sinema, and their more quiet allies — who have gained a reputation for gutting the Democratic agenda. Sinema has said that even the threat from progressives in the House to kill her infrastructure bill doesn’t faze her if she can get what she wants on reconciliation.

As of now, though, it appears that the House progressives outnumber the conservative Democrats who ally with Manchin and Sinema in their apparent goals to weaken or sabotage the reconciliation bill. Progressive representatives have vowed to shoot down the infrastructure bill if the reconciliation package doesn’t end up being what they negotiated for. And, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has pointed out, there are “dozens and dozens” of them — and only a handful of conservative Democrats.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 25, 2021

Jan. 6 Committee Requests Communications From Trump White House and Allies

The House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6 has sent out its first request for documents and communications related to the attack, seeking information on correspondence from the White House under Donald Trump and that of many of his associates.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), who chairs the committee, announced Wednesday that they are reaching out to several agencies seeking information that might lend answers to the committee’s mission to understand the extent of Trump and Republicans’ involvement in the attack and attempt to overturn the election.

“Our Constitution provides for a peaceful transfer of power, and this investigation seeks to evaluate threats to that process, identify lessons learned and recommend laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations necessary to protect our republic in the future,” Thompson wrote in the requests.

The committee has sent letters to the National Archives, Department of Justice, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and four other departments. Committee members are seeking information on the schedule, activities and whereabouts of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, as well as video and recordings of Trump recorded in public and within the White House that day.

They have asked the National Archives to turn over “All documents and communications within the White House on January 6, 2021, relating in any way to” a long list of events and people within Trump’s orbit. On top of correspondence from Trump and Pence, the committee is seeking information from and related to figures like Hope Hicks, Kayleigh McEnany, all of Trump’s adult children other than Tiffany, Melania Trump, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, and over a dozen others.

In the committee’s request to the Pentagon, members ask for “[a]ll documents and communications concerning possible attempts by President Donald Trump to remain in office after January 20, 2021.” They also ask for potential requests made by Trump and associates to the military to keep him in power and communications impeding the transition of power to President Joe Biden.

Agencies have two weeks to respond to the committee’s request, which may be challenging considering the scope and volume of the request.

The group is also asking the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense to provide information related to the government’s response to the attack.

The committee has requested that the Defense Department turn over documentation of requests made that day to send the National Guard to quell the protests. They also ask Homeland Security to send “All documents and communications internally expressing concerns regarding the Government’s ability to handle events that could or ultimately did transpire on January 6, 2021.”

The expansive request from the committee indicates the wide scope of information that the group is planning to seek and expose to the public. Though there is thousands of hours of video footage from the day and a huge amount of information has been uncovered about the attack on the Capitol up until now, there are still several glaring questions about the events of the day, especially as related to the extent of Trump and other elected officials’ involvement with the attack. Answers to questions such as what Trump was doing as the mob fueled by his conspiracy theories attacked the Capitol and why the police were so unprepared for the attack may come to light with this week’s inquiry.

The letters come just after Thompson announced this week that the committee is also planning to contact telecommunications companies for communications from members of Congress regarding the attack. Though the committee has not yet specified whose phone records they’re seeking, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) infamously had phone conversations with Trump that day, and could potentially be on the committee’s list.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 25, 2021

Trump Ally Erik Prince Is Charging People $6,500 to Fly Out of Kabul

Erik Prince, founder of the infamous defense contracting firm Blackwater, is reportedly charging $6,500 for a seat on a charter plane leaving Kabul, Afghanistan, as Afghan citizens are clamoring to leave the country amid a mounting humanitarian crisis.

Prince told the Wall Street Journal about his evident scheme to profit off the chaos and desperation in an article published Wednesday. It’s unclear whether or not the disgraced defense contractor is actually able to contribute to the evacuation efforts in this way.

Even as tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people rush to leave Afghanistan, however, the WSJ reports that many charter flights are leaving the country with hundreds of vacant seats. Afghans, risking being killed en route to the airport, are facing roadblocks and checkpoints put up by the Taliban, who have also made driving out of the country into Pakistan inaccessible and dangerous.

Prince has a storied and checkered career, defined partly by his drive to privatize and profit from the Afghanistan war. His latest stunt, then, is relatively unsurprising for anyone familiar with his past.

Prince’s company, Blackwater, is perhaps best known for a 2007 massacre in Baghdad in which 17 people were killed. The company was tasked with providing private security for the government when Blackwater guards apparently began shooting at innocent people attempting to flee Nisour square.

An investigation at the federal level found Blackwater responsible for the massacre. In 2014, one Blackwater guard was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, while three others were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years in prison. However, the latter sentence was later halved by a federal appeals court.

Controversially, however, in a particularly shocking move, former President Donald Trump, who appointed Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos as his education secretary, pardoned the former guards just before he left office. He was slammed by critics for the pardon and a United Nations human rights expert said that it violated international law.

Trump also kept a close relationship with Prince who acted as an unofficial adviser to Trump after the defense contractor had been excoriated by the media for being “an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris,” as The Intercept wrote, for the Blackwater incident. In 2017, shortly before Trump took office, Prince had met with a close ally of Vladimir Putin to discuss conflicts in the Middle East — another incident that created headlines.

As a Trump ally, Prince also dabbled in domestic politics. Last year, an explosive report found that he had helped recruit spies to infiltrate at least one Democratic campaign and other organizations that were viewed as a threat to Trump’s power.

As a shady Republican operative, Prince’s move to make evacuating Kabul perhaps prohibitively expensive is especially ironic considering the Republican Party’s stance on the Afghanistan withdrawal. The GOP has capitalized on President Joe Biden’s chaotic evacuation of the country, politicizing the issue even though they were fully supportive of withdrawing the troops on a much shorter timeline while Trump was president.

Biden has set an August 31 deadline to withdraw all American troops from the country, which he says the administration is on track to meet. He has also said that the U.S. will be helping refugees enter the country, but that they will be thoroughly vetted. The administration is pledging to resettle 50,000 refugees, though progressive critics have said that that’s not nearly enough.

