After mocking the idea just two weeks earlier, the Biden White House on Tuesday announced a plan to distribute 500 million free at-home coronavirus tests to households across the U.S. as the administration ramps up its effort to combat the surging Omicron variant, which now accounts for nearly 75% of the nation’s new cases.
According to a fact sheet the White House unveiled Tuesday morning, the administration will soon “purchase a half-billion at-home, rapid tests this winter to be distributed for free to Americans who want them, with the initial delivery starting in January 2022.”
“The administration will stand up a website where Americans can go to get at-home tests delivered to their home — for free,” the fact sheet notes.
The White House also said President Joe Biden will utilize the Defense Production Act to scale up the manufacturing of coronavirus tests to ensure adequate supply as demand surges in response to the spread of Omicron, which is driving a rise in infections across the country. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. are up 20% over the past two weeks and hospitalizations are up 14%, state and local health data shows.
Public health experts and campaigners welcomed the administration’s belated decision to use the apparatus of the federal government to widely distribute free at-home coronavirus tests, an approach that has long been a mainstay of other major nations’ pandemic response efforts.
“Finally they are listening!” tweeted Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
Uché Blackstock, a physician and health equity advocate, said the administration’s about-face demonstrates that “social media advocacy really does work.”
“Now, if only we could get these tests to folks now as opposed to sometime in January,” Blackstock added.
Earlier this month, the White House faced a wave of criticism over its dismissive response to a reporter’s suggestion that mass-mailing tests could be simpler — and more effective — than a separate administration plan allowing people to seek reimbursement from their private health insurers to cover test costs.
“Why not just make them free and give them out to — and have them available everywhere?” NPR’s Mara Liasson asked during a December 6 press briefing.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded sarcastically: “Should we just send one to every American?”
The American Prospect’s David Dayen argued after the administration’s reversal that “the teachable lesson is that the White House can be embarrassed into doing the right thing.”
“And that you don’t need Joe Manchin’s sign-off to produce for the American people,” Dayen added.
While lamenting that it is long overdue, epidemiologist Michael Mina said he is nevertheless “excited” about the administration’s plan, which will also attempt to increase lagging U.S. vaccination rates by establishing new pop-up clinics across the nation.
“Though to temper expectations — there’s 350 million people in the U.S. and 500 million free tests distributed over a period of months only goes so far,” Mina observed. “Although 500 million across 350 million is not massive per person, this has the ability ensure that this process is in place and the U.S. will have tests when needed beyond Omicron.”
As we head into the winter holidays nervously checking news about the Omicron variant and rising COVID-19 case numbers, let’s take a moment to think of how a more just society might handle the coming weeks.
Schools and many workplaces would offer remote options for the final week before Christmas to slow the spread just before people gather with older relatives and immunocompromised loved ones. Airports and bus stations would have free rapid tests for all passengers traveling for the holidays. Finally, of course, pharmaceutical companies and wealthy nations would have been forced to share vaccine supplies and formulas with the rest of the world, which probably would have prevented Omicron in the first place.
The personal depression many of us are feeling about another holiday season being ruined is matched by the political gloom that comes after a year of our expectations being steadily lowered. As frightening as the first year of COVID was, it was also a time of hope and new possibilities — fueled first by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent presidential campaign, and then by the summer’s historic movement for Black lives uprisings. It was common to hear talk in the mainstream press of how the pandemic revealed the need for deep structural changes, and President Joe Biden’s first stimulus bill — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — offered hope that the country’s political leaders might actually do something for once.
Since then, however, Biden has reverted to the inadequate centrism that has marked his entire career. While the new administration has thankfully not continued its predecessor’s daily stream of misinformation about masks and fake cures, it left in place many of former President Donald Trump’s most disastrous COVID policies, including:
An infuriating shortage of COVID tests, especially at-home rapid tests — a seemingly inexplicable mistake that just so happens to keep businesses open by preventing asymptomatic employees from knowing they have the virus and staying home from work.
Denying entry to migrants and refugees at the southern border in the name of a pandemic policy that epidemiologists have denounced as “scientifically baseless and politically motivated.”
Finally, there have been Biden’s proclamations that the pandemic is over and his gaslighting about how well his administration has handled the pandemic, even as the death rate under Biden’s watch has been as bad as it was under Trump. Mass death has become so normalized among the political class that the Biden team seems genuinely confused that in the midst of a historic plague, more Americans aren’t happier about some positive economic statistics.
The ruling class may be impatient for us to get over it already, but for many Americans, the profound questioning of priorities that started in 2020 didn’t stop in 2021. Instead, it has shifted from collective political movements to individual life choices. Record numbers of people have quit their jobs in 2021 for many different reasons, from seeking higher pay elsewhere, to taking an early retirement, to deciding that contagion risks have made already lousy jobs unbearable, to programs like the American Rescue Plan and eviction moratoriums allowing some to save money on child care and transportation by staying home. The so-called “Great Resignation” is the culmination of five decades of declining working-class conditions on and off the job, and it offers a glimpse of the societal upheaval waiting to be unleashed when just the slightest hint of an actual social welfare state removes the immediate threat of hunger and homelessness.
The resulting labor shortage has had numerous effects: from massive supply chain backlogs caused by unfilled truck driving and warehouse positions; to higher wage growth as employers are forced to offer raises to fill positions; to worrying impacts on hospitals and schools where already overstretched workers are leaving in droves. It’s a period of sustained chaos, but also the first moment in generations when the power of workers is making itself really felt, and when workers aren’t silently bearing the crisis but shoving it back in the bosses’ faces.
The left has an important role to play in giving voice to this moment when U.S. workers for the first time in generations are asserting that life is more important than a miserable job. We can help organize some of these individual actions and tie them to a set of policy demands that strike a blow against right-wing nationalism while putting Democrats on notice that we are not as willing as they are to accept a million deaths.
But to do that, we have to regain our bearings. The left has struggled to respond to COVID since those initial months in 2020. Hard questions like vaccine mandates and school closures have divided us, while more unifying and crucial demands such as ending Big Pharma’s vaccine monopoly haven’t garnered enough organizing. Most of us were demobilized over the last year as we watched the agonizing process of the Democrats’ once-promising Build Back Better bill undergo death by a thousand Joe Manchin shrugs. Of course, like everyone else, we’ve also been ground down by two years of grief, anxiety and depression — and hoped that the vaccines would end the pandemic and allow us to return to previous organizing work.
Now that we know that’s not happening, it’s time for a reset. In that spirit, I offer these resolutions for the new year.
We will accept that COVID is here to stay. We will do our best to stop being disoriented by each new variant and spike, and adjust our movement demands and organizing strategies to address this permanently changed world.
We will not give in to fatalism and stop fighting to reduce the virus’s spread. We will never accept the normalization of mass death. The fact that we will not eradicate COVID doesn’t mean we stop striving to protect the immunocompromised and elderly, and those of us who feel more protected by the vaccines should be wary of how little we know about the effects of long COVID and the possibilities of future vaccine-resistant strains.
We will put the spotlight back on the massive concentrations of wealth that should be deployed both to protect us from COVID and to increase the minimal pay and staffing levels that are driving workers to quit. There was much media coverage when billionaires increased their wealth by almost $4 billion during the first nine months of the pandemic, but that attention has faded even as billionaire wealth grew even faster in 2021. Then there’s the three quarters of a trillion dollars going to military spending every year, none of which will protect us from a disease that has killed more Americans than every single war of the 20th and 21st centuries combined. Everyone should know that the entire world could be vaccinated for the extra $25 billion that Congress just tossed to the Pentagon for no apparent reason.
We will put our heads together and come up with an easily understandable Green New Deal-style framework for COVID justice that shows that public health can’t be separated from economic, racial and global equality. Taxing the rich; sharing vaccines with the world; free and abundant rapid tests; disability coverage for those with long COVID; freeing the incarcerated; universal paid sick leave… The list could go on forever but we cannot make lists forever, so we will need public debate and strategic thinking.
We won’t be spectators. There were many great proposals in the Democrats’ original budget reconciliation bill crafted by Senator Sanders, but few grassroots attempts to try to mobilize protest as those proposals were ruthlessly plucked out one by one by centrist Democrats. Next year may be a major election year, but we can’t afford to let the Democratic Party shape our COVID agenda. In 2022, we have to reorient and give voice to all those straining to resist the push in both parties to make previously unthinkable levels of death become the new “business as usual.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has formally requested that the United States Supreme Court lift lower court orders that have halted the enforcement of the Biden administration’s requirements for certain health care workers to get vaccinated.
The White House rules require workers in health care facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to be vaccinated for protection against coronavirus. The mandate for health care workers was made in conjunction with a similar rule for workers at companies with 100 employees or more which required employees to either get vaccinated for COVID-19 or test weekly to ensure they weren’t spreading the virus. That rule, too, is being blocked by some lower courts.
Earlier this week, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a nationwide block of the mandate on health care workers that was made previously by a federal judge but kept it in place for the 14 states that were part of the original lawsuit. Separately, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has kept in place another block of the health care mandate that affects 10 other states. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, meanwhile, has ruled that the Biden administration had the authority to issue the mandate.
On Thursday, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked for the court orders blocking implementation of the rule to be put on hold while the appeals process continues, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its death toll.
Currently, health officials are reporting over 1,280 individuals are dying from COVID-19 each day on average across the U.S., an increase of 23 percent compared to two weeks ago. Ensuring that the vaccine rule for health care workers remains in place, Prelogar said in her filing, would “save hundreds or even thousands of lives each month” while the appeals process goes on.
Prelogar also maintained in her brief to the Court that the mandate, officially issued by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, was necessary to protect from further spread of the virus.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services exercised his express statutory authority to protect the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients by requiring healthcare facilities that choose to participate in those programs to ensure that their staff are vaccinated,” Prelogar said.
The Supreme Court has indicated in the past that it is more inclined to let vaccine mandates stand than to rule against them, at least at the local and state levels.
It rejected a challenge to New York’s state mandate that also required health care workers to get vaccinated. That mandate is even more restrictive and does not carve out exceptions for religious objectors, while the federal rule does. The High Court also refused to temporarily block a mandate in Maine back in October in spite of the fact that the rule in the state would be implemented before appeals could be heard on it.
How the Court ruled on those states’ actions, however, might not be how it rules on the federal mandate for health care workers, should the lawsuits continue to make their way through the appellate process. Critics contend that the federal mandate goes beyond what is statutorily allowed.
According to a fact sheet from the White House, the mandate on health care workers to get the vaccine would apply to 17 million workers at around 76,000 facilities across the U.S. Those workers would have to be fully vaccinated for protection against COVID-19 by January 4.
Most health care workers are already vaccinated. According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 30 percent of health care workers still need their shots, although that number may have decreased since it was published in November, due in part to the new omicron variant of the virus as well as the deadline to get fully vaccinated fast approaching.
The United States is continuing talks with Iran over its nuclear program after President Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. With a new Iranian administration after April’s controversial election, many worry that if talks fail, tensions between the two countries could turn into military escalation fueled by pressure from Israel. “The new hard-line team has been coming in to the negotiation table with more demands than the previous administration,” says Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi. “They want sanctions relief from the U.S. in exchange for them scaling back part of their nuclear program.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday the Biden administration is preparing alternatives in case the U.S. fails in its efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump withdrew the U.S. from. Indirect negotiations between the United States and Iran are underway in Vienna after a five-month break in efforts to revise the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On Tuesday, the chief of Iran’s civilian program insisted Iran will refuse to allow U.N. inspectors to access a sensitive centrifuge assembly plant. Last week,CIADirector William Burns said he’s concerned about Iran’s nuclear program during an interview withThe Wall Street Journal.
WILLIAMBURNS:Based on the results of the new round of nuclear negotiations, you know, with the so-called P5+1, the international partners and the Iranians, you know, the Iranians are not taking the negotiations seriously at this point. It was a pretty discouraging result then. You have the reality of, you know, the Iranians essentially dragging their feet on the nuclear negotiations, and at the same time, as you pointed out, Jerry, making steady advances in their nuclear program, particularly enrichment to 60% now, as well.
AMYGOODMAN:In recent days, Israeli officials have been urging the United States to take military action against Iran, suggesting the U.S. should either directly strike Iran or attack an Iranian base in Yemen. Israel insists that regardless of the outcome of the nuclear talks in Vienna, it reserves the right to attack Iran.
Well, for more we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Negar Mortazavi, Iranian American journalist, political analyst, host ofThe Iran Podcast.
Thanks so much for joining us, Negar.
NEGARMORTAZAVI:Great to be here.
AMYGOODMAN:If you can talk about the significance of what’s happening in Vienna right now? And what are these so-called alternatives to the Iran nuclear deal that Trump pulled the U.S. out of?
NEGARMORTAZAVI:Sure, Amy. So, as your audience may know, there are nuclear negotiations ongoing in Vienna. It’s been the site of this gathering of not just Iran and the United States, but really the world powers, all of the other parties to the nuclear deal. Sometimes we tend to forget that the nuclear deal was not just between Iran and the United States. There were other parties involved: European powers, Russia and China.
The seventh round of negotiations — can you hear me?
AMYGOODMAN:We hear you fine.
NEGARMORTAZAVI:OK, great. The seventh round of negotiations is — which has happened, is essentially the first round of negotiations with Iran’s new administration. There has been a change of presidency in Iran in June. And the new hard-line team has been coming in to the negotiating table with more demands than the previous administration.
