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.
From the federal mask recommendations suspended in May to White House COVID coordinator Jeffrey Zients’s December pronouncement that the unvaccinated are to blame for “the hospitals you may soon overwhelm,” the Biden administration has organized its COVID response around an ethos of personal responsibility.
COVID is spun as a pandemic of the unvaccinated even as the vaccinated can also spread the virus. Vaccines and their boosters, importantly protecting the vaccinated from hospitalization and death, appear nothing of the public health silver bullet they’ve been positioned to be, presently offering only 10 weeks’ protection against symptomatic infection with the now circulating Omicron variant.
Such a campaign against the unvaccinated represents both bad politics and bad public health.
Many of the unvaccinated aren’t ideologically motivated. Skepticism and hesitancy mark as much a failure of vaccine access, including the absence of a national door-to-door campaign to convince the 84 million Americans walking around without a single COVID shot to get vaccinated or to physically transport them to an appointment. Winning their trust is critical in controlling the outbreak stateside.
Other patients may refrain from vaccination even when it puts them in great personal danger. Jesse Rouse, photographed here in November suffering his second bout of COVID in Minneapolis, was reported to be unvaccinated at the time after he previously underwent a double lung transplant. Researchers have proposed that lung transplantees are especially vulnerable to respiratory infection and should be vaccinated for COVID.
Some people may refrain from vaccination for medical reasons – including confusion or conflicting information about how vaccination might interact with their health conditions or treatments.
Regardless of why particular people remain unvaccinated, thrusting culpability fully onto individuals is a harmful move. Like Ronald Reagan’s campaign against “welfare queens,” presuming public health problems emerge primarily from bad actors and individual decision-making obfuscates the systemic and structural roots of the failure of the U.S.’s response to the pandemic.
Much like Trump, the Biden administration appears repeatedly intent on turning the COVID page, no matter the state of the pandemic itself. The May mask recommendations, which stated that vaccinated people could stop wearing masks in most indoor spaces, were textbook on that account. The administration later ignored an October report from public health experts recommending free testing at a pace of 732 million tests per month in preparation for a holiday COVID surge:
The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment — endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again.
Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.” But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”
Early in December, Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki scoffed at reporter Mara Liasson’s query about why the U.S. doesn’t just pay for home COVID tests for every American household like other countries do instead of making Americans submit for reimbursement from insurance companies that have routinely failed to pick up the bill. “How much is that going to cost?” Psaki asked.
Should a government that had voted $768 billion for the Pentagon, $24 billion more than Biden requested, just pay for COVID tests? Yes, April Wallace replied in the Washington Post. Yes, it should:
I am a dual citizen of the United States and Britain, now living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I am able get rapid antigen tests anytime I want to, at no cost and with no hoops to jump through. I know that Americans pay more than $20 for a package of two tests — if they’re in stock. Here you can walk into your local pharmacy, and they will just hand you packs of seven tests at no charge. In my neighborhood I can also go to the local recreational center and collect packs of tests free for my family, or swing by a coronavirus testing center.
It turns out the reimbursement for home tests wasn’t to start until mid-January anyway:
The administration has already said that the plan will not provide retroactive reimbursement for tests that have already been purchased, which means that any tests you buy for the holidays will not be covered.
The Biden no-plan, expanded to a whole four rapid tests per household and three masks for each American, appeared to be phase one of a campaign of further eroding American expectations. As self-described “shitposter” @fingerblaster tweeted about what’s missing:
Wild that the most unhinged republican president in history sent us $2000 checks back when we had like 12k cases a day and now we have 300k cases a day and a dem president who’s like “lol not my problem go to work jack”
The more august New York Times reported on the end of monthly child benefits millions of Americans were depending on:
The end of the extra assistance for parents is the latest in a long line of benefits “cliffs” that Americans have encountered as pandemic aid programs have expired. The Paycheck Protection Program, which supported hundreds of thousands of small businesses, ended in March. Expanded unemployment benefits ended in September, and earlier in some states. The federal eviction moratorium expired last summer. The last round of stimulus payments landed in Americans’ bank accounts last spring.
These benefit programs, as modest as they were, saved thousands of Americans from COVID deaths.
A March 2021 FamiliesUSA report summarized research showing a third of COVID deaths were tied to the lack of health insurance. The effect was multiplicative: “Each 10% increase in the proportion of a county’s residents who lacked health insurance was associated with a 70% increase in COVID-19 cases and a 48% increase in COVID-19 deaths.”
Controlling for stay-at-home orders, school closures and mask mandates, another study, first posted November 2020, estimated that lifting eviction moratoriums state-to-state resulted in between 365,200 and 502,200 excess coronavirus cases and between 8,900 and 12,500 excess deaths.
Omicron’s Delta Strain
So, public health clearly extends beyond necessary prophylaxes into necessary social interventions. But if there was any doubt about which constituency the political class serves instead, in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cut down its recommendation for quarantine upon COVID exposure from 10 days to five. The act was decidedly in response to pressure from employers, notoriously Delta Air Lines’ CEO Ed Bastian in a letter that Delta proudly posted.
The Delta letter summarized the scientific literature in favor of its request in two sentences. The science is in reality more nuanced, marked by a variety of definitional complications.
Omicron, like new variants before it, is almost certain to evolve out from underneath the vaccine effectiveness that Delta Airlines cites as, full-stop, protection enough. Permitting COVID variants to circulate on Delta planes or elsewhere increases the chances they can evolve enough to circumvent medical and non-pharmaceutical controls.
Other drawbacks refute such summary boosterism. Omicron is already associated with increased reinfection. The variant’s other impacts on clinical courses and epidemiology are likely to be geographically specific, depending on a variety of local factors, including pre-existing immunity and the state of non-pharmaceutical interventions. What works as an intervention under one set of conditions does not necessarily hold under all.
More meta, the speed at which new variants are being allowed to evolve is outpacing even the frantic pace of the research conducted. “Flattening the curve” extends beyond our hospitals to research efforts aimed at discovering how to better control COVID.
In other words, under a more infectious Omicron, a variety of interventions, one layered atop another, is necessary, rather than stripping them back to serve criteria pretending to be scientific.
This isn’t the first time the airline industry tried to bend basic COVID science to its financial advantage. JetBlue CEO and reopen proponent David Neeleman funded and helped coordinate a Stanford University study that whistleblower complaints showed used a testing kit that erred on the side of false positives. By these tests, the study concluded the COVID virus was more widespread in the public and therefore, given the underlying number of deaths in the study population, was less dangerous of a pathogen.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, proving Lysenko on the Potomac, ran interference for Delta and other employers in the face of the twists and turns obvious in the COVID literature. Fauci parroted Bastian’s arguments nearly to the letter:
There is the danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated who are asymptomatic for the full ten days, that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running. So the decision was made of saying let’s get that cut in half.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky once fought back tears over the likelihood of COVID mass deaths. Now, like a meat plant manager thinking only of the bottom line, she defends sending people back to work still infectious:
There are a lot of studies [from other variants] that show the maximum transmissibility is in those first five days. And [with Omicron] we are about to face hundreds of thousands more cases a day, and it was becoming very, very clear from the health care system that we would have people who were [positive but] asymptomatic and not able to work, and that was a harbinger of what was going to come in all other essential functions of society.
In short, the combination of economic compulsion and traumatic bonding that sent millions of workers into unprotected workplaces the pandemic’s first two years now represents state policy. The denialism for which liberals punch down on Trumpists is the labor law of the land. It is now a key part of the administration’s public health campaign.
“I’m not letting COVID-19 take my shifts,” one recent CDC ad declared. “My job puts me at high risk for COVID-19 exposure. I got vaccinated because it’s better to be protected than to be out sick.”
Another CDC post shamelessly used the U.S.’s privatized health care system as a cudgel of class discipline: “Hospital stays can be expensive, but COVID-19 vaccines are free. Help protect yourself from being hospitalized with #COVID19 by getting vaccinated.”
In that spirit, Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein waxed optimistic on the economy. The depletion of personal savings would drive low-paid workers back into the labor market during a pandemic, Bernstein cheered.
“We are intent,” Jeff Zients declared mid-December, “on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this.” The vaccinated are presented as pure enough of soul to get back to working the gears of the economic machine. The unvaccinated are cast, to appropriate Hillary Clinton’s characterization, as a basket of eschatological deplorables.
Zients, a Biden campaign donor, was the CEO of investment firm Cranemere and director of Obama’s National Economic Council before becoming COVID czar with no public health experience. His primary portfolio of priorities was always apparent.
The quarantine switcheroo follows CDC’s changing recommendations for school distancing from six feet to three, which it now pretends is the virus’s limit. In reality, even six feet isn’t enough for the airborne virus. But in changing it to three, CDC could legally accommodate efforts to stuff students back in brick-and-mortar schools without changing day-to-day public health precautions.
Keeping kids out of school can have terrible impacts on learning outcomes and emotional well-being. Keeping kids in school, potentially leading to the deaths of other students or teachers in school, and older adults back home, can incur a different kind of emotional damage. Both risks serve as more the reason for bringing the outbreak under control with a full-spectrum intervention.
The CDC’s position, sending students back to school without controlling the outbreak, is geared toward other aims. It’s about putting the economic cart before the epidemiological horse. The kids need to go to school so that the parents can go to work.
Comedian Roy Wood Jr: CDC just said you only need to quarantine if you on a ventilator. But if ya ventilator got wheels and a battery pack you gotta take yo ass to work.
Author Alexander Chee: If you have to deploy the military to support hospitals you may have spent your budget on the wrong part of the system given the challenges we actually face.
Designer Char: CDC okays pull-out method as “eh, good enough.”
The administration is too full of itself to see it is losing the country. Its caustic claims about “the science” aren’t supported by the science, further undercutting research as a trusted source of both state strategy and public response.
The original 10-day quarantine that the CDC changed was grounded in the evidence-based realities of the virus itself, specifically its incubation time, generation time and serial interval. At the same time, the 10 days aren’t a matter of essentialist measures of central tendency.
Against CDC Director Walensky’s characterization, it’s about the variation in patients’ infectious periods. Some patients exit out of their infectiousness early, in the five days Walensky cited. Others can be infectious much longer. No one knows who’s a late bloomer in transmission. As a matter of practical public health intervention, it’s an unknown.
A public health campaign must therefore institute mask and quarantine policies that cover for the late transmissions, so that they don’t serve as the means by which the outbreak rolls on — particularly as Omicron’s infectiousness approaches that of measles and a 100% attack rate can still result from even a small group of infectious people walking around.