Refugee advocates are urging Biden to extend the deadline until all Afghan allies who aided the U.S. during the 20-year war are evacuated. The president has only doubled down on the deadline, however, and has said relatively little about refugee relocation.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 25, 2021

John Lewis Voting Rights Bill Passes House With Zero Republican Votes

The House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on Tuesday evening. The bill would empower nonwhite voters and enable the federal government to move against racial discrimination in voting.

The bill, named for the late Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and civil rights advocate who died last year, passed the House 219 to 212 along party lines. It now goes to the Senate, where it stands an exceedingly slim chance of passing.

Democrats and progressives have been pushing for the bill’s passage for years. If signed into law, it would restore and strengthen a rule shot down by conservative Supreme Court justices in 2013 that weakened protections from the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. Previously, jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to gain approval from the Justice Department if they were seeking to change their election rules, a process called preclearance.

The Supreme Court shot down that part of the Voting Rights Act eight years ago when it ruled that the way that Congress was deciding which jurisdictions had to undergo preclearance was outdated. Law experts like Attorney General Merrick Garland argue that the original preclearance process was “enormously effective,” though the John Lewis Act would create updated rules for preclearance to fit with modern practices of discrimination.

The bill also addresses another Supreme Court decision from earlier this year, from Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, that also severely weakened the section of the Voting Rights Act that limited states’ abilities to create racist voter suppression laws.

Voting rights advocates have lauded the bill for its potential to help tamp down racist voter suppression in the election process and stem the tide of voter suppression laws being passed by Republicans across the country.

But, partially because of that very potential, the bill stands a very low chance of gaining any Republican approval in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster — the outdated practice that progressives have called for abolishing.

“The House passed the For the People Act AND the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) on Twitter. “We’re tackling the urgent voter suppression crisis happening across our nation. It’s time for the Senate to do the same. End the filibuster.”

Other lawmakers called for the full passage of the For the People Act, or H.R.1, on top of the John Lewis Act to continue upholding voting rights in the U.S.

“The House passed HR 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — restoring key voting provisions undone by the Supreme Court,” tweeted Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). “But the work continues. And it must continue in the form of HR 1’s passage to bring about a new era in our multiracial democracy.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) echoed that sentiment, saying “The House just passed HR 4, restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But our work isn’t done. The Senate must also pass HR 1, which would enact automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail, and early voting in every state.”

Both H.R.1 and H.R.4, however, face opposition not only from Republicans but also from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who has said that he is in favor of the John Lewis Act, but with caveats, which significantly weaken the bill. Manchin also said he is supportive of some parts of the For the People Act — but the parts he does not support happen to be the most significant ones, such as the campaign finance transparency proposals.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Centrists Lose Bid to Sabotage Reconciliation as House Advances $3.5T Bill

The House voted to approve the budget resolution that would unlock the reconciliation process for Democrats’ $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Bill on Tuesday after an impasse with a group of conservative Democrats threatened its passage.

The House passed the resolution 220 to 212 Tuesday afternoon, with no Democrats joining the Republicans in voting no. With the budget approved by both chambers of Congress, committees can now craft the $3.5 trillion bill itself.

The chamber also approved a rule, as a concession by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), to pledge to schedule a vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill for no later than September 27.

It is reportedly the concession that convinced the group of centrist Democrats to agree to advance the reconciliation bill after a combative meeting between the two factions on Monday night following threats from the centrists over the past weeks to kill the bill. Indeed, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), who led the charge to obstruct the bill, voted to advance the resolution. He was joined by the rest of the centrist group in voting yes.

In spite of all the squabbling, or perhaps because of it, this is a monumental moment for the Democrats and progressives. The $3.5 trillion bill, as it’s been proposed, is a huge package representing a wide range of priorities with the aim of helping the American public in the midst of a devastating pandemic and decades-long growing income inequality.

In its current form, the bill contains some of the only consequential provisions to address the climate crisis with any chance of passing Congress. The bill also incorporates a wide range of funding for social programs like affordable housing, public transit, paid family leave, Medicare expansion, and more.

But progressive lawmakers emphasized on Tuesday that they are still planning to withhold their support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill if the $3.5 trillion bill is watered down or is not passed for any reason — as the conservative Democrats have already threatened.

If the infrastructure and $3.5 trillion bills aren’t voted for at the same time, “then [Democrats] shouldn’t count on us,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to Bloomberg reporter Erik Wasson.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), the driving force behind the reconciliation package, said in several tweets on Tuesday “No reconciliation, no deal,” saying that the bill is crucial to tackling the climate crisis, helping seniors access health care and lowering prescription drug costs.

And indeed, as the lawmakers imply, Democrats and progressives still aren’t in the clear yet with the reconciliation bill. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) said late last month that, though she supported beginning the reconciliation process, she doesn’t support the price tag for the bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who is always overly concerned about government spending when it comes from his own party, also said he opposes the price tag earlier this month.

Of course, the bill also faces opposition from Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has promised a fight over the debt ceiling if the reconciliation bill isn’t paid for. The draft of the bill released recently contains provisions, largely taxes on the wealthy and corporations, to pay for the entire bill, but the Republicans will likely seek other pathways to sabotage the bill — if the conservative Democrats don’t figure out a way to do that first.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Committee Seeks January 6 Phone Records of Lawmakers With Possible Ties to Mob

The House committee tasked with investigating the events leading up to and during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 has announced that its members are seeking phone records of several key figures in the attack, including those of some members of Congress.

The committee plans to send letters to telecommunications companies this week to preserve relevant records, as first reported by CNN. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), the committee chairman, says that he hopes to issue subpoenas by the end of the month.

“I won’t give you the names [of the companies]. But, you know, in terms of telecom companies, they’re the ones that pretty much you already know, maybe the networks, the social media platforms, those kinds of things,” Thompson told reporters, per Politico. “We’ll look at all records at some point. It won’t be tomorrow.”

If the companies don’t comply with the voluntary order by the committee, then the committee will order subpoenas for the information, Thompson said. The group is seeking records on several hundred people, according to the lawmaker, including several members of Congress.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the committee may also be looking to obtain phone records from the White House from January 6. It’s still unclear whether or not the committee will be doing so.

