The Biden administration on Friday took its latest step to hold Norfolk Southern accountable for the disaster continuing to unfold in East Palestine, Ohio and the surrounding area, filing a lawsuit against the rail company for sending toxic chemicals into the environment. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the company under the Clean Air Act, accusing it of “unlawfully polluting the nation’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Biden administration announced Friday that it will allow Medicare Advantage plans to continue overbilling the federal government in the short term after the insurance industry lobbied aggressively against proposed rule changes aimed at cracking down on fraud in the privately run program.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said it is still moving ahead with the changes despite industry pressure to drop or completely overhaul them.
But instead of implementing the reforms all at once, CMS outlined a plan to phase in the changes over a three-year period, a concession to large insurers that dominate the Medicare Advantage market—which is funded by the federal government.
“How Washington really works: Medicare Advantage providers whined for months that they simply couldn’t survive without being able to rip off the government, so the government said ‘you can rip us off for just a little longer,’” The American Prospect‘s David Dayen tweeted in response to the CMS announcement.
The changes involve tweaks to the Medicare Advantage risk-adjustment model, which determines how much the federal government pays insurers to cover patient care.
Medicare Advantage plans are notorious for piling on diagnoses to make patients appear sicker than they are to reap larger payments from the federal government. CMS estimates that overpayments to Medicare Advantage totaled $11.4 billion in fiscal year 2022, a sizeable drain on the Medicare trust fund.
“Nearly every large insurer in the program has settled or is facing a federal fraud lawsuit for such conduct,” The New York Times noted Friday. “Evidence of the overpayments has been documented by academic studies, government watchdog reports, and plan audits.”
Mark Miller, the executive vice president of healthcare for the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, expressed concern that the Biden administration’s decision to phase the Medicare Advantage changes in over three years will “continue to reward those insurers with the most abusive practices over the next two years.”
“We are disappointed to hear that reasonable changes targeting abuse and waste in Medicare Advantage will be phased in over three years rather than fully implemented immediately,” said Miller. “The coding abuses by insurers in Medicare Advantage have led the independent Medicare commission (MedPAC), which was created to advise Congress, to call for a ‘major overhaul‘ of Medicare Advantage policies.”
\u201cDisappointing to see the Biden administration bending the knee to the insurance industry while they fleece seniors and taxpayers billions\u201d— James A. Williams (@James A. Williams) 1680295460
Medicare Advantage insurers have been fighting the Biden administration’s proposed changes for months, running ads warning that the reforms would result in higher premiums and worse care for patients—claims that federal health officials adamantly rejected.
Axios reported that the Better Medicare Alliance, a Medicare Advantage lobbying group, “has spent $13.5 million on advertising since the beginning of the year, targeting markets with competitive 2024 Senate races. Their ads painted the CMS proposal as a cut to Medicare that will eat into consumer benefits.”
But Stacy Sanders, an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, told the Times last month that “we will not be deterred by industry hacks and deep-pocketed disinformation campaigns.”
Becerra himself pushed back on social media, writing, “Leave it to deep-pocketed insurance companies and industry front groups to characterize this year’s proposed increase in Medicare Advantage payments as a pay cut.”
Biden administration officials sounded a different note on Friday. “We were really comfortable in our policies, but we always want to hear what stakeholders have to say,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told the Times, admitting that industry lobbying impacted the agency’s decision to drag out its implementation of the changes.
CMS projected Friday that under the finalized rules, Medicare Advantage plans will see a payment increase of 3.32%—nearly $14 billion—in 2024 compared to this year.
The payment boost will come as Medicare Advantage insurers are facing growing scrutiny from progressive lawmakers over their business practices, including widespread overbilling, the use of artificial intelligence to cut off patient care, and denials of necessary care.
“Federal audits have found that taxpayers have been overpaying bad actors running Medicare Advantage plans by billions of dollars every year, threatening the stability of both Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said earlier this week. “This fraud has to end.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who joined Merkley last week in criticizing the massive profits of Medicare Advantage insurers, tweeted Saturday that CMS is “making progress, but these delays are a step backward.”
“For years, private Medicare insurers have been gouging taxpayers and denying care for seniors and people with disabilities,” Warren wrote. “There is a lot more work to do to curb these abusive practices.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
President Biden recently tweeted in support of “even more resources to secure the border,” contrasting himself with “MAGA House Republicans” who are proposing to “slash funding for border security.” He’s positioning himself to the right of the more explicitly xenophobic and far-right “MAGA” branch of the Republican Party and their fear-mongering about fentanyl. The Biden administration’s record…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led two dozen House Democrats in urging Congress to allocate at least $1.2 billion in humanitarian aid for Yemen—whose people have suffered eight years of U.S.-backed Saudi war—in next year’s budget.
“As we approach the 8th anniversary of the Yemen war, the country remains stuck in a devastating cycle of conflict and humanitarian crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) and 23 other lawmakers wrote in a letter to House Subcommittee on State and Foreign Relations Chair Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and Ranking Member Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).
“Yemen has the grim title of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with over 4 million Yemenis displaced and an estimated 80% of the country’s 30 million people reliant upon some form of assistance for their survival,” the letter, which was first sent last week, asserts.
None— (@)
The letter’s authors lament that “international appeals for assistance for Yemen have consistently [fallen] short of their goals by large margins” and that “the continuous reduction in funding has greatly exacerbated the humanitarian suffering.”
The United Nations “has had to close over 75% of its lifesaving programs, and the World Food Program has been forced to cut or reduce food distribution to 8 million people, increasing the number of areas at risk of famine,” the letter notes.
“Without a significant increase in American assistance (which we believe would incentivize foreign nations to increase their support in turn), we fear that 2023 will be a heartbreakingly deadly year for everyday Yemenis,” the signers assert.
The lawmakers urge Congress to include at least $1.2 billion “for humanitarian relief and reconstruction efforts in Yemen” in the budget for fiscal year 2024. They also ask the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development “to develop programming that directly invests in sustainably developing long-term economic opportunities for Yemenis.”
None— (@)
Tlaib is one of four dozen bipartisan House lawmakers who last June introduced a War Powers Resolution to end “unauthorized” United States military involvement in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s civil war.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), introduced a similar measure in the Senate. Last December, Sanders withdrew the resolution just before it was slated for a floor vote, while vowing to work with the Biden administration on ending U.S. involvement in the war.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The U.S. launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday after one American contractor was killed and five service members were injured in an attack by a drone that the Pentagon claims was of “Iranian origin.” The drone attack on a maintenance facility in northeast Syria and the U.S. response came two weeks after the House of Representatives voted down a bipartisan resolution that would have required…
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In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.
Here are excerpts from his comments:
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference. pic.twitter.com/HeE9uGEwrW
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2023
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.
We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.
US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.
The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>US Ambassador To China: "We're The Leader" Of The Indo-Pacific
The way US empire managers talk about "leading" ostensibly sovereign states with ostensibly independent governments shows you they really do think they own the world.https://t.co/obSehF6xZ1
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 2, 2023
Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.
I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.
The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.
It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no valid reason why the US needs to remain in charge of the world and can’t just let different people in different regions sort out their own affairs like they always did before. There’s no valid reason why governments need to be brandishing armageddon weapons at each other instead of collaborating peacefully in the interest of all humankind. We’re being pushed toward disaster to preserve “American leadership around the world,” and I for one do not consent to this.
______________________
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As we continue to look back on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we’re joined by Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi native who immigrated to the United States over 35 years ago and became a successful restaurateur and beloved member of the community in Minneapolis. After the U.S. invasion of his home country in 2003, he moved back to Iraq, where he founded the Muslim Peacemakers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the massive Willow oil project earlier this week infuriated climate advocates and environmentalists while drawing praise from Alaska politicians and oil industry figures. As the Biden administration weighed the benefits and drawbacks of the project over the past…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This week nearly 400 human rights groups urged the Biden administration not to revive the controversial practice of migrant family detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Biden ended family detention when he took office two years ago but is now reportedly reconsidering it as part of a wider crackdown as his administration prepares to phase out the contested Trump-era Title 42 pandemic…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Three environmental groups on Thursday filed a 30-day
notice of their intent to sue the Biden administration for refusing to respond to a petition to wind down fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters.
Signed by a coalition of more than 360 progressive advocacy organizations, the January 2022
petition submitted to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland provides a framework to slash federal oil and gas production by 98% by 2035 using long-dormant provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the National Emergencies Act.
Research published after the petition was submitted shows that wealthy countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of meeting the Paris agreement’s more ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C—beyond which the climate emergency’s impacts will grow increasingly deadly, especially for the world’s poor who have done the least to cause the crisis.