Instead, we have slashed public assistance, shortened quarantines, offered no-to-little remote schooling, hired few community health workers, conducted little genomic sequencing of the virus, and let hospitals get overrun. The CDC gave in upon the subsequent furor around the shortened quarantine by adding only a recommendation — not a requirement — of a negative rapid antigen test before workers returned to work.
Beyond trying to circumvent the rancor of partisan criticism, why did Trump and Biden alike aim at pretending the pandemic away? Biden’s trajectory is illustrative that capitalist realism has a way of eating away at even good faith efforts at addressing existential threats.
In October 2020, candidate Biden put the failings of his opposition in perspective: “We’re eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. I do.”
“This crisis,” President-elect Biden added, “demands a robust and immediate federal response.”
A year later, President Biden pivoted: “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level,” months after many state governors had lost or abandoned their emergency powers to impose mask mandates and shelter-at-home orders.
Other countries see federal jurisdiction differently, as if the very health of their ostensible constituencies has something to do with governance.
While the U.S. daily breaks record COVID caseloads, some other countries appear to be of another world. COVID long-hauler Ravi Veriah Jacques reported these January 2 caseloads from abroad:
New Zealand – 51
China – 191
Taiwan – 20
Japan – 477
Hong Kong – 18
China’s reactions are both broader and triggered more quickly, with the public health results to show for it. Xi’an, a metropolis of 13 million people in Shaanxi Province, underwent an arguably arduous lockdown upon the emergence of 175 COVID cases. Western media has played on the difficulties in obtaining food in the city over the 12 days’ quarantine, but not the campaigns to alleviate those problems.
Some may argue the Biden administration’s reaction is better late than never, but that’s not how controlling COVID’s lightning strikes works.
As epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace models, whatever the intervention, there’s nothing worse than dithering. Given the insidious nature of the virus, we are routinely six weeks too late if spikes in cases, rather than anticipatory planning, are the trigger. Repeated delays mark U.S. COVID planning — among them, the spread of the original wave out of coastal cities to the rest of the country in spring 2020 and the arrivals since of Delta and Omicron stateside.
Rapid Confusion Test
It happens that the mass at-home testing the Biden administration passed over in October, setting up a program several months too late, is itself already a failure. Big picture, like vaccination, it represents yet another technicist intervention that, while necessary, is also insufficient. It’s more of a grand gesture that detracts from the administration’s refusal to pursue multilevel systemic public health programming.
The specifics of such a rollout and the tests themselves also get in the way. It’s much more than a matter of rapid tests permitting an exit out of the shots for the deplorable unvaccinated, as the Biden administration feared. It’s also not merely a matter of doctors defending their testing territory, as rapid test proponents argued.
Among several intrinsic errors that biotech consultant Dale Harrison explores around the rapid tests, there is the difficulty of self-administering them:
One important note is that at-home antigen tests will give VERY poor results (both high false-positives and high false-negatives) if you are sloppy or misuse them.
These are complex molecular assays and the EXACT usage is critical. You MUST read and follow every single detail in the instructions to get a reliable outcome….
The difficulties extend beyond administering the tests. Interpreting them is a difficult task; it is swayed by our hopes as well as by technical matter:
Now comes the tricky part… what happens if you get conflicting test results.
Let’s say you get a positive result on an at-home antigen test (like the BinaxNow) and decide to take it again “just to be sure”.
Then you get a negative result on the 2nd Binax test. Now you schedule an appointment to get a PCR test.
A couple of days later, it comes back negative.
ARE YOU INFECTED? Absolutely positively YES!
If you’re non-symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results … a positive and two negatives in any order.
In that case, it is 56-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 5600% more likely!
And if you’re FULLY symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results, it is 20-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 2000% more likely!
Even if you get ANOTHER PCR test and THAT test comes back negative as well [Binax+ Binax- PCR- PCR-] you are still 4-times more likely to be infected than not … 400% more likely!
And it does NOT matter the order of the test results … the math holds true regardless.
Even medical doctors conducting these tests in clinics stumble:
I know this seems VERY counter-intuitive and even most doctors who prescribe these tests (other than Infectious Disease specialists) tend to NOT understand this!
And when faced with multiple conflicting test results, most medical people will incorrectly select the LAST result as the “correct one”.
This is a DANGEROUS mistake! Again, outside of certain specialties, few medical staff are trained to think in terms of Bayesian statistics.
Vanity Fair’s palace intrigue set the COVID Collaborative of high-end epidemiologists recommending the holiday testing surge against the administration that ignored them. But that isn’t quite right. Both sides agree on turning public health into an individualistic (and commodifiable) option:
Once [ex-Harvard epidemiologist and now chief science officer at the eMed diagnostic company Michael] Mina began to advocate for rapid home tests, he encountered the same mindset: doctors “trying to guard their domain.” Some doctors had long opposed home testing, even for pregnancy and HIV, arguing that patients who learned on their own about a given condition would not be able to act on the information effectively. Testing, in this view, should be used only by doctors as a diagnostic instrument, not by individuals as a public-health tool for influencing decisions.
The U.S. approach sticks the American people with the job of administering and then interpreting the conflicting results of multiple tests. The false positives might be low in part because nearly 100 percent specificity aligns with peak viral load. But, as Harrison describes, even should the test be administered correctly, the false negatives are legion and the results of one test do not necessarily change the implications of previous ones.
Techno-utopianism offers another iteration of blaming the victim if the outcome goes south: “It’s your own fault you didn’t do the test right.” Don’t let the easy lines on the lateral flow ag card confuse matters. Against Mina’s insinuation, it’s decidedly unlike a pregnancy test.
There is also the matter of what happens when organizing society’s access to work and recreation around such tests collides with a run on the tests at local stores already suffering supply chain problems, making the tests both unavailable and priced beyond working people’s budgets.
If, on the other hand, the Biden administration hired and trained a million community health workers to go door-to-door across the country administering these tests for free — like really free — we wouldn’t be in such a free-for-all, if you’ll excuse the phrasing.
If such teams had been put in place from the beginning, they may have been able to build the trust necessary to successfully introduce a variety of time- and place-specific public health interventions that would likely have minimized the duration and impact of each wave of the pandemic.
Surprising the Supposedly Surprised
What’s interesting about Harrison’s direct and clearly written posts is that his recommendations are framed by the context of what the U.S. can, or is willing to, offer right now: not much.
Yes, everyone should be able to test themselves whenever they wish, all the time. But the U.S. chooses to position itself as unable to pursue such a public health program. Should the sensitivity and specificity reported on the test boxes match their actual outcomes? Yes, they should, however righteous the original testing went into bringing the products to market. Should the efficaciousness and effectiveness of vaccines match? Yes, that would be nice.
There are expectations that individual American consumers hold about solutions — cheap and immediately effective — that the market repeatedly promises but can’t deliver. In this case, the multifactorial virus doesn’t cater to such an ideal of a single packet solution. And the public health response we need, and the market treats as a rival, is starved to near-death.
The U.S. government, and governments around the world, treat the capitalism that helped spring the COVID virus out of commoditized forests as more real than the ecologies and epidemiologies upon which the global system depends. To protect that mirage of a difference, each new variant that has since emerged is strangely presented as the beginning of the pandemic’s end, resetting the next round of denialism, instead of alerting us that in reality, without a change in public health practice, we’re caught in a daisy chain of viral evolution.
Each “surprise” that the COVID virus refuses to cooperate with such an expectation, acting in its own interests instead of ours, also serves to protect the system from the implications of its refusal to act. Surprise — pretending we don’t know what we know — is itself an ideological project. The business of governing a system in decline, after all, is about managing expectations. All is well, get back to work, until, suddenly, it isn’t, as it always was.
From the virus’s vantage, the resulting public health dithering and half-measures serve the virus as both escape hatch out of our control efforts and selection pressure to evolve around those campaigns. A combo that leads to the worst of epidemiological outcomes.
If we wish to unplug out of this trap, we have to organize together against our rulers and their financers. We must deploy a full-spectrum intervention that drives the COVID virus under its rate of replacement.
That requires we reject not only Washington’s business bipartisanism, but also the core model of our economy around which our civilization is organized. That’s no small matter, of course, but with climate change and other pandemics also in the wings, likely our sole option out.
Britain needs to show that it cares about the lives of starving humans, not just animals
Soon after the Taliban swept into Kabul, with Afghanistan’s economy collapsing, people began to sell meagre possessions, from mattresses to cooking pots, to buy basic necessities. Now we learn that desperate Afghans are selling their children and their kidneys, finding no other way to keep their families from starvation. Almost everyone is short of food; more than half the population faces extreme levels of hunger, and nearly 9 million are at risk of famine. The desperation will only worsen. The foreign aid that fuelled the economy has vanished; huge numbers are jobless; food prices have soared. Drought has worsened the already grim picture.
The UN says that $8bn is needed now: $4.4bn in humanitarian assistance, and $3.6bn to deliver essential services and maintain community infrastructure. Deborah Lyons, the special representative for Afghanistan, noted that donors are worried that they may help the Taliban consolidate their position or seem to be legitimising it. The disappearance of feminist activists last week – after one filmed a video of men she said were Taliban trying to enter her home – is further horrifying evidence of their brutal rule. Many older girls are still barred from school. LGBTQ+ people have reported mob attacks and rape. No one wants to give succour to the Taliban. But it should be possible to deal with them to support ordinary Afghans without formally recognising their government. The alternative is to abandon Afghans, who are suffering twice over: from Taliban control and from the international response to it.
A year after Joe Biden’s inauguration, things seem bleak. Despite the existence of life-saving vaccines, tests and masks, on January 21, more than 3,000 people were reported to have died of Covid-19, and the last time daily deaths were below 1,000 was in August. There is a better way, and it was proposed by then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020. As part of the Biden-Harris plan to tackle Covid-19, the campaign proposed the creation of a 100,000-strong U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps. In the words of the campaign, such a force would ensure “contact tracing reaches every single community in America” and that corps members “should come from the communities they serve.” Such a force was never created and, in the meantime, public health departments have struggled to deal with the increasing workload, with staff quickly burning out.
The United States and Russia are heading toward a dangerous showdown over Ukraine, as the U.S. has 8,500 troops on high alert, ready to deploy to Eastern Europe should Russia invade Ukraine, and a new round of arms shipments have begun arriving in Ukraine.
On the one hand, Russia’s ongoing occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, its support of armed insurgents in eastern Ukraine and threats of further military action against that country must be challenged by the international community — though not through war. Unfortunately, the United States is in no position to take any leadership in strategy or action against Russian aggression.