And this really goes back to what myself and some other Iran watchers had been warning, that President Biden, when he first started his administration, had a window of opportunity, really a golden window of opportunity, with Iran’s previous administration, a moderate administration, who was involved in the negotiations initially and the making of theJCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal agreement, to go back to theJCPOAand do these negotiations while the moderates were still in power in Tehran. That window closed in June. Iran had a presidential election. Now a new team is in. They started in August. And they obviously — they are the hard-liners in Iran’s political faction. They’ve always been very skeptical of the West, of the U.S., of the nuclear negotiations, of theJCPOA. They were vocal critics of theJCPOA. So, this team is going to do things differently, and I think that’s what the Biden administration is also starting to realize, that things are going to be more complicated and difficult with the hard-liners in Iran.
I don’t think we’re at the end of the road yet or at a point of no return. I still think, even with the hard-line team, that Iran wants a nuclear deal, wants this nuclear deal or a deal with the United States. They want sanctions relief from the U.S. in exchange for them scaling back part of their nuclear program. But I think the negotiations ahead are going to be difficult. And if they fail, if diplomacy fails, then the absence of diplomacy means more escalation, potentially in the form of sabotage attacks and military escalations, which won’t just be bound to Iran. It will be spread across the region and can easily get out of hand.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And, Negar, can you talk about the role of one nation that is not a party to the negotiations but has major influence, Israel? Israel’s defense minister and Mossad chief are in Washington this week meeting with senior members of the Biden administration. And, of course, Israel has been involved in repeated attempts at assassinations, or actual assassinations, of scientists in the nuclear program in Iran, as well as sabotage of Iran’s nuclear energy program. What is Israel trying to do with the Biden administration right now, from what you can tell?
NEGARMORTAZAVI:That’s a great question. You know, actually, Iran’s nuclear program, it’s not a nuclear weapons program to this point. But if Iran — the reason Iran is seen as a threat is because it can be a potential threat to U.S. allies in the region. Iran is not a threat to U.S. soil. So, as you were saying, Israel and other U.S. partners in the region are very key elements in all of these sort of perceptions of threat and also the negotiations and U.S. sort of posturing towards Iran.
We know that the previous Israeli government, Bibi Netanyahu, was very much opposed to theJCPOA. He fought against the negotiations and the deal when President Obama was doing diplomacy with Iran, but he didn’t succeed. Then, later, he succeeded in really pushing President Trump to pull out of theJCPOA. And now, interestingly, we’re hearing from former Israeli officials, some from Bibi Netanyahu’s own previous government, that this was actually a mistake, that Israel opposing theJCPOAand eventually pushing President Trump to pull out of the deal was a mistake. That was a good deal because Iran had essentially agreed to put limit on its nuclear program. And now that those limits are gone and Iran is expanding the program, it’s really escalating the situation. There’s no better deal to replace it.
And as you mentioned, and Amy, there are talks of Israeli officials now really trying to push the United States to take military action against Iran or potentially target Iranian nuclear sites or Iranian interests across the region. I’m not sure how much of an appetite there is in the White House for that form of direct military attack on Iran by the United States, and I’m not so confident that Israel, on its own, would carry out an attack like that without U.S. greenlight. Now, the situation can always change. And I said you can stumble into a conflict, and it can escalate and get out of hand in this volatile region that is the Middle East. But so far I’m not sure if the Israelis have succeeded in sort of convincing the United States, because this is something they’ve always wanted, as well as the U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf, Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, to not themselves take military action against Iran but sort of push the United States to do it for them, and they haven’t succeeded under President Obama, President Trump. And so far I haven’t seen that really succeeding with the Biden administration. I think they’re still trying to give diplomacy a chance, although I think the U.S. side has to make more serious compromises to meet Iran halfway.
AMYGOODMAN:We want to thank you, Negar Mortazavi, for joining us, Iranian American journalist, political analyst. She is host ofThe Iran Podcast. And, of course, we’ll continue to cover this issue.
After break, we go to Chile, where voters are headed to the polls Sunday to choose a new president in a tight runoff between a far-right candidate and a leftist former student leader. Stay with us.
Rep. Ro Khanna warned Tuesday that the Biden administration’s plan to restart federal student loan payments in February could hurt Democrats’ chances in the upcoming midterm elections by placing an additional financial burden on millions of people, right in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
In recent weeks — amid the rapidly spreading Omicron variant and astill-unsteadyeconomic recovery — the Biden administration has come undergrowing pressureto extend the student loan payment pause and cancel at least a portion of the roughly $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt saddling tens of millions of people across the U.S.
But the administration has thus far refused to commit to doing either.
Speaking to reporters last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psakisaidthat “a smooth transition back into repayment is a high priority for the administration,” an indication that the Department of Education has no intention of extending the freeze athird time.
Asked about President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower, Psakisaidduring a Monday briefing that “if Congress sends him a bill, he’s happy to sign it.”
Legal expertsand campaigners say Biden has the authority to cancel federal student loan debt via executive action, but the president has declined to take that route despite the proposal’spopularity.
Asurveyreleased Tuesday by the progressive polling outfit Data for Progress showed that 70% of U.S. voters support the pause on federal student loan payments during the ongoing pandemic.
Congress already sent a bill to the President…in 1965. It's called the Higher Education Act. In that bill Congress authorized the executive branch to cancel all federal student debt. https://t.co/jxoBDH7QKI
Restarting federal student loan payments could inflict significant harm on borrowers and the broader U.S. economy. The Roosevelt Institute estimated in arecent analysisthat federal student loan borrowers were paying an average of $393 per month before the pause was enacted in March of 2020, the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
If the Education Department lifts the payment freeze, the Roosevelt Institute warned, $85 billion could be drained from the U.S. economy next year.
Teen Vogue’s Lexi McMenamin argued in anop-edTuesday that Biden’s intention to end the payment pause in fewer than 50 days is “a betrayal to his voters.”
More than 200 advocacy organizations — including the Student Borrower Protection Center and the ACLU — similarlyarguedin a December 8 letter to Biden that “payments should not resume until your administration has fully delivered on the promises you made to student loan borrowers to fix the broken student loan system and cancel federal student debt.”
“You ran for president on the promise that you would reform the student loan system to ensure that student loan payments would be affordable for all,” the groups wrote. “It is critical that your administration continue to deliver on your promises made to student loan borrowers and their families before ending the pause in payments and collections.”
Washington — Conservation groups submitted formal comments today urging cancelation of February’s federal oil and gas lease auctions, saying the Biden administration is legally required to prevent harm from the leasing program’s greenhouse gas emissions, not just disclose it.
“The Biden administration must do more than simply talk about climate change, it has a duty to take action on a scale and with a sense of urgency that the climate crisis demands,” said Kyle Tisdel, attorney and Climate & Energy Program director with Western Environmental Law Center. “The ongoing sale and development of federal oil and gas is not only inconsistent with climate science, but a breach of the moral obligation we have to current and future generations.”
On the evening of December 7, 2021, the Senate shot down a resolution to block the sale of a package of air-to-air missiles and missile rail launchers to Saudi Arabia. In the weeks leading up to the vote, bombs rained down on the city of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. This November, civilian casualties in Yemen were at a 16-month high. Bombing rates from the Saudi coalition were 41 percent higher than the monthly average during this year. Ten months have passed since President Biden ended “offensive” support to the Saudi coalition that has been waging war on Yemen since 2015. Biden pledged to find a political solution to the conflict, but the situation on the ground has only gotten worse.
The sale of the package of weapons was announced by the White House in November for $650 million in air-to-air missiles — primarily produced by Raytheon Technologies. The administration insisted that these weapons were not to be used inside Yemen but to protect the Saudi people from retaliatory attacks in Saudi territory by its adversaries in Yemen, i.e., the Houthis. Congress then had 30 days to contest the sale. The biggest debate in the Senate centered on whether the weapons were “offensive” or “defensive” in nature.
The Biden administration, in a statement released hours before the Senate vote on the resolution to stop the sale, argued that the sale was for “defensive” support to Saudi Arabia and the weapons being sold could not be used offensively. Senators who voted in support of the sale echoed the same rhetoric. However, that characterization is ridiculous when discussing the Saudi-led war on Yemen because Saudi Arabia is aggressively violating another nation’s sovereignty by waging war on Yemen in the first place.
The nature of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen is entirely offensive. Support of any kind for the war by the United States sends a signal of impunity to the Saudi government. It says that even if Saudi Arabia is bombing, blockading and starving another independent country, the U.S. will be there to lend a hand.
The Senate largely failed to examine this particular sale in the broader context of Saudi Arabia imposing a land, air and sea blockade on the entire country of Yemen. Since 2015, Yemenis have not had full and proper access to their land crossings, their sea ports or their airports. The blockade has been a consistent strategy of the Saudi coalition since the beginning. This act of collective punishment has starved thousands of Yemenis and will have impacts on the population for generations to come. The blockade has also exacerbated the pandemic. Hospitals treating COVID19 patients risk losing power due to fuel shortages caused by the blockade and patients who need to leave the country for treatment are not able to. It is an act of war. Why would the United States be lending any support to a country starving millions of people, no matter how the support is labeled?
Saudi Arabia has tried to beat the Houthis for six years and has failed, despite being backed and armed by the United States, the most militarized nation on Earth. Now the Saudi government is using its blockade of Yemen as a bargaining chip in peace talks. The weapons that are a part of this new sale give Saudi Arabia the ability to prolong and enforce their air blockade — a crucial part of Saudi Arabia’s war strategy. The White House can say Saudi Arabia will only be able to use the weapons in defense of its population, but the United States is handing over weapons capable of shooting down other aircraft when Saudi Arabia maintains that it will control the airspace in Yemen.
It has been almost a year since President Biden ended “offensive” support for the war in Yemen and promised to find a lasting political solution. After the announcement, Yemen advocates in the United States and around the world were wondering what ending “offensive support” really means. Ten months after the announcement, the situation on the ground has only gotten worse. Worst-case estimates say that a Yemeni child is starving to death every 75 seconds. The Saudi government and the Houthis are nowhere close to a peace agreement because the blockade continues to be used as a political tool by Saudi leaders and because the U.S. continues to support Saudi Arabia, simply now calling the support “defensive.” It is clear that President Biden’s strategy of ending “offensive” support for the war is disingenuous. Creating this false dichotomy between offensive and defensive has only left wiggle room for the Saudi military to continue its brutal assault on the people of Yemen. It’s time that members of Congress and activists who are serious about ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen abandon that rhetoric completely.
Across political parties, 64 percent of likely voters oppose the newest sale, even though it has been defined as “defensive.” Members of Congress across party lines opposed the deal. The dichotomy is breaking down, and peace activists should welcome it. If the “defensive vs. offensive” rhetoric continues to be embraced, the Biden administration and Congress will only continue to postpone the day when Saudi Arabia realizes the futility of its intervention and leaves the Yemeni people to determine their own future.
LaPlante is being poached directly from the military industry that is praising him, which he entered after serving in an acquisitions role under the Obama administration, where he was known for shepherding through major (and controversial) programs, such as the acquisition of the F‑35 fighter jet.
By moving from government to industry, then back to government (should the Senate confirm him), all while the weapons industry cheers, LaPlante has spun through a well-trodden revolving door — a career trajectory that is entirely routine, but nonetheless scandalous.
In a November 30 White House statement, President Biden praised LaPlante as a “seasoned national security leader with nearly four decades of experience in acquisition, technology, sustainment and the defense industrial base.”
Given the brutish approach of his predecessor, many expected President Joe Biden to shift away from the worst practices in U.S. foreign policy and at the border in the previous four years. Indeed, in the first weeks of his presidency, the Biden administration signaled changes. In Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first press briefing, the State Department announced that it was reviewing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — which have led the catastrophic war on Yemen with essential U.S. partnership.
A week later, Biden declared in his first foreign policy address as president that “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”
Regarding its practices at the border, Biden administration officials promised a shift away from Trump’s practices of separating families and caging children, calling them a “moral failing.” He said that the new White House would “deal with immigration comprehensively, fairly, and humanely.”
As 2021 comes to a close, however, we are seeing the latter part of a trajectory that settles into familiar, disastrous militarism.
The U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $650 million worth of missiles and providing $500 million worth of maintenance for U.S.-made aircraft, training and other support for its military operations.
These arrangements come as Saudi Arabia is escalating its devastating bombing in Yemen. In November, Saudi forces carried out the largest number of air strikes since Trump’s last year in office.
These bookends — Biden’s early announcement of an end to U.S. support for the war in Yemen and his subsequent robust material support of that war — capture the set of practices that the Biden White House is settling into, not only in Yemen, but also in the realm of war and imperialism more broadly.
Consider the White House’s approval of a $23 billion weapons sale to the U.A.E., which provides the Emirates with attack drones and F-35 fighter jets. The arrangement was negotiated under the Trump administration as the prize for the U.A.E.’s role in leading the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and itself, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, despite Israel’s deepening violence against Palestinians.
The Biden administration embraced the normalization agreements, along with Trump’s other actions meant to consolidate U.S. support and extend legitimacy to Israel in a time when Palestinian protest presents a steady challenge to Israeli apartheid, and global Palestine solidarity campaigns have gained more traction than ever.
Trump fulfilled longstanding wishes of the Israeli right wing, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, declaring the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank — which are considered unambiguously illegal according to international law — and endorsing the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The crudeness with which Trump performed these acts — framing them nakedly as pandering to right-wing evangelical Christian voters, and declaring himself the “King of Israel” — may contrast with Biden’s rhetoric. Yet when it comes to concrete action, Biden has accepted and continued along his predecessor’s path.
This continuity is also painfully evident regarding Biden’s actions toward migrants — many of whom have been displaced due to U.S. imperialist policies. For example, in the face of severe social, political and economic crises in Central America — which are driven by decades of Washington-directed economic policies and brutal repression carried out by U.S.-armed regimes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — Kamala Harris, in Guatemala City on her first overseas tour as vice president, presented the U.S.’s policy in succinct cruelty: “Do not come.”