And yet, not only has the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) ignored the coalition’s regulatory blueprint for more than a year, but the agency on Monday approved the Willow project—ConocoPhillips’ massive oil drilling operation in Alaska’s North Slope. This decision, which prompted a pair of separate lawsuits, was the latest but far from the only time that Biden has reneged on his 2020 promise to curb federal fossil fuel extraction. A recent analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity shows that the Biden administration rubber-stamped more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018.
“Biden’s approval of the climate-killing Willow project shows how desperately we need rules cracking down on runaway oil and gas extraction on public lands,” Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity said Thursday in a
statement. “The climate deadline to end oil and gas extraction in the U.S. is 2034, and the natural place to start is on land the federal government controls. It’s pathetic that legal action is needed to force the administration to act.”
With Thursday’s notice, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and WildEarth Guardians informed Haaland that they intend to sue DOI for “unreasonable delay” if, 30 days from now, the agency “has still not initiated rulemaking or provided a substantive response” to last year’s petition.
The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to respond to such petitions within a “reasonable” amount of time, the groups explained. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, they argued, DOI’s 14-month period of inaction violates federal law.
“We can’t frack our way to a safe climate and this lawsuit aims to ensure President Biden’s administration heeds the reality that we need to transition the United States away from both the consumption and production of oil and gas.”
“Far from living up to his promise to protect the climate, President Biden is actually undermining his commitment to the American public to end fossil fuel leasing,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians. “We can’t frack our way to a safe climate and this lawsuit aims to ensure President Biden’s administration heeds the reality that we need to transition the United States away from both the consumption and production of oil and gas.”
As a presidential candidate, Biden vowed to prohibit new oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters and to require federal permitting decisions to weigh the social costs of additional greenhouse gas pollution. Although Biden issued an executive order suspending new fossil fuel leasing during his first week in office, his administration’s actions since then have flown in the face of earlier pledges.
On August 24, 2021, DOI argued that it had no choice but to restart lease auctions due to a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee who ruled in favor of Big Oil-funded Republican attorneys general who sued Biden over his moratorium. In a memorandum of opposition filed on the same day, however, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that while Doughty’s decision blocked the implementation of Biden’s pause, it did not force the DOI to hold new lease sales, “let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs’ contempt motion.”
Just days after Biden described global warming as “an existential threat to human existence” and declared Washington’s purported commitment to decarbonization at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the DOI ignored the DOJ’s legal advice and moved forward with Lease Sale 257. The nation’s largest-ever offshore auction, which saw more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico offered to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers, was blocked in January 2022 by a federal judge who argued that the Biden administration violated environmental laws by not adequately considering the likely consequences of resulting emissions.
“Interior’s delay on our petition to phase down fossil fuel extraction and development is not only unreasonable, it is simply unacceptable.”
Despite Biden’s pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas pollution in half by the end of this decade, the DOI held lease sales in several Western states in 2022, opening up tens of thousands of acres of public land to fossil fuel production.
Moreover, the White House supported the demands of right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.)—the top congressional recipient of fossil fuel industry cash during the 2022 election cycle and a longtime coal profiteer—to add oil and gas leasing provisions to the Inflation Reduction Act. The DOI has so far announced plans for multiple onshore and offshore lease sales in 2023.
The president’s 2021 freeze on new lease auctions was intended to give the DOI time to assess the “potential climate and other impacts associated with oil and gas activities on public lands or in offshore waters.” The agency’s review of the federal leasing program effectively ignored the climate crisis, however, focusing instead on proposed adjustments to royalties, bids, and bonding in what environmental justice advocates characterized as a “shocking capitulation to the needs of corporate polluters.”
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that about 25% of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions and 7% of its overall methane emissions stem from fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters. A 2015 analysis prepared for the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth warned that federal fossil fuels already leased to industry contain up to 43 billion tons of potential planet-heating pollution, and those not yet leased hold another 450 billion tons. According to peer-reviewed research, a nationwide ban on federal oil and gas leasing would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 280 million tons per year.
“It’s tragic that climate chaos has raged on Biden’s watch,” Hallie Templeton, legal director for Friends of the Earth, said Thursday. “People are dying, sea levels are rising, and we are rapidly reaching the point of no return.”
“Interior’s delay on our petition to phase down fossil fuel extraction and development is not only unreasonable, it is simply unacceptable,” said Templeton. “We hope that our lawsuit clears the administration’s apparent apathy and spurs the urgent action that this code-red moment calls for.”
While far-right Republicans continue threatening to blow up the global economy unless Congress makes cuts to popular social programs, progressive taxation experts are celebrating U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest push to invest in “widespread prosperity” by raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. As part of his fiscal year 2024 budget blueprint unveiled Thursday, Biden calls for a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Seven groups on Monday filed a legal challenge to the U.S. Interior Department’s Lease Sale 259, which would offer 73.3 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers.
Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, Healthy Gulf, Bayou City Waterkeeper, and Friends of the Earth filed the lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia. The complaint asks the court to “vacate or enjoin any leases issued or actions taken pursuant to the unlawful [sale] unless and until defendants comply with the law.”
President Joe Biden’s administration “previously canceled this and other sales, citing delays and ‘conflicting court rulings,’” the groups explained in a joint statement. But then right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—the top congressional recipient of fossil fuel industry cash during the 2022 election cycle and a long-time coal profiteer—made his support for Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), contingent on the inclusion of oil and gas leasing provisions.
Congressional Democrats, with zero votes to spare in the Senate amid unified Republican opposition, passed a Manchin-approved version of the IRA last August. Lease Sale 259, one of the largest offshore auctions in U.S. history, is now scheduled for March 28, less than a month before the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster.
The groups acknowledged that the IRA directs the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to hold the lease sale. However, they stressed, “it does not require such a vast area to be auctioned to industry, nor does it exempt the sale from any existing laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act.”
“Holding this offshore oil lease sale without careful environmental review is both unlawful and morally reprehensible.”
“Lease Sale 259 would offer up all unleased areas in the western and central Gulf of Mexico, which could lock in a massive drilling operation to extract more than 1 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 years,” the groups warned.
Such a move would fly in the face of the Biden administration’s purported commitment to slashing planet-heating pollution and speeding up the adoption of renewables, critics argued.
“This administration has pledged to oversee a historic transition to clean energy, but actions speak louder than words,” said Earthjustice attorney George Torgun. “We don’t need a billion new barrels of crude oil threatening people and ecosystems in the Gulf.”
Hallie Templeton, legal director of Friends of the Earth, said, “Yet again we find ourselves in the courtroom with the Biden administration over another unlawful and disastrous oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Last year, a federal judge blocked Lease Sale 257, the nation’s largest-ever offshore lease sale wherein more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico were put on the auction block.
“With each carbon bomb he drops, the president’s pledge to end oil and gas drilling feels long forgotten,” said Templeton. “BOEM should be proceeding with the utmost caution and ensuring that its oil and gas decisions comply with federal laws, not adding to our climate crisis.”
\u201cToday we & our Gulf partners filed a federal court legal challenge to the Department of the Interior\u2019s lease sale 259 that would offer 73.3 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing. https://t.co/7XuIJnDgDj\u201d— Bayou City Waterkeeper (@Bayou City Waterkeeper) 1678125892
According to the complaint, BOEM’s approval of Lease Sale 259 “was based on insufficient and arbitrary environmental analyses” in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The agency’s final supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) “failed to take the required ‘hard look’ at the significant impacts of this massive lease sale,” the suit alleges.
Specifically, the complaint says, BOEM “did not rationally evaluate the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, relying instead on problematic modeling and assumptions to conclude that this massive lease sale will result in only ‘slightly higher domestic emissions’ than not leasing at all, and further failed to consider the impacts of such fossil fuel development on climate goals and commitments.”
In addition, BOEM “arbitrarily dismissed the impacts of onshore oil and gas infrastructure—refineries, petrochemical plants, and other industrial sources that process fossil fuels and related products from Lease Sale 259—on Gulf communities,” according to the suit. The groups also accuse the agency of ignoring “the latest air quality data” and presenting “an incomplete and misleading picture of oil spill impacts and risks based on flawed modeling that failed to properly consider reasonably foreseeable accidents.”
Moreover, the complaint continues, BOEM “failed to properly disclose and consider the significant harm from ship strikes, pollution, and oil spills on endangered species such as the Rice’s whale” and five of the world’s seven species of sea turtles. The agency claimed that such impacts would be “negligible,” even as experts fear the Rice’s whale population has dropped below 50.