Just as U.S. military action in the greater Middle East in the name of protecting Americans from ideological extremism and violence in the area has ended up largely encouraging ideological extremism, Russia’s actions in the name of protecting Russians from far right Ukrainian ultranationalists — a small but well-armed minority in that country — will likely only encourage that militant movement as well. The United States, therefore, needs to avoid any actions that could encourage dangerous ultranationalist tendencies among either Russians or Ukrainians. Polls show most Russians are at best ambivalent about the Kremlin’s moves in Ukraine. Provocative actions by the United States would more likely solidify support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegitimate actions.
Ukraine is seeking international military support in part because it no longer has a nuclear “deterrent.” Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union as result of the 1994 Budapest Treaty signed by Russia, Ukraine, the United States, France, Great Britain and China. In return for Ukrainian disarmament, the treaty guaranteed the country’s territorial integrity and provided assurances that signatories would not engage in threats or use of force. Putin has violated that agreement, thereby leading many Ukrainians to seek protection under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Cold War alliance whichwould require NATO members to come to Ukraine’s defense if attacked.
There are quite a number of reasons why having Ukraine join NATO would nevertheless be a bad idea. Indeed, it was the eastward expansion of NATO, violating the promise made to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, which is partly responsible for Russia’s resurgent reactionary nationalism that made possible the rise of Putin. As a country which has been invaded from Europe via Ukraine on four occasions, having Ukraine as part of NATO — which was ostensibly formed to defend Western Europe from the USSR — is unnecessarily provocative, particularly since it was originally formed back in 1949 as a supposedly defensive alliance against a superpower which no longer exists.
Just as NATO members and the Soviet Union during the Cold War agreed that countries like Finland and Austria could develop their own democratic systems as nonaligned nations free from threats of foreign aggression, a similar agreement could potentially defuse the current crisis. The Biden administration appears to have rejected that potential compromise, however, by going on record in support of granting Ukraine NATO membership.
At the same time, the United States is correct in asserting that Russia has no right to determine whether another country can or cannot join NATO or any other military alliance, even if that country is located on its border. The Biden administration is also correct in noting the absurdity of the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine is somehow a threat to the larger and more powerful Russia.
However, the same could be said of Cuba and Nicaragua in relation to the United States. In recent decades, the United States has attacked both countries, as well as invading tiny Grenada and supporting coups in Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere due to those governments’ strategic and economic cooperation with Moscow. Washington insisted that these countries — far smaller and weaker than Ukraine and not even sharing a border with the United States — were national security threats requiring the president to declare extraordinary powers to protect the country. Indeed, the United States has intervened militarily as far away as Africa and Central Asia to topple governments that were allying with Moscow.
The United States maintains strict sanctions on Cuba and Nicaragua today, as it does Venezuela. For many years, Americans could be jailed simply for spending money in Cuba as tourists and the U.S. refused to even recognize the Cuban government until barely a decade ago. (Though the restricted political rights and civil liberties in those countries have often been cited as justification for Washington’s hostility, the close relationship the United States has had with far more repressive dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere makes clear that it was not these leftist countries’ systems of government that were the impetus for U.S. actions.)
President Biden has correctly pointed out that pre-emptive war, as Russia is threatening against Ukraine, is illegal. International law does not allow any country to invade another simply because they fear it might eventually become a threat. However, then-Senator Biden used that very reasoning — the possibility of a future threat — in supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Indeed, even after the U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country and the failure to find any of the “weapons of mass destruction” he claimed that Iraq had reconstituted after a UN-led disarmament process, Biden still defended the invasion on the grounds that Iraq might have nevertheless become a threat sometime in the future.
As with the United States during the Cold War, Russia’s hostility toward Ukraine is not simply about potential foreign alliances. Russia may perceive Ukraine’s democratic government (as imperfect as it indeed is) as a “threat” to its increasingly autocratic system — similar to the U.S.’s intervention against socialist governments (as imperfect as their forms of socialism may have been) due to perceived “threats” to the U.S.-driven global capitalist order.
Likewise, Russia’s claims that the limited amount of U.S. aid to Ukrainian liberal opposition groups was somehow responsible for the 2004-2005 and 2013-2014 popular uprisings against unpopular pro-Russian governments are as ludicrous as the U.S.’s claims that the limited Soviet aid to leftist opposition groups was responsible for the socialist revolutions in Central America, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and elsewhere. Though both Moscow and Washington have certainly sought to take advantage of such uprisings to advance their geopolitical agendas, it is wrong to deny agency to the people of those countries who put their bodies on the line in challenging their corrupt and repressive governments.
Biden is correct in noting that countries cannot unilaterally change international boundaries or expand their territories by force, and that such acts of aggression, such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, are clearly illegal under international law. However, the Biden administration has upheld the Trump administration’s decision to formally recognize Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights (seized in 1967) and Morocco’s illegal annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara (conquered in 1975), the only country in the world to do so. U.S. government maps show these conquered lands as simply a part of the occupying powers with no delineation between these countries’ internationally recognized borders and their occupied territories, demonstrating that the United States does not necessarily support upholding these international legal norms.
The international community must certainly take nonmilitary actions to deter further Russian aggression and end the occupation of Crimea. However, given that the United States is led by an administration which has demonstrated that it does not actually oppose such aggression on principle, the United States is in no position to lead any international effort in defense of international law and the right of self-determination.
The U.S. State Departmenton Tuesday approved a sprawling $2.5 billion arms sale to Egypt even as the Biden administration continues towithholda far smaller sum of military aid — $130 million — over expressed concerns about human rights abuses by the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a disconnect that critics said makes a mockery of U.S. leaders’ rhetoric.
Authorized on the 11th anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the weapons sale includes 12 Super Hercules C-130 transport aircraft as well as$355 million worthof air defense radar systems.
“Nothing says ‘the U.S. doesn’t care about your government’s oppression’ quite like announcing $2.5 billion in arms sales to Egypt on the anniversary of the January 25 Revolution,” Ben Freeman, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,wrotein response to the news.
Andrew Stroehlein, European Media director for Human Rights Watch,saidthe Biden administration is “encouraging and assisting Egypt’s torturers” by moving to funnel more arms to theauthoritarian al-Sisi regime.
Two new arms deals for Egypt valued at more than $2.5 billion announced by the State Department on the same day Congress is calling on the Biden administration to reprogram $130 million in military aid away from Egypt for failing to meet human rights conditions. https://t.co/N15y0mqdxs
In September, asCommon Dreamsreported, Biden administration officials announced their decision to provide Egypt with $170 million in military aid while withholding $130 million until the regime meets certain “human rights criteria,” including ending itscrackdownon political dissidents and activists. Egypt was given a January 30, 2022 deadline to comply with the administration’s conditions.
“If human rights were truly the center of our foreign policy, we wouldn’t be selling nearly $1.2 billion in weapons to one of the worst human rights abusers in the world,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)tweetedat the time, referring to earlier U.S. arms arrangements with Egypt.
During apress briefingon Tuesday,Associated Pressreporter Matt Lee pushed State Department spokesperson Ned Price on the seeming incoherence of withholding $130 million on human rights grounds while greenlighting a massive sale of high-tech weaponry to the same brutal regime.
“What is the point of holding — withholding — $130 million in foreign military financing when you’re just going to turn around and sell them $2.5 billion in weapons?” Lee asked.
Price dodged the question, telling Lee that “if we have anything to add on that… we’ll let you know.”
Earlier Tuesday, Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) — co-chairs of Congress’ Egypt Human Rights Caucus — issued astatementurging the Biden administration not to release the $130 million in military aid, warning that the al-Sisi government “has continued to engage in widespread torture, suppression of dissent, and even persecution of American citizens and the families of critics living in the United States.”
“Holding firm on the conditions,” the lawmakers added, “would be consistent with President Biden’s campaign commitment of ‘[n]o more blank checks’ for the Egyptian military regime.”
We should take the examples of the Biden administration reversing course on unpopular decisions — refusing to extend the student loan moratorium, refusing to send masks, etc — as but a taste of the power we could have if we used our rage to get organized. Biden and his cronies are far more scared of our power as workers than they are of our tweets. So, what concessions have been given, have been given to stave off the birth of a social movement that could win a lot more.
The idea that Joe Biden would provide harm reduction was created to help the unpopular candidate secure an electoral victory. The reality is a litany of lies and certain defeat for democrats at the polls. There is no harm reduction in a system dedicated to neo-liberalism and austerity.
On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibility
Joe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.
The president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode.
Every time I watch or read news updates on another promise that Joe Biden has reneged on, I hear this song in my head, jaunty synthesizer music and all. Because I seriously cannot figure out why people believed this guy and all his promises.
Remember the promise he made to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for everyone? Has it happened? Nope. What he has done instead was to extend the loan payment suspension first until January 2022, with payments originally set to resume in February 2022. Then after a nationwide outcry from those burdened with student loans that were coming due in the new year with no relief in sight from a pandemic that continues to ravage the nation, the federal student loan forbearance program was extended again to May 2022 .
President Biden said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay a “serious and dear price” if he orders his reported 100,000 troops stationed along the Russian-Ukraine border to invade Ukraine, a scenario Biden says is increasingly likely. This comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukraine’s president on Wednesday, similarly warning Russia could attack Ukraine on “very short notice.” We speak with The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who says the hawkish U.S. approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a waste of national resources, and says the U.S. should pursue diplomacy instead of throwing around threats of expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. “More attention should be paid to how we can exit these conflicts, how we can find a way for an independent Ukraine,” says vanden Heuvel, who calls the Ukraine conflict a civil war turned into a proxy war. “If there is creative diplomacy, I think you could see a resolution of this crisis.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: President Biden said Wednesday he expects Russia will invade Ukraine, but predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want a full-blown war. Russia has reportedly stationed about 100,000 troops on its Ukraine border and sent troops into Belarus, which also shares a border with Ukraine. Biden said Washington’s response to a Russian invasion will depend on its severity.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia.
AMYGOODMAN: Biden’s remarks about a “minor incursion” alarmed officials in Ukraine. Shortly after the news conference ended, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, released a statement clarifying Biden’s comments about a “minor incursion” by saying, quote, “If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.”