Once they approach or enter the country, migrants face a complex of forces that remains in place to detain, incarcerate, and deport migrants and prevent their entry into the United States.
Biden has maintained the use of Title 42 — a statute that allows the federal government special powers in public health emergencies — to deny migrants, including asylum seekers, access at the U.S.-Mexico border, in violation of international law. Biden is thus continuing Trump’s use of the measure, which was invoked when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Public health professionals and scholars have argued that the measure cannot be justified in the name of public health and have called upon the administration to end it.
Biden has also reopened some of the most notorious detention sites highlighted in the Trump era, including Florida’s Homestead Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. The numbers of people in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have swelled to 22,000 under Biden — marking a 56 percent increase since the day the new president took office.
Biden’s most dramatic and revealing act at the border this year was his handling of the arrival of thousands of primarily Haitian asylum seekers at Del Rio, Texas, in September. From Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping the Black migrants, to their confinement in squalid conditions on riverbanks and under a bridge, the U.S. government and its police forces engaged in racist violence, treating the Haitians as a criminal threat to be contained, rather than vulnerable people with the right to seek refuge and asylum. Biden deported the group of thousands to Haiti in an operation that revealed the logistical capacity at his disposal — which could, of course, instead be used to welcome people and support their survival.
Finally, the Biden administration has resumed Trump’s infamous “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border to apply in Mexico and wait there while their applications are processed. The policy goes against U.S. law, which guarantees people the right to apply for asylum inside the U.S. — regardless of how they entered. Biden initially opposed the program, suspending it in February. In the face of rulings by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, however, the White House negotiated a new version of the policy with the Mexican government, and has begun to administer it. The program — which made tens of thousands of asylum seekers vulnerable to kidnapping, assault and other hazards in Mexico under Trump — is now Biden’s.
Biden did follow through on his promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But even that long overdue and necessary move for a war that was unjust from its first day was done with such careless disregard for the lives of Afghans that it sparked a new and escalating humanitarian crisis. U.S. forces even killed several Afghans — including seven children in a single family — in the chaotic withdrawal of ground troops. While State Department officials failed Afghans made suddenly vulnerable by the haphazard withdrawal — with no plan to evacuate the many who sought exit — the Pentagon secured its ability to continue carrying out air missions in Afghanistan through its bases in the region and by positioning an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea weeks in advance.
At the moment, Afghanistan faces mass hunger and an economic catastrophe as billions of dollars belonging to the Afghan Central Bank sit in the United States, frozen by order of the Biden administration.
Yet, amid these blatant continuations of state violence, grassroots pressure has clearly made an impact on U.S. policy.
Biden’s rhetorical vows to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, for example, empty as they were, were responses in significant part to a years-long, consistent and vocal challenge of U.S. support for the war. This has been led by Yemeni activists in the U.S., journalists, and UN and other aid workers in Yemen calling attention to the catastrophic humanitarian crisis there and the U.S.’s central role. Activism has continued with Biden in the White House, including a hunger strike earlier this year led by activists in the Yemeni Liberation Movement.
Similarly, 2021 saw an increasingly critical and widespread challenge to U.S. support for Israel, especially during its horrific attack on Gaza and repression of Palestinians in Jerusalem during Ramadan this May. The ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s could no longer reconcile its progressive brand with doing business in Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and announced the end of its operations there. And though it ultimately passed, congressional approval for an additional $1 billion to Israel to replenish its missiles after the attack was more controversial and faced more direct opposition than any funding proposal for Israel in U.S. history.
These formidable challenges to U.S. support for Israeli apartheid stemmed from many years of Palestine-solidarity organizing, as well as a more widespread anti-racist consciousness in the U.S. driven by years of Black-led resistance to police violence and other forms of racism.
On the subject of popular resistance, it is important to remember that the greatest moments of setback for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda came when people mobilized en masse. This happened in response to the anti-Muslim travel ban, when thousands took to airports to express solidarity with those targeted — and then again in rallies across the country in response to the separation of families and cruel detention of children at the border. These moments of protest disrupted those policies, albeit temporarily.
As we enter a new year, we are challenged to build movements with capacity expansive enough to build and sustain solidarity with those targeted and displaced by U.S. policies. Mass mobilization is necessary to stop the violence that the U.S. carries out and supports around the world and at its borders.
After a five-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the United States and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook isn’t good.
Less than a week into negotiations, Britain, France, and Germany accused Iran of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises” achieved during the first round of negotiations before Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was sworn into office. While such actions by Iran certainly aren’t helping the negotiations succeed, there is another country — one that is not even a party to the agreement that was ripped up in 2018 by then president Donald Trump — whose hard-line position is creating obstacles to successful negotiations: Israel.
On Sunday, amid reports that the talks might collapse, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called on the countries meeting in Vienna to “take a strong line” against Iran. According to Channel 12 news in Israel, Israeli officials are urging the United States to take military action against Iran, either by striking Iran directly or by hitting an Iranian base in Yemen. Regardless of the negotiations’ outcome, Israel says that it reserves the right to take military action against Iran.
Israeli threats aren’t just bluster. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, caused significant damage to Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, shortly after Joe Biden won the presidential election, Israeli operatives used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. Had Iran retaliated proportionately, the United States might have backed up Israel, with the conflict spiraling into a full-blown US–Middle East war.
In April 2021, as diplomatic efforts were underway between the Biden administration and Iran, sabotage attributed to Israel caused a blackout at Natanz. Iran described the action as “nuclear terrorism.”
Ironically described as Iran’s Build Back Better plan, after each of Israel’s nuclear facility sabotage actions, Iranians have quickly gotten their facilities back online and even installed newer machines to more rapidly enrich uranium. As a result, American officials recently warned their Israeli counterparts that the attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are counterproductive. But Israel replied that it has no intention of letting up.
As the clock runs out to reseal the JCPOA, Israel is sending its top-level officials out to make its case. Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid was in London and Paris last week asking them not to support US intentions to return to the deal. This week, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea are in Washington for meetings with US defense secretary Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA officials. According to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Barnea brought “updated intelligence on Tehran’s efforts” to become a nuclear country.
Along with verbal appeals, Israel is preparing militarily. They have allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran. Throughout October and November, they held large-scale military exercises in preparation for strikes against Iran and this spring they plan to hold one of their largest strike simulation drills ever, using dozens of aircraft, including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet.
The United States is also readying for the possibility of violence. A week prior to the negotiations resuming in Vienna, the US’s top commander in the Middle East, General Kenneth McKenzie, announced that his forces were on standby for potential military actions should the negotiations collapse. It was reported Wednesday that Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz’s meeting with Lloyd Austin would include discussing possible joint US-Israeli military drills simulating the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Stakes are high for the talks to succeed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed this month that Iran is now enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity at its underground facility at Fordo, a site where the JCPOA forbids enrichment. According to the IAEA, since Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, Iran has furthered its uranium enrichment to 60 percent purity (compared with 3.67 percent under the deal), steadily moving closer to the 90 percent needed for a nuclear weapon. In September, the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report stating that, under the “worst-case breakout estimate,” within a month Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
The US exit from the JCPOA has not only led to the nightmarish prospect of another Middle East country becoming a nuclear state (Israel reportedly has between eighty and four hundred nuclear weapons), but it has already inflicted enormous damage on the Iranian people. The “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign — originally Trump’s but now under Joe Biden’s ownership — has plagued Iranians with runaway inflation; skyrocketing food, rent, and medicine prices; and a crippled health care sector.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, US sanctions were preventing Iran from importing necessary medicines to treat such illnesses as leukemia and epilepsy. In January 2021, the United Nations released a report stating that US sanctions on Iran were contributing to an “inadequate and opaque” response to COVID-19. With more than a hundred thirty thousand officially registered deaths so far, Iran has the highest number of recorded coronavirus deaths in the Middle East. Officials say that real numbers are likely even higher.
If the United States and Iran are not able to reach an agreement, the worst-case scenario will be a new US–Middle East war. Reflecting on the abject failures and destruction wrecked by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a war with Iran would be catastrophic. One would think that Israel, which receives $3.8 billion annually from the United States, would feel obligated not to drag the United States and their own people into such a disaster. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Though teetering on the brink of collapse, talks resumed again this week. Iran, now under a hard-line government that US sanctions helped bring into power, has shown that it isn’t going to be an acquiescent negotiator, and Israel is hell-bent on sabotaging the talks. This means it’s going to take bold diplomacy and a willingness to compromise from the Biden administration to get the deal resealed. Let’s hope Biden and his negotiators have the will and courage to do that.
On November 26, as news of the new Omicron variant of Covid-19 stoked alarm around the world, the White House released a statement calling on countries to support an intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 vaccines. However, this public statement, which garnered numerous headlines, stands in stark contrast with what the Biden administration did — or did not do — behind closed doors at the WTO on November 29.
The Biden administration on Thursday rejected demands for a binding international agreement banning or tightly regulating the use of so-called killer robots, autonomous weapons that campaigners fear will make war more deadly and entrench a global norm of “digital dehumanization.”
During a meeting in Geneva, State Department official Josh Dorosin said the U.S. prefers “the development of a non-binding code of conduct” on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), which have already been used in conflicts to track and kill without a human operator.
While dozens of countries — most recently New Zealand — have expressed support for a global ban on the use of autonomous weapons systems, the U.S. has been a major obstacle to progress for years. On Thursday, Dorosin reiterated U.S. opposition to prohibiting killer robots through a “legally-binding instrument.”
John Tasioulas, director of the Institute for Ethics in AI, called the Biden administration’s position “sad but unsurprising.”
New Zealand, for its part, announced Tuesday that it would join the international coalition demanding a ban on LAWS, declaring that “the prospect of a future where the decision to take a human life is delegated to machines is abhorrent.”
“This is an issue with significant implications for global peace and security, and I’m optimistic New Zealand, alongside the international community, is well placed to push for action,” said Phil Twyford, New Zealand’s minister of disarmament and arms control.
Clare Conboy of the Stop Killer Robots coalition applauded New Zealand’s stand as “a powerful demonstration of political and moral leadership.”
“We look forward to supporting the government of New Zealand in their work to establish new law and to further build upon their proud history of leading international disarmament efforts and centering human rights, peace, and disarmament in their foreign policy,” she added.
In a report issued ahead of the latest round of United Nations talks, Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic warned that “it would be difficult for fully autonomous weapons systems, which would select and engage targets without meaningful human control, to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants as required under international humanitarian law.”
“The emergence of autonomous weapons systems and the prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force,” the report states, “are grave threats that demand urgent action.”
Bonnie Docherty, senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Wednesday that “much opposition to killer robots reflects moral repulsion to the idea of machines making life-and-death decisions.”
“A new treaty would fill the gap in international treaty law and protect the principles of humanity and dictates of public conscience in the face of emerging weapons technology,” Docherty argued.
A group of congressionalRepublicans is threatening to shut down the government this week in a last-ditch attempt to block all funding for the enforcement of President Joe Biden’s coronavirusvaccine mandatefor large employers — a policy thatright-wing judgeshave temporarily put on hold.
PoliticoreportedWednesday that Senate Republicans led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah are “planning to object to quick consideration of a stopgap measure to extend funding into early 2022 unless Democratic leaders agree to deny money to enforce the mandate.”
“Because of the tight schedule — and Senate rules that require unanimous consent to move quickly — the senators believe they’ll be able to drag out the process well past midnight Friday, when funding officially expires,” the outlet explained. “The [Senate] group has backup from the House: In a meeting Tuesday night, the House Freedom Caucus voted to pressure Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to take a harder line on the so-called continuing resolution unless Democrats strip out funding to enforce the mandate.”
The federal government will shut down at the end of the day on December 3 — in the middle of a deadly pandemic — if Congress fails to approve a short-term funding bill before then. Though Democrats narrowly control both the House and the Senate, they will need Republican votes in the upper chamber due to the archaic 60-vote filibuster rule, which the majority party has left intact despitemounting progressive pressureto abolish it.
“The stakes are high,” theWashington Post’s Rachel RoubeinnotedTuesday. “Averting a government shutdown is critical for helping fund the U.S. territories’ Medicaid programs. The current stopgap spending measure sustains federal dollars for their safety net programs. It’s also crucial to keeping government agencies running and providing paychecks to overworked staff in the federal health department.”
While it’s not clear how many GOP lawmakers intend to go along with Lee’s shutdown plan, 15 Senate Republicanssigned onto a letter last month vowing to “use all means at [their] disposal to oppose… legislation that funds or in any way enables the enforcement of President Biden’s employer vaccine mandate.”
In atweetWednesday, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) lambasted the GOP’s shutdown threat as “another hissy fit in the making.”
“Republicans plan again to take their ball and go home after not getting their way,” Connolly wrote. “Like every other GOP shutdown, this would greatly harm federal employees, contractors, and the American people who need and deserve a functioning government.”
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Republicans’ ploy to shut down the federal government over Biden’s vaccination requirements amounts to an effort to “prevent essential services from going out to people across the country because they’re upset about our efforts to save peoples lives.”
WH Press Sec. Jen Psaki hits at “absurdity” of Republicans threatening to allow government shutdown over vaccine mandates:
“They’re upset about our efforts to save peoples lives. I’ll just leave that there.” pic.twitter.com/rj1bLAe9SM
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is tasked with enforcing Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, which compels businesses with more than 100 employees to require vaccination or weekly testing.
OSHA, which ischronicallyunderfunded and understaffed,suspendedenforcement of the requirement last month to comply with a temporary injunctionhanded downin early November by the conservative-dominated U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Biden administration is attempting to revive the mandate, which was challenged by large employers and Republican-controlled state governments.