Finally, the suit accuses BOEM of failing “to consider reasonable scaled-back alternatives to its proposed action,” and refusing “to adequately respond to plaintiffs’ comments on the draft SEIS, offering only boilerplate responses and failing to grapple with and respond to substantive technical and legal critiques.”
“The Biden administration needs to end new extraction, phase out drilling, and start taking its commitment to climate action seriously.”
Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said that “selling off more of our lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry is the last thing we should do at a time when we need to be rapidly transitioning away from oil and gas to meet our nation’s climate goals and create a livable planet for all.”
“Offshore drilling devastates millions of acres of nature, contributes to an increasing number of climate disasters, and creates a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions,” said Manuel. “While the IRA represents a historic step forward in achieving our nation’s climate goals, we cannot let the bad provisions of the bill, including oil and gas leasing, undercut what we stand to gain.”
Kristen Schlemmer, legal director for Bayou City Waterkeeper, echoed Manuel, noting that vulnerable residents of the Gulf Coast are already reeling from petrochemical pollution, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and intensified storms.
“We’re at a point where we should be moving away from fossil fuels, not enabling an astounding amount of drilling for more than a generation to come,” said Schlemmer. “For communities along the Houston Ship Channel, which are predominantly Black, brown, and lower-income, Lease Sale 259 creates an especially toxic combination of risks.”
“More drilling means more facilities in their backyards,” she added. “This will compound already elevated rates of cancer and heart and lung diseases, while also increasing risks during major storms.”
In the words of Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at CBD, “Holding this offshore oil lease sale without careful environmental review is both unlawful and morally reprehensible.”
“More oil drilling in the Gulf is too big a risk for the communities and wildlife living there, and too harmful to the climate,” said Monsell. “The Biden administration needs to end new extraction, phase out drilling, and start taking its commitment to climate action seriously.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Seven groups on Monday filed a legal challenge to the U.S. Interior Department’s Lease Sale 259, which would offer 73.3 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers.
Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, Healthy Gulf, Bayou City Waterkeeper, and Friends of the Earth filed the lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia. The complaint asks the court to “vacate or enjoin any leases issued or actions taken pursuant to the unlawful [sale] unless and until defendants comply with the law.”
President Joe Biden’s administration “previously canceled this and other sales, citing delays and ‘conflicting court rulings,’” the groups explained in a joint statement. But then right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—the top congressional recipient of fossil fuel industry cash during the 2022 election cycle and a long-time coal profiteer—made his support for Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), contingent on the inclusion of oil and gas leasing provisions.
Congressional Democrats, with zero votes to spare in the Senate amid unified Republican opposition, passed a Manchin-approved version of the IRA last August. Lease Sale 259, one of the largest offshore auctions in U.S. history, is now scheduled for March 28, less than a month before the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster.
The groups acknowledged that the IRA directs the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to hold the lease sale. However, they stressed, “it does not require such a vast area to be auctioned to industry, nor does it exempt the sale from any existing laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act.”
“Holding this offshore oil lease sale without careful environmental review is both unlawful and morally reprehensible.”
“Lease Sale 259 would offer up all unleased areas in the western and central Gulf of Mexico, which could lock in a massive drilling operation to extract more than 1 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 years,” the groups warned.
Such a move would fly in the face of the Biden administration’s purported commitment to slashing planet-heating pollution and speeding up the adoption of renewables, critics argued.
“This administration has pledged to oversee a historic transition to clean energy, but actions speak louder than words,” said Earthjustice attorney George Torgun. “We don’t need a billion new barrels of crude oil threatening people and ecosystems in the Gulf.”
Hallie Templeton, legal director of Friends of the Earth, said, “Yet again we find ourselves in the courtroom with the Biden administration over another unlawful and disastrous oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Last year, a federal judge blocked Lease Sale 257, the nation’s largest-ever offshore lease sale wherein more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico were put on the auction block.
“With each carbon bomb he drops, the president’s pledge to end oil and gas drilling feels long forgotten,” said Templeton. “BOEM should be proceeding with the utmost caution and ensuring that its oil and gas decisions comply with federal laws, not adding to our climate crisis.”
\u201cToday we & our Gulf partners filed a federal court legal challenge to the Department of the Interior\u2019s lease sale 259 that would offer 73.3 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing. https://t.co/7XuIJnDgDj\u201d— Bayou City Waterkeeper (@Bayou City Waterkeeper) 1678125892
According to the complaint, BOEM’s approval of Lease Sale 259 “was based on insufficient and arbitrary environmental analyses” in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The agency’s final supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) “failed to take the required ‘hard look’ at the significant impacts of this massive lease sale,” the suit alleges.
Specifically, the complaint says, BOEM “did not rationally evaluate the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, relying instead on problematic modeling and assumptions to conclude that this massive lease sale will result in only ‘slightly higher domestic emissions’ than not leasing at all, and further failed to consider the impacts of such fossil fuel development on climate goals and commitments.”
In addition, BOEM “arbitrarily dismissed the impacts of onshore oil and gas infrastructure—refineries, petrochemical plants, and other industrial sources that process fossil fuels and related products from Lease Sale 259—on Gulf communities,” according to the suit. The groups also accuse the agency of ignoring “the latest air quality data” and presenting “an incomplete and misleading picture of oil spill impacts and risks based on flawed modeling that failed to properly consider reasonably foreseeable accidents.”
Moreover, the complaint continues, BOEM “failed to properly disclose and consider the significant harm from ship strikes, pollution, and oil spills on endangered species such as the Rice’s whale” and five of the world’s seven species of sea turtles. The agency claimed that such impacts would be “negligible,” even as experts fear the Rice’s whale population has dropped below 50.
Finally, the suit accuses BOEM of failing “to consider reasonable scaled-back alternatives to its proposed action,” and refusing “to adequately respond to plaintiffs’ comments on the draft SEIS, offering only boilerplate responses and failing to grapple with and respond to substantive technical and legal critiques.”
“The Biden administration needs to end new extraction, phase out drilling, and start taking its commitment to climate action seriously.”
Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said that “selling off more of our lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry is the last thing we should do at a time when we need to be rapidly transitioning away from oil and gas to meet our nation’s climate goals and create a livable planet for all.”
“Offshore drilling devastates millions of acres of nature, contributes to an increasing number of climate disasters, and creates a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions,” said Manuel. “While the IRA represents a historic step forward in achieving our nation’s climate goals, we cannot let the bad provisions of the bill, including oil and gas leasing, undercut what we stand to gain.”
Kristen Schlemmer, legal director for Bayou City Waterkeeper, echoed Manuel, noting that vulnerable residents of the Gulf Coast are already reeling from petrochemical pollution, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and intensified storms.
“We’re at a point where we should be moving away from fossil fuels, not enabling an astounding amount of drilling for more than a generation to come,” said Schlemmer. “For communities along the Houston Ship Channel, which are predominantly Black, brown, and lower-income, Lease Sale 259 creates an especially toxic combination of risks.”
“More drilling means more facilities in their backyards,” she added. “This will compound already elevated rates of cancer and heart and lung diseases, while also increasing risks during major storms.”
In the words of Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at CBD, “Holding this offshore oil lease sale without careful environmental review is both unlawful and morally reprehensible.”
“More oil drilling in the Gulf is too big a risk for the communities and wildlife living there, and too harmful to the climate,” said Monsell. “The Biden administration needs to end new extraction, phase out drilling, and start taking its commitment to climate action seriously.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
One month after a fiery train crash in East Palestine, Ohio sparked an ongoing environmental and public health crisis, an anti-plastic coalition on Friday highlighted how the petrochemical industry poisons communities across the United States and called for “systemic change.”
The Norfolk Southern-owned train that derailed and ignited near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on February 3 was overloaded with hazardous materials, many of them derived from fossil fuels. To avert a catastrophic explosion, authorities released and burned vinyl chloride—a carcinogenic petrochemical used to make plastic—from five tanker cars, provoking residents’ fears about the long-term health impacts of toxic air pollution and groundwater contamination.
“This is a plastics and petrochemical disaster,” the global Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) coalition said Friday in a statement.
According to the coalition:
A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that the train derailment was caused by a hot axle that heated one of the train cars carrying polypropylene plastic pellets, according to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. These plastic pellets serve as the pre-production materials that corporations manufacture into shampoo bottles, plastic cups, and other single-use items. The highly combustible, fossil fuel-derived pellets ignited the initial fire aboard the Norfolk Southern train, which led to its derailment.
