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Category: Biden administration

  • Biden’s Proposed Budget Leaves Out the Hyde Amendment — for Now

    President Joe Biden’s 2023 budget proposal was released March 28, sans a 40-year-old restrictive clause known as the Hyde Amendment. This is the second year Biden has excluded the controversial amendment that denies insurance coverage of abortion for people enrolled in Medicaid. Public support for ending Hyde is at an all-time high, with nearly six in 10 Americans supporting health insurance coverage for abortion, whether public or private. Abortion rights advocates hope the budget will be passed without Hyde and that legislators will not reintroduce the amendment to appease conservative lawmakers, like during the 2022 spending bill negotiations.

    “We applaud the Biden administration for its recommitment to ending the Hyde Amendment by removing this decades-old policy, which disproportionately harms people of color working to make ends meet, from its budget,” said Morgan Hopkins, the interim executive director of campaigns and strategies at All* Above All. “It’s a significant step forward to ending a decades-old policy.”

    The Hyde Amendment has been included in annual spending bills since 1976, three years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion rights in 1973’s Roe v. Wade. Since legislators could no longer ban abortions outright, former Republican Rep. Henry Hyde introduced the Hyde Amendment as a rider to the budget. When the amendment passed, he was straightforward with his intention and was quoted saying that the amendment was the best vehicle for restricting abortion access. Since then, the amendment has been included every year and prohibits federal funds from being used to cover abortions for people enrolled in Medicaid, Medicare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

    “We often say that [Hyde] is the original abortion ban,” Hopkins said. “We really need to see bold action from all of our elected officials to end this harmful policy.”

    The people most impacted by Hyde have historically been communities of color. According to the Guttmacher Institute, people of color who are at reproductive age are disproportionately likely to have low incomes and to be insured through Medicaid. Twenty-nine percent of Black women aged 15 to 49, and 25% of Latinx women were enrolled in Medicaid between 2016 and 2019. Half of all women in the same age group with incomes below the poverty line were insured through Medicaid, and 62% of Black women with incomes below the poverty line were insured through Medicaid.

    “Systemic racism, economic insecurity, and immigration status multiply the barriers to abortion care,” Hopkins said. “Folks who are enrolled in Medicaid are disproportionately people of color because of the way that capitalism and systemic racism work. Abortion care is an economic justice issue and a racial justice issue.”

    In a testimony given to We Testify, an organization that amplifies abortion experiences, Brittany Mostiller, a 35-year-old woman from Illinois, said she had to figure out how to pay $900 out of pocket — more money than she made in a month — for an abortion because Medicaid would not cover the procedure. She was 22 years old at the time, a mother to three daughters, working a part-time job at a grocery store, and she knew she could not afford another child “physically, emotionally, or financially,” she said in her testimony.

    “The decision to have an abortion was the easy part — but I couldn’t afford it,” Mostiller said in her testimony.

    It took Mostiller several weeks to save up for the procedure in Illinois, which meant she had to wait until further in her pregnancy before she could afford the $900.

    “This was a really challenging and disheartening experience,” Mostiller said. “Millions of people live in states that are hostile to abortion. I experienced firsthand the panic and worry of not being sure of whether I’d be able to get the abortions I wanted because I couldn’t afford them. Medicaid insurance has been a health care lifeline for me and my family — including when I chose to become a parent. We need to make sure that everyone on Medicaid is able to decide if, when, and how to grow their families without fear of that decision being taken away from them simply because insurance won’t cover it.”

    Since Mostiller’s abortion, Illinois has become one of the 16 states that allows people enrolled in Medicaid to have abortion coverage. People in the other 34 states and the District of Columbia have to pay for the procedure themselves or access abortion funds to pay for the costs of abortion, which could include the procedure, medication, transportation, and lodging if they need to travel.

    “There is a web of barriers to abortion care that would also have to be addressed for people to truly be able to access care,” Hopkins said. “That includes making sure that clinics can stay open and making sure that if people have to travel, they can move freely. Ideally, people wouldn’t have to travel far for abortion care. So it’s one step forward, and we know that there’s larger changes that would still have to happen for people to fully be able to access abortion care.”

    As the fate of abortion rights hangs in the balance with the upcoming Supreme Court decision on abortion in June, and conservative states passing abortion bans at an alarming rate, abortion rights advocates see the removal of the Hyde Amendment as a win to guarantee and expand abortion access but hope that Congress and the Senate will support the momentum. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer hopes to pass the 2023 appropriations bill through the House of Representatives by the end of June.

    “With states like Texas, Idaho, Florida, and many others pushing abortion care out of reach, this critical moment we are in demands bold action from all of our elected officials,” Hopkins said. “We now look to Congress to carry this momentum and pass federal spending bills without Hyde and coverage bans. Abortion justice can’t wait.”

    Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Title 42 Led to 1.5 Million Deportations. Biden Should’ve Repealed It Earlier.

    The Biden administration has finally announced that, come May 23, it will no longer be summarily deporting asylum seekers back across the border into Mexico as part of the U.S.’s response to COVID-19.

    This is a momentous reversal of one of the Trump era’s most destructive anti-immigrant policies, coming on the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement nearly three weeks earlier that it was ending the summary-deportation policy for unaccompanied children. But it was a decision that ought to have come 15 months earlier.

    For more than two years, asylum seekers attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border have been summarily deported under a public health rule known as Title 42, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) invoked in response to the pandemic. This allowed a bypassing of traditional court processes, and a de facto shutting down of the land border to those hoping to claim asylum after crossing into the U.S.

    It was, for Donald Trump’s anti-immigration henchman Stephen Miller, the culmination of years of lobbying to use Title 42 as a catch-all regulation that would allow the administration to essentially shut down the southern border and deny sanctuary to pretty much anybody claiming asylum in the country. After putting the activation of Title 42 on a “wish list” of anti-immigration policies in 2017 shortly after Trump was inaugurated, Miller had, in the intervening years, repeatedly attempted to get the CDC to invoke the rule in response to mumps and flu outbreaks. Knowing that this was politically motivated rather than driven by sound public health principles, the CDC balked.

    When COVID hit, Miller saw his opportunity. He lobbied hard for the CDC to lock down the border. Then, when the agency’s top scientists continued to resist, realizing that doing so would have no meaningful impact on the course of the pandemic given the prevalence of community spread within the U.S. itself, Vice President Mike Pence, who had been put in charge of the administration’s pandemic response, ordered its director to invoke Title 42, hurting huge numbers of vulnerable migrants. To his eternal shame, then-CDC Director Robert Redfield complied with this order and mandated that his staff begin implementing it.

    The rule was a byword for cruelty in the last 10 months of the Trump administration — on par with the Muslim travel ban; the public charge rule that made it all but impossible for immigrants hoping to gain permanent residency to access any public services; Trump’s determination to build a border wall; and the obsessive efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Immigrants’ rights advocates hoped that, in the first days of the Biden presidency, the new administration would stop using Title 42 in this way.

    Instead, faced with a massive increase in the numbers crossing the southern border every day, and a groundswell of political dissatisfaction regarding its handling of the border “crisis,” the Biden administration found it politically expedient to keep the rule in place. In August of last year, in another ghastly example of politics usurping science at the agency, CDC Director Rachel Walensky inked her signature on an extension of the order.

    In the two years since it was first triggered, somewhere in the region of 1.5 million deportations under its mandate have taken place. (Since many border crossers are deported multiple times in a given year, the number of individuals deported under Title 42 is likely far lower than this.)

    The results have been morally catastrophic. Last month, Human Rights First released a report detailing that since Title 42 was activated in March 2020, more than 10,000 would-be migrants expelled into Mexico under its guise, had suffered kidnapping, rape, torture, and other violent forms of attack.

    In September 2021, many of the country’s top epidemiologists signed a letter to the administration decrying the “scientifically baseless and politically motivated” expulsion policy. That same month, a slew of leading public health experts wrote a similar letter to Walensky, as well as to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccerra, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The letter pointed out that a large majority of the countries that had implemented entry restrictions to try to control their COVID outbreaks had also carved out exceptions to let in asylum seekers. The U.S. was, in this regard, a harsh outlier.

    The Biden administration, which from the get-go has claimed that its response to the pandemic is strictly science-driven, shut down the criticisms coming its way from leading scientists, and instead doubled down on this Trump-era anti-immigration tool. The administration’s fear was that ending the policy would result in a dash to the border by desperate migrants who finally saw an opportunity to get a toehold in the United States. And so, with polling showing that a growing number of Americans were angry at Biden and the Democrats for their priorities around immigration, and specifically for presiding over a huge increase in the numbers of people trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico each day, Biden’s team decided to double down in support of Title 42.

    This decision to continue implementing Title 42 was politically expedient but morally squalid. Over the past few months, it has attracted increasing criticism from progressives within Congress and among the grassroots, as well as from some officials within the State Department — one of whom, Harold Koh, sent in a scathing resignation letter in October in which he decried the ongoing “illegal” and “inhumane” use of Title 42.