On Tuesday, Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana — a Trump appointee — blockedthe start of a separate vaccine mandate that would have applied to healthcare workers at facilities that rely on Medicare and Medicaid funding.
“Thank you, Judge Terry Doughty, for making the world less safe today with your ruling on vaccine mandates,” responded Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “You know-nothing ideologue, you simpering puppet following a GOP vogue for cruelty, selfishness wrapped up in the defense of liberty.”
The House is expected to vote on a stopgap government funding measureas soon as Wednesdayin the hopes of keeping the resolution on track to pass before the Friday deadline.
In a floor speech on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “Senate Democrats are ready to pass this legislation and to get it done as quickly as possible.”
“To avoid a needless shutdown, Republicans will have to cooperate and approve the government funding legislation without delay. If Republicans choose obstruction, there will be a shutdown entirely because of their own dysfunction,” Schumer warned. “We cannot afford to go down that road.”
“As winter begins,” he added, “the last thing that Americans need right now is an avoidable, Republican-manufactured shutdown that will potentially harm millions of federal workers, harm their families, and harm local communities that rely on an open and functioning federal government.”
A Trump-era pilot program that could result in the complete privatization of traditional Medicare in a matter of years is moving ahead under the Biden administration, a development that — despite its potentially massive implications for patients across the U.S. — has received scant attention from the national press or Congress.
On Tuesday, a group of physicians from around the nation will try to grab the notice of lawmakers, the Biden White House, and the public by traveling to Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) immediately stop the Medicare experiment, which is known as Direct Contracting (DC).
The doctors plan to present HHS with a petition signed by more than 1,500 physicians who believe the DC pilot threatens “the future of Medicare as we know it.”
Advocates have been publicly sounding the alarm about the DC program for months, warning that it could fully hand traditional Medicare over to Wall Street investors and other profit-seekers, resulting in higher costs for patients and lower-quality care.
“Everything we know about Direct Contracting should be cause to halt the pilot,” Diane Archer, the founder of Just Care USA and the senior adviser on Medicare at Social Security Works, told Common Dreams in an email. “Direct Contracting effectively eliminates the more cost-effective traditional Medicare program designed to ensure that people with complex health conditions get the care they need.”
“The Direct Contracting experiment is likely to be both a healthcare policy and a political nightmare,” Archer argued. “We already know from the Medicare Advantage experiment that Direct Contracting won’t save money, nor will it be able to show improved quality.”
But healthcare campaigners’ concerns have fallen largely on deaf ears in Congress and the Biden administration, which has allowed much of the pilot program to proceed as planned.
In a phone interview with Common Dreams ahead of Tuesday’s demonstration at HHS headquarters, Dr. Ed Weisbart — chair of the Missouri chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) — said that Congress is largely “asleep at the switch” as Wall Street-backed startups and private insurance giants close in on traditional Medicare, a 56-year-old program that covers tens of millions of U.S. seniors.
“People don’t know that it’s happening,” Weisbart, one of the physicians traveling to the nation’s capital, said of the DC experiment. “Most people in Congress don’t know that it’s happening. We’ve started having some of these conversations with congressional staff, and we’re hoping to have many more of them next week when we’re there, but it’s not on their radar either.”
“That’s the disturbing part,” he added. “How radical the transformation of Medicare is becoming under this new model, how widespread it will be — it’ll be the entire book of business — and yet that’s occurring with neither the awareness nor consent of Congress.”
Under the DC model, so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) are paid monthly by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care — a significant shift from traditional Medicare’s direct reimbursement of providers.
DCEs are allowed to pocket the funding they don’t spend on care, an arrangement that critics believe will incentivize the private middlemen to skimp on Medicare patients — many of whom could be auto-enrolled into DCEs without their knowledge or permission.
According to a policy brief released by PNHP, “Virtually any company can apply to be a DCE, including investor-backed startups that include primary care physicians, [Medicare Advantage] plans and other commercial insurers, accountable care organizations (ACOs) or ACO-like organizations, and for-profit hospital systems.”
“Applicants are approved by CMS without input from Congress or other elected officials,” the group notes.
At present, the pilot includes 53 DCEs in 38 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Drs. Richard Gilfillan and Donald Berwick pointed out in a September article for Health Affairs that 28 of the current DCEs are controlled by investors, not healthcare providers. A second tranche of DCEs is expected to debut in January 2022.
Dr. Ana Malinow, a physician from San Francisco who is taking part in Tuesday’s petition delivery, said in a statement that “Medicare Advantage — the first wave of Medicare privatization — showed us that inserting a profit-seeking middleman into public coverage does not save money for taxpayers, but rather costs more money while also taking away care choices from seniors.”
“If left unchecked, the Direct Contracting program will hand traditional Medicare off to Wall Street investors, without input from seniors, doctors, or even members of Congress,” said Malinow. “Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has the power to stop this Trump-era program in its tracks, and must do so now.”
The DC experiment was launched by the Trump administration but actually has its roots in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which established CMMI with the stated goal of identifying “ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs.”
The ACA granted CMMI, also known as the Innovation Center, the authority to test alternative payment and service delivery models on a national scale without congressional approval — latitude that, in the hands of the Trump administration, ultimately spawned the DC pilot program.
CMMI is currently headed by Elizabeth Fowler, who previously served as vice president of public policy and external affairs for WellPoint, Inc. — a health insurance giant that later became Anthem. Fowler also worked as chief health counsel to former Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, a right-wing Democrat who infamously had single-payer proponents arrested in 2009 and helped ensure that the ACA did not include a public option.
Weisbart told Common Dreams that while the creation of CMMI may have been well-intentioned, the body’s ability to “so fundamentally and radically transform a public health program that so many Americans rely on” without congressional approval or oversight is a real danger that lawmakers must take seriously.
“Someplace there needs to be congressional oversight,” Weisbart said. “When the public does finally find out that [lawmakers] were asleep at the switch, they’re not going to be happy. This is your chance to do what democracy is intended to do.”
The Biden administration paused the most extreme form of Direct Contracting — known as the Geographic (GEO) model — in March, but it is allowing the Global and Professional Direct Contracting (GPDC) pilot to move forward. According to CMS, the GPDC pilot is expected to play out over a six-year period.
While lawmakers have largely been quiet about the Medicare experiment, a handful of Democratic members of Congress have echoed grassroots demands for an immediate end to the DC program in recent months.
“We appreciate that you paused implementation of the Geographic model,” Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas.) Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) wrote in a May letter to Becerra and then-Acting CMS Administrator Elizabeth Richter. “However, we remain worried that the 53 DCEs participating in the GPDC model, a policy launched under the Trump administration, lacks oversight to protect Medicare beneficiaries’ care.”
“As members of Congress committed to protecting Medicare beneficiaries,” the lawmakers continued, “we ask that CMS immediately freeze the harmful CMMI DCE pilot program including the Geographic model and the Global and Professional Direct Contracting Model and evaluate the impact to beneficiaries.”
In September, Porter took part in a PNHP-hosted webinar that spotlighted the potentially far-reaching harms of the DC pilot.
“This program was supposed to make Medicare more efficient,” said Porter. “But actually it does just the opposite. Rather than allowing patients to go to providers directly under traditional Medicare, DCEs invite insurers and investors to step in and interfere with the care that Americans get.”
“This Direct Contracting Entity model is just one more example of the Trump administration’s many attempts to wreck a functioning, successful, popular government program for the sake of lining the pockets of its corporate donors,” Porter added. “The bottom line for Direct Contracting Entities is not to improve the quality of care. They drive up costs for patients to maximize their profits.”
In a column earlier this month, the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Tomlinson argued that the Biden administration’s decision to allow the DC program to continue “reflects for-profit health companies and investors’ power over both political parties.”
“Direct Contracting is also likely to kill any chance for progressive Democrats to make Medicare an option for any American who wants to enroll,” Tomlinson added. “If the government puts private companies in charge of all Medicare patients, it will eliminate any opportunity to overhaul our healthcare system truly.”
“Next year,” he added, “millions more Americans will find themselves in privatized Medicare, and most will never know what happened.”
Climate campaigners and other progressive critics on Friday called out the Biden administration for a new U.S. Interior Department report about leasing public lands and waters to oil and gas companies, slamming its proposals as far too weak given the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
The report — prepared in response to President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14008 — recommends adjusting royalty and bonding rates, prioritizing leasing in areas with known resource potential, and avoiding regions where drilling conflicts with conservation, historical and cultural resources, recreation, and wildlife habitat.
“Releasing this completely inadequate report over a long holiday weekend is a shameful attempt to hide the fact that President Biden has no intention of fulfilling his promise to stop oil and gas drilling on our public lands,” said Food & Water Watch policy director Mitch Jones in a statement.
Despite the president’s campaign pledge to ban new oil and gas leasing for public lands and waters, the administration last week auctioned off 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. In response to legal action from Republican state attorneys general, a federal judge ruled in June that Biden could not pause new leases.
The administration’s legal obligation to hold lease sales has not stopped climate campaigners from accusing the president of failing to deliver on his promises to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
“A minor increase in the royalties paid by climate polluters will have zero impact on combating the climate crisis,” Jones asserted Friday, “and will in effect make the federal government more dependent on fossil fuels as a source of revenue.”
“This shocking capitulation to the needs of corporate polluters is a clear sign that, when it comes to climate action, the White House does not actually mean what it says,” he added.
Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, was similarly critical, according toReuters.
“These trivial changes are nearly meaningless in the midst of this climate emergency, and they break Biden’s campaign promise to stop new oil and gas leasing on public lands,” said Spivak. “Greenlighting more fossil fuel extraction, then pretending it’s OK by nudging up royalty rates, is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland acknowledged the climate emergency in her statement about the report.
“Our nation faces a profound climate crisis that is impacting every American. The Interior Department has an obligation to responsibly manage our public lands and waters — providing a fair return to the taxpayer and mitigating worsening climate impacts — while staying steadfast in the pursuit of environmental justice,” she said. “This review outlines significant deficiencies in the federal oil and gas programs, and identifies important and urgent fiscal and programmatic reforms that will benefit the American people.”
However, as The New York Timesnoted, “the long-awaited report was nearly silent about the climate impacts from the public drilling program,” which frustrated climate activists.
“We expected the agency to do a programmatic review of the entire fossil fuel leasing program that takes into account not only the environmental harms of drilling at the local and landscape level, but also the impact on the global climate crisis that we’re in,” said Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“And that had never been done before,” Hartl pointed out. “The agency had never taken a cumulative look at the harm that would come from burning the fossil fuels that would come out of these leases. If you wanted to accomplish what the president had promised, this was the best mechanism to achieve that promise.”
As Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, put it: “Interior’s leasing report reads as if it was written in the 1990s, and does little more than confirm what advocates and other branches of government have been saying for decades.”
NEW: @Interior just released a months-late review of oil + gas leasing.
Rather than end new oil + gas leasing as Biden promised, it proposes minor changes to increase public revenues from drilling.
“The report is woefully inadequate and contains almost no new insights, despite arriving more than six months later than promised,” he continued. “The government’s royalty rates and bonding requirements are far too low and lead to public money subsidizing Big Oil’s profits while our federal lands and waters suffer egregious harm.”
“But President Biden promised to end the leasing program entirely due to its deadly threat to the climate,” Rees said. “Interior’s recommendations fall far short of that goal and ring particularly hollow days after the largest lease sale in U.S. history.”
“Secretary Haaland and President Biden must end all federal leasing and permits for oil and gas extraction,” he added. “Anything less is unacceptable and a damning failure of their climate promises and responsibility to future generations.”
Kyle Herrig, president of the government watchdog Accountable.US, urged Senate Democrats to follow the lead of their House colleagues and ensure reforms to the leasing program are included in their version of the Build Back Better budget reconciliation package.
“The Interior Department’s report makes it abundantly clear that under the current oil and gas leasing program, taxpayers and the environment are losing out while Big Oil profits handsomely,” he said. “Lawmakers should be prioritizing Americans’ best interests, not wealthy oil and gas companies’ bottom lines.”
“If Congress is serious about combating climate change and protecting our nation’s cherished public lands,” Herrig added, “senators must ensure bold reforms to the nation’s public lands leasing program are included in the Build Back Better Act.”
The BBB bill, as originally conceived, was a minimal sort of social needs proposal, pathetically far behind the norm on the planet, originally costing about a third of U.S. military spending (across all departments and agencies of military spending, and treating both BBB and military spending in terms of annual cost, rather than multiplying only the former by 10 as is the custom). BBB has now been cut to (depending on how you count it) a sixth of military spending and with — wait for it — no, it’s really worth the wait — wait for it — tax cuts for the mega-wealthy thrown in during the process of paring the bill down because of — you guessed it — costs.
E. J. Dionne is a columnist for the Washington Post. Speaking on WBUR, of National Public Radio on November 8, he applauded the work of the Biden Administration with regard to job numbers in October. He cited the standard Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measure which is U-3. The BLS reported that the unemployment rate in October fell to 4.6 percent. That would be a cause for applause if it was remotely accurate. It certainly is not.
The outcome at COP26 doesn’t bode well for the future of the planet, but then again, no one remotely aware of the history of international climate talks should have expected anything but a failure at Glasgow.
As a matter of fact, given what we already know about the science of climate change (fossil fuels are the primary culprits behind global warming), and, in light of our experience with the catastrophic effects of global warming (heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, habitat loss and species extinction), COP26 must be regarded as a “monumental failure.”
Indeed, it is quite shocking to see reports and commentaries from certain quarters trying to convince the public that COP26 represents a step forward in the fight against the climate crisis.