In addition to the pellets, yet another plastic building block is at the heart of this disaster: vinyl chloride. Vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen used almost exclusively to produce polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC plastic, which is often turned into pipes, flooring, shower curtains, and even plastic food wrap. Not only is vinyl chloride toxic and harmful itself, Norfolk Southern’s burning of the chemical likely resulted in dioxins, one of the most persistent and toxic chemicals, even at low levels of exposure.
In response to public pressure, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday ordered Norfolk Southern to test for dioxins, a class of highly toxic industrial byproducts that the agency had previously opted to ignore in the East Palestine disaster zone.
“While we’re glad to see this announcement, we wish it had come sooner,” said Graham Hamilton, U.S. policy officer at BFFP. “Justice delayed is justice denied, and we expect more from an administration that claims to prioritize environmental justice.”
Mike Schade, director of Toxic-Free Future’s Mind the Store campaign, said that “the EPA must not only test for dioxins in soil, but also in indoor dust, sediments, fish, and on farms impacted by the massive plume.”
“Importantly, the EPA should be conducting the testing itself and/or hiring independent scientists to test for dioxins, rather than requiring the community of East Palestine to rely on Norfolk Southern for that accountability,” said Schade.
“This disaster is yet another painful reminder of the dangers of making, transporting, using, and disposing of chemicals in plastics, especially polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic,” Schade added. “Governments, retailers, and brands must redouble their efforts to phase out PVC plastic and other highly hazardous plastics and chemicals and move towards safer solutions.”
The U.S. is home to more than 1,000 train derailments per year, and according to one estimate, the country is averaging one chemical disaster every two days.
Low-income communities in the Ohio River Valley and along the Gulf Coast are disproportionately harmed by the petrochemical industry.
“These communities subsidize the cost of cheap disposable plastic at the fenceline of oil rigs, petrochemical plants, incinerators, and the trains and trucks used for transporting the toxic and deadly chemicals,” said Yvette Arellano, the founder and director of Fenceline Watch, a Texas-based advocacy group and BFFP member.
“The price we pay is with our lives, from shortened lifespans [to] reproductive harm [and] developmental issues; these toxics trespass our bodies and harm our communities for generations,” added Arellano, whose organization helped pressure the EPA to halt the 1,300-mile shipment of contaminated wastewater from East Palestine to the Houston area, where it had been slated to be injected underground.
“The petrochemical industry is inherently unsafe. Even standard operations pollute and damage communities, and regulators continue to fail to do the bare minimum to hold polluters accountable.”
As BFFP pointed out, the ongoing East Palestine disaster “is not the only petrochemical crisis” hurting residents of the Ohio River Valley.
“Less than 15 miles from the derailment site,” a new Shell facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania “has received numerous violations and exceeded its annual emissions limits since coming online in November of 2022,” the coalition pointed out.
As Andie from the Eyes on Shell watchdog group observed: “With the community already on edge, just one week following the release and burn in East Palestine, Shell activated an enormous emergency flare which, without warning, continued flaring for hours. The derailment and emergency flare are terrifying reminders of the risks the petrochemical industry poses to our community every single day.”
Earthworks campaigner Anaïs Peterson stressed that “the petrochemical industry is inherently unsafe.”
“Even standard operations pollute and damage communities,” said Peterson, “and regulators continue to fail to do the bare minimum to hold polluters accountable.”
Amanda Kiger of River Valley Organizing (RVO)—a Columbiana County-based group that has been working to support East Palestine residents since the derailment—said that “nobody should have their entire lives upended because Norfolk Southern and makers of these hazardous chemicals put their profits ahead of the safety of our communities and our country.”
“With people developing rashes and breathing problems, it’s clear people are still being exposed to dangerous chemicals,” said Kiger. “Norfolk Southern should give residents the resources to relocate and should pay for independent testing of the soil, water, and air, as well as medical exams and follow-up for years to come.”
Ultimately, BFFP argued, “we need systemic reforms to stop the petrochemical industry from having carte blanche to profit off of poisoning people and the planet.”
Despite BFFP’s demands for a robust, legally binding global plastics treaty that prohibits corporations from manufacturing an endless stream of toxic single-use items, Inside Climate News reported this week that the initial proposal from the Biden administration’s delegation to the United Nations was described as “low ambition” and “underwhelming” because it “sidesteps calls for cuts in production, praises the benefits of plastics, and focuses on national priorities versus global mandates.”
Borrowers, advocates, and lawmakers converged on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday night and Tuesday morning to defend President Joe Biden’s stalled student debt relief plan as justices prepared to consider a pair of right-wing challenges to the popular proposal.
Attendees argued that Biden’s move to erase up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers with individual incomes under $125,000 and modify the income-driven repayment program is just, legal, and necessary. Although it falls short of progressives’ demands for universal cancellation, speakers made clear that the White House’s plan is key to improving economic security.
“You should not have to face financial ruin because you want a damn education!” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said during Tuesday morning’s rally. “Education, from child care to graduate school, is a human right. It should be free to all.”
“Today we say to the Supreme Court, listen to the needs of millions of struggling people,” Sanders added. “Do the right thing. Support Biden’s proposal to cancel student debt.”
“President Biden’s executive authority to provide student debt relief to borrowers is abundantly clear.”
After Monday night’s rally, some campaigners planned to camp out overnight in a bid to secure seats in the courtroom for Tuesday’s oral arguments, which began at 10:00 am ET.
In both Biden v. Nebraska—brought by the Republican-led states of Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina—and Department of Education v. Brown—filed with the support of billionaires by a pair of plaintiffs who claim they were unfairly excluded from relief—the right-wing-controlled Supreme Court will decide whether Biden’s plan exceeds the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) authority and whether the lawsuits have legal standing.
In a Tuesday statement released ahead of the hearing, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri said, “Today, far-right Republican attorneys general will bring baseless and politically motivated arguments to the Supreme Court in opposition to providing student debt relief promised to 40 million borrowers across our country.”
“Regardless,” said Bush, “President Biden’s executive authority to provide student debt relief to borrowers is abundantly clear—just look at the facts.”
Bush continued:
Fact: The basis of the Republican AG’s case relies on the claim that this relief plan threatens the profits of loan servicers such as MOHELA and states will be financially injured. Yet, in response to an October letter I sent to MOHELA, they denied involvement in the case and discredited Republicans by stating that they don’t operate to make profits and remain committed to complying with contractual obligations set forth by the U.S. Department of Education.
Fact: Republicans claim that states, like Missouri, also rely on revenue from loan servicers like MOHELA. Yet, MOHELA hasn’t paid their bills to the state in over a decade and owes over $100 million to the state of Missouri.
Fact: President Biden’s student debt relief plan would provide 40 million borrowers across our country—including 144,000 of my constituents—with life-changing financial relief. Following the economic devastation of the pandemic, we need transformative policy solutions to foster an equitable economic recovery.
“I know what it’s like to carry crushing student debt and to have to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying an exorbitant student loan bill,” said Bush. “And I’ve heard from people across the country who have shared how this relief would change their lives—from being able to afford child care, to paying their medical bills, to being able to put food on the table.”
“The facts are clear, and I implore the Supreme Court to affirm the president’s executive authority to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt,” she added. “I’m confident the Biden-Harris administration’s plan will withstand these hurdles and provide the much-needed relief to borrowers.”
Right-wing lawmakers and activists filed numerous lawsuits after the White House announced its student debt cancellation bid in August. Applications for relief closed in November after a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump blocked Biden’s plan. At the time, 26 million borrowers had already applied for or were automatically eligible for relief, and 16 million applications were given the green light and sent to loan servicers.
While GOP members of Congress argue that student debt relief is a regressive policy whose benefits would flow disproportionately to wealthy households, DOE data released earlier this month dispels that myth. According to a Politico analysis of the data, over 98% of people who applied before the portal was frozen reside in ZIP codes where the average per-capita income is under $75,000. Nearly two-thirds of applicants live in neighborhoods where the average person makes less than $40,000 per year.
With his relief initiative on hold, Biden extended the pause on federal student loan repayments—a measure that was introduced at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and had been set to expire on December 31, 2022—through June 30, 2023. Payments are set to restart 60 days after that date, or 60 days after the high court hands down its decision, whichever comes first.
The Debt Collective, however, tweeted Monday night: “We’re not paying that damn student debt no matter what the Supreme Court and its corrupted judges say.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Striking down President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan would have devastating impacts on millions of borrowers, advocacy groups warned in a report released Monday, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments over the White House’s cancellation bid.
“Denying student debt cancellation would cause financial disaster for millions of Americans,” says the report, which was assembled after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked the Debt Collective, NAACP, and more than a dozen other organizations last month to explain how upholding or rejecting Biden’s plan would affect borrowers.