    Now, in the spring of 2022, with thousands of desperate would-be asylees (including a growing number of Ukrainians) being turned back daily after trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico to claim asylum, the Biden administration has finally announced that it is changing course. It’s a long overdue shift back to a more decent treatment of asylum seekers. What a shame it took 15 months, and the war in Ukraine, for the Biden administration to finally locate its moral compass on the issue.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressive Lawmakers in US and Japan Demand No-First-Use Policy on Nukes

    Dozens of progressive lawmakers in the United States and Japan are urging President Joe Biden to make a “sensible” shift and commit the U.S. to a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons “at any time or under any circumstances.”

    The demand, which is also directed at Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, came in a letter dated Friday.

    The effort was led by lawmakers including Congressional Progressive Caucus chair U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as well as Progressive Caucus of Japan chair and Diet House of Representatives member Masaharu Nakagawa.

    The group’s call comes as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has escalated fears of atomic warfare, especially as Russian President Vladimir Putin has waved a “nuclear saber” with recent declarations.

    Biden last month signed off on his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, a policy which, to the disappointment of nonproliferation advocates, walks back his 2020 campaign promise of no-first-use. The NPR, according to U.S. officials, instead leaves open the possible use of nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear warfare.

    But, the lawmakers stressed in their letter, “it is never too late to commit to a no-first-use policy.”

    Addressing the “nuclear umbrella” security alliance between the two nations, the letter states: “A no-first-use policy would not weaken the U.S. ability to protect Japan and itself from a nuclear attack. That protection is based on the promise of U.S. nuclear retaliation, not on the ability to strike first. In fact, a no-first-use policy would increase protection against a nuclear attack by reducing doubt, miscalculation, and the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch.”

    Additionally, “a U.S. declaration stating that it would never start a nuclear war, supported by Japan, would breathe new life into international efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate the danger of nuclear war,” the lawmakers assert. “This is especially important at a time when tensions between the nuclear-weapons-possessing states, especially between the United States and China, are increasing.”

    As The Associated Press reported Saturday, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has added new fears of a nuclear exchange.

    “For U.S. officials and world leaders, discussions of how to respond to a limited nuclear attack are no longer theoretical,” AP reported.

    “One overarching concern is that by casting some nuclear weapons as tactical weapons to be used in battle, Russia could break the nearly eight-decade global taboo against using a nuclear weapon against another country.” Yet, AP added, “even comparatively small tactical nuclear weapons approach the strength of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.”

    The demand to the U.S. and Japanese leaders came a week after 16 Nobel Peace Prize winners released an open letter calling for an immediate end to the assault of Ukraine and the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

    “The time to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons is now. It is the only way to guarantee that the inhabitants of the planet will be safe from this existential threat,” they wrote.

    “It is either the end of nuclear weapons,” they said, “or the end of us.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Billionaires Would Pay Nearly 100 Times More in Taxes Under New Biden Proposal

    Economic experts and progressives opposed to the outrageous levels of inequality in the United States celebrated Saturday evening and into Sunday after reporting revealed that President Joe Biden plans to unveil “a 20 percent minimum tax rate on all American households worth more than $100 million” — a so-called “Billionaire’s Tax” that will specifically target approximately 700 of the nation’s wealthiest people.

    First reported by the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, citing multiple people familiar with the matter and an internal White House document, the proposal could be announced as early as Monday, part of the president’s rollout of his 2023 budget.

    According to the Post:

    Many billionaires can pay far lower tax rates than average Americans because the federal government does not tax the increase in the value of their stock holdings until those assets are sold. Billionaires are able to borrow against their accumulated gains without triggering taxes on capital gains, enabling huge accumulations of wealth to go virtually untaxed by the federal government.

    The White House Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers estimated this fall that 400 billionaire families paid an average federal tax rate of just over 8 percent of their income between 2010 and 2018. That rate is lower than the rate paid by millions of Americans.

    The White House plan would mandate billionaires to pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, or the combination of traditional forms of wage income and whatever they may have made in unrealized gains, such as higher stock prices.

    Gabriel Zucman, associated professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley and an expert on inequality and taxation, said the Biden plan could have real teeth.

    “This is big!” Zucman tweeted late Saturday in response to the reporting on the plan. “With this tax, the top 10 billionaires alone would pay at least $215 billion in the next 10 years.”

    Currently, the five richest U.S. billionaires are Elon Musk of Tesla, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, and Google co-founder Larry Page.

    “How big of a change would this make?” Zucman continued. “According to ProPublica, Bezos, Buffett, and Musk collectively paid $1.5 billion in federal income tax in the 5 years 2014-2018.” But under the Biden proposal, he said, “they would pay at least $111 billion (almost 100x more) over the next 9 years.” The increase would be especially profound, given how little these ultra-wealthy individuals currently pay.

    The White House document on the proposal, according to the Post, states: “The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax will ensure that the very wealthiest Americans pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income. This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters.”

    Harvard economics professor Jason Furman called the plan a “landmark proposal” from Biden. “A minimum tax that also applies to unrealized gains — as a prepayment against future capital gains,” he said, would be a substantive improvement for the nation’s tax system, one that “should get serious consideration as a fair and efficient way to raise significant revenue.”

    The nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has documented the various ways by which current tax code favors the rich over working people, said the proposal — which comes at a time in which “billionaire wealth grew by $1.7 trillion during the pandemic” — would be a great improvement over the status quo.

    Americans For Tax Fairness, a campaign coalition of more than 400 national and local organizations that advocates for a more fair tax system, also welcomed the news.

    “Right now in America,” the group said Saturday, “704 billionaires own more wealth than 65 million households. We can build an economy that works for the rest of us, but we need billionaires to pay their fair share. It’s time for a #BillionairesTax.”

  • We Must Stop Family Separation — And We Can Do It Now

    “I’m scared all the time, even in my sleep.” I will never forget the teary-eyed 8-year-old who told me that — one of the bravest young people I’ve ever met. I met him just five months after the Trump administration took office and began an onslaught of harsh immigration actions, including prioritizing the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. That included this 8-year-old citizen’s parents, and he was terrified of losing them.

    The post We Must Stop Family Separation — And We Can Do It Now appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Activists Decry “Climate-Wrecking” Biden Plan to Boost US Gas Exports to Europe

    President Joe Biden meets European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, Belgium, on March 25, 2022.

    Global climate advocates on Friday panned as “misguided and dangerous” the Biden administration’s newly announced effort to ramp up U.S. gas shipments to European Union countries as they look to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

    Under the new initiative, according to a White House fact sheet, the U.S. will help the E.U. secure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2022 “with expected increases going forward” — a set-up likely to benefit U.S. gas exporters.

    The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that “the U.S. aims to ship 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually through at least 2030… making up for about a third of the gas the E.U. receives from Russia.”

    “The E.U. imported a record 22 billion cubic meters of LNG from the U.S. last year,” the Journal noted. New gas projects are set to come online in 2025.

    While the Biden administration vowed to “undertake efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of all new LNG infrastructure and associated pipelines,” climate campaigners warned that the planned construction of new import facilities in Europe flies in the face of both U.S. and E.U. vows to slash planet-warming carbon emissions.

    “Europe already has enough capacity to import the amount of gas the U.S. intends to supply, and building new import terminals would mean locking in fossil gas imports for years to come, long after the E.U. needs to quit this climate-wrecking fuel for good,” Murray Worthy, the gas campaign leader at Global Witness, said in a statement.

    “Doubling down on gas is not the solution, whether it comes from Russia or the U.S.,” Worthy continued. “This announcement does not and must not be used to justify more fossil fuel projects in the U.S. New gas export terminals would take too long to build to help Europe now, would lead to huge climate-wrecking emissions and only help the fossil fuel industry.”

    “Instead of lining the pockets of American fracking companies,” he added, “Europe should focus its energy investments on lasting solutions such as improving building insulation, heat pumps, and renewable energy sources. More investment and reliance on fossil fuels is music to the ears of despots and warmongers all over the world who recognize this is an energy system that benefits them. If Europe truly wants to get off Russian gas, the only real option it has is phasing out gas altogether.”

    In response to Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine — now in its second month with no end in sight — the E.U. is looking to slash Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year and completely end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027.

    Before the Ukraine invasion, Europe got roughly 40% of its gas supply and 27% of its oil imports from Russia, an arrangement that led E.U. members — Germany in particular — to resist sanctions targeting the Russian fossil fuel industry.

    “We aim to reduce this dependence on Russian fossil fuels and get rid of it,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Friday.

    But Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, warned in a statement Friday that simply switching gas suppliers “won’t solve Europe’s current crisis” — and will surely make the climate emergency worse.

    “Pushing new toxic export facilities and decades more methane gas is a death sentence for those on the frontlines of the climate emergency,” Siegel said of the U.S. role in the new initiative. “President Biden must lead the world with a rapid buildout of renewable energy — not feed the fossil fuel beast that’s responsible for both petro-dictators and the climate crisis.”