Asking companies to preserve phone records could lead the investigatory process toward witness testimony later on, writes CNN. With members of Congress potentially implicated, the committee’s phone record probe could lead to dramatic revelations about politicians’ ties to the attack.

Several lawmakers’ names have been raised in connection with the Donald Trump-sponsored attempted coup over the past months. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) both talked on the phone with Trump on the day that the violent right-wing mob breached the Capitol.

Jordan and McCarthy have been evasive about the substance of their conversations with Trump. Minority Leader McCarthy also recruited Jordan to help him sabotage the January 6 committee, back when Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) was seeking input from McCarthy on committee members. The California Republican did so after weeks of reports saying that he may be one of the members subpoenaed to testify before the committee.

There could also be some not-so-obvious members of Congress whose deeds surrounding the attack may come to light. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) and Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) were named by one of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” movement for helping him coordinate the attack. Though Rep. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) has managed to stay out of the spotlight in the past months, he also received a call from Trump as the mob breached the Capitol.

Some members have also been accused of leading “reconnaissance” tours for the attackers to show them the layout and inner workings of the Capitol. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) is one such member who was seen leading a large group of visitors in a tunnel that leads to the Capitol several days before the attack.

It’s still unclear which members of Congress will be subject to the probe by the committee, but the results could be illuminating. The first hearing held by the committee confirmed the violence and the fear it engendered that day. Information from the phone records could help shed light on those responsible for organizing the violent uprising that day.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 24, 2021

Cori Bush Blasts Centrists, Saying “Budget Resolution Isn’t a Political Pawn”

The nine conservative Democrats who are trying to undermine their party’s plans to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill alongside the reconciliation bill are having trouble finding a sympathetic ear in their party — but they’re still holding fast to their convictions.

In a contentious meeting Monday night with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), the group was determined to get Pelosi to cave in on her promise to not pass the infrastructure bill without the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package. Pelosi has promised to pass the infrastructure bill by September 27, but the two parties have not reached agreement on much else.

But the battle that the centrists are fighting so fiercely may be a battle in which they stand alone in their mission — with only, perhaps, the support of Senate conservative Democrats Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona).

For the past couple of weeks, the nine centrists, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) have threatened to vote against the $3.5 trillion package if the bipartisan infrastructure bill isn’t passed soon. They argue that “Time kills deals” — despite the fact that it is conservative Democrats and Republicans who have dragged out the infrastructure talks from spring through the summer.

Pelosi, however, typically sympathetic to the more conservative voices in her party, has been surprisingly insistent in defending the reconciliation bill. Other House Democrats are livid and progressive Democrats have been panning the group in the media. One representative, Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania), who formerly agreed with the centrists’ plan has flipped, telling The Washington Post that their strategy is “stupid” and it’s “time to fold.”

They stand, too, against the wills of their constituents. In a poll released Tuesday, Data for Progress found that 63 percent of likely voters living in the nine Democrats’ districts support the reconciliation bill that they’re threatening to tank, including 94 percent of Democrats polled.

The centrist group claimed in an op-ed this week that President Joe Biden, at least, is on their side. “[W]e are pushing to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress and immediately to President Biden’s desk — as the president himself requested the day after it passed the Senate,” they wrote in The Washington Post.

But even this isn’t true. Though the president has celebrated the bipartisan infrastructure package that has been widely criticized by progressives and Democrats, he does not have the nine centrists’ backs on their latest obstruction agenda. “[W]hen asked by NBC News on Monday if Biden is calling for that, White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded: ‘No,’” the outlet reported.

This makes sense: the centrists are, after all, obstructing the president’s agenda. The $3.5 trillion bill contains a wide swath of Democratic priorities like expanding Medicare and increasing taxes on the rich. It has the support of progressives and moderate Democrats alike and builds on Biden’s infrastructure plan from the spring. If passed, it could be consequential and far-reaching in helping the country recover from the impacts of COVID on the economy by providing a safety net for more Americans.

As Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) pointed out in a statement on Monday, the reconciliation bill isn’t just about politics.

“The budget resolution isn’t a political pawn. It’s an opportunity to deliver on our agenda by making long-overdue and life-changing investments into the health, safety, and education of the people who need it most,” she said. “We are not here to play politics with people’s lives — we are here to pass transformative policies.”

“We must pass the budget resolution immediately,” Bush continued. “St. Louis sent me to Congress to tangibly improve the lives of regular, everyday people. Why are you here?” she asked, addressing the group directly.

Though the Democrats are standing at odds with their own party, they have gained the praise of the conservative lobby group of the Chamber of Commerce, which is running ads thanking the Democrats for their current agenda. This is a familiar tune: Manchin, an advisor to the group, has become an expert on obstructing Democrats in recent months. He also has the support of right-wing dark money groups with ties to the Koch family.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 23, 2021

Pfizer Vaccine Gets Full FDA Approval, Potentially Triggering Mandates

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine full approval Monday, potentially opening the door to more vaccine mandates.

The Pfizer vaccine previously only had emergency use authorization (EUA), which meant that the FDA had deemed it safe and approved for the duration of the emergency declaration for the pandemic. While the FDA used the best available evidence based on clinical trials for the EUA, full approval required more evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective.

Full authorization of the vaccine may pave the way for employers to require workers to get vaccinated. Health officials are also hopeful that the FDA’s approval will also convince people who have yet to be vaccinated to get the shot.

“For businesses and universities that have been thinking about putting vaccine requirements in place in order to create safer spaces for people to work and learn, I think that this move from the FDA … will actually help them to move forward with those kinds of plans,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN on Sunday.

While some organizations have been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccines, places like the California State University System and companies like Google and Facebook have put mandates into place. Universities have been facing lawsuits over mandates, but the Supreme Court denied vaccine mandate challengers a win earlier this month in a lawsuit brought by Indiana University students.

Most Americans are supportive of vaccine mandates, according to recent polling. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from earlier this month showed that 56 percent of nearly 2,000 registered voters polled supported local governments requiring vaccines for all Americans except for those who are medically exempt from the vaccine. Over 8 in 10 Democrats and over half of independents approve of such mandates, while only 35 percent of Republicans support those measures.