“Reducing debt burdens through cancellation will help avoid defaults when student loan payments resume and ensure borrowers do not face financial ruin as the economy continues its recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to the report, which was provided exclusively to Insider. This would disproportionately benefit low-income households.
However, “if the Supreme Court sides with the extremist judges, millions of Americans’ monthly costs will rise significantly when student loan payments resume later this year,” the report cautions.
“I’m putting all of my hope into this process finally getting approval. I haven’t allowed myself to imagine another scenario because I may not continue even trying to exist everyday if that happens.”
Although Biden ignored progressives’ demands for universal student debt cancellation, his administration in August announced several relief measures, including a move to wipe out up to $10,000 in debt for federal borrowers with individual incomes under $125,000—and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients—as well as proposed changes to the income-driven repayment program.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing activists responded with a barrage of lawsuits. Applications for relief opened in October but closed a month later after a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump blocked Biden’s plan, deeming it “unlawful” on legal grounds criticized by experts as dubious. At the time, 26 million borrowers had already applied for or were automatically eligible for relief, and 16 million applications were fully approved and sent to loan servicers.
With his relief initiative on hold, Biden extended the moratorium on federal student loan repayments—a policy that was first implemented at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and had been set to expire on December 31, 2022—through June 30, 2023. Payments are set to resume 60 days after that date, or 60 days after the Supreme Court hands down its decision, whichever comes first.
The nation’s chief judicial body agreed in December to hear oral arguments in two student loan-related cases on Tuesday.
In both Biden v. Nebraska—brought by the GOP-led states of Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina—and Department of Education v. Brown—brought by two plaintiffs who claim they were unfairly excluded from relief—the right-wing-dominated high court will decide whether Biden’s plan exceeds the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) authority and whether the lawsuits have legal standing.
As TIME explained:
Six Republican-led states filed Biden v. Nebraska, arguing that in addition to the administration overreach, the program would cause states to lose tax revenue as a result of debt cancellation. U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey initially dismissed the case saying that it lacked legal standing. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, later decided that Missouri had legal standing because a loan servicer in the state would lose substantial revenue.
Department of Education v. Brown was filed by Alexander Taylor and Myra Brown. Brown is not eligible for any relief, and Taylor is only eligible for $10,000 (rather than the up to $20,000 given to Pell Grant recipients). They also argue that the administration did not go through the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment procedure, which requires agencies to notify the public of their proposal and take comments.
Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is contingent on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003, which allows the Department of Education to modify student financial assistance programs in response to national emergencies to alleviate borrowers’ financial hardship. Former President Donald Trump used the act for the student loan moratorium, which began during the pandemic and is still in place for the next few months. Programs implemented under the HEROES Act are exempt from the notice-and-comment period, but plaintiffs in the Department of Education v. Brown case say that the Education Department does not have the authority to act under this law.
The Debt Collective tweeted Monday that Taylor and Brown “are just political pawns for billionaire-funded groups—they’re not actually harmed by people getting debt relief.”
In a recent video, More Perfect Union detailed how the plaintiffs’ lawsuit is being backed by “a shady network of conservative billionaires trying to keep you in debt.”
\u201cThis week the Supreme Court will hear the case that’s trying to stop student debt relief.\n\nAnd the plaintiff is a seemingly normal woman named Myra Brown.\n\nBut, behind her is a shady network of conservative billionaires trying to keep you in debt.\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1677427440
An unnamed White House official previously told TIME that “our debt relief plan is needed to prevent defaults and delinquencies as student borrowers transition back to repayment after the end of the payment pause.”
“There was a national emergency that impacted millions of student borrowers,” said the official. “Many of those borrowers still face risk of default on their student loans due to that emergency. Congress gave the Secretary of Education the authority under the HEROES Act to take steps to prevent that harm, and he is.”
Those who responded to Warren’s inquiry echoed the Biden administration’s warnings about the harmful economic consequences of a ruling against student debt relief, which would likely come in late June or early July.
One member of the Debt Collective said: “I’m putting all of my hope into this process finally getting approval. I haven’t allowed myself to imagine another scenario because I may not continue even trying to exist everyday if that happens. This debt follows me daily.”
\u201cA 64-year-old member of @StrikeDebt said “the thought of having the loan payments starting again in general and without cancellation terrifies me. It means I might have to take a second job or use my 401K retirement money to pay for the loans. I [cannot] plan for retirement.”\u201d— Ayelet Sheffey (@Ayelet Sheffey) 1677502823
While GOP lawmakers contend that student debt relief is a regressive policy whose benefits would flow disproportionately to high-income households, DOE data released earlier this month debunks such arguments. According to a Politico analysis of the data, over 98% of people who applied before the portal was shut down live in ZIP codes where the average per-capita income is under $75,000. Nearly two-thirds of applicants reside in neighborhoods where the average person makes less than $40,000 per year.
As Common Dreams reported last week, supporters of Biden’s stalled relief proposal plan to rally outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The recent widely acclaimed report of 517,000 jobs created in January by the Biden administration placated the recession-phobic instincts of the corporate media into another state of torpor.
All the dismal predictions of an imminent recession by an array of economists were just momentary glitches proven useless by the “spectacular” creation of jobs.
Unsurprisingly, Americans are not feeling quite as sanguine as the Biden administration. Recent polls report a sizable and increasing discontent with the economic direction of the country.
A Gallup poll this February reported a significant number of Americans were pessimistic about inflation and the stock market.
Another Gallup poll in the same month reported that over 50% of Americans stated they were “worse off” economically since 2009.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll reported also this February that 58% of Americans disapproved of President Joe Biden’s economic policies.
Even former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, a benign corporate Democrat, was baffled that Americans were still pessimistic despite the 517,000 jobs claim.
Mr. Reich conveniently forgot that the hoopla around the many jobs created back then that were predominantly from the lower end of the wage brackets of each job grouping as pointed out by economist Robert Pollin in 2016.
Moreover, Clinton’s terms in office saw the explosion of “contingent” jobs. These were part-time, temporary, and contracting jobs that usually paid 60% of full-time jobs with almost no benefits as reported by economist Jack Rasmus in February 2016. Consequently, low-paid, tentative jobs increased from 22 million in 1995 to 27 million by 2000.
It appears Biden’s job creation claim has parallel results.
The Biden administration like every administration relies on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to report unemployment and job creation numbers.
The BLS releases two principal monthly reports on the economy:
1. The Current Employment Survey (CES), or “establishment survey,” or “payroll survey” reports monthly data collected from 122,000 business and government agencies, and 666,000 worksites. It provides data on all ages of nonfarm employment, hours, and earnings based on payroll records with industry and geographic details. The CES is revised twice before a final report that accounts for seasonal adjustments and variable data collection rates.
2. The Current Population Survey (CPS) or “household survey” reports monthly data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau on 60,000 eligible households. It provides data on the civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and older, the labor force, employment, unemployment, and associated rates with demographic details.
What often goes unreported by the corporate media are the two CES revisions that present a more accurate report of job creation.
For example, during the Trump administration, the corporate media and mainstream economists responded exuberantly to the 209,000 new jobs in July 2017.
However, when the CES reported the revised job numbers in September, it declined to 189,000 jobs; it was revised again in October down to 138,000 jobs, which was met with utter silence from the Trump administration and the corporate media.
The Biden administration’s 517,000 jobs claim is unlikely to be maintained by future revisions.
The BLS also reports two other important indicators of our economic model:
1. The employment-population ratio is a private sector measure. It represents the number of employed people age 16 and older as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population. In other words, it is the percentage of the population that is currently working. The employment-population ratio indicates how efficiently an economy provides jobs for people who want to work. It is valuable because it is not affected by seasonal variations or voluntary changes in labor force participants.
According to economists at Bloomberg, the BLS adjustments in this January’s numbers raised the estimated population size by nearly 1 million and the civilian labor force by 871,000 resulting in employment to population ratio of 87%. They asserted this was a misrepresentation; the actual employment-to-population rate was much lower.
2. The labor force participation rate is an important economic measure because it consists of those who are age 16 and older working at any job or actively seeking work. Its advantage is that it reports the supply of labor available to work in the production of goods and services. It is a simple calculation: Total Labor Force/Civilian Noninstitutional population x 100.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) the labor force participation rate in December 2022 was 65.1%. In January 2023, the month of the Biden administration’s claim of 517,000 jobs, the labor force participation rate declined to 62.4%. Moreover, the labor force participation rate is still below pre-pandemic levels.
The Biden administration’s fanciful claims of job creation also did not describe the type of jobs created. According to FRED, part-time jobs are dramatically increasing. That means low wages and no benefits.