    “Approving more export terminals, pipelines, and fossil fuel production,” Siegel added, “only throws fuel on the fire of our burning world.”

  • Biden Administration Remains Silent on Morocco’s Occupation of Western Sahara

    Biden Administration Remains Silent on Morocco’s Occupation of Western Sahara

    While the Biden administration has condemned the Russian invasion of a sovereign, independent Ukraine, it has refused to similarly recognize or support Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975. Human rights groups have documented brutal suppression of pro-independence activists and the Indigenous population, known as Sahrawis. The disparity between U.S. treatment of the two countries reveals Western hypocrisy and discrimination when it comes to countries that are not white, Christian and European, says Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. He adds that U.S. policy on Western Sahara emboldens Putin’s claims on Ukraine, as it shows the U.S. lacks principled opposition to illegal territorial expansion. “When Biden says that Russia has no right to unilaterally change international boundaries, that countries cannot expand their territory by force, he’s certainly correct. But he seems to think it’s OK if you’re a U.S. ally like Morocco.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    As we continue to look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re joined by professor Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco. He recently published an article in The Progressive headlined “The U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine.” Zunes condemns the Russian invasion but criticizes what he sees as President Biden’s hypocrisy. He writes, “If Biden really believed that countries have a right self-determination he would not refuse to recognize this right for Western Sahara, as the International Court of Justice and virtually every country on Earth has called for, nor would he refuse to support Palestinian self-determination outside of the parameters agreed to by their Israeli occupiers.” That’s Professor Zunes’s words. He’s written extensively on Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975.

    In a few minutes, we’re going to turn to an interview I did with a leading Sahrawi human rights defender on Friday who’s been under de facto house arrest since November 2020. But first we turn to Professor Zunes. His books include Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.

    Welcome back to Democracy Now! As we see the Russian invasion of Ukraine play out, Stephen Zunes, talk about why you’re talking about Western Sahara.

    STEPHEN ZUNES: Well, Trump recognized, formally recognized, Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara during his final weeks of his presidency. And like a number of impetuous Trump decisions, it was assumed that Biden would reverse it as soon as he came to office, particularly since a bipartisan group of congresspeople, career State Department officials and allied governments were encouraging him to do so. He has refused to do so, however.

    The United States is virtually the only country in the world, the only country, to formally recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation. If you look at maps from the United Nations, from Google, from Rand McNally, National Geographic, whatever, they’re depicted as two separate countries. U.S. government maps, by contrast, show Western Sahara as part of Morocco, no demarcation between them. So, when Biden says that Russia has no right to unilaterally change international boundaries, that countries cannot expand their territory by force, he’s certainly correct. But he seems to think it’s OK if you’re a U.S. ally like Morocco.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, for those who aren’t familiar with Africa’s last colony, if you can explain, very quickly, how Morocco occupied Western Sahara?

    STEPHEN ZUNES: Morocco seized the territory in 1975 on the verge of its independence from Spain. And Western Sahara — its formal name is the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic — has been recognized by well over 80 countries. It’s a full member state of the African Union. So, what Biden is doing is he’s essentially recognizing the conquest of one recognized African state by another at a time when he’s speaking sanctimoniously about how the world must unite against Russian aggression because it violates long-standing international legal norms. The International Court of Justice, the United Nations Security Council, United Nations General Assembly, the Organization for African Unity all called for the withdrawal of Moroccan forces and an act of self-determination such as a referendum. But the United States has quietly supported the occupation ever since ’75, and in 2020 made the recognition official.

    AMY GOODMAN: And talk about why you also, in the same articles, talk about both Palestine and Western Sahara. And then there’s a link with Trump pushing Morocco and accepting their power over Western Sahara.

    STEPHEN ZUNES: Well, the United States is also the only country in the world that has formally recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. We’ve made a de facto recognition of Israel’s annexation of greater East Jerusalem. And since the Trump administration, we have considered the illegal settlements as part of Israel. And so there’s a link there. But in regard — but we’re talking about a whole nation when we’re talking about Western Sahara.

    And what’s interesting — and this development just happened last week — we had thought we had scored a great victory when Congress blocked U.S. military cooperation with the repressive Armed Forces of Morocco until Morocco agreed to find a mutually acceptable political solution to Western Sahara, but the Biden administration just recently claimed that Morocco had done so via their dubious autonomy plan, which denies the people their right to self-determination, as the United Nations and World Court has demanded. It rules out independence and makes permanent the occupation. I mean, if Russia conquered 80% of Ukraine and offered some vague form of autonomy under Russian sovereignty, would Biden find that it constituted a mutually acceptable political solution? But this is what U.S. policy is. And again, we are a big outlier here, just as we’re trying to lead the world in upholding these international legal norms against the expansion of territory by force.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US declares Myanmar army committed genocide against Rohingya

    Designation could put global pressure on military-led government, which faces accusations at international court of justice

    The US has declared Myanmar’s mass killing of the Rohingya Muslim population to be a “genocide”.

    The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made the announcement at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Democrats Quietly Cut $5 Billion In Global Covid Aid—With Biden Already Behind On Vaccine Donations

    As the Biden administration falls woefully behind on its pledges to donate Covid vaccines to the world, on Wednesday, the U.S. House slashed $5 billion for the global pandemic response from an omnibus spending bill. The cut to Covid funds underscores the capriciousness of the U.S. government’s promises, and lends credence to public health activists who argue that countries in the Global South cannot rely on the pledges of wealthy nations, and should be given the information they need to manufacture vaccines themselves.

    The post Democrats Quietly Cut $5 Billion In Global Covid Aid—With Biden Already Behind On Vaccine Donations appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Is Likely to Miss Modest International Vaccine Donation Goal, Report Warns

    President Joe Biden speaks during an event in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on June 2, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    An analysis published Tuesday warns that the Biden administration is likely to miss its modest goal of donating more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to the world by the end of September, a concern the White House seemed to tacitly acknowledge last week by omitting the timeline from its new Covid-19 preparedness plan.

    Authored by Zain Rizvi of Public Citizen and Jo Walker, a PhD student in Yale’s Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, the new report finds that the Biden administration is set to fall short of its vaccine donation commitment “absent a surge of funding and political support for global vaccinations.”

    “By the end of February, the U.S. had shipped 474 million doses, donating doses at a rate of 60 million in recent months,” the report notes. “To meet the 1.1 billion dose target, the U.S. would have to donate 626 million doses in seven months, or about 90 million doses per month. That would require increasing the donation rate by 50%.”

    The assessment comes as Covid-19 remains a serious threat worldwide, killing more than 7,000 people each day and wreaking havoc on health systems across the globe.

    Experts have been warning since the start of the vaccine rollout that failure to achieve sufficient global inoculation against the coronavirus virtually guarantees that additional mutations will emerge and spread, prolonging the deadly pandemic and its far-reaching societal consequences.

    According to the World Health Organization, nearly 90 countries are not on track to fully vaccinate 70% of their populations by the start of July 2022. The latest figures from Our World in Data indicate that just 13.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose as rich nations continue to hoard doses and key technology.

    In an interview with the New York Times, Rizvi said it is “shocking” that the Biden administration is struggling to meet donation commitments that advocacy groups have criticized as inadequate. Public health campaigners have also criticized the Biden White House for focusing its attention largely on vaccine charity while neglecting technology transfer and global manufacturing.

    In the new report, Rizvi and Walker note that “after a brief spike in December, donations in January and February lagged behind the required pace.”

    “The reason for the delay is unclear,” the report states. “But it comes after a Politico story in June reported that the Biden administration had used more than a billion dollars intended to assist countries with vaccine distribution to pay for Pfizer vaccines.”

    Last month, Politico reported that the Biden administration is “running out of money to support the global vaccination push, and negotiations with Congress on securing new funding have stalled.” Such cash shortages are an indication that “more delays may be coming,” Rizvi and Walker write.

    “Biden promised a war time effort against the virus,” the report continues, alluding to president’s vow to make the U.S. the “vaccine arsenal” of the world. “But a narrow reliance on donations, without a larger strategy on delivery and manufacturing, has undermined the global vaccination effort. The Biden administration can move forward by rapidly requesting additional funding from Congress to make ambitious investments in delivery and manufacturing. One million lives may be at stake.”

    Rizvi and Walker’s analysis was released days after the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that “while the U.S. has contributed far more [coronavirus vaccine doses] than any other donor, its rank falls considerably when standardized by GDP.”

    “The U.S. falls to 6th when ranked by pledged doses per $1 million GDP and is more in line, but still lower than, other large economies such as Germany and France,” KFF notes. “By this measure, Bhutan ranks first, followed by the Maldives, Germany, France, New Zealand, and then the U.S.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Advocates Push Biden to Cancel Student Debt as He Mulls Extending Payment Pause

    Student debt borrowers demand President Biden cancel student loan debt during a demonstration outside the White House on February 16, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

    After a White House official confirmed this week that President Joe Biden is considering further extending a pandemic-related pause on student loan payments, lawmakers and activists renewed calls for debt cancellation.