During the news conference, President Biden also predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin will move troops into Ukraine. This is Biden responding to a question from David Sanger of The New York Times about Putin.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: I think he still does not want any full-blown war, number one. Number two, do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will. But I think he’ll pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it. …
I’m not so sure he has — is certain what he’s going to do. My guess is he will move in. He has to do something. And, by the way, I’ve indicated to him — the two things he said to me that he wants guarantees on: One is Ukraine will never be part of NATO, and, two, that NATO — or, there will not be strategic weapons stationed in Ukraine. Well, we can work out something on the second piece, [inaudible] what he does along the Russian line, as well, or the Russian border, in the European area of Russia. …
DAVIDSANGER: Mr. President, it sounds like you’re offering some way out here, some off-ramp. And it sounds like what it is, is at least an informal assurance that NATO is not going to take in Ukraine anytime in the next few decades. And it sounds like you’re saying we would never put nuclear weapons there. He also wants us to move all of our nuclear weapons out of Europe and not have troops rotating through the old Soviet Bloc. Do you think there’s space there, as well?
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: No. No, there’s not space for that. We won’t permanently station, but the idea we’re not going to — we’re going to actually increase troop presence in Poland, in Romania, etc., if in fact he moves, because we have a sacred obligation in Article 5 to defend those countries. They are part of NATO. We don’t have that obligation relative to Ukraine, although we have great concern about what happens in Ukraine.
AMYGOODMAN: That’s President Biden speaking at his two-hour news conference Wednesday.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken is planning to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Friday. Blinken is meeting with some of his NATO counterparts in Berlin today and was in Kyiv Wednesday.
To talk about U.S.-Russian relations, we’re joined by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine. She has been reporting from Russia and on Russia for the last 30 years. She’s also a columnist for The Washington Post. Her latest piece is headlined “Stop the stumble toward war with Russia.”
In your piece, you write, “In the technical argot of diplomacy, what’s going on in the Ukraine crisis is nuts.” Katrina, can you first respond to what President Biden said, what the White House took back after, and actually what is going on?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: Well, I mean, Amy, first of all, what you just listened to, David Sanger of The New York Times, who’s been on the beat to promote a conflict or war with Russia for — with Russia-Ukraine for several years. What’s going on is that the most immediate task is to defuse the immediate crisis. And you can hear in Biden’s — the interstitial pieces of Biden, if you decipher what he said, that there is room, if there was creative diplomacy, if there was as much time spent pondering what Putin is going to do or worrying about the — you know, not even worrying, but ginning up war.
What’s clear is that three presidents — Obama, Trump and even Biden — have said that Ukraine is not a national security, vital security interest of the United States. No president at this moment is going to send men and women to Ukraine to fight. It has become a proxy war, however. It’s been geopoliticized, when in fact it’s a civil war. And there is this relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and it also goes back to the bigger issue, Amy, of NATO expansion. In 1997, there was a vigorous debate in this country about NATO expansion, and key people who knew Russia well warned it would lead to a new Cold War.
So, here we are. And I think it — you know, we’re living at a time, Amy, of pandemic, of racial division, of staggering economic inequality, of climate crisis. And to go to war, or even to contemplate these two new Cold Wars, Russia and China, seems to me nuts. And more attention should be paid to how we can exit these conflicts, how we can find a way for an independent Ukraine, free and whole, between East and West, as opposed to all this talk about more military massing on the border, or even — and I’ll end here — The New York Times the other day planting anonymous intelligence sources warning of a false flag operation which would create a pretext for Russian invasion. There is that danger. Why I use the word “stumble” is that it, you know, looks a little like World War I, where some accident could happen. You’ve got two nuclear-armed countries. And I think instead of focusing on troops and this, let’s find a diplomatic — tough diplomatic solution, and let’s begin the arms control work that needs to be done. The INF could be brought back; it was abolished by John Bolton and Trump, 2019. Today’s the Doomsday Clock announcement. Will it be closer to midnight, which is perilous? Lots of work to be done, instead of all this talk about war, war, war, troops, troops, troops.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, Katrina, we’ll go back in a second to, as you said, a possible diplomatic resolution to the conflict, you know, Blinken’s meetings in the last couple of days, and tomorrow meeting with Lavrov. But you mentioned — and this is a critical issue — the question of NATO expansion since 1997. I mean, it’s staggering. There have been a very large number of countries that have joined since 1997, Eastern European countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and, most recently, North Macedonia. So, two questions: First of all, could you explain why Russia is especially concerned about Ukraine joining NATO? And also, what the significance, the importance of, what the function is of NATO, now that the — I mean, it’s been decades now that the Warsaw Pact was dissolved?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: That is the central question, Nermeen. I mean, when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, naturally one would think NATO would be dissolved, and we would find a new security architecture that wasn’t a militarized one. By the way, in 1997, people like Paul Nitze — I mean, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, McNamara, these people opposed the expansion. But put that aside. The expansion of NATO was the expansion of a military institution, which is dominated by the United States. This is no coffee klatsch. This is a group which brings weapons to the fore. You have to buy certain weapons, you know, get in sync with the whole operation. There are other institutions that could have created, as Mikhail Gorbachev had spoken of a “common European home” from Vladivostok to Lisbon, which wouldn’t have been militarized.
You know, Russia, the Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II. There is a real continuing fear, even in younger generations, about being encircled. And, you know, we had our Monroe Doctrine. We had our spheres of influence. What if Mexico — what if Soviet troops had — Russian troops suddenly decided to alight in Mexico? Borders matter, especially in the Russian historical consciousness. But that is playing a role right now. Ukraine, unlike the other countries you mentioned, has had a very special relationship with Russia, and Russia with Ukraine. Ukraine is a divided country. It is a country that has a right to be fully independent. But it is very much in — a lot of Russians are intermarried with Ukraine. Ukraine is not like Montenegro. And so, I think one has to understand that there is an expression in foreign affairs called strategic empathy. I mean, you try — and if there was standing in the other’s shoes, not condoning, but understanding, I think we would be in a better place.
Finally, Article 5 of NATO demands that NATO members go to the military assistance of countries which are invaded. I come back to the fact that, first of all, no American president, in my understanding, will send American men and women to fight. There is talk of funding an insurgency in Ukraine. How did that turn out in Afghanistan when we funded the mujahideen?
So, there are a lot of issues. But, you know, Gorbachev was promised after German reunification that NATO would not move one inch eastward. That is to be found in archives — National Security Archive, for example. And there is kind of a thought that Putin is asking for written material because he thinks that might protect him from Gorbachev’s fate. I don’t think so. But again I come back to, if there is creative diplomacy, I think you could see a resolution of this crisis. And to have war at this time is to add to the other wars we confront, climate, pandemics.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And as far as the negotiations are concerned, Katrina, can you talk about what we know so far about what happened in the meetings between Zelensky and Blinken, and today his meetings with his counterparts in the EU, and what to expect from what might happen tomorrow with Blinken’s meeting with Lavrov? Yesterday also, on Wednesday, French President Macron, going against what the U.S. has called for, has urged EU states to speak directly to Russia. Could you comment on that, as well?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: That, I think, is very important, and it speaks to a diplomatic resolution that may be able to be revived, either called Minsk, the Minsk agreement, or the Normandy agreement, which was originally Germany, France, Russia, Ukraine, not the United States. But I think it’s a good sign that European countries may have more independence — France, Germany — in working out something with Russia.
And I think, you know, what is happening in Ukraine, I don’t know, except that Zelensky’s rival arrived in Ukraine, Kyiv, the other day, the “Chocolate King,” who was the previous president, and was arrested and is sitting in a courthouse. Why that’s happening now maybe exposes some of the real problems in Ukraine. By the way, Ukraine couldn’t legally enter NATO right now, because its territorial integrity is not whole.
I think Lavrov — and I’ll get in trouble for this — is one of the most steady and experienced diplomats working today. So I think if Blinken and Lavrov could get beyond some of the kind of rhetoric, you could see some real dealings that would be a resolution, perhaps moving back to Minsk and/or finding EU as a vehicle or finding the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. So, I think this is hopeful that there are ongoing meetings, because I do think the crisis immediately, the importance of that being defused then gives some space.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Katrina, before we turn to other aspects of Biden’s comments yesterday and assessment of his first year in office, one last point on what’s happening now in Ukraine. I mean, the U.S. and EU have discussed the possibility of wide-ranging sanctions against Russia as a first step. I mean, there are already sanctions in place. Could you say something about the kinds of sanctions that are being contemplated and the significance of the U.S. possibly cutting Russia off from the dollar-denominated international financial system? What would that mean, and how likely is it?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: Well, I think you’re certainly hearing a lot of talk about punitive sanctions, you know, onerous sanctions. First of all, one needs to understand there are already layers and layers of sanctions on Russia. In fact, the Democrats put forward their sanction bill the other day, and I believe it was Cruz put forward one.
I do think the SWIFT removing Russia from the global trading system could have real implications, but, you know, that could push Russia closer to China and an alternative currency, which would not be helpful to the Europeans or to the United States.
And I think the — again, in Germany, you have the big issue of Nord Stream, the pipeline. It’s an interesting moment, because that is not yet fully approved. There are still regulatory issues. You now have a new government in Germany. The foreign minister is a Green, and the Greens are opposed to the pipeline for environmental and other reasons. So that may be played out apart from sanctions imposed by the United States.
In general, sanctions have not worked. They have made countries more resistant to U.S. pressure. And I think the whole matter of sanction as a foreign policy, in some cases it’s the equivalent of war. The humanitarian cost has to be thought through.
AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there for now and, of course, continue to cover this issue, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, columnist for The Washington Post. We’ll link to your pieces there, the latest one, “Stop the stumble toward war with Russia.” Katrina is going to stay with us as we look at President Biden’s first year in office and the Senate’s failure to pass voting rights legislation after Manchin and Sinema sided with the Republicans to block changing the filibuster. And we will be joined, as well, by Ralph Nader. Stay with us.
The youth-led Sunrise Movement on Thursday deemed President Joe Biden’s first year in office a failure on the existential threat of climate change, which the administration has vowed to tackle while simultaneously greenlighting fossil fuel projects that will worsen the crisis.
In a statement marking the one-year anniversary of the president’s inauguration, Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash said that “Biden is failing us — he’s failing young people and the millions of people that took a chance on him in 2020 because he refuses to meet the moment we’re in right now — from the climate crisis to the student debt crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“While Biden started off his first year strong by ushering through the passage of the American Rescue Plan and undoing most of Trump’s anti-climate executive orders like putting the U.S. back in the Paris Climate Agreement, Biden has stopped leading and is instead feeding us empty promises without delivering on a bold climate agenda,” Prakash continued. “Stump speeches alone will not save us.”
Since Biden took office last January, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than the Trump administration, which was packed with fossil fuel industry allies and enthusiasts.