Why? Because for the first time in nearly three decades the world “coal” was used in a COP climate agreement? Or because of the pledge to end deforestation by 2030? Or could it be because world leaders agreed to end “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels?
Hypocrisy reigned supreme at COP26 in Glasgow. Leaving aside the presence of the fossil fuel industry with a bigger delegation than any country, most world leaders were there to defend their national economic interests rather than the sustainability of the planet.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden. He argued that “there is no more time to hang back or sit on the fence,” and then sought to convince everyone present that the U.S. will “lead by example” in the fight against global warming. How? By leasing over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies for oil and gas extraction immediately after his rhetorical posture at COP26.
And let’s not forget his urgent plea to OPEC just a few months ago to increase oil production.
Countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, to name just a few, worked hard during the negotiations to weaken as much as possible the final COP26 pact.
Of course, wealthy nations, which are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, bear the vast majority of the blame for climate impasse.
Their failure to honor a pledge of $100 billion in climate financing a year to poor nations, which are hit hardest by the consequences of global warming, speaks volumes of their commitment to the transformation of a sustainable and just future. So does their position on the issue of financing for “losses and damages” at COP26, which was deliberately couched in very vague terms and was left to be addressed in future climate talks.
But that’s what international climate diplomacy amounts to in the end: governments fighting for a climate agenda that won’t harm the specific interests and needs of their own ruling classes. This is exactly the reason why world leaders have been kicking the can down the road for nearly three decades now when it comes to taking drastic measures to combat global warming.
The truth of the matter is that whatever progress has been made so far in our fight against the climate crisis has been greatly due to activism on the part of individuals and a wide array of organizations such as community groups, labor unions, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous groups. Youth voices on the climate crisis have been, of course, most instrumental in raising public consciousness and building momentum for the formation of a global climate movement, which is our only hope left towards securing the goal of sustainability for all life on Earth.
The irony is that actually no sober and rational thinking human being could possibly have any illusions about the challenge humanity faces in the 21st century. It requires an indubitably high level of ignorance, in conjunction with a heavy dose of misanthropy, to pass over the fact that the world is faced with a titanic struggle over how to save the planet.
Moreover, there is no mystery about how humanity can avoid a possible collapse of civilized order as we have known it. A global Green New Deal is our only hope to save the planet from the disastrous effects of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Decarbonization in conjunction with natural climate solutions such as reforestation are key to making sure that humanity doesn’t get trapped in a conundrum the “the gates of hell are locked on the inside.”
There is no other choice at the present juncture. It is still not clear to what degree technology can be part of the solution at some point in the future, and we surely have no luxury in waiting to find out whether emerging technologies can solve the climate crisis.
Also, let’s have no illusions about the global Green New Deal project. This is not some sort of a utopian dream, as its opponents seem to suggest. The research, for instance, conducted by economists at the renowned Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst shows with unquestionable clarity that the implementation of the Green New Deal project will not only spare us from the worsening effects of global warming, but will also ensure sustainable development and a just transition.
But, perhaps more important, there are already scores of organizations in places all over the world working hard to turn the Green New Deal vision into reality. For example, ReImagine Appalachia, a collection of individuals and organizations seeking to “built a sustainable 21st century Appalachia,” is restoring damaged lands and water, refashioning the electric grid, building a sustainable transportation system, reforesting the region, while at the same time promoting union rights and ensuring that workers in extractive industries remain vital elements of the workforce in the post-fossil fuel economy.
Mass organizing is central, of course, to the attainment of the goals set forth by Reimagine Appalachia. Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia, says ReImagine Appalachia “reaches out and engages a wide variety of stakeholders – labor, faith, enviro, racial justice, criminal justice reform advocates, local electeds and others.”
Indeed, participation from below is the key to ensuring a societal transformation towards sustainability. As Amanda Woodrum so eloquently expressed to Truthout, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In addition, ReImagine Appalachia appears to have developed a very effective local elected outreach strategy, which, according to Amanda Woodrum, “has secured a number of endorsements from local electeds and passed community resolutions in several communities.” Equally important, the organization has launched BLAC, the Black Appalachian Coalition, an initiative led by Black women, as Black Appalachians have been hit hardest by the downward mobility of the neoliberal project since the 1980s.
The outcomes of international climate summits are very discouraging, but the work done at the grassroots level by researchers and activists alike in the fight against humanity’s greatest existential crisis is quite inspiring.
So, yes, the struggle ahead promises to be hard and brutal, but the “general will” can always prevail in the end even under the most gruesome of circumstances if people are willing to fight for the right cause. And no cause can be more sacred than saving planet Earth.
It was already clear that meatpacking plants hosted some of the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks. But a congressional investigation released in late October revealed just how dire the situation is. The COVID-19 infection and death toll in slaughterhouses run by the country’s largest meat conglomerates is now nearly three times higher than previously estimated. Considering the hazards cited by the report — crowded assembly lines, lax screening precautions, sweat-saturated masks and barriers made with “flimsy ‘plastic bags on frames’” — it’s little surprise that in some plants, more than half of workers have contracted the virus.
Emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigation paint a picture of executives who aggressively pushed back against safety measures in the pandemic’s early days. The CEO of Smithfield Foods, for example, called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendations “problematic” and lamented that touchless mask distribution would cause each employee to miss 30 seconds of work. Meanwhile, Smithfield workers were filing complaints that they were not spaced six feet apart, were denied breaks and couldn’t breathe through masks saturated with sweat. Others said their production line was so quick, they weren’t able to turn away to cough. “If you’re not in a casket, they want you there,” former Smithfield worker Sonja Johnson told The Washington Post.
“The lack of care and the lack of interest in providing workers with the most basic protections by the companies is shocking,” said Magaly Licolli, director of an Arkansas-based poultry worker organization, in a recent Food Chain Workers Alliance report on frontline worker organizing. “With this pandemic it’s about fighting or dying. There is no other option.”
Meat processing plants were dangerous places to work even before the pandemic. And while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — the federal agency responsible for ensuring workers’ safety — acknowledges the presence of hazards like noise, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, repetitive motions, hazardous chemicals and exposure to airborne pathogens in slaughterhouses, it provides only limited protections from these dangers through its general standards that apply across industries.
When it comes to air quality, in particular, OSHA has failed to develop standards for any sector — even though meat-processing facilities are notorious for spreading viruses due to temperature and humidity levels that encourage pathogens to thrive. OSHA has also failed to adopt standards to protect workers from musculoskeletal disorders, a particularly severe problem in the poultry industry. Instead, OSHA has largely developed “nonbinding guidance” for employers or unsuccessfully attempted to invoke the OSHA Act’s general duty clause — which requires employers to ensure the workplace is free of “recognized hazards.” It has generally been understood as a backstop in the absence of specifically applicable standards but is difficult for the agency to justify when challenged.
OSHA also issued “nonbinding guidance” during COVID-19 when, as the congressional investigation argues, it should have issued an Emergency Temporary Standard to protect workers. As a result, meatpacking companies were left largely unchecked. Investigators describe this as a “political decision” by OSHA leadership under former President Trump. Yet even under the Biden administration, the agency has still not implemented those sorely needed safety rules — or so many of the others that could help to curb the health hazards and injustices facing workers.
On his first day as president, Joe Biden signed an executive order on advancing racial equity and claimed he would make racial equity and support for underserved communities “the business of the whole government.” Protecting marginalized workers must be central to this strategy for it to succeed. By implementing workplace protections in key industries like meatpacking, OSHA now has the chance to address the disproportionate impact of health hazards and promote racial equity in industries employing BIPOC workers long left unprotected due to the nonexistence of binding regulatory standards.
Fortunately, there are signs of progress. In September, the Biden administration announced new initiatives at OSHA to address heat hazards in the workplace — a dangerous issue that disproportionately impacts immigrant farmworkers, and for which OSHA has never had an enforceable national standard. OSHA launched a rulemaking process on October 27 to finally create such a standard, which will replace its previous “nonbinding guidance.”
This is a significant step in the right direction. It will save lives. But when it comes to remedying the disproportionate impacts of hazardous workplaces, it is just the beginning. Meat-processing workers deserve protection, too.
For years, slaughterhouse workers and their advocates have been calling for a slowdown to increasing factory line speeds, which crowd workers closer together and raise their risk of injury. They’ve asked for strengthened inspection programs that address not only food safety, but worker safety, and allow workers to designate a representative to accompany inspectors. And they’ve demanded that their basic rights — to bathroom breaks, to leave from work due to medical and other emergencies, and to protection from retaliation when filing complaints — be respected. Federal legislation could address many of these longstanding issues to protect workers over the long term, in addition to compelling OSHA to create emergency pandemic standards.
Advocates are also calling on OSHA to keep a record of pandemic-related infections and deaths, including the racial demographics of those affected. Because — as October’s congressional investigation shows — lives are lost when companies aren’t held publicly accountable for protecting their workers. As long as these companies continue to prioritize profits over people, the federal government can no longer stand aside and must step in to uphold safety, equity and justice for the workers our food system depends on.
The Biden administration went through with the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history Wednesday. In the controversial sale, major fossil-fuel companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP bid a total of $192 million for the rights to drill a stretch of the Gulf of Mexico that is about double the size of Florida, The AP reported. The amount offered is the second-highest total since bidding resumed in the Gulf of Mexico in 2017. The Biden administration has been widely criticized for allowing the sale to proceed even after President Joe Biden promised U.S. climate action during the COP26 talks in Glasgow.
It’s been nearly 10 years since Kanautica Zayre-Brown started taking estrogen. Her birth certificate and ID say “female.” She legally changed her name.
If it were up to her, her transition would already be complete. But at 40, Zayre-Brown, an incarcerated woman in North Carolina, is fighting for something that experts agree is a basic medical necessity for transgender people: gender-affirming medical care. Her case highlights the tensions between LGBTQ+ advocates and the Biden administration as trans people behind bars are being denied what experts agree is medically necessary care.
Zayre-Brown has a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, when a person’s gender does not align with their sex assigned at birth. Two years ago — with orders from a doctor — she began petitioning Anson Correctional Institution to provide her surgery that would help complete her transition. Her attorney, Jaclyn Maffetore with the ACLU, argues that Anson has a legal obligation to provide it.
“What the law requires is an individualized determination for each individual person for the medical care that they need,” Maffetore said. “The step that she’s seeking to take now is a step that has been in her plan of care for her gender dysphoria before she was incarcerated. And methods to alleviate her gender dysphoria [like hormone replacement therapy and affirming clothing] have just not been effective.”
“I just felt like they just didn’t care because they couldn’t understand me,” Zayre-Brown said. “When I take my clothes off, I don’t feel like the woman that I am.”
Maffetore said she can’t get a clear answer from the state on why her client does not meet the criteria for gender-affirming surgery. She also added that her client has been misgendered by prison staff.
“She is a woman. She has been living as a woman for the majority of her life,” Maffetore said. “That obviously seems like a failure on the part of [the state Department of Public Safety] to ensure that their staff is adequately trained and following their policies.”
Maffetore alleges DPS has been slow to provide explanations for the delay, blaming procedural delays and the pandemic. Now, Maffetore says the ACLU is prepared to file suit.
“Kanautica is in mental anguish, dealing with her gender dysphoria that has not been released through any other means and feeling like DPS has forgotten about her,” she said.
John Bull, a spokesperson for the North Carolina DPS, provided The 19th a copy with the department’s policy for caring for transgender people, which mandates that requests for surgery be fielded by a committee made up of health care and administration prison officials.
He added that health privacy laws prevent the state from commenting on Zayre-Brown’s specific case.
It also requires staff to use affirming names and pronouns for transgender staff, something that many staff members have neglected to do, Zayre-Brown claims. Although her name is legally changed, her “deadname,” a term trans people use to refer to a former name, still appears in searches on the state’s database of incarcerated people.
Treatment of transgender people in state and federal prisons has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. In courting the LGBTQ+ vote, then-candidate Joe Biden promised that if elected president, he would bolster protections for transgender people behind bars.
Among those promises was enforcement of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a law passed unanimously by Congress in 2003 and implemented in 2012 that, in part, required prisons to house transgender people on a case-by-case basis, with an emphasis on where they would be safest. An NBC News investigation in 2020 found that in nearly in 5,000 transgender prison placements, just 15 transgender prisoners were housed according their lived genders.
On his campaign website, Biden also pledged to “ensure all transgender inmates in federal correctional facilities have access to appropriate doctors and medical care — including OBGYNs and hormone therapy.”
The Department of Justice, which enforces PREA in state prisons, would not comment on how far the administration has come in developing policy toward those goals. In an email to The 19th, the department pointed to its investigation into conditions facing trans people in Georgia.
In April, the DOJ filed a statement of interest in the case of Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman incarcerated in Georgia who alleged that the state failed to provide her gender-affirming medical care. The statement argues that constituted cruel and unusual punishment and that the U.S. government has an obligation under the Constitution to protect against it.
“By taking action in this case, the Justice Department is reminding departments of corrections that prison officials have the obligation to assess and treat gender dysphoria just as they would any other medical or mental health condition,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta in a statement at the time.
LGBTQ+ advocates celebrated the Justice Department’s filing in the Georgia case as potentially landmark for the future of trans rights. The case remains pending.
Two years ago, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Idaho must provide gender-affirming care to Adree Edmo, who had repeatedly been denied surgery while serving a 10-year sentence for a sex crime.
Gov. Brad Little wrote in a statement at the time that “hardworking taxpayers of Idaho should not be forced to pay for a convicted sex offender’s gender reassignment surgeries.” Emdo’s attorneys countered that her right to care had nothing to do with her crime.
Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department did not enforce the part of PREA governing the placement of incarcerated transgender people. While PREA does not directly mandate surgery, access to both often go hand in hand. According to Project for Incarcerated Transgender Survivors at American University, many prisons won’t transfer transgender people who have not had surgery. Conversely, those who petition for surgery from men’s prisons are almost always denied, court records show.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department said states must comply with the PREA rules, placing transgender people on a case-by-case basis and certifying that they are in compliance, or risk losing 5 percent of their funding.
LGBTQ+ advocates have been eager to see if the Biden administration might enforce health care protections for trans people behind bars in state and federal prisons and revise changes made to the federal Bureau of Prisons Manual under the Trump administration that removed transgender PREA protections.
In the interim, people like Zayre-Brown are waiting. She doesn’t know how much longer she can hold out, she said. Her last emergency grievance, in which she threatened self-mutilation, was denied. She also volunteered to pay for her own surgery and recover at home under home monitoring.
“I really, really, really understand now how trans individuals, trans sisters, and brothers have passed away,” she said. “I totally understand how they feel from not having access to adequate care. I never thought I would understand it. I understand it now.”
Less than two months after U.S. border patrol agents were caught on video flogging Haitian asylum seekers with riding crops, the Biden administration is continuing its pursuit of deportation of Black asylum seekers with a seemingly banal but still devastating instrument: boilerplate form letters.
Truthout recently gained access to two of these letters via the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. On their face, they don’t seem noteworthy — they are identical, standard-issue form letters informing two asylum seekers from Mauritania that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied their asylum claims on the basis that they have not demonstrated a “credible fear” of returning to Mauritania if deported back there by the U.S., despite the fact that they are fleeing enslavement and brutality.
Under U.S. law, asylum seekers may not be deported to their home countries while their asylum cases are waiting to be processed if they demonstrate “credible fear” of persecution or violence.
It’s unfathomable and outrageous that DHS is denying the credible fear claims of these Mauritanian asylum seekers after everything they have endured and escaped, including enslavement, beatings, stalking, murder threats, multiple arrests and incarceration in nightmarish holding pens without beds or sanitation.
Mauritania is an African country which is 90 percent desert and whose economy can barely sustain its 4.7 million people. An estimated 500,000 Black Mauritanians are mercilessly exploited via formal and informal systems of slavery and enforced servitude by the light-skinned Berber and Bidhan (locally called “white Arab”) ruling class, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. However, absent any governmental or international action, Black Mauritanians must flee their oppression relying only on help from family and village members already abroad.
Asylum seekers I.C. and I.W. were among the daring few who have risked the harrowing journey across the Atlantic, through South and Central America, and who made it to Mexico to submit themselves to Biden’s asylum process at one of the port of entries along the U.S.-Mexico border. (To protect them from retaliation, Truthout has refrained from using the men’s full names and has obscured other potentially identifying details in this report.)
I.C.’s sworn declaration chronicles the harms he’s suffered and the traumas he’s already borne:
In Mauritania I was forced to work for white Arabs without pay. When I would demand payment for my labor, they would throw me in a jail … until I was willing to return to work without pay. This happened to me twice. The first time I was wrongfully imprisoned for about two weeks. The second time my confinement lasted for about a month.
The prison where they threw me for refusing to work without pay is disgusting and the guards are abusive … they woke us up every morning by throwing cold water on us, kicking us and yelling at us.… We are forced to defecate in a hole three men at a time while the guards stand watch over us like we are animals….
A third man, M.A., who had also endured enslavement and survived torture, has passed the hurdle of his credible fear interview, and can meet all the other conditions needed for release. Nonetheless, he is yet to be freed from Richwood Correctional Center, a for-profit prison in Louisiana. When the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative attorneys complained to DHS headquarters in D.C. that the two release requests they’d submitted on M.A.’s behalf were being wholly ignored by the New Orleans ICE Field Office, D.C. kicked it back to New Orleans. This is the same field office that oversaw the brutal mass deportations of Black Africans in the waning days of the Trump administration, and against whom Cameroonians in the Pine Prairie detention facility conducted a desperate hunger strike to protest their lengthy detentions, measured in years, not months or weeks.
“It’s a dystopian reality,” says Mich González, associate director of advocacy for the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, one of several attorneys handling their cases. “Coming off the heels of the prior administration, I was really hopeful and excited for an administration that cared about humanitarian issues, cared about restoring our asylum process that was all but destroyed,” he told Truthout. Instead, he says, that care seems to exist only in theory.
I.C. and I.W. are living in a paroxysm of anxiety. Because their credible fear claims were denied, at any moment, they could potentially be plucked out of the Richwood Correctional Center and Stewart Detention Centers in Georgia, respectively, where they have been languishing for months, and forced, shackled, onto dangerous ICE Air charter flights back to Mauritania — and back to enslavement.
Photos smuggled out of a Mauritanian prison were provided to Truthout by Lynn Tramonte, director of Ohio Immigrant Alliance, who received them from another nonprofit, which received them directly from a Black Mauritanian man deported from the U.S. in January 2021. They are confirmation of just how credible I.C. and I.W.’s fears actually are: incarceration to enforce enslavement is not a farfetched or abnormal condition in Mauritania.
Mauritanians deported from the U.S. in January 2021 were taken to this jail directly from the airport.Courtesy of Ohio Immigrant Alliance
Stephen J. King, professor of government at Georgetown University, estimates that of the half-a-million Black Mauritanians who are subjected to slavery or forced servitude, about 90,000 are born slaves into a hereditary system of chattel slavery, wherein “white Arab” and Berber families own Black families as private property. The remainder have been tricked or trapped into servitude because they are denied IDs, which are an impediment to employment. As King explains in an August 2021 white paper published by Arab Reform Initiative:
Slavery in Mauritania is also a racial slavery. In a country that has a largely destitute population, Mauritania’s Arabic-speaking Arab-Berber elite, an exclusionary and predatory group that self-identifies as White (Bidan), ruthlessly dominates the country’s state and economy. They represent, at most, 30% of the population. The enslaved are Blacks from within Mauritania’s Arab-Islamic linguistic and cultural sphere (Black Arabs or Sudan).
What this means is that if higher-ups in the Biden administration do not meaningfully intervene, I.C. and I.W. may soon be reinserted into the catastrophe that pushed them to U.S. shores in the first place. Their quest will have been in vain, other than to have added to the coffers of for-profit prison operators extracting billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers every year that immigrant detention is allowed to exist.
Maryam Sy is an organizer in the Ohio Immigrant Alliance’s ReuniteUS campaign working to bring back those with cases pending who were illegally deported under Trump. Of Senegalese heritage, she’s married to a Mauritanian man whose family was slaughtered in what they refer to as the 1989 genocide.
“I love America, it’s a great country with many opportunities,” she told Truthout. “But I feel pain about what’s still happening in Mauritania.”
Sy’s advocacy began in earnest in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 2020 after her husband’s nephew escaped slavery. He traveled though Brazil, through the jungle, to the southern U.S. border. A nationwide fundraiser on social media raised his $8,000 release bond in 24 hours. “When he got released,” Sy recalled, “I said I need to do more for the Mauritanian people.”
She has interviewed 253 people, 75 percent of whom are Mauritanians who were deported by the Trump and previous administrations, plus 20 who fled to Canada in fear of deportation. Sy describes an expedient relationship between DHS and officials in Mauritania, in which the quid pro quo runs along these lines: In order to deport Mauritanians back to Mauritania, DHS must get a laissez-passer document stating that those being deported are citizens, which is routinely provided by the Mauritanian consulate. But, she says, ICE officials only bring the men to the tarmac.
Inside the airport, the returning men, who themselves have no identifying documentation, are not able to prove their citizenship and are taken to the prisons (like the one pictured) where they are trapped until they can bribe or otherwise finagle their way out. Once free, they are harassed and sometimes hounded by authorities (one man was arrested 15 times) for being undocumented, and are ineligible to work. Free to starve, free to be unsheltered, the desperate circumstances imposed on them by a cunning and treacherous state force them to capitulate to servitude; and if they eventually protest their exploitation, there’s hell to pay.
In a forthcoming documentary Sy’s group is producing to advocate for temporary protected status (TPS) for Mauritanian migrants, one man sums up the tragedy he’s fallen prey to, saying he has his diplomas, he is a doctor in sociology, but he is enslaved. He goes on to say that when he asks for money, those who have enslaved him say they won’t pay and threaten to call the police, or they beat him up. “This is a form of modern slavery,” he says.
Sy further describes a cynical and antiquated judicial bureaucracy in which U.S. immigration judges rely on the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices like this one from 2019, which are widely understood to be inaccurate. Earlier this year The Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the U.S. issued a statement decrying the false picture of human rights advances made in Mauritania presented by Washington. Rather than the free elections claimed by our diplomatic corps, they say “Mauritanians witnessed one of the most contested non-transparent elections in Mauritanian history,” which were followed by kidnappings of opposition leaders and prominent journalists who were detained without charge; some were sentenced to prison terms and most were beaten and tortured “in the most horrible ways.”
And while DHS will meet with advocates about designating TPS for Mauritanians, when the meeting concludes, immigration judges continue pretending that overly optimistic United Nations reports on Mauritania from 1996, written when the situation after the 1989 massacres and expulsions to Senegal had improved, and later in 2012, when a fraction of the Mauritanians violently driven across the border to Senegal were allowed to return, are somehow relevant to 2021.
In an email to Truthout, Tramonte condemned the UN’s assessments, saying:
There is so much wrong with the content of these, it’s impossible to do justice. But a few things jump out: Haratines are the SLAVE caste of the [White Arabs]. They are not empowered. The Black African ethnic groups (Fulani, Wolof, Soninke, Bambara, a few others) have ALL been and are still being harmed by the ongoing repression against Black ethnic groups in Mauritania and they do not have the same rights or privileges as the [White Arabs]. The idea that people who returned from Senegal all got their land and cattle back would be laughable if the issues were not so serious. People were murdered to take that land, women raped, dissidents tortured in jail. This is gaslighting of the highest order.
But U.S. officials deliberately burying their heads in the convenient sand does not change the reality on the ground. “There is slavery in Mauritania,” Sy says. “Black Mauritanians are not being recognized as citizens. They can’t get IDs because all the archives have been destroyed. They can’t register on the current census that’s happening right now. So, they are stateless.”
Tramonte says that despite all the attempts to disempower and dehumanize them, the Mauritanian migrants she works with inspire her with their compassion, smarts and humanity every single day.
“They have been on the run for 30 years,” Tramonte told Truthout. “They have the strength to get here … they came to our doorstep [men like M.A.] and said ‘Will you help me?’ and we said, ‘Sure, here’s a jail cell.’ And still they organize and know what their rights are, and find a way to use their voices.”
She fondly remembers the Mauritanian men detained in Ohio from 2017-2019 who banded together and created a nucleus where they would all look out for each other.
“If someone’s commissary funds got frozen, oh no, is he going to be deported or moved? Who’s got money on their books? So the person calls us, we call their attorney, their attorney files last-minute stays, sometimes they pull people off the plane. They knew the law, they were looking at the time frames for appeals. There were three men who wanted habeas corpus petitions filed. We raised some money, found some lawyers, and their strategy worked: they got out.”
But if there is strength in numbers, there is also vulnerability in isolation. Tramonte is currently working on a case of a sole Black Mauritanian man incarcerated in a remote rural county in Michigan.
“DHS will put Black Muslim men in a county jail where the county is 99 percent white, no immigration lawyers live there, and there’s active white supremacist groups,” she explained. “It’s all about breaking their spirits. It can’t be overstated how inhumane it is.”
Zeinabou Sall, an advocate working with Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the US for the past two years, says it’s hard not to see DHS’s practices as blatant anti-Blackness. “We’ve had a lot of problems in Louisiana,” Sall told Truthout. “When they call me — whether they’re from Cameroon, Kenya, Haiti or Mauritania — they all tell me the same things: We, Blacks are being mistreated.”
One case was especially upsetting. “ICE dragged this boy, used force to take him out of his cell, to the airport; but he was lucky because the airline would not take him without his COVD test,” Sall said.
In another, DHS released a Black Mauritanian man from detention in Louisiana, but ICE agents drove him deep into Mississippi where officials dropped him off at a Greyhound bus station “without any documents, where no one speaks the language.” He contacted Sall, and she made arrangements through an aid group in Louisiana to get him to safety.
Born and raised in Mauritania, Sall’s family fled “because of the discrimination and killing,” and were refugees in Senegal for 10 years before they were brought by the United Nations to Texas in 2001. Among many other duties, she helps the lawyers with translation — she can speak French, English, Fula, Wolof, a few dialects of Fulani, and some Arabic. She’s heard many stories and is certain of one commonality: “Black Mauritanians are leaving for fear of our lives, and it’s an ongoing situation for over 30 years. They need help to get access to language services to get access to freedom. I’m here for them. I’m their voice; they cannot talk for themselves.”
On that point, I.C. is scheduled to have a second chance today (November 17) at his credible fear interview because it came to light that the first one had been seriously botched by a translator who did not speak the same dialect and omitted or fudged crucial details. González had to fight hard even for this concession.
“And there is no guarantee he will get a different result,” he said.
As for M.A., a torture victim for whom every day spent imprisoned is a day he cannot heal from the trauma he carries, his advocates want him released from Richwood and reunited with his cousin before Thanksgiving.
“When you think about the cases of the Mauritanians, it’s horrifying,” says González. “They’re fleeing conditions of slavery which include being incarcerated if they don’t agree to indentured servitude. Then we incarcerate them the moment they seek help. It’s really disgusting.”
The Biden administration declined to establish more stringent rules for part of the mushrooming cryptocurrency industry despite evidence that it could be at the heart of a massive scam which threatens broader economic well-being.