Last week, the White House announced a plan to begin providing booster shots to U.S. adults who previously received a two-dose vaccine. The plan, endorsed by the FDA and an advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), will allow adults to get a booster shot eight months after their last dose. evidence that getting a booster will help protect people against COVID for longer.

Pfizer’s FDA approval comes as U.S. vaccination rates have slowed precipitously since spring. Vaccination rates peaked in April, when over 3 million doses were being administered a day on average, according to The New York Times’s vaccine tracker. Now, only about 800,000 are being administered on average every day, and only 73 percent of American adults have received at least one dose.

As vaccination rates have slowed, the virus has surged across the country, largely due to the highly transmissible Delta variant. After reaching lows in June, case counts have soared to levels seen last winter, averaging nearly 150,000 cases and over 1,000 deaths a day as of Sunday.

The virus is also ripping through schools that have returned to in-person teaching. Children under 12 are not yet eligible for any of the approved vaccines, and children with COVID are filling up hospitals. Dozens have died.

According to polls, nearly 7 in 10 Americans are also in favor of mask mandates for schools.

But Republicans have politicized the issue, opposing not only mask mandates but also vaccine mandates, despite evidence in July that the U.S.’s vaccine campaign has saved about 279,000 lives and prevented 1.25 million hospitalizations.

Still, right-wing firebrands like Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have signed orders to bar localities and school districts from implementing mask mandates in schools. In his July order, Abbott also barred local and state agencies from creating a vaccine mandate.

Republicans make up one of the largest demographic groups of people who are still unvaccinated and still are the most staunchly against getting a vaccine. Kaiser Family Foundation polling from June found that those who say they will never get vaccinated are more likely to be white and Republican. Those in the “wait-and-see” group, meanwhile, are more likely to be Black and Latinx and represent a more equal split between party affiliation.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 20, 2021

Boebert Failed to Disclose Husband’s Nearly Half-Million Energy Company Salary

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) failed to disclose her husband’s large energy company earnings during her congressional campaign as required by law, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Boebert’s husband made $478,000 last year and $460,000 in 2019 while consulting for Terra Energy Productions, according to the disclosure. The lawmaker, who filed the 2020 earnings this week, should have reported the income last year during her run for office, as campaign and congressional finance laws require lawmakers to disclose all sources of income, including investments.

AP reported that, while there is no Terra Energy Productions in Colorado, there is a Houston, Texas-based company called Terra Energy Partners that claims to be “one of the largest producers of natural gas in Colorado.”

The late disclosure raises ethical questions for transparency advocates.

“Voters have a right to know what financial interest their elected officials might be beholden to,” Kedric Payne, Campaign Legal Center senior ethics director and former deputy chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, told The Washington Post. The Office of Congressional Ethics should investigate the lawmaker for what “could be [a] criminal” failure to disclose, if it was done intentionally.

Boebert now serves on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees energy and land management in the U.S., including fossil fuel extraction inland and offshore. She has also introduced legislation that could have benefited her husband financially or professionally, as Terra Energy’s focus is on oil and gas exploration, according to its website.

Since January, when Boebert was sworn in, she has introduced several pro-fossil fuel bills and made statements aimed at bolstering the industry or taking down its detractors, the American Independent reported.

In her first month in office, the Colorado representative introduced a bill that would have barred the U.S. from reentering the 2015 Paris Agreement, a nonbinding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The next month, she introduced a bill that would keep the U.S. from banning oil and gas leasing on federal lands and reverse Joe Biden’s decision to axe the Keystone XL pipeline.

Boebert criticized the Green New Deal after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) reintroduced the resolution earlier this year. In her statement, Boebert said that the proposal calls for a reduction in fossil fuel use that would throw the country into “a literal energy dark age.”

Boebert is not the only lawmaker defending fossil fuels who has close ties to the industry. The oil and gas industry contributes millions to lawmakers, influencing Republicans and Democrats alike to continue legislating in their favor. The most recent and high profile example of this is the infrastructure bill, which was stripped of its climate provisions by lawmakers under the influence of oil giant Exxon.

The Colorado Republican also faces scrutiny over other potentially illegal actions involving campaign funds, including questions from the Federal Election Commission over an “apparent personal use of thousands of dollars in campaign funds.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 20, 2021

Biden Forgiving Student Debt of Disabled People, Totaling $5.8 Billion

The Biden administration announced Thursday that it is cancelling student debt for people who have been diagnosed with certain disabilities, affecting more than 323,000 borrowers. This latest slate of cancellations will wipe out more than $5.8 billion in debt, according to the administration.

“We’ve heard loud and clear from borrowers with disabilities and advocates about the need for this change and we are excited to follow through on it,” said Education Miguel Cardona in a statement.

The Department of Education sought to make the student loan forgiveness process simpler for severely disabled borrowers.

The federal government has a program for disabled borrowers to have their loans forgiven, but the process is often cumbersome and has been widely criticized for its lack of accessibility. Currently, disabled people seeking debt forgiveness have to navigate documentation barriers and undergo three years of monitoring to ensure that their income does not exceed the poverty line.

Large swaths of people have been dropped from the program over the years for simply failing to file proof of income, critics point out. This can lead to people having their loans reinstated if they forget to file paperwork. The monitoring program provides an extra burden for people who hope to qualify.

“The irony is that you have to work really hard to prove that you’re unable to work,” Persis Yu, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told NPR in 2019. Hundreds of thousands of people at the time who could qualify for the program weren’t receiving the benefit, according to NPR.

The new guidance will allow people who have been diagnosed by a physician, the Social Security Administration or Department of Veterans Affairs to be totally and permanently disabled to have their loans forgiven automatically, without having to navigate a complicated system of paperwork.

The Biden administration is extending an income waiver indefinitely after dropping the paperwork requirement retroactively for the course of the pandemic. It is planning to pursue a rule to eliminate the requirement altogether in October, according to the Education Department.

“The Department of Education is evolving practices to make sure that we’re keeping the borrowers first and that we’re providing relief without having them jump through hoops,” Cardona said in a call with reporters, according to The Washington Post. “I’ve heard from borrowers over the last six months that the processes are too difficult so we’re simplifying it.”