The BLS report released this February classified the types of jobs created in January. The largest number of job gains were predominantly in lower-paid sectors of the economy. The leisure and hospitality sector added 128,000 jobs. Other lower-paid jobs added were healthcare at 58,000, education services and state government (notably not in the private sector) at 35,000, partially reflecting the return to work by tens of thousands of striking graduate student employees in California. Other low-paid jobs added were social assistance jobs at 21,000.
Consider that more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and 91,000 plants have been lost since 1998 due to our economic model that allowed corporations to move to foreign countries. Corporations did this to avoid paying a fair share of taxes and pesky regulations that protected employees, the environment, and labor unions.
Manufacturing jobs historically compensate employees with high wages and benefits.
According to the BLS initial monthly report, the Biden administration added only 19,000 manufacturing jobs in January 2023.
The economic predicament of working people who comprise most Americans continues its deterioration.
FRED reported that personal savings rates are diminishing for most Americans.
FRED also reported a significant spike in credit card debt.
The BLS reported that real wages are still down 1.8% from last year. Housing costs are up 7.9% from 2022. Prices of groceries increased 11.8%.
President Biden’s claim of creating 517,000 jobs clearly does not adequately improve the living conditions for most working people.
The underlying exploitative economic relationship between the dominant economic class, or oligarchs, and most of the middle-working class and working-class Americans continues. The oligarchs’ inherent consolidation of their massive wealth is accrued at the expense of all working people.
The oligarchs’ brilliantly malevolent plan also continues. Billionaires pour millions of dollars into conservative organizations to perpetuate cultural issues designed to distract working people from the real source of their discontent; that source is the economic dominance of the oligarchs.
Predictable scapegoats are “big government,” labor unions, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, women’s healthcare, gun control, and LGBTQ issues. They are all mashed up into one deceptive quagmire that keeps working people distracted from recognizing their common economic interests.
Certainly, reasonable people can disagree on cultural issues from a spiritual to a secular perspective. However, when those issues are used by insanely wealthy power brokers to distract and divide working people, the process is categorically cynical.
They become political obstacles to building a moral economic model based on economic democracy that transcends those narrow cultural issues.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A coalition of Afghan-American community organizations on Wednesday welcomed a U.S. federal judge’s ruling rejecting a bid by relatives of 9/11 victims to seize billions of dollars in assets belonging to the people of Afghanistan.
In a 30-page opinion issued Tuesday, Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York denied an effort by family members of people killed during the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to gain access to $3.5 billion in frozen funds from Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank.
“The judgment creditors are entitled to collect on their default judgments and be made whole for the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, but they cannot do so with the funds of the central bank of Afghanistan,” Daniels wrote. “The Taliban—not the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or the Afghan people—must pay for the Taliban’s liability in the 9/11 attacks.”
“We support the 9/11 families’ quest for just compensation, but believe justice will not be achieved by ‘raiding the coffers’… of a people already suffering.”
The frozen assets are currently being held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the wake of the Taliban’s reconquest of the nation that, under the militant group’s previous rule, hosted al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other figures involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The 9/11 attacks resulted in a U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that lasted nearly two decades, the longest war in American history.
“We are pleased to see that Judge Daniels shares the same assessment we laid out in our amicus brief to the court: That this money belongs to the Afghan people, and no one else,” the coalition—Afghans for a Better Tomorrow (AFBT)—said in a statement.
\u201c\u2705 VICTORY FOR THE AFGHAN PEOPLE\n\nOur coalition of Afghan-American community organizations welcomes a judgment by a federal judge that rejects a bid to seize assets by the families of the victims of the September 11th attacks. \n\nOur full statement: https://t.co/mZct0WbZSU\u201d— Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (@Afghans For A Better Tomorrow) 1677095507
In February 2022, the Biden administration said it would split $7 billion in frozen DAB funds between the people of Afghanistan and victims of the 9/11 attacks who sued the Taliban—a move that one critic warned would amount to a “death sentence for untold numbers of civilians” in a war-ravaged country reeling from multiple humanitarian crises including widespread starvation.
Last August, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn said that 9/11 families should not be allowed to use billions of frozen DAB funds to pay off legal judgments against the Taliban.
“Just like the families of the September 11th attack victims, the Afghan people are no stranger to the Taliban’s brutality and rule,” AFBT co-director Arash Azizzada said. “We support the 9/11 families’ quest for just compensation, but believe justice will not be achieved by ‘raiding the coffers,’ as Judge Daniels put [it], of a people already suffering.”
\u201cThis wouldn\u2019t have been possible without the selfless efforts of many 9/11 victims\u2019 families \u2014 from @PeacefulTomorro and beyond \u2014 that refused to let their own tragedy be used to justify another tragedy for the Afghan people \nhttps://t.co/ehphzAqIPI\u201d— Michael Galant (@Michael Galant) 1677029836
Homaira Hosseini, a board member of coalition member Afghan-American Community Organization (AACO), asserted that “an appeal of this decision, which the 9/11 families have stated they will pursue, will only cause further harm to both Afghans and the families involved.”
“We continue to encourage these families to seek legal retribution elsewhere,” Hosseini added, “and to not further harm Afghans in the process.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Ahead of former President Donald Trump’s Wednesday visit to East Palestine, Ohio—where a Norfolk Southern-owned train transporting carcinogenic chemicals derailed on February 3, prompting a mass evacuation and release of pollutants—progressive critics highlighted the key role his administration played in making the fiery crash and its toxic aftermath more likely.
During his speech, Trump—considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 despite spearheading a deadly coup attempt following his 2020 loss—criticized how President Joe Biden’s administration has responded to the environmental and public health disaster unfolding in East Palestine, a poor rural town of about 4,700 people located a few miles west of the Pennsylvania border.
But as critics noted beforehand, the Trump administration’s gutting of train safety rules at the behest of railroad industry lobbyists was instrumental in creating the conditions for the derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff, which has provoked fears of groundwater contamination and air pollution.
“He should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations,” progressive stalwart Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, tweeted prior to Trump’s address.
\u201cFormer President Trump is on his way to East Palestine, Ohio today. \n\nHe should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations.\u201d— Nina Turner (@Nina Turner)
1677089826
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar point in an opinion piece published earlier this week.
“If residents of East Palestine—a modern news desert of downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester—truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with tiki torches and pitchforks,” Bunch wrote, comparing the former president’s visit to “the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime.”
Bunch noted that “Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effort to protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped, and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine.”
“Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to kill the 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technology that was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems,” wrote Bunch, who pointed out that this came after Norfolk Southern and other rail carriers donated more than $6 million to Republican candidates in 2016 and spent millions more on lobbying.
“With the investigation into the East Palestine wreck still in its early phases, it’s not clear if the modern brakes—originally required for installation by 2021—could have prevented the toxic derailment or whether the specific Obama rule would have applied,” Bunch continued. “But experts do believe the new brakes could have mitigated the wreckage—and thus the release of so many hazardous chemicals.”
“The rule reversal wasn’t the only time that Team Trump sided with Big Rail over the forgotten Americans who live on the wrong side of their tracks,” he added. “In 2019, for example, the Trump administration moved to not strengthen but relax regulations on shipping fracked natural gas through communities like East Palestine. The same year, Trump’s White House also killed an Obama-era proposal that would have required two crew members in freight-train locomotives.”
“The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit.”
Ahead of Trump’s visit, More Perfect Union also argued on social media that the ex-president’s “attempt to portray himself as a friend of the town and as someone who would have stood up to Norfolk Southern… couldn’t be further from the truth.”
As the progressive media outlet observed, the Trump administration “withdrew multiple rail safety recommendations and moved toward a ‘self-regulatory approach’ where rail companies could do as they pleased.”
“It’s no surprise that the Trump years were filled with dangerous deregulation,” More Perfect Union asserted, describing his decision to nominate top rail industry executives to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration as “a prime example of the revolving door between business and government.”
“The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit,” the outlet continued. “This approach, and rail companies’ greed, has led to over 1,000 derailments each year. Some are massive catastrophes like East Palestine. But every single one is harmful. And if the industry isn’t regulated and forced to change, we’ll soon be seeing more disasters.”
When Trump “pretends to care about rail workers, or the people of East Palestine, we can’t believe him,” More Perfect Union added. “His record tells a very different story, the story of his own role in creating this problem in the first place.”
Even some conservative critics of Trump have questioned the sincerity of his visit.