    While payments are due to resume on May 1, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain suggested on a popular podcast that the president may extend the pause and is still sorting out whether he will take further action on the student debt crisis.

    “This is a GOOD idea!” the group Bold Progressives tweeted with a video of Klain on “Pod Save America.”

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key advocate of student debt cancellation in Congress, agreed, also tweeting Klain’s comments.

    n response to HuffPost’s reporting on Klain’s remarks, Congresswoman Marie Newman (D-Ill.) said Saturday that “pausing student loan payments during Covid has allowed Americans to get by.”

    “We need immediate student debt relief, and deferring payments again is a great step, but we need to do more,” she added.

    Noting that “education is a pathway to greater opportunity and economic security, yet many Americans simply can’t afford it or become crushed by student loans,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) told Biden on Saturday that “we must cancel student debt.”

    Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also pressured the president to take action on the issue Saturday:

    Pressley and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who have been leading the fight in Congress with Schumer, participated in a Friday roundtable about how student loan debt impacts Black communities, particularly business owners, entrepreneurs, and other professionals.

    Advocates of debt cancellation often argue that it is necessary to help address the racial wealth gap in the United States.

    Also on Friday, the Debt Collective announced a nationally coordinated refusal to make payments if Biden refuses to step in before they resume in May.

    “If President Biden resumes illegitimate student debt payments in May, we will facilitate as many student debtors as possible to safely pay $0 a month to the Department of Education,” declared Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor.

    “Whether it’s filing a borrower defense or enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan, we are politicizing our refusal to pay as part of our escalation on President Biden,” Taylor said. “He has the authority to cancel all federal student debt with the flick of a pen. He can end this manufactured crisis today.”

    Debt Collective spokesperson Braxton Brewington emphasized that “we want to be clear — a student debt strike is not intentionally defaulting on your loans, but politicizing and collectivizing your refusal to pay by using the tools the Department of Education already provides to student borrowers.”

    “The federal government doesn’t need our student debt payments to function, and the last two years have proved that,” Brewington added, “but they do need our cooperation — and they certainly won’t have that.”

    Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) expressed support for the planned strike, noting that “the road to student debt cancellation is long and hard, and a key aspect is building solidarity amongst students and graduates with debt.”

    “The Debt Collective’s Student Debt Strike is an important campaign to help build the mass movement we need to resist and abolish student debt, and there are so many ways to support it without putting yourself in financial jeopardy,” she said. “I stand with Student Debt Strikers and encourage everyone — whether you have debt or not — to join us.”

    As Common Dreams reported last month, polling shows student debt cancellation is popular with the American public, even among people who don’t have higher education loans to repay.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Capitalism, Nationalism, And Copaganda: Biden’s First State Of The Union

    Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address reveled in nationalism, vague promises, and anti-Russian rhetoric. But, behind all the sloganeering, the speech revealed that Biden intends to stay the course on his disastrous governing strategy of empty promises that have categorically failed the working class and oppressed.

    The post Capitalism, Nationalism, And Copaganda: Biden’s First State Of The Union appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Immigrant Youth Hold Rally Demanding Biden End All Deportations

    A day after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, immigrant youth from across the U.S. rallied outside the White House on Wednesday, demanding an end to all deportations.

    Organized by United We Dream—the largest immigrant youth-led group in the country—activists at the rally drew attention to the president’s failed immigration policies and unveiled a banner acknowledging the over two million people who have been deported or expelled under the Biden administration.

    The post Immigrant Youth Hold Rally Demanding Biden End All Deportations appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Critics Blast Biden Rebrand of Trump’s Medicare Privatization Scheme

    Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on June 9, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

    Rejecting pressure to terminate the program in its entirety, the Biden administration on Thursday announced it is redesigning a Trump-era experiment that physicians and progressive lawmakers have criticized as a scheme to fully privatize Medicare.

    Instead of ending what’s known as the Direct Contracting model, which the Trump administration officially launched in 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) gave the program a new name: ACO REACH, which stands for Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health.

    In addition to the name change and fresh veneer — a step in line with the healthcare industry’s call for a “rebranding” — CMS said the program will now span four years instead of eight and will include requirements aimed at ensuring “transparency” and “equity.”

    The changes are slated to take effect on January 1, 2023.

    Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a doctor-led group that has spearheaded the opposition to Direct Contracting, was far from satisfied with the Biden administration’s changes, which the organization argued are more cosmetic than substantive.

    “ACO REACH is Direct Contracting in disguise,” said Dr. Susan Rogers, an internal medicine physician and president of PNHP. “This new model doubles down on Direct Contracting’s fatal flaws, inserting a profit-seeking middleman between beneficiaries and their providers.”

    Under Direct Contracting, so-called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) were paid monthly by CMS to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care. DCEs — the majority of which are currently controlled by investors, not healthcare providers — are allowed to pocket funds they didn’t spend on care.

    In a statement, PNHP — which has implored the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fully halt the program — outlined how the revamped pilot “perpetuates the dangerous flaws” of the Trump administration’s Direct Contracting experiment:

    • First, like the DC model, ACO REACH will pay middlemen a flat fee to “manage” seniors’ health, allowing them to keep 40% of what they don’t spend on care as profit and overhead.
    • Next, Traditional Medicare beneficiaries will still be automatically enrolled into ACO REACH entities without their full understanding or consent, and once enrolled cannot opt out of an ACO REACH entity unless they change primary care providers.
    • Like DCEs, the ACO REACH program has virtually no limits on what type of company can participate; entities can be owned by commercial insurers, private equity investors, and other profit-seeking firms, including current Direct Contracting entities.
    • The new program increases provider governance from 25% to 75% (with loopholes built into the application process), but ACO REACH entities are ultimately accountable to investors.

    “You can’t slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured,” said Rogers. “Direct Contracting — and now ACO REACH — threatens the health of beneficiaries and the future of Traditional Medicare. As physicians committed to the health of our patients, we urge HHS to abandon this rebranding effort and focus the agency’s efforts towards strengthening and protecting Traditional Medicare.”

    CMS unveiled its raft of changes to the Medicare experiment just over a week after a coalition of industry groups — including active participants in the Direct Contracting program — requested that the Biden administration “fix” the model instead of ending it.

    The industry organizations suggested that “a rebranding and name change would… help communicate how this model is part of the evolution to accountable care.”

    CMS is headed by Elizabeth Fowler, who has previously worked at Johnson & Johnson and WellPoint, Inc. — now known as Anthem, one of the largest private health insurance companies in the United States.

    While CMS said Thursday that it took into account “feedback received from participants and stakeholders,” the new ACO REACH program is more in line with industry demands than those of physicians, grassroots advocacy groups, and progressive lawmakers.

    “Changing the name doesn’t change the fact that the Direct Contracting program is backdoor privatization of Medicare,” Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said in a statement. “This dangerous experiment must be stopped before it further harms the health of vulnerable seniors, eats into the Medicare Trust Fund, and destroys traditional Medicare.”

    “DCEs and their investors — which include private equity firms — are focused on generating profits,” added Lawson. “They are incentivized to deny and delay care as much as possible. There are no changes that can address that fundamental flaw at the heart of the program. President Biden must protect older adults and people with disabilities by ending the direct contracting program immediately.”

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who earlier this month led more than 50 House Democrats in urging Biden to cut off the program, said Thursday that she will “continue to fight tooth and nail against any and all efforts to privatize Medicare.”

    “Trump-era Direct Contracting is a major threat to Medicare coverage, hidden in bureaucracy,” said Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “While I’m glad to see the administration taking steps to redesign this flawed program, I am disappointed that these changes will not be enacted for 10 months and that there are no limits on how many seniors are funneled into this experimental model. More needs to be done.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The US Owes Afghanistan Reparations, Not Starvation

    A man carries his daughter as people queue to enter the passport office at a checkpoint in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 19, 2021.

    During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

    But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

    When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

    They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

    Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

    After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

    These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

    ***

    Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

    “Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”

    Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”

    The Congressmembers added, “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.”

    For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

    After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

    The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

    “After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”

    Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

    Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Greta stands with Sami and Navalny on trial again: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • US Is Effectively Stealing Billions From a Nation Ravaged by a US-Initiated War

    People hold placards as they march during a protest against the recent remarks by President Joe Biden to freeze Afghanistan's assets, in Kabul on February 15, 2022.

    President Joe Biden recently declared a national emergency in the name of addressing the dual threats of the massive humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan, as well as “the potential for a deepening economic collapse in Afghanistan.” He was right to do so.