“Biden can’t be the climate leader he claims to be when he is actively conducting major lease sales and lobbying oil states to produce more fossil fuels,” said Prakash, referring to the president’s November call for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost oil production — a demand that came at the start of the COP26 climate talks.
Meanwhile, the president’s flagship Build Back Better package — a reconciliation measure that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy investments — remains stalled in the Senate largely due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a coal profiteer and major ally of Big Oil.
During a press conference on the eve of his first year as president, Biden acknowledged that the climate proposals are stuck in the upper chamber but blamed Senate Republicans for obstructing them.
“What have they done to do anything to ameliorate the climate change that’s occurring, other than to deny it exists?” Biden said of the GOP.
But in her statement Friday, Prakash argued that it’s up to Biden to bring Manchin and other members of the majority party into line on climate action and other elements of the Build Back Better Act, whose failure could herald a midterm disaster for Democrats.
“He can’t be the Climate President when he refuses to play hardball with Joe Manchin and corporate politicians who have prevented the passage of a historic climate bill that will save lives across the country,” said Prakash. “And he can’t be a strong climate advocate when he creates emissions goals but has yet to demonstrate how he plans to achieve them.”
Going forward, Prakash urged Biden to make full use of his executive authority to achieve key climate objectives such as “banning fossil fuel extraction on public lands” — echoing a demand that more than 360 environmental groups issued Wednesday.
“Put simply, he needs to act with the urgency and courage that the climate crisis demands,” said Prakash. “Doing anything less risks young people’s support, and Democrats’ already slim majorities in the House and Senate.”
Joe Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve longstanding foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.
Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of 10 critical foreign policy issues:
1. Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan.It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the U.S. from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.
Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.
2. Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine.Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states. The U.S. bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.
Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.
3. Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China.President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.
After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.
Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.
4. Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.After Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.
Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.
A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden has still not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.
5. Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine.Biden took office as the first COVID vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the U.S. and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”
Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a nonprofit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the U.S. and other Western countries have chosen to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the COVID virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the delta and omicron variants.
Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for COVID vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.
6. Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow.After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.
Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the U.S. has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.
7. Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantánamo torture victims. Under Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.
In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Twenty years after the U.S. set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.
8. Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries.Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the U.S. tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.
Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the U.S. claim to democratic and human rights credentials.
Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Honduras — and maybe Brazil in 2022.
9. Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and its repressive ruler.Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and to stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to OK a $650 million weapons sale. The U.S. still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
10. Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes.The U.S. is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.
Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.
But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. embassy remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.
Conclusion
Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional, even global, instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.
The U.S. has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.
As a presidential candidate, Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but as president he has instead doubled down on the policies through which the U.S. lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.
Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond, however reluctantly, by adopting more rational ways.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal warned Monday that the upcoming midterm elections could be painful for Democrats if they fail to substantively deliver on their healthcare-related campaign promises, which ranged from tackling sky-high drug prices to lowering the Medicare eligibility age.
“It has been a concern for us,” Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021, told the Washington Post. “You can see it with the number of Democrats in vulnerable districts across the country who want to be able to go back and tell people that we’ve lowered their costs for child care, for pre-K, for elder care, for drug pricing, for healthcare.”
The stagnation of Democrats’ $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package — thanks in large part to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other right-wing lawmakers — has increased the likelihood that the party will enter campaign season having accomplished little on healthcare, which voters consistently view as a top priority.
Republicans, which have obstructed their Democratic counterparts at every turn, are already favored to retake the House in the midterms, riding a wave of voter suppression and aggressive map-rigging.
The current, dramatically scaled-back version of the Build Back Better Act includes a new hearing benefit for Medicare, provisions to reduce sky-high prescription drug costs, and policy changes aimed at addressing the Medicaid coverage gap.
More sweeping proposals to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and add dental and vision coverage to the program were removed at the behest of corporate-backed right-wing Democrats, including Manchin.
The Medicare for All Act — which has the support of a majority of the House Democratic caucus and the public, but not President Joe Biden — hasn’t even been put on the table for discussion. The Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, unveiled in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, mentions Medicare for All just once but does not endorse it.
With Congress and the Biden administration failing to act, pharmaceutical companies are raising prices for prescription drugs at will and Medicare beneficiaries are facing a massive premium hike — neither of which bode well for the party in full control of the federal government.
The healthcare provisions that have survived Build Back Better talks thus far are likely to crumble if Democrats aren’t able to salvage the bill, which has been put on hold as the party focuses on voting rights legislation that also faces long odds in the Senate.
“We’ve campaigned for a long time on taking it to the drug companies and passing the bulk negotiation of prices. It’s something that voters understand,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told the Post. “I think it’s problematic if we can’t get that done.”
With the full Build Back Better Act stuck in the Senate, some vulnerable frontline Democrats are calling on the party’s leadership to break the bill into pieces and hold votes on popular individual elements, including prescription drug price reforms.
“People want to know that the people they elect can get things done that are going to make a difference in the lives of ordinary citizens,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), who narrowly won reelection in 2020.
But some outside progressives argue such an approach would be a mistake and would not increase the likelihood of passage given that individual bills, unlike the full reconciliation package, would be subject to the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster.
“Breaking up BBB at this point when Democrats have foolishly given away all their leverage (by releasing [the bipartisan infrastructure bill]) will only reward and embolden obstruction — while further diluting an already milquetoast bill,” tweeted progressive media strategist Murshed Zaheed.
Ellen Sciales, a spokesperson for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, echoed that criticism in a statement to the Post.
“The idea of breaking up BBB into smaller bills is a false choice for Democrats,” she said. “Everything in the Build Back Better Act is urgently needed.”
“Democrats have a trifecta right now, and instead of pitting programs and communities against each other, the White House and Senate leaders should figure out a way to bring the last two senators on board,” Sciales added, referring to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). “It’s clear the tactic of negotiating in private is failing, and we’re quickly losing our window of opportunity to act.”
President Joe Biden is coming under growing pressure to fire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients—a former private equity executive with no public health background—as the administration continues to face criticism over its slow-moving and inadequate efforts to combat Covid-19.
Watchdog groups have long warned that Zients is not qualified to take on the massive task of leading the federal government’s pandemic response given both his lack of scientific and medical experience as well as his record in the private sector, where his firm invested in a company accused of exploitative surprise billing.
After two years without being able to travel home from London, England to Los Angeles, Cali. to see my family, I finally arrived in a chaotic U.S. in time for the holidays amid the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although I’d been preparing for a difficult return thanks to the new variant, I had been eager to see my family now that I’m finally vaccinated against Covid-19 and that my partner, who holds a British passport, was able to visit alongside me after more than a year of travel restrictions barring Europeans. What I hadn’t been expecting, however, was to find family and friends desperately trying to procure rapid antigen tests as many of them developed Covid symptoms and wanted to protect their loved ones and community over the holidays.
When I was a union organizer with the United Farm Workers I twice served on a contract negotiating committee – as the note-taker. I learned that the very first clause negotiated in any union contract is the ‘Recognition’ by the company of the union’s right to bargain on behalf of the workers.
This recent meeting between Russia and U.S. in Geneva proved to me that Washington does not recognize Russia as an equal bargaining entity. Instead the US arrogantly believes it can pre-determine its policy – in this case steroidal NATO expansion and regime change in Russia. This is clearly the US agenda.
Washington and Brussels (and London of course) can’t afford to recognize Russia as an equal.
A coalition of environmentalgroupsslammedPresident Joe Biden on Friday for refusing to immediately reinstate the federalmoratoriumon coal leasing on public lands that was discarded more than four years ago by the Trump administration.
While the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI)saysthat it is assessing its coal leasing program, the agency responsible for managing public lands has not taken steps to prevent new leases from being sold before a comprehensive environmental review is completed.
Instead, the Biden administration continued to process applications for new coal leases throughout 2021, helping spark a14% increasein coal consumption nationwide, which climate scientistssaycontributed to the ongoing, life-threateningsurgein greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures.
Although the tribal and conservation organizations suing the DOI stress that nothing meaningful has been done to mitigate air, water, and climate damages caused by the federal coal leasing program, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court not to rule on alleged legal violations in afilingsubmitted on Thursday.
“The Biden administration cannot have it both ways on coal,” Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office,saidFriday in a statement. “While they seem to recognize that it is indefensible to continue to allow coal leasing on public lands, they are also refusing to do the bare minimum by reinstating the Obama-era coal leasing moratorium.”
As the coal industry and the states of Montana and Wyoming defend former President Donald Trump’s coal policy in court, the Biden administration is helping to prolong it through inaction, Indigenous rights and environmental advocates argue.
Biden, whovowedon the campaign trail that he would halt fossil fuel extraction on public lands, “came into office promising to be a climate champion,” said Harbine. “But six years after [former] President [Barack] Obama paused our nation’s coal leasing we are now taking steps in the wrong direction.”
After the DOI reversed theObama-era moratoriumin 2017, Earthjustice and a coalition of conservation groups, states, and the Northern Cheyenne Tribewon a legal challengeto that policy in 2019.
The court ordered the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to conduct an environmental review, under the National Environmental Policy Act, before ending the coal leasing moratorium, the coalitionexplained.
However, the groups added:
The Trump-era BLM’s analysis refused to consider the full impact of that choice, instead analyzing only the impact of allowing six coal leases to move forward, including the Alton coal mine expansion in Utah, which a federal judge in Utah determined was approved illegally by the Trump administration. The BLM’s truncated environmental analysis applies to only six federal coal leases, so the groups went back to court in 2020 to challenge it.
Last year, the Biden administration chose to maintain the Trump-era policy ending the coal leasing moratorium. In May of 2021, tribal and environmental groups filed an opening brief challenging the Biden administration’s decision to defend continued coal leasing on public lands.
In a filing just last week, the Biden administration’s BLM defended two Trump-era resource management plans that failed to comply with a court order to account for impacts from burning publicly-owned coal, including on public health, and to consider alternatives that limit coal leasing in the Powder River Basin — the largest coal-producing region in the country.
Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity,saidthat “it’s appalling that the Biden administration is refusing to confront Trump’s reckless policy of federal coal leasing despite mounting, undeniable evidence of catastrophic climate change and rising fossil fuel emissions.”
According toAthan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, “The Biden administration is again missing an easy opportunity to back up its climate rhetoric by limiting the federal coal leasing program, which accounts for 11% of all U.S. climate pollution.”
While Biden haspromisedthat the U.S. government will take the climate crisis seriously, Jeremy Nichols, director of WildEarth Guardian’s Climate and Energy Program,saidthat “it seems as if he has no intention of following through with this promise.”
“Coal is killing our climate, yet the Biden administration is defending it,” Nichols added.