“It’s clear that it’s a political stunt,” Ray LaHood, a Republican ex-member of Congress who led the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) during former President Barack Obama’s first term, told Politico on Wednesday. “If he wants to visit, he’s a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted little time in doing exactly that, calling the GOP’s indignation “fake” soon after Trump announced his travel plans.
\u201cGood morning.\n\nThe same Republicans who are up in arms about East Palestine are the same ones who supported Trump\u2019s campaign to gut Obama\u2019s railroad safety regulations. \n\nIt\u2019s all fake indignation.\u201d— Chris Murphy (@Chris Murphy)
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Bunch acknowledged that “it’s beyond hypocritical for Trump to bring his Harold Hill-huckster shtick to East Palestine when residents are still experiencing headaches and breathing foul air from the kind of catastrophe he didn’t lift a finger to stop from the Resolute Desk.”
“But also it’s a bit baffling why Biden or his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who seems to be channeling his inner McKinsey & Co. these days—haven’t gone to Ohio,” he argued. “Especially when Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine’s misery are coming to town empty-handed.”
“None of the anti-Biden critics on this issue have offered a solution, because they can’t,” wrote Bunch. “The only fix for the kind of runaway abuses of modern capitalism that cause these environmental catastrophes is government regulation, aided by empowering worker safety with strong unions—two things that the Trump-led GOP has opposed at every turn.”
Even in the wake of the disaster, Republican lawmakers have refused to demand stronger regulations, as HuffPost reported:
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), a vocal Biden critic who represents East Palestine, on Tuesday dismissed immediate calls for stricter rail regulations, saying actions toward accountability will hinge on the findings of a National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] investigation into the derailment.
“That will dictate whether there are laws, regulations that need to be changed, whether there were rules that were violated,” he said during a news conference in East Palestine. “We don’t know any of that yet, and we won’t know that until NTSB releases its report.”
Hours before Trump spoke, Buttigieg announced that he plans to travel to East Palestine on Thursday. His visit is expected to coincide with the publication of the NTSB’s preliminary report about its ongoing probe into the crash.
“Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine’s misery are coming to town empty-handed.”
On Tuesday, Buttigieg unveiled DOT’s recommendations for improving the safety of the nation’s rail system, though an inter-union alliance of rail workers immediately criticized the plan as inadequate.
Given the scale of the problems—and in light of the transportation secretary’s ongoing refusal to exercise his authority to reinstate previously gutted rules along with his consideration of an industry-backed proposal to further weaken the regulation of train braking systems—union leaders have called for nationalizing the railways and implementing their proposed solutions.
Turner, for her part, emphasized that she has “been outspoken about the two years the Biden administration had [to] fix these problems.”
“The Trump administration is at fault, as is the Obama administration,” Turner contended, referring to the fact that the latter’s regulations were also watered down in response to industry pressure.
“The Ohio GOP is to blame as well,” she added, echoing recent reporting on Norfolk Southern’s campaign to influence state-level lawmakers and officials. “Failure at every level of government and multiple administrations led to this.”
Last Friday, the State Department announced the nomination of James Cavallaro, a widely respected human rights attorney, to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. But earlier this week, the State Department withdrew Cavallaro’s nomination after reports emerged that he had described Israel as an apartheid state and had criticized House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s close ties to AIPAC…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union address Tuesday that the climate crisis is an “existential threat” and political leaders have an obligation to confront it. Seconds later, the president briefly deviated from his prepared remarks to add, “We’re still going to need oil and gas for a while” — prompting applause from Republican lawmakers. To climate advocates…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The White House on Saturday condemned a newly introduced Republican bill that would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that includes a number of changes aimed at lowering costs for Medicare recipients. Unveiled Thursday by freshman Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee), the bill has 20 original co-sponsors and is endorsed by several right-wing groups, including the Koch-funded organization…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As some families seek restitution for the suffering caused by former President Donald Trump’s family separation policy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday acknowledged that nearly five years after the policy was first enforced, 998 children have yet to be reunited with their relatives. On the two-year anniversary of the establishment of President Joe Biden’s Interagency Task…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After decades of criminalization, Australia’s government said Friday that it will legalize the prescription of MDMA and psilocybin for the treatment of two medical conditions, a historic move hailed by researchers who have studied the therapeutic possibilities of the drugs.
Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) said in a statement that starting July 1, psychiatrists may prescribe MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), commonly called “Molly” or “ecstasy” by recreational users, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin—the psychedelic prodrug compound in “magic” mushrooms—for treatment-resistant depression.
“These are the only conditions where there is currently sufficient evidence for potential benefits in certain patients,” TGA said, adding that the drugs must be taken “in a controlled medical setting.”
Advocates of MDMA and psilocybin are hopeful that one day doctors could prescribe them to treat a range of conditions, from alcoholism and eating disorders to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
David Caldicott, a clinical senior lecturer in emergency medicine at Australian National University, told The Guardian that Friday’s surprise announcement is a “very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization.”
Caldicott said it is now “abundantly clear” that both MDMA and psilocybin “can have dramatic effects” on hard-to-treat mental health problems, and that “in addition to a clear and evolving therapeutic benefit, [legalization] also offers the chance to catch up on the decades of lost opportunity [of] delving into the inner workings of the human mind, abandoned for so long as part of an ill-conceived, ideological ‘war on drugs.’”
\u201cFrom 1 July this year, medicines containing the psychedelic substances psilocybin and MDMA can be prescribed by specifically authorised psychiatrists for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depression.\n\nRead more: https://t.co/rJI9dRs3M7\u201d— TGA Australia (@TGA Australia) 1675387806
MDMA—which has been criminalized in Australia since 1987—was first patented by German drugmaker Merck in the early 1910s. After World War II the United States military explored possibilities for weaponizing MDMA as a truth serum as part of the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments aimed at creating real-life Manchurian candidates. A crossover from clinical usage in marriage and other therapies in the 1970s and ’80s to recreational consumption—especially in the disco and burgeoning rave scenes—in the latter decade sparked a conservative backlash in the form of emergency bans in countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies MDMA and psilocybin as Schedule I substances, meaning they have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Patients who’ve tried MDMA therapy and those who treat them say otherwise. A study published last year by John Hopkins Health found that in a carefully controlled setting, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy held promise for “significant and durable improvements in depression.”
The California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—the world’s premier organization for psychedelic advocacy and research—interviewed Colorado massage therapist Rachael Kaplan about her MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD:
For the majority of my life I prayed to die and fought suicidal urges as I struggled with complex PTSD. This PTSD was born out of chronic severe childhood abuse. Since then, my life has been a journey of searching for healing. I started going to therapy 21 years ago, and since then I have tried every healing modality that I could think of, such as bodywork, energy work, medications, residential treatment, and more. Many of these modalities were beneficial but none of them significantly reduced my trauma symptoms. I was still terrified most of the time…
In my first MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session I was surprised that the MDMA helped me see the world as it was, instead of seeing it through my lens of terror. I thought that the MDMA would alter my perception of reality, but instead, it helped me see… more clearly… The MDMA session was the first time that I was able to stay present, explore, and process what had happened to me. This changed everything… There are no words for the gratitude that I feel.
Jon Lubecky, an American Iraq War combat veteran who tried to kill himself five times, told NBC‘s “Today” in 2021 that MDMA therapy—also with MAPS—enabled him “to talk about things I had never brought up before to anyone.”
“And it was OK. My body did not betray me. I didn’t get panic attacks. I didn’t shut down emotionally or just become so overemotional I couldn’t deal with anything,” he recounted.
“This treatment is the reason my son has a father instead of a folded flag,” Lubecky said in a message to other veterans afflicted with PTSD. “I want all of you to be around in 2023 when this is [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved. I know what your suffering is like. You can make it.”
MAPS’ latest clinical research on MDMA—which is aimed at winning FDA approval—is currently in phase three trials. The Biden administration said last year that it “anticipates” MDMA and psilocybin would be approved by the FDA by 2024 and is “exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor” therapeutic possibilities of both drugs.
\u201cFounder and Executive Director of @MAPSnews, @RickDoblin Ph.D., discusses a new #psychedelic study that supports MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for post traumatic stress disorder (#PTSD) on @FoxBusiness. \n\nhttps://t.co/im1QEz3vdR\u201d— Psychedelic Science (@Psychedelic Science) 1675357038
Like MDMA, psilocybin—which occurs naturally in hundreds of fungal species and has been used by humans for medicinal, spiritual, and recreational purposes for millennia—remains illegal at the federal level in the U.S., although several states and municipalities have legalized or decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms, or have moved to do so.