President Joe Biden has come under scrutiny from the left for failing to follow through with campaign promises to cancel student debt for all. He has only offered limited debt cancellation programs that target specific groups. Progressives offered limited praise for Thursday’s move, though noted that Biden can and should do more on the issue.

“I’m very glad that [the Education Department] is taking this important step to provide long-overdue relief to borrowers with disabilities. This announcement will change thousands of lives for the better,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) in a tweet on Thursday. Warren has been one of Congress’s largest advocates for cancelling student loans.

“Grateful that the Biden Administration has formally recognized its authority to cancel student debt,” wrote Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) on Twitter Thursday. “He must now do this for everyone.”

Activist group The Debt Collective noted on Twitter that the administration’s move was a very limited step to resolving this economic burden on millions of former students and their families. “The Biden administration announced student debt cancellation for 300,000 people today — a major policy win that took essentially no effort. He can, and should, do the same for every borrower,” the organization wrote.

“The student debt crisis was $1.8 trillion yesterday,” the Debt Collective continued in a separate tweet on Friday, “but thankfully Biden canceled nearly $6 billion, which means the student debt crisis is at $1.8 trillion.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 16, 2021

GOP Quietly Deletes Praise for Trump-Taliban Deal From RNC Website

The Republican National Committee (RNC) removed a webpage praising former President Donald Trump for making a “historic peace agreement” with the Taliban on Monday amid chaos as the group took over the Afghanistan government.

The page, according to the archival Wayback Machine, was removed on August 15 as the Taliban surrounded Kabul. In an article entitled “President Trump Is Bringing Peace To The Middle East,” the RNC touted a “historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan” made by Trump.

Though critics argued the agreement didn’t contain enough concessions from the Taliban to be worthwhile for the U.S., it still signalled the beginning of troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which progressives have been pushing for decades. President Obama had pledged but failed to follow through on withdrawing from Afghanistan and it was only after the agreement last year, that Trump began withdrawing troops from the country.

The RNC deputy chief of staff Mike Reed said that the RNC web page was taken down because the organization is moving to a new website and that its removal on Sunday was a coincidence. But Republican lawmakers and the RNC have also appeared to be reversing course on the issue in recent days, saying now that withdrawing from Afghanistan is a mistake.

“With the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, America is now less safe. This is the latest real world, horrific consequence of Biden’s weak foreign policy,” tweeted the RNC on Monday.

Meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers have also reversed course on the issue, as the American Independent pointed out. Rep. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) tweeted in February that Trump’s agreement is “a sign of progress, and a step toward being able to bring our troops home.” But on Sunday, she pinned the entire situation on Biden, criticizing his “rapid and haphazard withdrawal of American troops.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) took an even sharper heel turn. In February, she tweeted criticism of Biden’s plan to extend the full troop withdrawal to September after it was originally planned for May — an extension that was arguably necessitated by a lack of planning from the Trump administration. Still, Boebert said, “We’ve been in Afghanistan for more than half my life. We need to end the endless wars.”

By Sunday, Boebert had a different stance — though still, somehow, critical of Biden. “Joe Biden was in the Senate when America pulled out of Saigon in 1975. He didn’t learn,” she said.

Trump also did a swift turnaround on the withdrawal strategy to criticize Biden. Back in April Trump had said that continuing to withdraw troops was “a wonderful and positive thing to do” while criticizing Biden’s timeline. On Saturday, however, Trump criticized Biden for “[running] out of Afghanistan” and not following Trump’s timeline — though Trump’s deadline passed three months ago.

It’s hard to say whether or not any troop withdrawal from the country would have caused the current outcome. Biden could likely have taken more precautions, especially with regards to refugees, in the event that the Taliban did take over, but judging by his comments earlier this year, he seemed confident that it wouldn’t happen.

Biden has said that he was withdrawing because, as progressives have warned over the years, there is no good militaristic solution to the situation. “I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” Biden said in July. Though it appears that his administration had miscalculated the risk of a Taliban takeover, it also didn’t give in to the decades-old lies about the U.S. in Afghanistan holding back terrorism and creating peace.

Biden re-emphasized that position on Monday in remarks about the Taliban takeover. “Truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” he said. “If anything, the developments in the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

The president then promised to end American occupation of the country. “I will not pass this responsibility onto a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 16, 2021

Centrists Threaten Congress’s Only Climate Bill as Earth Records Hottest Month

Centrist Democrats over the weekend doubled down on threats to kill the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, with some of the only major climate proposals that currently stand a chance of passing Congress, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) told lawmakers of a plan to tie the reconciliation and bipartisan infrastructure bills together.

Nine centrist Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), last week threatened to tank the reconciliation bill if Pelosi doesn’t first bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to a near-immediate vote. The House speaker is currently planning to advance both bills together to ensure that the reconciliation bill, which contains many provisions cut by Republicans and conservative Democrats from the infrastructure bill, also passes.

She emphasized that plan on Sunday, saying in a letter that she’s looking into creating a rule that would allow both bills to advance simultaneously. Pelosi is presumably trying to appease both conservative Democrats and progressives in her caucus, the latter of whom say they would reject the infrastructure bill without a sufficient reconciliation package.

The nine centrists are evidently displeased with that plan, responding in a joint statement, “our view remains consistent. We should vote first on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework without delay and then move to immediate consideration of the budget.”

The group said last week that they think the infrastructure bill is a win for Joe Biden and that if it’s held up to fit Pelosi’s planned timeline, people will forget about it. One centrist lawmaker, not a signatory to last week’s letter, described the infrastructure bill as being held “hostage” to the reconciliation bill.

Threatening the reconciliation bill, however, is viewed as a far greater danger to President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ agenda. Whereas bipartisanship — however faulty — seems to be one of Biden’s priorities, the reconciliation bill contains a wide swath of Biden’s agenda. It’s also one of his last best hopes to pass climate action while the Democrats still hold the majority in Congress.

“We can’t call people moderate Democrats if they vote against child care, paid leave, health care, and addressing climate change,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) on Twitter. “This is the Democratic agenda, it’s the president’s agenda, and it’s what we promised people across America. Now we must deliver.”

Progressives for months have been emphasizing that now is the time to pass climate action as the window to prevent some of the climate crisis’s worst effects is rapidly closing.