    In sharp contrast, his decision to unilaterally assert the U.S.’s authority to redistribute $7.1 billion of Afghanistan’s frozen funds as it sees fit was dead wrong. In declaring the national emergency, the president laid out his administration’s vision for Afghanistan’s funds should U.S. courts voice their approval: that half be made available, pending litigation, to the families of 9/11 victims who have claims against the Taliban for its role in harboring al-Qaeda. The remaining $3.5 billion would go towards humanitarian efforts.

    Setting aside the moral and political problems inherent in the U.S. effectively stealing billions of dollars from a nation ravaged by a U.S.-initiated war and the resulting humanitarian and economic devastation, the president’s failure to make any of these funds immediately available to the people of Afghanistan in their hour of need is unforgivable. In abdicating responsibility to the courts, which may take months to decide how these frozen funds can be redistributed, the Biden administration is threatening the well-being of millions of Afghans, while also undermining the ability of civil society organizations to respond to the crisis. This is in direct opposition to the “beacon of human rights” the U.S. claims to be.

    To say that Afghanistan is in urgent need is to understate the severity of the situation. Over 24 million Afghans, nearly 60 percent of the population, need humanitarian aid. Some 23 million face acute food insecurity, meaning their lives are in immediate danger, and over 1 million children are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition. While Afghanistan has faced humanitarian challenges for years as a result of conflict, U.S. occupation and natural disasters, the current situation is markedly worse, in no small part due to U.S. policies towards Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

    When the Taliban took control of the country last August, the Biden administration froze $7.1 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign reserves held in the U.S. — money that belongs to the Afghan people — and that prior to the takeover, the Central Bank of Afghanistan (Da Afghanistan Bank) had been using to maintain economic stability.

    The resulting liquidity crisis has led to massive inflation, alongside depreciation of the Afghani, whose value the Central Bank can no longer stabilize by selling off its foreign reserves. Many banks in Afghanistan have dramatically limited the amount of money account holders can withdraw, while others have closed entirely. Businesses, no longer able to pay their employees, have shuttered, leading to rampant unemployment. The price of food has risen, while the value of the Afghani has plummeted, leading to mass starvation.

    As a further result of freezing these funds and of U.S. sanctions that have led risk-averse banks to severely limit access to financial services in Afghanistan, local and international aid groups and other civil society organizations in Afghanistan are struggling to pay their staff and provide services to the millions of Afghans in need.

    Kate Phillips-Barrasso, director of humanitarian policy at InterAction, a network of humanitarian aid organizations, recently explained that financial service providers “just don’t want to get involved. There’s a lot of risk aversion. Financial institutions say that even with explicit permission, it still reeks of effort and risk, and it’s better to just not provide the service.” As a result, aid organizations are turning to informal cash transfer networks, which entail greater risk and higher fees. Some have also turned to cryptocurrency as another means of getting funds into the country, despite challenges arising from limited use of cryptocurrency among much of the population. While these workarounds have offered some relief, limited access to cash and financial services is still plaguing the humanitarian aid sector as a direct result of U.S. policy.

    The Biden administration must urgently reconsider and correct its policies towards Afghanistan, and towards Afghanistan’s foreign reserves in particular. Shah Mehrabi, a member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s Central Bank and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, has called on the administration to “allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan limited, monitored, and conditional access to $150m per month from Afghanistan’s foreign reserves,” citing the Central Bank’s “independen[ce] from the Afghan government,” and the U.S.’s ability to monitor how the funds are dispersed. Some form of a phased release of the frozen funds has widespread support, including from members of the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and prominent international aid groups, human rights groups, and women’s human rights and peace groups.

    Beyond releasing the frozen funds, the Biden administration must also lift sanctions on Afghanistan, which have done almost nothing to incentivize the Taliban to change its policies. Instead, sanctions have unleashed a chilling effect on national and international banking in Afghanistan by shutting down access to financial services, causing dire repercussions to Afghan lives and preventing civil society groups from addressing the crisis. While the U.S. Treasury Department has issued piecemeal general licenses aimed at enabling civil society organizations to continue their work in Afghanistan, these necessary but insufficient steps have failed to address the financial access issues caused by sanctions, let alone the liquidity crisis caused by freezing Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.

    There is room for honest debate about precisely how, not if, these frozen funds should be returned to the people of Afghanistan, and which, if any, sanctions should remain in place — however, there is no room, or time, to cling to a status quo that is starving Afghanistan’s people and its economy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Whatever Happened to Biden’s Pandemic Testing Board?

    by Bianca Fortis

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    When President Joe Biden was campaigning for office, he said that to beat the coronavirus, the U.S. needed the testing equivalent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board.

    That board had sweeping powers to shift the country’s economy to support the war effort, and it ultimately oversaw a reported 40% of the world’s munition production during World War II.

    Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

    “It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time,” the Biden campaign website said. “And it’s how we can produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”

    The day after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order creating the Pandemic Testing Board. He said he would be putting the “full force of the federal government” behind expanding testing.

    A year later, though, it’s remarkably hard to tell what the board has done.

    As far as we can find, the group has put out no press releases, held no hearings and made no announcements. Biden’s executive order states that the head of the board would be, or be chosen by, the White House’s head of COVID-19 response. That’s Jeffrey Zients, but when we contacted him, he didn’t respond.

    When we asked White House officials about the Pandemic Testing Board — who was on it and what actions it had taken — they declined to answer our questions and pointed us to the Department of Health and Human Services.

    That agency did respond to our inquiries about the board, but its answers offered few details about the board’s work. It did not say who is on the panel or what decisions it has made.

    “The Pandemic Testing Board serves as the forum where agencies across the federal government which are involved in testing can describe emerging challenges and what they are learning,” the agency said. “It provides a mechanism for addressing policy and implementation issues regarding the supply and distribution of tests, as well as increasing access to and affordability of tests in the community.”

    The agency’s full statement also notes that the board has met regularly and has been split into two groups, one focused on test supply and the other on testing policies.

    Public health experts told us they, too, hadn’t heard much about the board.

    “I had assumed that they jettisoned these plans,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “If it still exists, it is certainly very low profile,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. The country’s first coronavirus testing czar, Adm. Brett Giroir, said he knew little about it as well. “It is rumored to have met, but I did not see public disclosure or reports from the meetings.”

    Of course, the inner workings of a board are less important than whether the government is getting the job done. But as ProPublica detailed in November, the Biden administration has been slow to roll out wider testing — just what the board was created to do.

    In October, White House officials reportedly disregarded a proposal from testing experts to send rapid tests directly to Americans in anticipation of a COVID-19 spike during the holidays. Press secretary Jen Psaki also infamously dismissed the idea in a December briefing.

    Later that month, the Biden administration announced it would send tests directly to Americans. But the tests are arriving just as the omicron wave is receding, and critics have argued that the effort shortchanges communities of color.

    “I think it’s damn well about time,” said David Paltiel, a professor of public health at Yale University. “It’s never too late, but some of us have been screaming and yelling about the idea for more than 18 months.”

    There was no shortage of money for expanding testing. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress appropriated nearly $48 billion for testing, contact tracing and other efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That is in addition to $48 billion set aside for testing in 2020.

    But just like with the board’s activities, details about where exactly the money has gone have been hard to come by. Since the Biden administration hadn’t released a breakdown, we submitted a request for specifics more than two months ago.

    Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., sent a letter on Jan. 3 asking for similar information. After Burr’s office shared what it had learned, the Biden administration sent ProPublica a one-page rundown of COVID-19 spending last week.

    The allocations thus far include: $10 billion for testing in schools, $9 billion for manufacturing testing supplies, nearly $5 billion for testing uninsured individuals, and more than $4 billion for testing and mitigation measures for high-risk populations. Nearly $3.9 billion went toward free community testing at pharmacies and federally qualified health centers, and $2.9 billion went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for expanding labs and testing capacity. More than $1.9 billion has gone toward COVID-19 testing of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border. About $3.6 billion is listed as simply “activities previously planned for PPPHCEA,” a reference to the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The Indian Health Service received an additional $1.5 billion. Another $4.4 billion is still pending allocation.

    Mara Aspinall, an Arizona State University professor and an adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation on the subject of COVID-19 testing, has been tracking HHS press releases to figure out how the stimulus funds have been spent, since the numbers are not publicly disclosed. She said testing should have been more of a focus since the beginning of the pandemic, but there’s still plenty left to do.

    “There are a lot of indications that the federal government and state governments are understanding the power of the information that tests bring,” she said. “But what we can’t repeat is the error of last spring thinking it was over and therefore not continuing to focus.”

    Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

    We’re expanding our coverage of government agencies and federal policy. With your help, we can dig deeper.

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    Lydia DePillis contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Rep. Ilhan Omar Slams Biden Plan to Seize Afghan Assets to Give to 9/11 Victims

    People wait to receive aid provided by a charity on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 30, 2022.

    As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday led condemnation of a reported Biden administration plan to permanently seize $7 billion of currently frozen Afghan assets and distribute half to relatives of 9/11 victims, advocates pointed to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and urged President Joe Biden to change course.