There have also been bipartisan congressional efforts to allow patients access to both drugs. Legislation introduced last year by U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would permit therapeutic use of certain Schedule I drugs for terminally ill patients. Meanwhile, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) passed amendments to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act providing more funding for psychedelic research and making it easier for veterans and active-duty troops suffering from PTSD to try drug-based treatments.
Canada, Israel, and the United States have enacted compassionate-use programs for psychedelic-assisted mental health therapy.
\u201cMAPS commends The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) of Australia for becoming the fourth nation to provide access to some #psychedelic-assisted therapies. \n\nRead our official statement on this announcement:\n\nhttps://t.co/xJyk5dOro1\u201d— MAPS (@MAPS) 1675468458
“As the funder and sponsor of the most advanced research of a psychedelic-assisted therapy, MAPS is encouraged to see a fourth nation provide access to some psychedelic-assisted therapies,” Rick Doblin, the group’s founder and director, said in a statement. “Australians who have endured long-standing psychological suffering will soon have the opportunity to consider emerging treatments backed by rigorous clinical research: MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, with two successful phase three studies, and psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression, currently in phase 2 clinical trials.”
“Australia’s policy change is one that every country should consider: suffering people, regardless of nationality, need more opportunities to access novel treatments,” Doblin added. “We hope that this announcement will encourage more international discussion and collaboration towards access to psychedelic therapies and comprehensive drug policy reform.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Indigenous, climate, and conservation advocates on Wednesday welcomed the reintroduction of congressional legislation to restore protections and prevent fossil fuel development in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), along with Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), reintroduced the Arctic Refuge Protection Act, the continuation of legislative efforts dating back to the 1980s to protect the critical wilderness and its inhabitants.
The lawmakers said in a statement that their bill “will restore critical protections to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—home to the Gwich’in people and the nation’s largest national wildlife refuge—by designating the Coastal Plain ecosystem as wilderness under the National Wilderness Preservation System.”
If passed, the bill “would permanently halt any new oil and gas leasing, exploration, development, and drilling on the Coastal Plain, and would safeguard the subsistence rights of the Arctic Indigenous peoples who depend upon the unique ecosystem within the Arctic Refuge,” the statement explained.
As Huffman’s office noted:
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge covers 19.6 million acres and is the largest unit in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The 1.56 million-acre Coastal Plain, the biological heart of the refuge, contains the calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd and is home to denning polar bears, musk oxen, wolves, and more than 150 species of migratory birds. The 9,000-strong Gwich’in Nation, living in Alaska and Canada, make their home on or near the migratory route of the Porcupine caribou herd, and have depended on this herd for their subsistence and culture for thousands of years.
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a national treasure and a cultural and spiritual home for Arctic Indigenous peoples,” said Markey. “The traditional relationship that the Gwich’in and Iñupiat have had with the refuge for generations, as well as the singular ecosystem on the Coastal Plain, should not be put into harm’s way because of old failed promises of a fictional financial windfall.”
“We need a law on the books that will affirm these lands are not for sale, preserve the wilderness of the Coastal Plain, and uphold the sovereignty of Arctic Indigenous peoples—who must be consulted regarding the use, management, and conservation of the Coastal Plain,” he added.
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a national treasure and a cultural and spiritual home for Arctic Indigenous peoples.”
Karlin Itchoak, Alaska regional director for the Wilderness Society, stated that the bill “recognizes not only the importance of protecting wildlife and public land, but also shows respect and concern for the Indigenous peoples who live in and near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
“The Coastal Plain of the refuge is sacred to the Gwich’in Nation, and the Iñupiat people have stewarded this land since time immemorial,” Itchoak added. “Protecting the Coastal Plain from oil drilling is essential to their cultures, food security, and ways of life, as well as to the global climate.”
Some Indigenous and conservationist activists expressed their deep disappointment last year after congressional Democrats excluded Arctic protections from their $430 billion budget reconciliation package. Protections including a measure to end the Trump-era mandate for oil and gas leases on the Coastal Plain were included in the Build Back Better package that made it no further than passage by House Democrats in 2021.
The lawmakers said the reintroduced bill “would enshrine the protections sought by President [Joe] Biden on his first day in office, which were reaffirmed last June when the administration temporarily suspended drilling lease sales in the Arctic refuge.”
However, they stressed that “the Coastal Plain ecosystem remains at risk due to oil and gas lease sales mandated by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”—also known as the Republican Tax Scam—signed into law by then-President Donald Trump. Such lease sales ultimately generated little interest.
The reintroduction of the Arctic Refuge Protection Act came on the same day that the Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management infuriated climate advocates by publishing an environmental assessment recommending partial approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project, a major drilling initiative on Alaska’s North Slope, which contains much of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The Biden administration is reportedly expected in the coming days to release an environmental analysis that will endorse partial approval of a massive oil drilling initiative on the North Slope of Alaska, alarming climate advocates who say the so-called Willow Project poses a dire threat to the environment, local communities, and wildlife. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the legally…
Indigenous and green groups on Wednesday applauded the Biden administration for reinstating protections for millions of acres of wilderness in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest that were lifted during a Trump-era regulatory rollback spree.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Wednesday that it has finalized protections for the Tongass National Forest by restoring “longstanding roadless protections to 9.37 million acres of roadless areas that support the ecological, economic, and cultural values of Southeastern Alaska.”
The Roadless Rule was established in 2001 to protect wilderness areas in U.S. national forests from roads and logging. The administration of former President Donald Trump rescinded the rule in 2020 amid a flurry of regulatory rollbacks, prompting a lawsuit from a coalition of Indigenous, conservation, and business organizations. The Biden administration subsequently committed to reviving the Roadless Rule in 2021.
“As our nation’s largest national forest and the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, the Tongass National Forest is key to conserving biodiversity and addressing the climate crisis,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement Wednesday. “Restoring roadless protections listens to the voices of tribal nations and the people of Southeast Alaska while recognizing the importance of fishing and tourism to the region’s economy.”
\u201cThe moment we\u2019ve been waiting for! \ud83c\udf32\ud83c\udf89 Roadless Rule protections have OFFICIALLY been reinstated in Tongass National Forest! This will restore federal protection to just over 9 million undeveloped acres in America\u2019s largest national forest.\u201d— The Wilderness Society \ud83c\udf33 (@The Wilderness Society \ud83c\udf33) 1674680022
According to the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife:
The Tongass contains rare expanses of pristine old-growth forest and as many as 17,000 miles of creeks, rivers, and lakes. These waters abound with all five species of Pacific salmon, which anchor the economy of Southeast Alaska. Approximately 1 million visitors come from all over the U.S. and internationally each year to see its glaciers, old-growth forests, and abundant wildlife.
The Tongass supports an incredible array of biodiversity and is home to the Alexander Archipelago wolf, brown bears, bald eagles, northern goshawks, and Pacific marten, among others. The Tongass is also one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs, storing the equivalent of about 8% of the carbon stored in all the U.S. forests combined. In addition, a broad coalition of tribal leaders, outdoor recreation businesses, and conservationists in Southeast Alaska have fought to preserve the region’s remaining cedar, hemlock, and Sitka spruce trees.
“The restoration of National Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest is a great first step in honoring the voices of the many tribal governments and tribal citizens who spoke out in favor of Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass,” said Naawéiyaa Tagaban, the environmental justice strategy lead at Native Movement. “We are grateful to the Biden administration for taking this first step toward long-term protections for the Tongass. We hope that going forward true long-term protections will be established that do not rely on a rule which can be changed at the whim of a presidential administration.”
“The administration must look to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous stewardship as the true long-term solution for protections in the Tongass,” Tagaban added. “Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people have lived in and managed the Tongass national forest for generations; true protections will look like the restoration of lands into Indigenous ownership.”
\u201cBREAKING: The Biden administration has finalized the Roadless Rule on the Tongass! This is thanks to years of hard work by Tribes, small businesses, conservation groups, and Tongass supporters like yourself! \n\nFor more information, see https://t.co/pORem4DCcM \n\n#ProtectTheTongass\u201d— SEACC (@SEACC) 1674679664
Kate Glover, senior attorney at EarthJustice, said her group applauds the Forest Service “for making good on its commitment to tribes and to the climate by restoring the Roadless Rule across the Tongass. This is great news for the forest, the salmon, the wildlife, and the people who depend on intact ecosystems to support their ways of life and livelihoods.”
Teague Whalen, who owns Tongass Teague, asserted that “there are two uncompromising realities for the survival of life on this planet: clean air and clean water.”
“My hiking tours into the Tongass begin at the literal end of our road, where the Roadless Rule reinstatement will ensure that the Tongass can continue to be a lasting carbon sink,” Whalen added.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.