Indeed, on Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association announced that July is officially the hottest month in Earth’s recorded history since agencies began keeping records 142 years ago. This terrifying news comes on the heels of a tumultuous few months of climate change-effected heat waves in the U.S., which have created unprecedented conditions in the Northwest and across the country.

The news also came shortly after a landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that, even if the world were to somehow stop emitting greenhouse gases immediately, some of the effects of the climate crisis are irreversible and locked in. The world is set to blow past the Paris Climate Agreement goal to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees celsius or less.

Democrats have said in a memo on the reconciliation bill that it will “put America on a path to meet President Biden’s climate change goals of 80% clean electricity and 50% economy-wide carbon emissions reductions by 2030.” One of the major mechanisms for that change could be a clean energy payment program that would incentivize utilities to use clean energy sources.

Meanwhile, the bipartisan group of senators working on the infrastructure bill — who were also, coincidentally, lobbied by Exxon — cut climate out of the bill nearly entirely, leaving a meager amount for electric vehicle funding and not much else.

Climate was sidelined so efficiently by the centrist lawmakers that Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) said in June that the deal that centrists were cutting at the time was “climate denial masquerading as bipartisanship.” It’s hard to imagine that this current situation — with conservative House Democrats threatening one of the U.S.’s only chances of cutting emissions for a symbolic “win” for bipartisanship — is much different.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 16, 2021

Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee Call for Opening US to Refugees From Afghanistan

Progressive lawmakers are calling on the U.S. to accept Afghan refugees as the Taliban has taken over the country, forcing at least thousands of residents to attempt to flee.

After the Afghanistan government collapsed, the Kabul airport has been flooded with Afghans desperate to flee the country. Particularly striking footage Monday showed hundreds of Afghans attempting to cling to a U.S. Air Force plane that was taking off. Meanwhile, earlier that day in Afghanistan, five people were killed at the Hamid Karzai International Airport amid chaos.

The United Nations (UN) has warned of a coming refugee crisis as conditions worsen drastically for the people of Afghanistan. It also said that the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who have fled the country over the past months have been women and children.

Some countries are bracing for the sudden influx of refugees; Canada last week announced that it would be offering refuge to 20,000 Afghans, with an emphasis on women, children and LGBTQ people. Mediterranean countries have requested European Union-level talks on the situation.

But the U.S. has yet to announce any mass refugee resettlement plans. President Joe Biden has been relatively quiet and, on Friday, Reuters reported that the U.S. is searching for countries willing to temporarily house Afghan refugees who have worked for the U.S. government. The U.S. is reportedly considering other resettlement plans but officials are still discussing details.

Biden has announced that he will address the nation on Afghanistan on Monday afternoon.

Progressives on Twitter say that the U.S. should open its doors to refugees immediately — not just because of the morality of the matter, but also because of the U.S’s role in imperializing the country and killing civilians, adding to chaos and destruction in the country over the past two decades.

“Foreign policy matters: After 20 years of U.S. effort,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), “Afghanistan was left with a corrupt government and an ineffectual military. At this moment, we must do everything we can to evacuate our allies and open our doors to refugees.”

“If we don’t start putting everyday people first, no matter what country they’re born in, this will keep happening,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) on Sunday. “Let’s start by opening our country to shelter refugees fleeing the consequences of our actions.”

Tlaib also pointed out that, while the U.S. has waged its forever war in Afghanistan, politicians and arms dealers have profited greatly from the conflict. “Innocent people suffer the horrors of war while political leaders and arms-dealing corporations sit back and make billions,” she said.

Indeed, on top of the hundreds of thousands of people killed over the past 20 years in the country, the U.S. has also spent over $2.2 trillion on the war, according to research from Brown University.

Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have profited massively from the U.S.’s military spending over the past decades. Members of Congress with stock in such companies, meanwhile, have profited from the aggressive U.S. defense spending — spending that the lawmakers themselves authorize.

As Republicans scramble over messaging on Biden’s troop withdrawal from the country, liberal and Republican war hawks alike are saying that the Taliban’s takeover is justification for the U.S. troops to stay in the country, citing lies from American officials that the war is effectual in preventing terrorism.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) pushed back against that idea over the weekend. “What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis. Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan,” she wrote. “Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid and resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children.”

Indeed, many progressive advocates have said for decades that the U.S. should never have engaged in war in Afghanistan to begin with, arguing that the war would and has done more harm than good, especially to the citizens of Afghanistan.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) argued as such last year when she introduced a proposal to accelerate the U.S.’s withdrawal from the country and end the war. But she was shot down by Republicans and a whopping 103 Democrats in the House who voted down her proposal.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 13, 2021

Democrats Considering Inclusion of Union Member Tax Break in Reconciliation Bill

Democrats are reportedly considering whether to include a tax break for union members in their $3.5 trillion budget resolution currently awaiting House approval.

The proposal would allow workers to deduct union dues from their taxable income. Labor groups have been pushing for its inclusion, and, according to HuffPost, lawmakers are considering the proposal.

Labor organizers have also been encouraging Democrats to make the deduction “above the line,” meaning that taxpayers could take advantage of the tax law regardless of whether they itemize their deductions or not. The policy, if enacted, could help to encourage union membership by defraying the cost of union membership.

It could also help level the playing field between union members and corporations, labor advocates argue. Whereas employers can deduct costs of union-busting efforts, workers cannot currently deduct union dues, meaning that workers are shouldering an unfair burden.

“In other words, workers cannot deduct an important cost of earning their income,” wrote Alexandra Thornton, senior director of tax policy at the Center for American Progress, in 2019, “while employers can deduct the costs of maximizing their profits at the expense of workers.”

This is partially due to Republicans’ tax overhaul in 2017, which was one of the largest rewrites of the U.S. tax code in history. Republicans killed a previous version of a union member tax break that allowed workers to deduct union fees if they were filing itemized deductions. The tax deduction could only be used if dues were more than 2 percent of a taxpayer’s gross income.

The current proposal would be a step up from the previous tax benefit, allowing taxpayers to deduct union dues regardless of their filing status if Democrats adopt the “above the line” proposal.