The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, a multiagency initiative tasked with attempting to ensure market orderliness, said in a report released on November 1 that so-called stablecoins should be regulated like banks, but that it would be up to Congress to establish such a regulatory framework.
Cryptocurrencies consist of encrypted public records that demonstrate an entity’s ownership over the record, and transactions that the record facilitates. Advocates claim that cryptocurrencies enhance privacy and revolutionize payment processing, but their use-value has been widely questioned by critics who view the market as a highly speculative bubble waiting to burst. The computing power that can be used to obtain, or “mine,” certain cryptocurrencies also increasingly contributes to global carbon emissions, as those who question the benefit of the industry often point out. Research published by University of Cambridge found that Bitcoin mining uses more energy than the population of Argentina.
While the prices of most cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin fluctuate wildly, stablecoins are pegged to the value of another asset, like the U.S. dollar. They are primarily used to borrow and lend money on cryptocurrency financial markets and to bet on the prices of various tokens, like Bitcoin.
Stablecoins are attractive for those interested in speculating on cryptocurrency because it’s easier to trade one type of token for another using stablecoins than it is to convert the token into fiat currency, and then into another type of token. The top stock market regulator, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler, has called stablecoins “poker chips at the casino.”
Industry trade groups hailed the Biden administration’s decision, with some noting that Congress is very unlikely to act on the recommendations anytime soon. Meanwhile, public interest groups decried the move, saying that regulators are playing with fire by sitting on their hands, and that the government already has the authority it needs to rein in abuses.
“Unless federal regulators take prompt and effective action to deal with stablecoins, there is a grave danger that the $120 billion dollar stablecoin market will pose severe operational and systemic threats to our financial system,” Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) said in an open letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, which was published on October 19 in anticipation of the report.
Todd Phillips, director of financial regulatory and corporate governance for the Center for American Progress, said he was “very disappointed by the political aspect of this decision.”
“Congress is not going to enact the very narrow statute that the President’s Working Group recommends,” he told Truthout. Phillips said that the report’s authors “have given a big gift to the crypto industry, which has been saying: ‘We need Congress, regulators cannot do it.’”
Phillips explained that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) already “has legal authority to decide what are bank deposits.”
“There are likely ways the FDIC could grant deposit insurance to stablecoins, and it’s disappointing that no one has articulated what that would look like, or what actions the FDIC could take to make that a reality,” he remarked.
Renita Marcellin, a senior policy analyst for AFR, bolstered this argument, saying that regulators can already “put stablecoins under the full banking regime,” if they wanted to.
“We can say you have to get a national bank charter and be regulated by the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency], you have to get deposit insurance, you have to submit to prudential regulation,” she said, referring to rules forcing banks to keep money and other assets on hand to weather rough patches.
Marcellin added that regulators could also decide to treat stablecoins like securities, which are broadly defined by case law as investment products. In the 1982 case, Marine Bank v. Weaver, the Supreme Court ruled that deposits which aren’t subject to federal banking regulations are securities.
The market for stablecoins, which is now worth roughly $138 billion, has increased in size by more than 500 percent in the past year. Growth in the overall market for cryptocurrency has run roughly parallel to this trend and is now worth almost $3 trillion, having ballooned by about 650 percent in the past year, despite sharp market contractions in late spring. The growth has been fueled by hopes that cryptocurrency will one day become widely used in payment systems, and a speculative frenzy driven by aggressive marketing campaigns that have included prominent celebrities, such as Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon, and major nonfinancial corporations such as Burger King.
Growth in the stablecoin market has worried regulators because the market looks set to fail in a time of distress — a scenario that could cause the price of various cryptocurrencies to plummet, considering many token purchases are financed with stablecoins. The financial industry stands to take losses in this scenario with a growing number of hedge funds exposed to cryptocurrency.
Those who are least likely to own any financial assets stand to suffer as a result. Systemic financial distress often causes or exacerbates economic recessions, which tend to hit the poor the hardest.
There are well-documented doubts about the integrity of the most widely used stablecoin, the U.S. Dollar Tether (USDT), which has been advertised as being backed one-to-one by the national currency that bears its name. The company that issues USDTs, Tether, has recently settled allegations leveled by state and federal regulators who had accused it of lacking the assets to back up USDTs. The company is also currently under investigation by the Justice Department, which is looking into charges that it has committed bank fraud.
In February, Tether agreed to pay $18.5 million in a settlement with New York Attorney General Letitia James and to refrain from operating in the state of New York. In October, Tether agreed to pay $41 million in penalties to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which found that the company only had enough cash to back up its token for “27.6% of the days in a 26-month sample time period from 2016 through 2018.”
Journalists have also found Tether incapable of proving that it has the liquidity to maintain its USDT peg. A Bloomberg investigation published in October found that the company has used its reserves to make risky bets, such as loans backed up by Bitcoin, and that Tether’s chief financial officer has used company reserves to make personal investments. The piece noted that if the company’s critics are correct “and Tether is a Ponzi scheme, it would be larger than Bernie Madoff’s.”
Madoff, a former wealth manager, scammed thousands of people out of $64.8 billion by taking cash from more recent clients and using it to pay older clients instead of investing the money — the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme. The scam collapsed in 2008 when the global financial system crashed and new clients stopped coming to Madoff. There are some $73 billion USDTs in circulation, $52 billion of which were issued this year alone, meaning that the token comprises roughly half of the global stablecoin market.
Tether was reportedly on the mind of Secretary Yellen when she first convened the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets in July to discuss stablecoins. Yellen was concerned the company “had gotten so large that it threatened to put the U.S. financial system at risk,” according to last month’s Bloomberg investigation. (She was also worried about the stablecoin market because of Facebook’s interest in entering it, citing the firm’s ability to reach almost half the world’s population on a monthly basis.)
Yellen wasn’t alone among regulators worried about Tether posing a wider risk to economic well-being, either. Officials at the Federal Reserve had raised concerns about the possibility of a run on Tether. Runs occur when clients attempt to simultaneously withdraw their money from a financial institution, which lacks the assets to honor the requests. They typically cause the loss of deposits, the failure of the firm, and losses for other entities that have done business with the company that suffered the run.
Though runs are often associated with black-and-white images of long lines for bank withdrawals during the early years of the Great Depression, there have been several high-profile examples of runs in recent U.S. history, mostly centered around nonbank financial firms. During the 2008 meltdown, there was the equivalent of a run on insurance giant AIG, as institutional investors attempted to collect on bets against the imploding housing market. And as the world was roiled by the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020, investorsrushed to take their cash out of U.S.-based money market funds, which consist of short-term credit agreements that corporations rely on to stay current on debt payments. Both examples resulted in Federal Reserve bailouts and broader economic turmoil.
The knock-on effects of financial distress heightened the urgency for regulators to do something about the slow-motion car wreck transpiring in the stablecoin market. A readout of the meeting convened in July by Yellen noted that potential risks posed by the growth in stablecoins include “risks to end-users, the financial system, and national security.”
“The Secretary underscored the need to act quickly to ensure there is an appropriate U.S. regulatory framework in place,” the Treasury Department also noted.
But when the President’s Working Group issued its report on November 1, it did not urge regulators to “act quickly.” The group recommended another examination of stablecoin-related systemic risk by another multiagency bureaucracy: the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The report also said that stablecoin issuers should be subject to deposit insurance requirements like banks, but that Congress was required to legislate the matter.
The working group additionally called on Congress to pass legislation that limits business partnerships between cryptocurrency firms that perform different functions, so as to limit the possibility of conflicts of interest. (Tether has also come under scrutiny for mingling its reserves with assets managed by a cryptocurrency exchange called Bitfinex). The report also said that Congress should pass legislation “to require any entity that performs activities that are critical to the functioning of the stablecoin arrangement to meet appropriate risk-management standards.”
With Congress easily swayed by industry lobbyists, cryptocurrency trade associations welcomed the recommendations.
“Prompt action from this Congress on anything is unlikely, let alone on something like stablecoins,” tweeted Jake Chervinsky, the head of policy for a trade group called the Blockchain Association. Chervinsky’s colleague, Blockchain Association Executive Director Kristin Smith said: “Given that there is still a crypto information gap among some lawmakers and that the legislative process takes time, it is unlikely that anything will be signed into law anytime soon.” Meanwhile, Jerry Britto, the executive director of another trade association called Coin Center, reacted to the release of the report saying, “Bottom line: not a big deal from a crypto advocate’s perspective.”
The cryptocurrency industry has spent at least $4.9 million this year on lobbying, an increase from the $2.8 million that it spent last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Though many lawmakers are already ideologically aligned with the laissez-faire ideology that characterizes cryptocurrency, the industry has stepped up its efforts to raise campaign funds for its strongest advocates on Capitol Hill. Cryptocurrency players hosted a fundraiser for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) after he unsuccessfully advocated for “the industry’s preferred fix” to tax reporting provisions in the infrastructure bill signed into law on November 15 by President Biden, according to The Washington Post. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) raised $180,000 from the cryptocurrency industry in the third quarter after altering an amendment that would have softened the same tax reporting provisions to make the revisions more industry friendly, according to
Though the President’s Working Group report largely relies on Congress to do something about stablecoins, it did, however, leave open the possibility of regulatory action by the SEC and the CFTC. According to AFR’s Marcellin, one of those agencies could act soon.
“The regulators are getting warm to the fact that there are existing authorities,” Marcellin said. “We see [SEC chair] Gensler making a lot of movement and we expect an announcement on that shortly, based on his public statements.”
She noted, however, that rules limiting a financial institution’s risky behavior come primarily from banking regulators, such as the FDIC, and that the President’s Working Group report appears to have foreclosed on that possibility at a crucial time.
“When we’ve had major legislation up before, the banking and tech industry have proven themselves to be very formidable in their lobbying efforts,” Marcellin said. “Putting this before Congress might not lead to good public policy right now.”
Biden administration may not send official delegation to Beijing 2022, in protest at human rights abuses
The US is going to stage a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China and will not send an official delegation in protest against human rights abuses, according to a report on Tuesday.
The report comes the day after a virtual summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, in which multiple policy issues were raised but the Olympics were not mentioned, despite some earlier reports that Xi would deliver an invitation to the games.
Citing “over a century of failed and racist cannabis policies,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and two other leading Democrats have joined a growing chorus of activists, celebrities and congressional Democrats in calling on President Joe Biden to pardon people with federal marijuana convictions and set up a process for formally clearing their criminal records.
Warren joined fellow Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Sen. Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon in sending a letter to Biden last week requesting a “blanket pardon” for all nonviolent federal marijuana convictions. The lawmakers urged Biden to use his constitutional authority to pardon a “broad class” of people, which would fulfill “promises” made by Biden on the campaign trail and transform the lives of “tens of thousands of Americans,” including those who are currently in prison or formerly incarcerated and have difficulty accessing jobs and services due to their criminal record.
Biden is facing mounting pressure to take executive action on marijuana by advocates and Democrats, who have introduced sweeping bills in the House and Senate that would end federal marijuana prohibition and expunge convictions but are once again at risk of falling on the back burner. The House made history last year by passing an earlier version of the legislation that died in the Senate, and so far, Democrats have used their slim majority in Congress to prioritize a host of other issues during the current legislative session.
As a presidential candidate, Biden, who was debating Warren and other Democrats on marijuana policy at the time, said “we should decriminalize marijuana,” and declared people with marijuana convictions should be “let out of jail” and have their records expunged. In a pledge to “Black America,” the Biden campaign said the president would “decriminalize the use of cannabis” and “expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.”
The latter pledge to expunge convictions for cannabis “use” appears to fall short of requests by Warren and others to issue a “blanket pardon” for all nonviolent cannabis offenses, which would include people charged with growing and selling cannabis. Few people, if any, are caged in federal prison for simply using marijuana, and as medical and recreational cannabis sales continue to grow in dozens of states, the uneven enforcement of federal marijuana prohibition has become a major racial justice issue for Democrats.
“In the 1970s, President Nixon launched the War on Drugs over the objections of his own advisors and experts, spawning mass incarceration policies with devastating effects on Black and Brown families,” the senators wrote. “Today, despite legalization efforts across the country and roughly equal cannabis usage rates, Black Americans are still nearly four times as likely to be arrested for cannabis possession as white Americans.”
Biden has remained resistant to the idea of legalizing marijuana at the federal level, even as other Democrats say legalization’s sheer popularity among voters makes marijuana reform a political no-brainer. Instead, Biden has said he supports decimalization, which typically means reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of a drug without lifting prohibition.
Pro-legalization Democrats have warnedfor years that their party should champion marijuana legalization before Republicans attempt to take credit, and GOP efforts are indeed underway. On Monday, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) introduced legislation in the House that would repeal federal marijuana prohibition and expunge nonviolent federal marijuana convictions to release people from prison and clear their criminal records.
The nonpartisan marijuana reform group NORML said Republicans have introduced previous legislation that would “narrowly amend” federal marijuana laws, but Mace’s is the first to provide relief to those who have been criminalized.
The Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act introduced by Democrats in the House would go further by prohibiting the denial of federal benefits and immigration protections based on marijuana convictions and funnel tax revenues from legal sales to programs for communities harmed by the drug war. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has introduced similar legislation in the Senate.
“Between the previously passed MORE Act, the recent Senate proposal by Schumer, and this new bill, it is truly a race to the top for the best ideas and smartest approaches to responsible reform,” said Justin Strekal, NORML’s political director, in a statement.
In April, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden supports legalizing medical marijuana while leaving decisions over whether to legalize and how to regulate recreational weed up to individual states, which the Democratic bills and Mace’s legislation are also designed to do. However, instead of ending the federal ban that is currently in conflict with multiple states, Biden supports “rescheduling” cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act, the federal law that regulates and prohibits psychoactive drugs.
Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug considered by the federal government to have no “currently accepted medical use” and therefore completely banned, which flies in the face of plenty of research on medical cannabis and millions of patients. If “rescheduled” under Schedule II, cannabis would join a list of highly regulated drugs including powerful prescription painkillers that are considered “dangerous,” but researchers would have easier access to cannabis for studying its “positive and negative effects,” as Psaki put it.
Biden has said he opposes legalization until there is more research on the health risks of cannabis, a view that experts say reflects the opinions of older voters in Biden’s generation and family members of people who developed substance abuse disorders.
However, many of the positive and negative effects of cannabis are well-known and the drug is already widely used in every corner of the nation despite federal prohibition. Advocates, leading Democrats and a growing number of Republicans say marijuana should be “descheduled” and removed from Controlled Substances Act altogether, which would effectively end federal prohibition.
“At this point, it is nonsensical and cruel for President Biden to stand by any position that is not in full of support of descheduling marijuana, particularly when the tide is now turning toward full drug decriminalization,” Maritza Perez, the national affairs director at the Drug Policy Alliance, recently told Truthout.
On October 9, Warren and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting that his office initiate a multi-agency review of cannabis scheduling, which would be the Biden administration’s first step toward removing marijuana from Schedule I without waiting for Congress to act. The senators gave Garland until October 20 to respond, but it remains unclear if Garland intends to act. The Department of Justice and both Warren and Booker’s offices have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
A recent Congressional Research Service report states that Biden could also kickstart the administrative process for descheduling marijuana with executive orders urging federal agencies to conduct a health review and start a rulemaking process. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, the White House’s drug policy office, did not respond to a request for comment on the calls to deschedule marijuana and issue a “blanket pardon” for past convictions.
An effort by the Biden administration to deschedule marijuana administratively would take time and likely face legal challenges. Warren, Markey and Merkley wrote that issuing a blanket pardon for people with nonviolent cannabis convictions and setting up a process for expunging criminal records would allow President Biden to “act now.”
“Most importantly, such a pardon — combined with your leadership on an accessible expungement process to formally clear the criminal records of those affected — would mark the beginning of a reversal of decades of ineffective and discriminatory cannabis policies, allowing Americans to return to their communities, find housing and jobs, and rebuild their lives without the burdens of an unjustly imposed criminal record,” the senators wrote.
As President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure framework into law Monday, progressives both inside and out of Congress called for the swift passage of his social investment and climate policy agenda, demanding that right-wing Democrats “keep their word” and approve the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act to invest in the wellbeing of working-class Americans and the planet.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was passed earlier this month, with six progressive Democrats in the House — including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) — voting against the bill due to objections over the legislative process.
Now that the $1.2 trillion bill has been signed into law, said progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups, Congress must continue pushing Biden’s full agenda forward and pass the Build Back Better Act.
Today would be a great day to pass the Build Back Better Act.
Five centrist Democrats in the House — Reps. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.), Ed Case (D-Hawaii), Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) — pledged to support the Build Back Better Act after receiving the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) cost estimate for the package, which has been drastically cut due to objections from right-wing lawmakers including Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
The CBO’s analysis of the entire package is now expected on Friday. The White House has said the bill — which includes provisions such as universal free pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, child care subsidies, and tax incentives to enable families to purchase electric vehicles — is fully paid for.
The Stop Deficit Squawks coalition, which includes Indivisible, Tax March Social Security Works, and People’s Action, demanded the Democrats reject the “fear-mongering around an artificial debt crisis” by Republicans and centrists and pass the Build Back Better Act.
“The bipartisan infrastructure package shows us what’s possible when Washington puts real issues and everyday Americans ahead of the deficit squawks’ artificial debt crisis,” said Sarah Baron, campaign director for Tax March. “Now we need Congress to finish the job and quickly pass the Build Back Better Act.”
“Democrats should know by now that deficit squawks represent right wing and corporate special interests, not everyday Americans,” Baron added. “It’s time to push back against their scare tactics and invest in our future.”
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure package was recognized by liberal-leaning environmental groups like Environment America as one that will fund “historic investments across the United States,” including $39 billion for public transportation, $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, $55 billion to clean up waterways and remove lead pipes and lead from drinking water, and $65 billion to expand broadband internet access.
But, more progressive groups including the Sunrise Movement made clear that in their view, the bipartisan framework “is not a climate bill” and will not convince voters to keep Democrats in power in the midterm elections coming up in less than a year.
“Today, as politicians in D.C. celebrate what they see as a victory, young people, BIPOC, and marginalized communities, who sacrificed so much to get Democrats elected, still have no reason to believe that putting Democrats in office will meaningfully improve their lives,” said Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash.
The infrastructure bill alone “won’t win elections,” she added. “It is not what we were promised when we put Democrats in the House, Senate, and White House. If Biden is concerned at all about the future of our country, or at the very least voter turnout in 2022, he must pass Build Back Better immediately. Only then can we begin to combat the climate crisis.”
While objections by right-wing Democrats including Manchin forced the party to significantly dial back climate provisions in the Build Back Better Act, the package still includes incentives to manufacture electric vehicles and grow domestic supply chains in renewable energy sectors, a Civilian Climate Corps, and increased investment in “climate smart agriculture.”
The passage of the IIJA and the Build Back Better Act together, said the small business coalition Main Street Alliance, puts the U.S. “on the precipice of a more equitable society” — illustrating why progressives in the House called for both pieces of legislation to be brought to the floor for a vote at the same time.
“In partnership, the Build Back Better Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will make critical investments we need to boost our economy and rebuild our communities,” said Chanda Causer, co-executive director of the group. “Now, we are urging the House and Senate to swiftly pass a robust Build Back Better bill as soon as possible and deliver on the promises for millions of people and small businesses in America.”
As Biden signed the infrastructure legislation, the national economic justice group Poor People’s Campaign rallied in Washington, D.C. to demand the urgent passage of the Build Back Better Act, with a number of campaigners arrested during the direct action.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, condemned corporate Democrats for perpetuating false narratives over social investments and the needs of the working class.
“Unstable housing among families with children costs the United States $111 billion in affordable health and special education costs over the next 10 years,” Barber said at the rally. “That’s some cost for you.”
“Public assistance programs spend $153 billion a year as a direct result of low wages,” he added. “If we didn’t have low wages they wouldn’t have to subsidize communities… The problem is we’re not talking about these costs. The only costs they’re talking about is, ‘How much will it cost the billionaires?’”
Reducing methane emissions took center stage at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow ending Friday. More than 100 countries pledged to reduce their methane emissions by 30% over the next decade. Methane is a significantly more potent yet shorter-lived greenhouse gas, making it a target to prevent near-term warming as societies hurtle towards the 1.5 degrees of warming deemed disastrous for life on Earth.
In tandem with this global commitment, the Biden administration released its plan to bring down U.S. methane emissions. While this plan would set new limits on methane emissions coming off oil and gas plants, it does not regulate the single largest source of U.S. methane emissions: animal agriculture.
The Biden administration is preparing to auction off more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling companies less than a week after the United Nations COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where global negotiations over plans to reduce fossil fuel emissions faced an official deadline on Friday.
The annual Gulf of Mexico lease sale planned for November 17 in New Orleans is the largest federal offshore drilling auction in United States history and comes just months after Hurricane Ida unleashed dozens of oil spills and petrochemical leaks from aging fossil fuel infrastructure near the Louisiana coast. On October 1, a ruptured underwater pipeline off the coast of California spilled an estimated 25,000 gallons of crude oil across ocean waters and beaches, the latest disaster to raise fears about the dangers of offshore drilling.
More than 250 environmental, social justice and Indigenous groups sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Wednesday with an “urgent plea” to cancel the lease sale as the U.S. and other major polluters hammer out their latest pledges to reduce climate-warming emissions at the UN climate conference. Fossil fuels produced in the Gulf would contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis, environmentalists say, and feed onshore refineries and petrochemical plants that pollute low-income communities and neighborhoods of color.
“The Gulf of Mexico continues to be treated as a sacrificial zone to oil and gas development, disproportionately harming local communities already at the frontlines of climate disaster, wreaking havoc on the environment, and contributing to global climate change,” the groups wrote in the letter. “The region’s communities are frontline Black, Indigenous and people of color and low-income families who have been living with degraded air, land, and water for decades.”
After campaigning on a pledge to ban new oil and gas leases on public lands and ocean waters, President Biden in January issued an executive order placing a moratorium on new federal leases while his administration conducts an environmental review that has yet to materialize. The moratorium was expected to have little immediate impact on drilling companies, which have already secured leases and permits to drill on public lands and waters for years to come. Still, Louisiana and a dozen other fossil fuel-producing states filed suit, and in June a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the “pause” on leasing.
The Biden administration is appealing the decision, but the Department of Interior is moving ahead with plans to lease 734,000 acres of public lands in western states and millions of acres across the Gulf despite objections filed by environmental groups. John Filostrat, a spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), said the federal agency is conducting the Gulf of Mexico lease sale in compliance with the court order.
BOEM and Interior Department agencies collect revenue from the leases they sell and royalties from the oil and gas produced as private drilling companies develop vast swaths of the Gulf and prairie lands from West Texas to the Dakotas. For more than a decade, the Government Accountability Office has flagged federal leasing programs as “vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, or in need of transformation.” Interior Department officials say they “continue review the programs’ noted shortcomings.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration is continuing its comprehensive review of the deficiencies associated with its offshore and onshore oil and gas leasing programs,” Filostrat said in an email.
About 26 million federal acres of the country were under a federal fossil fuel lease in 2018, and that does not include the Gulf of Mexico, where hundreds of drilling platforms dot the horizon from Texas to Alabama. Since 2017, offshore leasing in the Gulf has generated more than $1 trillion in federal revenues.
Fossil fuels produced from public lands and waters are responsible for about 24 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to federal researchers. If oil and gas leasing on public lands came to a halt, researchers estimate that carbon dioxide emissions would fall by 280 million tons by 2030, a sizeable reduction compared to other proposed climate policies.
After the federal court ruling blocked Biden’s “pause” on new leases, BOEM’s offshore regulators announced that they would move forward with the Gulf lease sale on August 31. Hurricane Ida had just swept across Louisiana, “wreaking havoc on the same frontline communities” the Biden administration “committed to help heal by stopping the deep-rooted injustices perpetrated by the oil and gas industry and helping build clean, sustainable local economies,” according to the letter from environmental and Indigenous groups.
Environmental attorneys quickly filed a lawsuit, arguing the analysis used by federal regulators to estimate the environmental impacts of the lease sale is outdated and insufficient.
Developed in 2016 and 2017, this legally-required Environmental Impact Statement acknowledges some ecological impacts but estimates that the greenhouse gases from fossil fuels produced under new drilling leases in the Gulf — projected to be as high as 1.12 billion barrels of crude oil and 4.4. trillion cubic feet of gas — would not contribute to climate change. Regulators argue oil and gas would still be imported and burned if not produced in the Gulf, but environmentalists say their analysis is flawed, and new leases would lock in fossil fuel production for decades even as the world turns to alternatives.
Kristen Monsell, an oceans defense attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said advances in climate science in recent years tell us that burning this amount of oil and gas will absolutely contribute to the climate crisis. Widespread and rapid reduction in emissions is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold first championed by the Alliance of Small Island States that has guided international climate negotiations but appears increasingly out of reach.
“A slew of new information demonstrates that those old analyses don’t adequately consider just how risky continued oil and gas activity actually is, and a federal appeals court has held the greenhouse gas analysis the administration is relying on fails to properly consider the impacts of more leasing on the climate crisis,” Monsell told Truthout in an email.
Monsell said the court order blocking the portion of Biden’s executive order that placed a moratorium on new leasing does not “compel” offshore regulators to hold the lease sale for the Gulf of Mexico. At the very least, regulators could postpone the offshore drilling auction and update the environmental impact review that advocates have challenged in court, according to a brief the groups filed with the Interior Department.
“The administration has more than sufficient authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to cancel this lease sale,” Monsell said. “It’s incredibly disappointing to see them not doing so and instead casting their lot with the fossil fuel industry and worsening the climate emergency.”
The Biden administration has committed to cutting U.S. emissions by 50 percent under 2005 levels by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, but the proposal to stop the leasing public lands and waters to private drilling companies appears to have fallen to the wayside in the face of stiff opposition from the fossil fuel lobby.
Instead, the administration is focusing on new methane regulations and investments in cleaner technology and renewable energy, along with updates to infrastructure included in two bills Democrats are pushing through Congress. Biden is expected to sign the first package on Monday, which passed with support from a handful of Republicans. Climate advocates say the legislation will not result in serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and are urging Democrats to pass their broader spending package with a ban on offshore drilling for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Investigation finds rights activists working for groups accused by Israel of being terrorist were previously targeted by NSO spyware
The mobile phones of six Palestinian human rights defenders who work for organisations that were recently – and controversially – accused by Israel of being terrorist groups were previously hacked by sophisticated spyware made by NSO Group, according to a report.
An investigation by Front Line Defenders (FLD), a Dublin-based human rights group, found that the mobile phones of Salah Hammouri, a Palestinian rights defender and lawyer whose Jerusalem residency status has been revoked, and five others were hacked using Pegasus, NSO’s signature spyware. In one case, the hacking was found to have occurred as far back as July 2020.
In an about-turn from its stated policy, the Joe Biden administration on Thursday, November 4, approved USD 650 million worth of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. The deal marks the first major arms sales deal with Saudi Arabia since Biden announced the end of US involvement in the war in Yemen and the sale of “offensive” weapons to Riyadh in February.
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