Saul emphasized that the president’s inaction “will worsen the climate emergency and the extinction crisis and lessen the chance that we’ll leave a livable planet to future generations.”
“How can Biden explain this to his grandchildren?” he asked.
As the Biden administration considers changes to Trump-era nuclear policy, 60 national and regional organizations released a statement this week calling for the elimination of 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that are “now armed and on hair-trigger alert in the United States.”
“Intercontinental ballistic missiles are uniquely dangerous, greatly increasing the chances that a false alarm or miscalculation will result in nuclear war,” the statement reads. “There is no more important step the United States could take to reduce the chances of a global nuclear holocaust than to eliminate its ICBMs.”
Progressives, scientists and some Democrats in Congress are also pushing President Joe Biden, who has pledged to reduce U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons in its defense strategy, to adopt a “no first use” policy and declare that the U.S. will never be the first to launch a nuclear attack. Taking such a stance would strengthen the U.S. position in global nonproliferation talks, advocates say.
The White House is slowly pursuing such talks with other nuclear-armed governments including Russia, the United Kingdom and France, which recently issued a joint statement declaring that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Pakistan and India, two regional rivals armed with nuclear weapons, issued statements calling the joint statement a positive development in international arms control.
A “no first use” or “sole purpose” policy, advocates say, would also be consistent with the Democratic Party platform and Biden himself, who has said that nuclear weapons should only be used to deter nuclear attack. The Trump administration went in the opposite direction with its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which says that deterring a nuclear attack is not the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons and nuclear war could be used to deter “non-nuclear” attacks and achieve “U.S. objectives” if deterrence fails.
The Biden administration is working on a new Nuclear Posture Review, which could be completed early this year, according to Politico. The administration would not comment on internal deliberations for the review, but unnamed officials told Politico it is unlikely to include deep cuts to nuclear weapons spending as the U.S. works to overhaul and modernize its vast nuclear arsenal.
Federal spending on nuclear forces is projected to reach $634 billion over the next decade, a 28 percent increase over 2019 projections, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Advocates for arms control said Biden should have — and still could — put the most controversial nuclear weapons projects approved under former President Donald Trump on pause until the new posture review is completed.
Writing for Defense One, Tom Collins, the policy director at the peace group Ploughshares, argues that Biden must act fast to rein in a Pentagon bureaucracy intent on keeping money flowing to the nuclear war machine, or his own policy will end up looking a lot like Trump’s:
The good news is that President Biden knows more about nuclear policy than any commander-in-chief in recent history. If Biden makes this a priority, there is every reason to think that he will approve new policies that will reduce the risk of nuclear war and make the nation and world safer.
Unfortunately, the president has left these crucial issues to officials who are not committed to his vision. A key strategy document — called the Nuclear Posture Review — has been drafted by an entrenched Pentagon bureaucracy that apparently wants to keep core elements of the Trump agenda intact, including new nuclear weapons and more ways to use them.
Biden is under pressure from conservative war hawks in Congress and the Pentagon to avoid cuts to new nuclear weapons programs approved under Trump, as Russia and China are thought to be bolstering their own arsenals. These proposed weapons systems are different than the existing ICBMs, which require billions of tax dollars for upkeep and sit ready to launch in silos located on the U.S. mainland.
The U.S. maintains a vast nuclear arsenal that can strike from the air, sea and land. The statement issued this week reports that 400 ICBM missile silos — relics of the arms race with the Soviet Union that first raised fears that global nuclear war that would lay waste of all of human civilization — are scattered across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Citing a former Defense Secretary William Perry, the 60 peace and civil society groups issued the “call to eliminate ICBMs” on Wednesday. Perry has explained that the ICBMs are the weapons most likely to spark a catastrophic nuclear war. If enemy missiles were launched at the U.S., the president would only have about 30 minutes to decide whether to retaliate before the ICBMs are destroyed, a terrible decision that could result in “nuclear winter,” according to the statement.
“Rather than being any kind of deterrent, ICBMs are the opposite — a foreseeable catalyst for nuclear attack. ICBMs certainly waste billions of dollars, but what makes them unique is the threat that they pose to all of humanity,” the statement reads.
Even if the ICBMs facilities were closed, the U.S. would still retain a devastating nuclear arsenal that could respond to attacks across the world. Missiles carried on submarines and aircraft could kill millions of people. However, they are not subject to the same “use them or lose them” dilemma as the ICBMs.
“Until now, the public discussion has been almost entirely limited to the narrow question of whether to build a new ICBM system or stick with the existing Minuteman III missiles for decades longer,” said Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction, one of the groups that signed the statement. “That’s like arguing over whether to refurbish the deck chairs on the nuclear Titanic. Both options retain the same unique dangers of nuclear war that ICBMs involve.”
The worldview of liberals usually ends at the borders of the U.S. settler-state until they are mobilized by the oligarchy to provide ideological cover for the latest imperialist intrigue. This is as true for the liberal Black “misleadership” class as it is for Euro-American liberals.
But U.S.-centrism and class collaboration are not just maladies of the liberal class. Self-identified radicals or leftists from all backgrounds also suffer from this affliction, resulting in a very thin social base for anti-imperialism in the U.S., and even throughout Western Europe.
So, Ukraine, Russia, and NATO feel like a world away and in no way relevant to the everyday grind that the millions of working people are forced to engage in as part of this vicious, backward social, economic system called capitalism.
One year into the Joe Biden administration and most of the world has accepted two realities. First, America is not back, and Biden’s slogans notwithstanding, there simply is no going back to the pre-Trump era. Secondly, whether America keeps troops in various parts of the world or brings them home, America’s will to fight is by and large no longer there. Its implications for the trans-Atlantic relationship will be profound. Europe would be wise to pro-actively adjust its defense policies accordingly.
American decision-makers have long warned allies and partners that the United States must reduce its security obligations, lighten its military footprints in certain regions and that greater burden-sharing is inescapable.
Working-class families are faced with an extra burden as the new year begins – the expiration of the expanded child tax credit. The expansion provided support for families struggling during the pandemic by changing some key factors of the already existing credit. Namely, the expansion increased the annual amount per child from $2,000 to between $3,000 and $3,600, it paid the credit in monthly installments rather than in one lump sum, and it expanded the full benefits of the credit to families who previously had been ruled ineligible due to their income being too low.
On the same day that the CTC expansion expired, there were almost 450,000 new COVID cases reported, almost double the number reported at the same time in 2021.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin came under fire Saturday after The Washington Postreported that the West Virginia Democrat “does not currently support” passing even his own recent $1.8 trillion counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.
“Sen. Manchin is operating in bad faith,” tweeted Nida Allam, a progressive congressional candidate in North Carolina. “We need to be electing Democrats who are accountable to the American people and working families — not Dems who are reneging on deals which would support millions.”
Journalist Judd Legum, who runs the newsletter Popular Information, said that “if you were a fossil fuel lobbyist and had to construct an ideal strategy not only to kill BBB but to gum up the works for as long as possible it would look a lot like what Manchin has been doing.”
If you were a fossil fuel lobbyist and had to construct an ideal strategy not only to kill BBB but to gum up the works for as long as possible it would look a lot like what Manchin has been doing https://t.co/BXCGIk1izA
In a secretly recorded conversation published last summer by Unearthed, Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative journalism arm, a lobbyist for fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil said of Manchin, “I talk to his office every week.”
Since then, House Democrats have passed a watered-down version of the Build Back Better package. However, progressives within and beyond Congress have grown increasingly alarmed about the bill’s future, especially after the lower chamber caved to a few members of their own party and decoupled it from bipartisan infrastructure legislation.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the six progressives to oppose the decoupling, warned at the time that “passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”
Noting the new reporting, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said Saturday that “the Squad was right to not trust Joe Manchin.”
Manchin — who, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), has long held up a vote on the Build Back Better Act in the upper chamber — confirmed Tuesday that he is not currently talking with the White House about the package, telling reporters that “there is no negotiation going on at this time.”
Citing three unnamed sources, the Post’s Jeff Stein revealed that “privately, he has also made clear that he is not interested in approving legislation resembling Biden’s Build Back Better package and that Democrats should fundamentally rethink their approach.”
“Senior Democrats say they do not believe Manchin would support his offer even if the White House tried adopting it in full — at least not at the moment — following the fallout in mid-December,” Stein continued, referencing a pair of White House statements that called out the senator by name and a Fox News appearance in which Manchin blasted the bill.
In response to Stein’s revelation that Manchin’s offer “may no longer be on the table,” Jake Sherman of Punchbowl Newstweeted that “it’s definitely not.”
“As of now, I have no reporting that Manchin will get back up to [$1.8 trillion]. I talk to him nearly every day and he continues to be exceedingly skeptical of anything,” Sherman said. “Now, could something happen? Sure. Could it happen at [$1.8 trillion]? Maybe. Is that likely today? It doesn’t seem so.”
Not supporting your own last counteroffer seems like a hallmark sign of bad-faith negotiating. https://t.co/whCIYKIdKc
Along with cutting the expanded child tax credit, “Manchin’s offer included no funding for housing and no funding for racial equity initiatives,” according to the Post. His proposal also retained tax increases opposed by Sinema, and though it featured “substantial new climate funds, the underlying policy details of his proposed climate provisions remain unclear and could have proved difficult for the White House to ultimately accept.”
Getting the Build Back Better Act through the Senate requires support from every single member of the Democratic caucus. Though they can use the budget reconciliation process for that package, other bills are being blocked by the legislative filibuster — which Democrats could abolish with majority support, but Manchin and Sinema oppose doing so.
With the Build Back Better agenda stalled, Senate Democrats have shifted their focus to voting rights legislation. While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently vowed to change the chamber’s rules to advance such bills by January 17, progressives argue picking between the sweeping package and protecting U.S. democracy is a “false choice.”
We don’t have to choose between Build Back Better, voting rights or student loan debt cancellation.
These are false choices.
Not only can we afford to do these things—we can’t afford *not* to.
Progressive campaigners plan to keep pushing for Congress to get the Build Back Better Act to Biden’s desk, Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, told the Post.
“The policies we’re fighting for — like letting Medicare negotiate prices — are incredibly popular in West Virginia, and Manchin is clearly not listening to people in his state,” he said. “Biden has to bring the full weight of the presidency to bear on Joe Manchin to get his vote to get Build Back Better across the finish line.”
“I know the grassroots are not in any way giving up on Joe Manchin,” Lawson added, “and we’ll make it harder and harder for him to not listen to what the people in West Virginia are demanding he do.”