Democrats have indicated in public documents that the reconciliation package will incorporate “[p]ro-worker incentives and worker support,” though details are currently unclear.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has also previously indicated that parts of Democrats’ pro-union legislation, the PRO Act, are included in the reconciliation package. Again, it’s unclear which proposals are in the legislation, as lawmakers are still hammering out the final bill text. But, in combination, these proposals could help to spur union membership in the U.S.

Corporations often scaremonger about union dues to their employees, saying that union membership is expensive and therefore not worth it. However, research shows that union members are paid 11.2 percent more than non-union workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with greater access to benefits like health care.

But corporate scaremongering against unionization still often succeeds. Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, used aggressive union-busting techniques earlier this year to hold off a unionization effort in an Alabama warehouse. Though the National Labor Relations Board announced this month that Amazon violated the law in the Alabama campaign, corporations often face little to no consequences for illegal anti-union activities.

The steady weakening of labor laws in the U.S. has led to a corresponding decline in union membership over the past decades. Whereas union membership of U.S. workers hovered around 30 percent in the 1940s and ‘50s, in 2020, the union membership rate was only 10.8 percent, a continuation of a steady decline that began in the 60s.

The union dues deduction could help combat some corporate anti-union tactics by helping offset the cost of union membership. In conjunction with other pro-union laws, like the full passage of the PRO Act, Democrats have an opportunity to help reverse the decline in union membership.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 13, 2021

Wealth Tax and IRS Funding Could Pay for Entire $3.5T Bill, Warren Writes

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Massachusetts) proposals to raise and enforce taxes on corporations and the rich could raise more than enough to pay for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan, according to a new op-ed by the senator.

Warren writes in The Washington Post that, if Congress and the president were to adapt her plans to levy a wealth tax, create a tax on corporate profits and fund the IRS to catch rich tax cheats, they could raise $5 trillion in revenue. That could cover the Democrats’ spending bill and the bipartisan infrastructure plan, which proposes $550 billion in new spending, and still have nearly a trillion left over to expand either plan or put toward a future package.

“Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, [President Joe] Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box,” Warren wrote. “No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.”

As the Massachusetts senator has previously proposed, a 2 percent tax on the wealth of the top 0.05 percent of the richest households in the U.S. could raise about $3 trillion over the next decade. Even a one-time wealth tax would raise $1 trillion.

Warren raised the example of Jeff Bezos, who is sometimes able to avoid paying federal income taxes altogether by exploiting tax loopholes. “When Jeff Bezos takes a joyride to space, he isn’t paying for it with his declared income of $80,000. Bezos, who owns The Post, and lots of other billionaires have gamed the system so they have plenty of spending money and close to zero tax obligations,” she wrote.

A recent analysis by progressive organizations also found that, if the world were to levy a 99 percent tax on billionaires’ COVID-19 profits alone, the tax could raise enough money to pay for a vaccine for every adult on earth — and have enough left over to provide $20,000 in cash to hundreds of millions of unemployed workers. It’s a far-fetched policy, but it shows the extreme wealth of the world’s richest people. It also shows how precipitously their wealth has surged as the rest of the world has suffered during the pandemic.

The Real Corporate Profits Tax Act, which Warren introduced this week, could raise $700 billion over the next decade. The bill would create a seven-percent tax on income over $100 million which corporations report to their shareholders, also known as book profits, rather than on the profits they report to the government. This could collect more revenue and help ensure that corporations actually pay federal taxes.

“These companies boosted their stock prices and increased CEO pay by telling their shareholders they raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while simultaneously telling the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t owe any taxes,” Warren wrote. She also emphasized that Biden supports the idea, having unveiled a similar proposal earlier this year as part of his infrastructure package.

The last policy that Warren raises is another that Biden has supported: pouring funds into the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) so that the agency can more effectively chase after wealthy and corporate tax cheats. Biden previously proposed effectively doubling the agency’s size so that it could target the nation’s wealthiest individuals and companies.

Warren’s proposal goes a step further. Whereas Biden proposed an $8 billion a year funding plan, Warren in May unveiled a bill that would create mandatory yearly funding of $31.5 billion for the IRS. That’s about 2.5 times higher than its budget for 2021.

This proposal could raise as much as $1.75 trillion, Warren wrote. She pointed out that Republicans have taken an axe to IRS funding over the past decades, meaning that the agency has lost 20 percent of its enforcement budget and a third of its enforcement workers. “It’s no surprise that audit rates for taxpayers making more than $10 million have plummeted,” she wrote. “This should enrage every American who plays by the rules.”

The lawmaker said that Congress should use these plans to help pay for the infrastructure and reconciliation packages and make corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.

The reconciliation package incorporates some proposals to tax these groups, but it’s yet unclear how drastic these tax hikes will be. It’s unlikely that a wealth tax will be incorporated, though a memo on the package suggests that funding for the IRS could be included. Republicans have roundly rejected any role for taxes on the rich and corporations, so it’s up to Democrats to pass these proposals during the budget reconciliation process.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 12, 2021

Centrist Dems Seek to Delay the Reconciliation Bill While Passing Infrastructure

Over the past months, the Democratic caucus in Congress has struck a careful, if tenuous, balance within the party and its allies. The agreement is that the bipartisan infrastructure bill, largely influenced by Republicans, can pass as long as the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, with many Democratic priorities, passes alongside it.

Though it took some cajoling, progressives were swayed to support the infrastructure bill because of moderate Democrats’ insistent support of the bipartisan bill, with the only caveat being that items like climate action aren’t cut from the reconciliation package. Even the moderate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has agreed to this plan, saying that she won’t bring the infrastructure bill, which progressives have panned, to a vote until the reconciliation bill is passed.

But moderate Democrats evidently aren’t satisfied with their ability to pass a far-reaching, consequential bill containing many of the party’s priorities, given to them by the Senate’s unusual passage of both bills this week. According to Politico, a handful of centrist Democrats are conniving to sink the plan carefully crafted by party leadership to satisfy the caucus, President Joe Biden, the public, and even some Republicans seeking to pass the bipartisan bill.