    Noting that “there wasn’t a single Afghan” among the 9/11 hijackers — and the U.S. gives billions of dollars to the Saudi and Egyptian governments despite their “direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists” — Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that punishing millions of starving people is “unconscionable.”

    Omar said she agrees with Barry Amundson — a member of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost his brother in the Pentagon attack — who warned the proposed seizure would “cause further harm to innocent Afghans.”

    “That’s exactly what will happen,” Omar tweeted.

    Khaled Beydoun, an Egyptian-American scholar, tweeted: “This is theft. Graft. Amid famine, no less.”

    “Newsflash: Zero of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan,” he added. “This is absurd.”

    The advocacy group Afghans for A Better Tomorrow said in a statement that the proposed redistribution of Afghan funds “is short-sighted, cruel, and will worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation.”

    “Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan,” the group — which is circulating a petition aimed at convincing the administration to immediately unfreeze some of the funds — asserted.

    Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and who is also with Peaceful Tomorrows, was among those urging Biden to reject the proposed policy.

    “President Biden has the opportunity to make amends right now! He can unfreeze the funds belonging to the Afghan people,” she said. “They are not the Taliban’s property but of everyday folks like us. Let’s see this as a humanitarian crisis that we can address immediately.”

    Others noted the dire conditions the Afghan people are currently enduring.

    Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American author and activist with Unfreeze Afghanistan, said that Afghans are “experiencing a historic famine within a pandemic, and their economy has been in a freefall worse than the Great Depression.”

    “One of the main drivers of the economic collapse is the freezing of their assets,” she added. “If the funds are not returned and the famine is not averted, America will be blamed for one of the worst famines in history.”

    Rodriguez said that “it saddens me that there are 9/11 family members who can’t see the discrepancies in our relative privilege to demand reparations instead of recognizing the dire need of Afghans.”

    “They have suffered unjustly for the actions of a cadre of extremists — a tiny minority of the population,” she continued. “Major famine, disease, displacement, and destruction that our government and its allies created should be reversed through all means possible.”

    Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, said in a statement that “taking funds that rightfully belong to some of the poorest people in the world who are now facing a catastrophic famine is a cruel move that will not bring justice to the 9/11 families.”

    Referencing the U.S. occupation that Biden ended last year as the Taliban retook the country, Benjamin tweeted that taking “billions of dollars away from starving Afghans” would be “a fitting end to 20 years of screwing the Afghan people.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Love To Afghanistan

    This Valentine’s Day, we are organizing “Love to Afghanistan” vigils across the country to promote much-needed aid to the people of Afghanistan.

    We will be pressuring members of Congress to increase aid to Afghanistan and end the sanctions policies and asset freezes that humanitarian groups say are driving the current famine.

    The post Love To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden Admin Restores Sanctions Waivers Seen as Key to Reviving Iran Nuclear Deal

    State Department spokesman Ned Price speaks during a briefing at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on February 1, 2022.

    Supporters of the Iran nuclear deal welcomed news Friday that the Biden administration restored sanctions waivers seen as key to a mutual return to the agreement.

    “This is excellent news for diplomacy!” tweeted the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The waivers, the group added, “will help facilitate negotiations to bring us back into the Iran nuclear deal, which will reduce the threat of war with Iran, and reduce civilian harm from sanctions.”

    With Iran hawk Mike Pompeo then leading the State Department, the Trump administration rescinded the waivers allowing for international cooperation on Iran’s nuclear sites in 2020. That followed its 2018 move to pull the U.S. out of the Obama-era deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

    According to Agence France-Presse, the waivers allow “other countries and companies to participate in Iran’s civilian nuclear program without triggering U.S. sanctions on them, in the name of promoting safety and non-proliferation.”

    The State Department has notified Congress of the waivers.

    “We are issuing the waiver now for a simple reason,” said a senior State Department official to CNN. “It will enable some of our international partners to have more detailed technical discussions to enable cooperation that we view as being in our non-proliferation interests.”

    The official called such discussions “necessary in the final weeks of JCPOA talks” and said “the waiver itself would be essential to ensuring Iran’s swift compliance with its nuclear commitments.”

    “If talks do not result in a return to the nuclear agreement,” the official said, “such technical discussions could still contribute to achieving our non-proliferation goals.”

    Anti-war group CodePink said the development marked “a step in the right direction” but added: “If only it hadn’t taken Biden a year to do so…”

    In a Friday tweet, State Department spokesperson Ned Price defended the decision from critics, saying that the U.S. “did NOT provide sanctions relief for Iran and WILL NOT until/unless Tehran returns to its commitments under the JCPOA. We did precisely what the last administration did: permit our international partners to address growing nuclear nonproliferation and safety risks in Iran.”

    National Iranian American Council (NIAC) senior research fellow Assal Rad drew attention to the ongoing U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran.

    “As people who pushed Trump’s failed policy start yelling that this is a ‘concession’ to Iran, remember the sanctions crushing its economy are still in place,” she tweeted. “These waivers let other countries work on Iran’s civilian nuclear program, a step that helps bring it back to compliance.”

    NIAC policy director Ryan Costello responded to the development in a statement in which he also drew attention to the continued sanctions.

    “Trump never should have revoked these waivers in the first place, which are in the U.S. interest and benefit nonproliferation efforts,” said Costello. He called Biden’s move to restore them “a positive sign and welcome move” as it’s “in the interest of the United States, as well as the global community, and supports important nonproliferation goals.”

    “The Biden administration is right that these waivers will not entail financial relief to Iran, though there remains a strong case for up front humanitarian relief as it is the people of Iran who have suffered the most under U.S. sanctions,” Costello added. “Hopefully this is a step to a full restoration of the JCPOA and relief for the people of Iran.”

    Iran, meanwhile, has called the Biden move “not sufficient,” with its foreign ministry saying that “good will, in our viewpoint, means that something tangible happens on the ground.”

    Final talks in Vienna on trying to revive the nuclear deal could take place next week.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Demand Biden Close ICE Jail Accused of Abusing Black Immigrants

    The Glades County Detention Center, which leases out space to ICE.

    Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a group of House Democrats are demanding the Biden administration quickly shut down a notorious immigration jail in Florida accused of racist violence and rampant abuse of Black immigrants who were transferred there under a federal contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week, the group of 17 lawmakers point to multiple complaints outlining a “systemic pattern of racially based abuse” at the Glades County Detention Center, a local jail in south Florida that contracts with ICE to incarcerate federal immigration defendants. Civil rights and ethics watchdogs also suspect the facility violated federal law by deleting surveillance camera footage of the abuse.

    Black immigrants and civil rights groups reported dozens of alleged human rights abuses at the facility over the past year, including medical and sexual abuse, death threats, solitary confinement, physical violence, and exposure to pepper spray and toxic fumes. The rampant anti-Blackness at Glades is evident by the racism described by detainees — including a woman who was called a “monkey” by a guard, and a man who said the facility’s director threatened to put a “noose” in his cell, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

    “People’s lives continue to be in danger every minute that the Glades Detention Center stays open,” wrote Rep. Wasserman Schultz, who represents parts of Miami-Dade and Broward County in Florida.

    Since July 2021, ICE has transferred at least 200 people away from their families and communities in states across the country to Glades, according to civil and immigrant rights groups. Most of the ICE detainees are Black and originally hail from Haiti, Somalia, Liberia and other African and Caribbean nations. About 100 of them staged a mass hunger strike in September, when one Haitian striker told Truthout that he was facing deportation after living with his family in the United States for 43 years.

    “The guards treat you however they want because nobody will say anything to them,” said one man who has been released from Glades and wishes to be identified as E.E., in a statement this week. “They treated us like we were less than human. I was a victim of abuse at Glades; I know how hard it can be there.”

    In September, E.E. and five other Black men reported that guards subjected them to pepper spray and excessive use of force while withholding medical aid and placing the men in solitary confinement as punishment, according to text messages and civil rights complaints reviewed by Truthout. It’s unclear whether the violence was related to the mass hunger strike, but under extreme duress, two of the men reportedly attempted suicide.

    Advocates say many of the people held at Glades qualify for release, but ICE has chosen to incarcerate them as their immigration cases wind through the courts. While federal immigration jails are often run by private prison companies, ICE also signs lucrative contracts with sheriffs in Florida and other states to hold detainees in local jails and prisons, a trend that accelerated during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and will continue under President Joe Biden unless policies change.

    “The Biden administration has failed immigrant communities when it comes to detention and deportation,” said Rebecca Talbot, who works with the Florida-based Immigrant Action Alliance to support Glades detainees, in a statement.

    Last week, the ACLU and the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington notified ICE that the Glades facility violated federal records law by deleting video footage from surveillance cameras that is likely to contain “key evidence” of inhumane conditions. The facility reportedly keeps footage for only three months before deleting it, but under the federal contract with ICE, the jail is required to keep the videos for three years, the groups said.