Our Revolution agreed that the president “must use his power to deliver his full agenda,” declaring that “it’s the bare minimum to address the crises we face and begin to restore the trust of voters.”
At least two of the state officials arguing against the Biden Administration’s federal vaccine mandates Friday were forced to appear in front of the Supreme Court remotely because they had contracted COVID over the last few days, reports said.
Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers and Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill argued their case over the phone, on behalf of Republican state officials and business groups who are seeking to block two Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) vaccine requirements: one for employers who employ more than 100 people and another for healthcare facilities of any size.
Other attorneys who passed the Supreme Court’s strict COVID-19 guidelines were able to appear in front of the court, which had just eight members present, Reuters reported. Justice Sonia Sotomayor participated in the hearings remotely from her chambers, a spokesperson for the court confirmed.
Everyone present had to present a negative PCR test taken at a court-approved facility before entrance, and wear an N95 or KN95 mask while inside. The public, normally allowed to attend oral arguments, is also barred from entering the building.
Many public health professionals pointed out the irony of Friday’s proceedings: The protocols being followed by attendees are far more stringent than the ones required by the Biden Administration — and have so far worked to prevent an outbreak.
“Now, meeting in a safe, controlled environment, the justices may well block OSHA’s requirements that employers protect workers from exposure to a deadly virus,” epidemiologist David Michaels wrote for The Washington Post this week. “This irony illustrates a fundamental inequity that is so normalized it is essentially invisible: Powerful people can choose to work safely, while vulnerable workers must continue to risk their lives to make a living.”
The court has not yet announced a decision on either of Biden’s COVID safety rules, though reports suggest the conservative majority is likely to reject the Administration’s rules pertaining to large employers. It’s less clear what they will decide on the separate vaccine mandate for healthcare facilities — at least some of the justices appeared more open to this rule than the first, according to CNN.
In 2015, then-deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration Robert Califf worked closely with pharmaceutical and medical device lobbyists on an industry-backed bill designed to accelerate the approval process for new drugs. Califf attended frequent meetings with individuals from Johnson & Johnson and other drug companies, as well as Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) CEO Stephen Ubl, then at trade group AdvaMed, helping to jointly write legislative text that would become part of Republican Rep. Fred Upton’s (Mich.) 21st Century Cures Act, according to a report from InsideHealthPolicy based on a review of internal emails and documents.
When the 21st Century Cures Act passed the House, PhRMA’s Ubl released a statement praising it for including “reforms which enhance the competitive market for biopharmaceuticals and drive greater efficiency in drug development.” The bill relaxes some methodological standards for drug trials, for example by setting up a way for drug companies to submit “real world evidence” about their products’ safety and effectiveness, rather than information from double-blind randomized clinical trials.
Watchdog group Public Citizen blasted Claiff’s ties to industry in 2016, as he was facing confirmation to become FDA commissioner. “The attitudes he has developed over his decadeslong history of extensive financial ties to pharmaceutical and medical device companies leave him all too willing to promote the interests of regulated industries over those of public health and patient safety,” the group said in a blog post. “These entrenched attitudes do not befit the position of FDA commissioner.”
After leaving the government in 2017, Califf went to work as a consultant and compensated board member for several health industry companies including Cytokinetics, Bitterroot Bio, Centessa Pharmaceuticals, and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. Since 2017, he has also worked as an advisor for Google and Alphabet’s life sciences research company Verily, according to his financial disclosure. He also returned to a job he held before his stint in the Obama administration at Duke University, where he told Time in 2015 that his salary was contractually underwritten by pharmaceutical companies including Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Califf has also amassed millions of dollars worth of pharmaceutical company stocks. His holdings include shares worth up to $500,000 in both Amgen and Bristol-Myers Squibb, up to $250,000 in Gilead Sciences stock, more than $2 million in Cytokinetics stock and options, and up to $5 million in Centessa stock options.
Now, Califf may be about to spin through the revolving door once again and take a job as the commissioner of the FDA, a position he held for nearly a year during the tail end of the Obama administration. President Biden nominated Califf in November for the position, and a vote by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to send his nomination to the Senate floor is scheduled for Jan. 12.
Califf’s nomination was quickly celebrated by the pharmaceutical industry. “Congratulations to Dr. Robert Califf for being nominated as the next commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration” lobbying group PhRMA said in a statement. “It’s vital that we have a commissioner who understands the important role the FDA plays in promoting public health and providing science-based oversight of our nation’s medicine supply.”
But Califf’s confirmation is not certain. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) have said they will vote against confirming Califf because of his ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who voted against Califf in 2016, also appears to be leaning no. HELP Committee members Maggie Hassan (N.H.) and Ben Ray Luján (N.M.) have told reporters that they are undecided or have qualms. Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, also a HELP Committee member, has also vowed to vote against Califf’s confirmation. “At a time when the American people pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and as drug companies continue to be the most powerful special interest in Washington, we need leadership at the FDA that is finally willing to stand up to the greed and power of the pharmaceutical industry,” Sanders said in his statement opposing Califf’s nomination.
Even with these Democratic voting no, however, Califf may be able to squeak through and find the votes he needs to be confirmed because four Republican HELP Committee members have already told reporters that they plan to cross the aisle and vote for him. Each of these Republicans have entrenched pharmaceutical industry ties themselves, according to research provided by the Revolving Door Project and a Sludge analysis of campaign finance and financial disclosure data.
HELP Committee Ranking Member Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has told reporters he will vote for Califf and praised the former FDA commissioner at his hearing last month. “Dr. Califf’s unique perspective as a former FDA commissioner coupled with his understanding of partnerships with the private sector and academia that assist in fueling innovation will be vital if confirmed as the next FDA Commissioner,” Burr said in his opening statement.
Burr announced in 2016 that he is retiring at the end of 2022, but he has still received at least $173,600 from pharmaceutical and health products industry PACs since 2017, according to OpenSecrets. The industry has given his campaign and leadership PAC more money since 2017 than any other industry, including maximum donations from the PACs of companies including Abbott Labs, Merck, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer. Over the course of his entire Senate career, OpenSecrets says that Burr’s campaigns have taken in more than $1.6 million from the pharmaceutical and health products industry, including donations from company PACs and employees in the industry. That total makes Burr the third-largest Senate Republican recipient of money from that industry ever.
Burr, who is being investigated by the SEC for possible insider trading after dumping stocks following a confidential covid briefing in February 2020, has also sought to profit from personal financial holdings in the industry. A 2020 review of his trades by ProPublica found that Burr and his wife bought and sold up to $1.1 million worth of stock in companies that make medical devices, equipment, supplies, and pharmaceutical drugs.
Another Republican HELP Committee member that plans to vote for Califf, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), is also an investor in many of the drug companies whose main trade association has applauded Califf’s nomination. In 2021, Tuberville bought and sold stock in Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Regeneron, West Pharmaceuticals, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Some of these transactions were only disclosed by the senator months after they were made, a violation of the STOCK Act that requires financial transactions of members of Congress to be disclosed within 45 days. His annual financial disclosure shows holdings in several pharmaceutical and medical device companies as of the end of 2020 that he does not appear to have sold since, including Pfizer stock worth up to $150,000, investments worth up to $50,000 each in AmerisourceBergen, Abbvie, Allergan, and Eli Lilly, and smaller stakes in Zoetis, Edwards Lifesciences, and Novo Nordisk shares.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has also told reporters that she is voting for Califf. Collins has benefited from $541,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical and health products industry over the course of her career. The senator’s husband, former lobbyist Thomas Daffron, has up to $100,000 invested in the stocks of drug companies Johnson & Johnson and Merck, according to Collins’s 2020 annual disclosure. Collin’s 2020 campaign was chaired by pharmaceutical company lobbyist Josh Tardy, whose clients in Maine have included Eli Lilly and PhRMA, according to a report from Beacon.
HELP member Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who initially told Politico on Dec. 17 that he would support Califf, has taken $102,000 in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and health products industry since first running for congressional office in 2016. His pharmaceutical PAC donors have included PhRMA member companies like Amgen, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Teva Pharmaceuticals.
Update, Jan. 7: In a note today, Sen. Marshall’s spokesperson says that he will not be supporting the FDA nominee.
If Califf’s nomination gets out of the HELP Committee, he is expected to easily be confirmed by the full Senate. His last confirmation in 2016 was approved by a vote of 89-4, with seven not voting.
President Joe Biden signed a record-shattering military budget earlier this week, and a new analysis published Thursday predicted that if recent contracting trends continue, the Pentagon will funnel $407 billion worth of public funds to private weapons makers this fiscal year — more than the federal government spent when sending $1,400 relief checks to most Americans in 2021.
Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, found that “from fiscal year (FY) 2002 to FY2021, 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors.”
“If the privatization of funds rate over the last 20 years holds,” Semler noted, “it means [the] military industry will get about $407 billion from Biden’s first military budget — $16 billion more than the $391 billion those $1,400 stimulus checks cost the government earlier this year.”
Because ~55% of military spending goes to contractors, arms companies will likely get more money from Biden’s Pentagon budget than the public got through his $1,400 stimulus checks: https://t.co/Tbh8X4gOInpic.twitter.com/u7u8kLh6LL
The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2022 was passed with broad bipartisan support earlier this month in the House, where the margin was 363-70, and in the Senate, where the vote was 88-11. By signing the bill into law on Monday, Biden approved a record-high $778 billion military budget.
Even though U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August, Republicans and Democrats awash in weapons industry cash refused to support popular amendments to reduce Pentagon spending.
In fact, lawmakers in the House and the Senate added $25 billion — which happens to be the amount of funding that progressive advocacy group Public Citizen says is necessary to ramp up vaccine manufacturing to inoculate the world against Covid-19 — on top of the already gargantuan $753 billion military budget requested by Biden back in May.
Semler’s calculations are based on the Pentagon’s $740 billion “base” budget — that is, the money allocated strictly to the Defense Department and not the additional $38 billion worth of “nuclear funding from the Energy Department or funding from elsewhere, even though that stuff is rightly considered military spending, too,” he pointed out.
“Military spending involves a massive redistribution of wealth from the public to private sector,” wrote Semler. “There are over 700 lobbyists representing for-profit military contractors in D.C., and this redistribution of wealth is why they’re there.”
In a Jacobin essay published Thursday, Semler argued that Biden is doubling down on the “New Cold War” framework embraced by former President Donald Trump, whose administration claimed that the best way for the U.S. to prevent an armed confrontation with China and Russia “is to be prepared to win one.”