Pelosi is currently planning to workshop and pass the reconciliation bill and the infrastructure bills by the end of September, before certain funding programs are set to expire. If Pelosi brings the infrastructure bill to a vote this month without substantial movement of the reconciliation bill, progressives have promised to reject its passage.

“Pelosi’s timetable hasn’t assuaged a small group of frustrated Democratic moderates who are plotting ways to convince her and her team to change course,” reports Politico. “At least six of those centrists say privately they are willing to block consideration of the Democrats’ budget blueprint as a last-ditch move to stall the $3.5 trillion bill, according to two people familiar with the discussions.” Democrats hold the majority in the House by only three votes.

What the unnamed moderates want instead, it seems, is to pass the infrastructure bill now, with no mention of the reconciliation bill about which the conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), somewhat of a ringleader of centrist thought, has raised concern. Their worry is that the public may forget about President Joe Biden’s so-called victory on the infrastructure negotiations by September.

“I believe we need to take an immediate vote on the infrastructure legislation that we have in front of us,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Florida), who co-leads the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, told Politico. The House should not “hold the infrastructure bill hostage to the yet-developed reconciliation bill,” Murphy said.

While it’s true that the reconciliation bill has yet to be fully fleshed out, Democrats have released a relatively detailed blueprint of the legislation. It contains long-vaunted Democratic priorities like a Civilian Climate Corps, Medicare expansion, guaranteed medical leave, funding for affordable housing, and much more. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who led the bill, has called it “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.”

Many of the proposals in the reconciliation are of vital and timely importance as COVID-19 sweeps the country yet again and the climate crisis is revealed to be accelerating more rapidly than scientists previously thought. And many of the proposals, outside of the reconciliation process, would be or have already been blocked by Republicans, who carved things like climate and affordable housing nearly entirely out of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

As Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) pointed out on Twitter on Wednesday, there are more progressives who have threatened to vote against the infrastructure bill if the reconciliation bill is watered down than there are centrists who want to pass the infrastructure bill immediately.

The reconciliation bill is already a compromise for progressives, some of whom wanted a $10 trillion climate and justice bill in place of Biden’s infrastructure bill. In an internal survey of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a majority of the group’s 96 House members said they’d reject the bipartisan bill without a sufficient reconciliation package.

“There are MANY more of us demanding that the only way the bipartisan bill gets a vote in the House is if we do not miss the chance to invest in our communities with a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill,” tweeted Bush. “This was already the compromise. We must deliver what we promised.”

The centrists seeking to change course on this plan, then, seem to be ignoring the delicate balance that Democratic leaders have struck between progressives and the more conservative part of their caucus. As Politico reported in an interview with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), the Senate leader has worked to get both Manchin and Sanders to support each other’s bills, contingent on both bills passing.

It’s yet unclear what moderates are angling for, but their plan to rush the infrastructure bill separately from the reconciliation bill would surely fail with dozens of progressives standing against them — a show, perhaps, of the growing power of progressives within Congress. Surely even Pelosi, who tends to be especially precious about moderates in her party, understands that.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 12, 2021

Rand Paul Just Disclosed That His Wife Bought COVID Drug Stock in February 2020

In February of 2020, before the public knew the full extent of the coming pandemic but after senators were secretly briefed about the threat, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Kentucky) wife bought stock in a company that manufactures an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19. Now, 16 months after the stock reporting deadline for the buy has passed, Paul has disclosed the purchase.

Under the Stock Act, lawmakers have 45 days to disclose a stock transaction after it’s made. Paul’s disclosure on Wednesday came incredibly late, raising suspicions, experts say, over the already questionable stock trade first reported by The Washington Post.

Paul’s wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences, the company that makes the antiviral drug remdesivir shortly before the public was made aware of the pandemic in March and before the stock market crashed in March. The purchase was relatively small, between $1,000 and $15,000, and a spokesperson for the senator said that she actually lost money on the stock.

“The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and, more importantly, why it took him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife,” James D. Cox, a Duke University law professor, told The Washington Post.

The Senate was embroiled in a stock trading investigation last year when three senators were suspected of insider trading after dumping huge amounts of stock following the private briefing on the pandemic. The Justice Department had conducted a short probe into the stock trades by Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia), James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California).

While the Justice Department ultimately found no evidence of illegal conduct, it raised questions over the ability of lawmakers to buy and sell stocks and the erosion of public trust that comes with such trades.

“It is absolutely wild that members of Congress are still allowed to buy and sell individual stock. It shouldn’t be legal,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “We’ve introduced legislation to end the practice, but as one can imagine it’s a very uphill battle to pass.”

The spokesperson for Paul told The Washington Post that the reason the disclosure came so late was because the senator had filed a statement but it hadn’t been transmitted. When he was made aware of this, he filed the disclosure along with his annual disclosure statement, which was submitted three months late.

Paul’s wife bought the Gilead stock on February 26, 2020 — two days after a World Health Organization (WHO) official said that the antiviral drug was the only drug at the time that “may have real efficacy” against COVID-19. The WHO in October reversed that position after more study on the drug.

Though the WHO’s statement on remdesivir was public, most Americans were not privy to the information made clear to senators in the private briefing on the pandemic in January. Experts say there could still have been information on the drug that Paul was told in that meeting.

“Not everything about the product was necessarily clear from existing announcements,” Joshua Mitts, a law professor at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. “There could have been information about interest that certain individuals within the administration may have had in the product, or that hospitals here in the U.S. were already loading up.”

The month after Paul’s wife bought stock in Gilead was busy for the senator. In March, Paul became a beacon of recklessness when it came to the virus, insisting on getting tested for COVID back when tests were still extremely limited and still going to the gym, lunches and regular Senate meetings. He announced that he tested positive on March 22, 2020, becoming the first senator to test positive for COVID-19.

Then, Paul became even more reckless, using his platform as a senator to spread disinformation about the virus and going out of his way to undermine the advice from public health experts.

He refused to wear a mask after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had spread guidance about doing so, claiming without evidence that people who have been infected with the virus can’t spread it.

Just on Wednesday, Paul got banned from YouTube for a video falsely claiming that masks don’t work in preventing the spread of COVID-19. He also said in June that, if an individual has already been infected with the virus, they didn’t need to get the vaccine, going against official recommendations from the CDC.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.