    In August, Black women at the facility filed a complaint alleging sexual and medical abuse, describing guards who watched them in the shower and a psychiatrist who abused his authority to sexually harass women. The woman also reported hearing racist insults and being exposed to a toxic chemical spray used as a disinfectant for COVID. In 2019, the Southern Policy Law Center reported that Glades officers routinely use pepper spray, solitary confinement and deprivation of basic needs like food and clothing to punish people.

    Fifteen immigration detainees were incarcerated at Glades as of Monday, but ICE pays the facility to hold up to 300 people under its contract with the Glades County Sheriff’s Office, according to Freedom for Immigrants. The DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is investigation several complaints filed by advocates and Black immigrants at the Glades facility, according to documents obtained by Truthout.

    The DHS could not be reached, and ICE did not provide answers to questions over email. The corrections department at the Glades County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the Glades jail, did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story was published.

    The group of House Democrats led by Wasserman Shultz, which includes members from the Congressional Black Caucus, said the Glades County Detention Center’s contract with ICE is up for renewal in March. The lawmakers told Mayorkas that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, should “immediately” terminate the contract and shut down immigration detention portion of the facility.

    “The patterns of abuse and neglect at Glades make it a death trap, and it must be closed immediately and permanently,” Talbot said. “People have died here. Countless others suffer severe long-term health damage from the endless abuse, incompetence and neglect.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Calls on Biden to End Trump-Era Plan Aimed at Privatizing Medicare

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren talks with reporters as she makes her way to the Senate floor for a vote in Washington, D.C., on June 22, 2021.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday joined physicians and dozens of her House Democratic colleagues in urging the Biden administration to immediately halt Medicare Direct Contracting, a Trump-era pilot that could result in complete privatization of the cherished public healthcare program by decade’s end.

    “It is completely baffling to me that the Biden administration wants to give the same bad actors in Medicare Advantage free rein in traditional Medicare,” Warren (D-Mass.) said during a hearing held by the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth.

    “My view is that President Biden should not permit Medicare to be handed over to corporate profiteers,” Warren added. “Doing so is going to increase costs and put more strain on the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. The Biden administration should shut down the Direct Contracting model.”

    The Direct Contracting (DC) pilot was first publicly announced by the Trump administration in 2019 and launched with little notice in the final months of the former president’s tenure. The program is administered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center, an agency that the Affordable Care Act empowered to experiment with alternatives to traditional Medicare’s payment model, which directly reimburses healthcare providers.

    The DC pilot, by contrast, inserts private middlemen called Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs) between patients and providers, allowing insurance giants and Wall Street-backed startups to keep as profit the public funding that they don’t spend on care.

    A majority of the 53 current DCEs — which are paid monthly by the federal government to cover a specified portion of a patient’s medical care — are investor-owned. Unlike Medicare Advantage, which Medicare patients choose voluntarily, the DC pilot automatically assigns seniors to DCEs, often without their knowledge or consent.

    “Wall Street is not racing to buy up clinics because they want to expand coordinated care models and limit profits,” Warren argued Wednesday. “Private equity and insurance companies want the eye-popping profits that are possible when the federal government lets them pocket whatever it is they can avoid spending on seniors and people with disabilities who need healthcare.”

    “The number of corporate vultures hoping to feed on Medicare continues to grow,” said Warren, the first Democratic senator to publicly criticize the Biden administration for letting the DC pilot proceed. “This invites fiscal disaster, and I hope this administration will reverse this decision.”

    Among the witnesses who testified at Wednesday’s hearing was Dr. Susan Rogers, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an advocacy group that has been leading the opposition to the DC pilot and urging the Biden administration to stop the experiment in its tracks.

    During her testimony, Rogers noted that “DCEs may spend as little as 60% of their Medicare payments on patient care, keeping the other 40% as profit and overhead.”

    “Medicare was designed as a lifeline for America’s seniors and those with disabilities, not a playground for Wall Street investors,” Rogers said. “If middlemen in healthcare actually saved money and improved outcomes, the U.S. wouldn’t have the most expensive and ineffective healthcare system in the world. We don’t need to put seniors through another failed experiment to prove this.”

    Despite mounting pressure from advocacy groups and members of Congress — including more than 50 House Democrats led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) — the Biden administration has not yet provided any signal that it intends to stop the DC pilot.

    As Buzzfeed reported last week, the administration’s “current plan is to run the program through the end of Biden’s term, potentially allowing a future president to expand its scope and further erode Medicare, the pillar of public healthcare in America.”

    While the Biden administration paused the most extreme form of Direct Contracting — known as the Geographic (GEO) Model — last March, it has let the rest of the pilot program move forward as planned despite internal questions over its legality.

    One unnamed Senate Democratic aide told Buzzfeed that “because companies had already spent a substantial amount of money preparing for the program, his administration would have faced fierce industry backlash if they shut it down.”

    In her opening statement at Wednesday’s hearing, Warren argued that the federal government needs “to make changes to Medicare.”

    “But not the cuts and privatization that my Republican colleagues have sought in past efforts to so-called ‘reform’ Medicare. No,” Warren continued. “Instead of undermining the system and the benefits that we deliver, we need to crack down on greedy drug manufacturers, on private insurers, and on private equity firms.”

    “The Medicare system is hemorrhaging money on scams and frauds,” said the Massachusetts Democrat. “It is critical that we stop the flow, and, if we do, the system will have more than enough money to operate at its current level and increase coverage.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Moves To Block Student Debt Victory

    Despite increasing pressure to fulfill a campaign promise to forgive student debt, President Joe Biden is now going in the opposite direction: His administration has taken an initial step to try to overturn a key legal victory for borrowers, according to court filings reviewed by The Daily Poster.

    If the administration wins an appeal, it could bolster a legal precedent against millions of debtors being crushed by bankruptcy laws that Biden infamously helped his finance industry donors sculpt during his four decades in Washington.

    The post Biden Moves To Block Student Debt Victory appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Climate Groups Urge Biden Not to Fight Ruling Against Oil and Gas Lease Sale

    Dark clouds of smoke and fire emerge as oil burns during a controlled fire on May 6, 2010, following the April 20 explosion on Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.

    As the fossil fuel industry clamors for an appeal, the Biden administration on Tuesday faced pressure from environmentalists to adhere to a judge’s decision blocking a massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon spill.

    “We urge you to comply with the court’s ruling and not appeal the court’s decision,” more than 70 climate groups wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. “The [Department of the Interior] should not continue to defend unlawful drilling for oil and gas in public waters in appellate court given the impacts on our climate, clear violations of federal environmental standards, and public commitments made by President Biden to end the practice.”

    “We also strongly urge the Department of the Interior to create a new five-year offshore lease program with no proposed offshore lease sales when the current program expires in June 2022,” the groups added.

    Last week, as Common Dreams reported, a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration failed to sufficiently account for the emissions impact of the proposed oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest such sell-off in the nation’s history. The judge blocked the sale and instructed the Biden administration to conduct a fresh environmental review.

    John Beard, CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network and member of the Build Back Fossil Free Coalition, said in a statement Tuesday that the judge got it “exactly right: every politician, judge, and decisionmaker in the country must consider the devastating damage that fossil fuel pollution does to our communities, our health, and our climate before they rubber-stamp a new pipeline, oil and gas lease, refinery, or chemical facility.”

    “If they did, every one of these projects would be rejected,” Beard continued. “Instead of siding with the oil billionaires who will appeal this decision, President Biden should learn a lesson from this case, not appeal the court’s ruling, and listen to the Black leaders, Indigenous leaders, environmental justice advocates, and climate activists urging him to reject the dangerous fossil fuel projects currently under federal review, while rapidly and equitably deploying clean energy with a stroke of his pen.”

    While Biden has pledged to end fossil fuel drilling on public lands and waters and to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by the end of the decade, his administration has gone to bat for Trump-era fossil fuel projects and coal-friendly policies in court, infuriating environmentalists who say the White House is reneging on its commitments and harming the planet.

    If the administration had succeeded in selling all 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico that it auctioned off last year, roughly 1.12 billion barrels of oil could have been produced. According to Earthjustice, “Burning this amount of oil and gas would result in more than 516 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to 112 million cars, 130 coal-fired power plants operating for a year, or the carbon sequestered by 632 million acres of forests.”

    A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the agency is reviewing the judge’s decision to block the Gulf lease sale as fossil fuel industry groups implore the administration to appeal.

    “It will be incumbent on the administration to defend responsible U.S. offshore production and to take the necessary steps, including the development of a new U.S. offshore oil and gas leasing program, to ensure continued leasing and energy production from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico,” Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, said in a statement last week.

    Environmentalists, for their part, warned the Biden administration against taking legal advice from the industry most responsible for the global climate crisis.

    “We simply cannot continue to make investments in the fossil fuel industry to the peril of our communities and increasingly warming planet,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. “This administration must meet this critical moment and honor the campaign promises President Biden made by stopping offshore leasing once and for all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More Than 100 Antiwar Groups Call on Biden to End Brinksmanship With Russia

    Antiwar activists demonstrate against the escalating conflict with Russia in Ukraine in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 2022.

    More than 100 advocacy organizations representing millions of people across the U.S. demanded Tuesday that the Biden administration take immediate steps to defuse tensions with Russia as the two nuclear-armed powers remain perilously close to war over Ukraine.

    “We call upon President Biden to end the U.S. role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia,” the progressive groups said in a joint statement spearheaded by CodePink and RootsAction.org. “It is gravely irresponsible for the president to participate in brinkmanship between two nations that possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

    The statement — signed by 105 organizations, including Physicians for Social Responsibility, Just Foreign Policy, and Peace Action — came hours after a sharp verbal back-and-forth between U.S. and Russian representatives at a United Nations Security Council meeting, which did little to abate fears of a looming military conflict.

    During her remarks at the U.N. gathering, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia of “attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to fabricate a pretext for attack.”

    Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya responded by alleging that the U.S. is the one “provoking escalation” with false claims about Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, which has ambitions of joining NATO — something Russia views as a severe security threat.

    Nebenzya also accused the U.S. of elevating “nationalists, radicals, Russophobes, and pure Nazis” to power in Kyiv by backing the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government.

    Thus far, the U.S. has rejected Russia’s demand for a guarantee of no “further eastward expansion” of NATO. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are set to speak by phone Tuesday after the two countries exchanged written proposals that did not appear to presage a diplomatic breakthrough.

    In their joint statement on Tuesday, the 105 anti-war groups argued that the roots of the present crisis are “entangled in the failure of the U.S. government to live up to its promise made in 1990 by then-Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would expand not ‘one inch to the East.’”

    “Since 1999, NATO has expanded to include numerous countries, including some that border Russia,” the groups noted. “Rather than dismissing out of hand the Russian government’s current insistence on a written guarantee that Ukraine will not become part of NATO, the U.S. government should agree to a long-term moratorium on any NATO expansion.”

    While the Biden administration has publicly said it is committed to pursuing dialogue and diplomacy with Russia, it has simultaneously continued pouring arms into Ukraine and placed thousands of U.S. troops on standby for possible deployment to Eastern Europe.

    Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, told Common Dreams on Tuesday that “the emergency that we now face is literally putting humanity’s survival at risk,” given the thousands of nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia possess.

    “It’s not enough for officials in Washington to say that they hope diplomacy will find a solution — we’ve heard that many times just before the U.S. plunged into one new war after another,” said Solomon. “The major cause of this conflict is that the United States has pushed NATO up to Russia’s borders and now is continuing to ship very large quantities of weapons to Ukraine, a situation that the U.S. government would never tolerate if Russia were doing the same near the USA’s borders.”

    “Whatever you think about the current Ukraine conflict, we all have the most profound possible interest in de-escalating it to prevent a clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers,” Solomon continued. “Polling shows that most Americans want the U.S. government to compromise with Russia in this terribly dangerous conflict — yet the mainstream media and vast majority of Congress members are whipping up a frenzy of uncompromising jingoistic fervor. They might as well be telling the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ to giddyup.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Antiwar Groups Pan Biden for Announcing Troop Deployment to Eastern Europe

    President Joe Biden speaks to the press about the situation in Ukraine, after arriving on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, on January 28, 2022.

    Anti-war advocates accused the Biden administration of continued warmongering late Friday into Saturday after President Joe Biden confirmed he plans to send U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

    “I’ll be moving troops to Eastern Europe in the NATO countries in the near term,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews late Friday. “Not too many.”

    Earlier this week, the president announced that 8,500 troops were standing ready for a potential deployment to confront what the White House says is an imminent attack by Russian forces in Ukraine—despite pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop creating “panic.”

    In a phone call Thursday night, Zelensky reportedly questioned the Biden administration’s belief — promoted by the corporate media — that a Russian invasion is “imminent.”

    “I’m the president of Ukraine, I’m based here and I think I know the details deeper than any other president,” Zelensky told the press after the call. “The image that mass media creates is that we have troops on the roads, we have mobilization, people are leaving for places. That’s not the case. We don’t need this panic.”

    Veteran journalist John Pilger tweeted that Zelensky’s comments exposed “the warmongering of Biden… as a crime.”

    As Common Dreams reported Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed hope that a diplomatic approach could avoid conflict with Russia, which has demanded a guarantee that Ukraine will be excluded from NATO, along with other security measures.

    Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley also spoke Friday and called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to pursue diplomacy — after Putin reportedly spoke to French President Emanuel Macron about implementing a diplomatic agreement forged in 2014.

    Milley warned that there will be “horrific” consequences if Russia invades Ukraine.

    “Given the type of forces that are arrayed, the ground maneuver forces, the artillery, the ballistic missiles, the air forces, all of it packaged together — if that was unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant, very significant, and it would result in a significant amount of casualties,” he told reporters.

    Peace group CodePink accused the Biden administration of reaching “putting the entire world at risk” while the U.S. public and international leaders make clear their anti-war stance.

    “Russia doesn’t want war. Ukraine doesn’t want war. The American people don’t want war,” tweeted the group. “The Biden administration needs to get with the program and STOP endangering us all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Climate Groups Celebrate as Judge Blocks Biden’s Oil Lease Sale in Gulf

    An oil drilling rig at sunset in the Gulf of Mexico.

    A federal judge late Thursday blocked the Biden administration’s massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, a significant win for environmentalists as they work to prevent the Interior Department from handing public lands and waters over to the fossil fuel industry.

    In his 68-page decision (pdf), Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. wrote that the Biden administration violated federal law by not adequately accounting for the emissions impact of the sale, which would have been the biggest offshore oil and gas lease sell-off in the country’s history.

    Climate groups characterized the sale — held just days after the COP26 summit in Glasgow — as the equivalent of “lighting the fuse of a massive carbon bomb.”

    “The Department of the Interior acted arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding foreign consumption from their greenhouse gas emissions calculation,” Contreras, an Obama appointee, found.

    The Biden Interior Department, which now must conduct a fresh environmental review, had relied on an analysis completed under the Trump administration, which was teeming with allies of the fossil fuel industry.

    Brettny Hardy, senior attorney for Earthjustice — a group that sued the Biden administration over the lease sale — applauded the judge’s decision Thursday and said that “we simply cannot continue to make investments in the fossil fuel industry to the peril of our communities and increasingly warming planet.”

    “Interior should use its next five-year leasing plan to protect our coastal communities and public waters and offer no new offshore leases,” Hardy added. “We can no longer afford to do anything less.”

    On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden pledged to ban new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, a promise that climate advocates cautiously applauded while demanding more ambitious action. One of the first executive orders Biden signed as president directed the Interior Department to pause all new oil and natural gas leasing on public lands and offshore waters.

    Yet, over the past 12 months, the Biden administration has approved drilling permits at a faster rate than its oil-friendly predecessor. According to new federal data, the Biden administration signed off on more than 3,550 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year in power.

    Around a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — which Biden has promised to slash — come from fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

    Administration officials insist they’ve been hamstrung by a Trump-appointed federal judge who, in a June ruling, blocked Biden’s temporary pause on new drilling leases. But climate groups argue the judge’s order did not require the administration to move ahead with the huge lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico — a conclusion echoed by the Biden Justice Department.

    Following Contreras’ ruling on Thursday, Kristen Monsell of the Center for Biological Diversity said she is “thrilled the court saw through the Biden administration’s horribly reckless decision to hold the largest oil lease sale in U.S. history without carefully studying the risks.”

    “This is a huge victory for our climate, endangered whales, and Gulf communities,” said Monsell. “New oil leases are fundamentally incompatible with addressing the climate emergency, and they’ll cause more oil spills and harm to wildlife and people in the Gulf.”

    “For the sake of our climate and frontline communities,” she added, “the Biden administration must end new leasing and phase out existing drilling. Anything less would be a gross failure of climate leadership.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russia’s Red Line

    “They must understand,” Sergei Lavrov said in one of his many public statements last week, “that the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.”

    The Russian foreign minister has repeated this thought almost ad infinitum lately. He speaks, of course, of the Biden administration and the diplomats who bear its messages to others.

    Here is another of Lavrov’s recent utterances:

    “We are very patient… we have been harnessing [burdens] for a very long time, and now it’s time for us to go.”

    I do not know quite what Lavrov means by “harnessing burdens.” I suspect it is a translation problem, and he said something closer to “bearing burdens.”

    The post Russia’s Red Line appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Limits Of Privatized Climate Policy

    For many in the climate movement, Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was a moment of euphoric optimism. With Joe Biden in charge, we could look forward to a possible return to climate action and diplomacy. No longer would policy be shaped by denialists, politicians proudly in Exxon’s back pocket, and a media fixated on the “costs” of public investment. A year on, it’s become easier to see the limits of the Biden administration’s approach, and how little has really changed.

    The post The Limits Of Privatized Climate Policy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.