According to Semler:
The difference between Trump’s arms race and Biden’s was supposed to be that the latter would bring a commensurate rise in social outlays. Biden campaigned on spending $7 trillion over a decade—or $700 billion per year, on average—for civil infrastructure, transportation, climate, healthcare, education, and other social programs.
Once in office, Biden’s plan was to beat the drum on China, triggering a rally ’round the flag effect that would convince Congress—conservatives included—to budget for both military and economic competition. As a Democratic congressional aide told Vox in the first months of the Biden presidency, “[t]he best way to enact a progressive agenda is to use China [as a] threat.”
“The Biden administration has done its best to put that theory into action,” Semler argued. “But Biden’s Cold Warrior experiment has failed.”
Who needs expanded healthcare, climate action, affordable housing, and free pre-K anyway???
“While military spending is shooting up as expected — Biden’s budget allocates nearly $40 billion more than the Trump administration, $170 billion more than Obama’s last budget, and 5% more than he campaigned on — less than 8% of the funding Biden sought for his domestic agenda has come through,” he continued.
“Adjusted on a per-year average,” Semler added, “Biden has only delivered $55 billion of the $700 billion he promised for human and physical infrastructure for fiscal year 2022.”
After all this time, the complete lack of a public health-based approach to this pandemic is criminal. The Biden administration has instead chosen to lay all responsibility on the individual decision to vaccinate or not, implicitly blaming the unvaccinated for the ongoing ills resulting from the pandemic. After facing heavy criticism for his administration’s incompetent management of the Omicron surge, Biden recently addressed the status of the pandemic, doubling down hard on this narrative. He said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’ve done the right thing, celebrate holidays as you’ve planned them.”
President Joe Biden cast his successful election as a signal of a return to some semblance of normalcy after the chaos that defined the reign of Donald Trump, as if “normal” could describe a world obsessed with profit and facing a pandemic and climate crisis.
Still, 2021 saw organized resistance to climate destruction and the politics of white grievance, despair and mass death. After a year of shifting narratives, here’s just a few of our favorite stories from 2021 that help us understand where we are at today.
COVID and the Variants
Just as experts predicted, the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19 arose in populous areas of the world where governments struggled to vaccinate enough people. Delta and its contagious mutations are believed to originate in India, and Omicron in South Africa — two countries that have been pleading with wealthy nations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive intellectual property protections for vaccines so cheaper generics could be produced at a mass scale for lower-income countries.
Today, vaccine makers — many of them originally funded by the U.S. and other wealthy governments to develop vaccines — still refuse to share their “recipes” with biotech firms in India and Africa, despite the efforts of dozens of nations, as well as public health and human rights groups across the world. Instead of a patent waiver, the world got vaccine-piercing COVID variants.
Is the United States capable of such a radical transformation? We can’t get people to wear masks in order to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, there are millions of dollars to be made lying to a large segment of the population about issues like climate disruption, and our governing bodies cannot summon the necessary majority to fix a pothole.
Our capitalism is driving everything that is murdering the environment — oil, war, consumption — and that capitalism has powerful defenders.
The pandemic exacerbated another public health emergency: the drug overdose crisis, which reached terrifying new heights in 2020 and 2021. Despite billions of dollars and a decade of attempts at containing the crisis, more than 100,000 people died of an overdose in a year’s time in the U.S.
In June, as the number of overdose deaths continued to shatter records, Truthout’s Maya Schenwar reflected on the life and tragic death of her sister, Keeley. Drug policing discourages people from accessing medical care, Schenwar wrote, and the only “solutions” offered by the criminal legal system can be deadly:
In early 2019, my sister was sentenced to two years in drug court, which meant entering a court-mandated treatment program — the type of program Biden is pushing to expand. Keeley was frequently drug-tested; she knew that if there were illicit drugs in her system, she could be sent back to jail — and possibly locked up for longer than if she’d been sentenced by a regular court. Keeley didn’t feel ready to quit heroin, but she tried, in order to comply with court orders.
When you stop using heroin, your tolerance lowers, making you more vulnerable to overdose. When Keeley relapsed, she died.
My sister breathed her last breath in a tent under a viaduct, hiding from the police.
Some of our favorite stories of 2021 flew under the radar, and others were never fully covered by the dominant media to begin with. All of them leave us with a burning question: What will we do with our rage in 2022?
On June 20, 2020, World Refugee Day, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden made his most sweeping statement to date on how his administration would differ from his predecessor’s on the rights of migrants. Gone would be the “xenophobia and racism” that were “the unabashed tenets of Trump’s refugee and immigration policy.” Biden pledged to increase the cap on refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000 in his first year in office, and to restore “America’s historic role as leader in resettlement and defending the rights of refugees everywhere.”
His first year did not go as promised.
In the fiscal year ending in October 2021, the United States only resettled 11,411 refugees through regular channels. That’s 400 fewer than the previous fiscal year — which itself saw historically low resettlement — and far short of the 62,500 that Biden eventually ordered to be allowed to resettle in the United States in his first year in office. The U.S. has only released data for the first month of the new fiscal year, which shows 401 refugees have been resettled. Biden did finally raise the cap to 125,000, which, if met by the end of September 2022, would represent a massive turnaround not just over previous years, but of the last two decades: The last time the U.S. resettled more than 100,000 refugees was in 1994.
An additional 40,000 Afghans were temporarily allowed into the United States under a program called humanitarian parole, though they have not been issued green cards, and in most cases, their status expires in a year or two. Roughly 30,000 Afghans still housed on military bases are waiting to be allowed into the United States.
Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Program, told Truthout that Biden’s low numbers have a lot to do with Donald Trump’s successful dismantling of the resettlement infrastructure, but plenty of blame rests with the current administration as well. Biden’s “rhetoric of a human rights-centric approach to migration and foreign policy may not be an overarching, guiding principle, but one of many competing considerations,” Varghese said.
Other refugee advocates echo the degree to which Trump dismantled the refugee screening and support apparatuses. “The process of facilitating the resettlement of displaced persons into the U.S. is not like a light switch that can be turned on and off,” said Danielle Grigsby, director of external affairs at the Community Sponsorship Hub, which connects refugees with local sponsors and advocates. “The damage inflicted on the resettlement infrastructure will take significant time to repair.”
Biden’s immigration, asylum and refugee policies in general have been a decidedly mixed bag. His administration has followed through on some long-held progressive priorities, but many others have fallen to the side. In mid-December, the administration ended the longstanding U.S. policy of holding immigrant families in prison-like detention centers, according to Axios. “This is truly a good development, even though the treatment of migrant families writ large continues to be poor,” American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in response to the news. Families can still be subject to confusing and arbitrary seeming court hearings and procedures, and many face significant economic hardships.
Even this development is tempered, as the Department of Homeland Security will continue to rely at least partially on using GPS-enabled ankle bracelets to surveil migrants. Advocates have long criticized the use of bracelets, saying they lead to stigma and are unnecessary to compel migrants to appear in court.
In other areas, the Biden administration is acting with near-total continuity to Trump. Biden continues to invoke a 1944 public health act called Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away asylum seekers without providing them an opportunity to make their case before a judge. Trump used the pandemic as an excuse to implement the rule, which many saw as a flimsy pretext to pursue his openly bigoted policies at the southern border. Biden has also reimplemented Trump’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denies asylum seekers the right to live in the United States while their case is pending. Legal scholars say this practice is illegal and in violation of U.S. treaty obligation and international law.
“It took a couple years for the Trump administration to figure out the nuances of the various immigration programs,” Varghese said. By the time Trump left office, though, he and his team had been very successful in jamming up almost every refugee and asylum assistance program in the executive branch. He and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, took an “all of the above” approach to limiting refugees and immigrants into the country. “That could be changing internal policies, it could be writing new regulations, it could be creating new policies and bureaucracies,” Varghese continued. “It could be by bankrupting [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services], it could be closing offices.”
The plight of refugees is no longer in the corporate headlines, but in 2016, the subject was a major political issue. Then-candidate Donald Trump demonized refugees and asylum seekers constantly, especially Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war. Following his lead, nearly every other Republican candidate promised restricted refugee resettlement to the United States.
Trump and Miller attempted to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the country in the administration’s first week in office. After initially striking the policy down, the Supreme Court ultimately gave the ban its blessing once North Korea and Venezuela were added. The outrage over the “Muslim ban” was perhaps only matched by the administration’s family separation policy at the southern border.
For all the criticism Trump deserves for dismantling the existing refugee apparatus, the Biden administration has not made rebuilding it a top priority, despite early promising signs. In February 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14013, which called for the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program to be “rebuilt and expanded, commensurate with global need.” The order also revoked the discriminatory restrictions Trump had imposed, and called for additional reporting from the responsible executive agencies to determine what other changes could be made to address the refugee backlog.
Then, somewhat inexplicably to outside observers, in April, Biden refused to raise the resettlement cap from Trump’s historically low 15,000. He reversed course two weeks later, bowing to pressure from progressives and refugee advocates. His administration’s new policy to resettle 125,000 refugees by September signals, on paper at least, a renewed commitment to expanding the assistance program. Whether the executive branch will actually devote the resources, time and political efforts to achieve those goals remains to be seen.
The issue of refugee resettlement in the United States, and migrant humanitarian concerns throughout Europe and the rest of the world, will likely become more pressing with every year. The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, along with continuing conflicts throughout the Middle East and Africa, all but ensure migration levels will stay at near-record highs for the foreseeable future.
Deeply intertwined with migration from conflict zones is migration driven by climate change. The United Nations predicts that 200 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 due to rising temperatures, drought, flooding, extreme weather and conflict over resources.
The treatment of refugees has largely taken a backseat to other liberal priorities under Biden. The administration has prioritized its COVID response and push for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, two of Biden’s few major legislative accomplishments to date, all while trying to balance demands for increased attention to voting rights, gun control, health care costs, and other headline issues. The record-low number of refugees admitted barely made a blip in the mainstream media ecosystem. The State Department refused to comment on the record.
Varghese and other refugee advocates would like to see Biden take a holistic approach to migrant rights and assistance, and to redouble his administration’s efforts. “What we’ve seen is basically a political calculation” from Biden to treat refugee issues as “just one factor among many,” Varghese said. “The Trump administration was so singularly focused on paring down humanitarian immigration programs” that Biden’s measured approach “is not enough to combat four years of a whole-of-government approach to tear down refugee resettlement.”
A group of 11 Haitian asylum seekers is suing the Biden administration, accusing the U.S. government of physical abuse, racial discrimination and other rights violations when they were forced to shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The class-action lawsuit comes after images of Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian asylum seekers from horseback went viral in September, drawing outrage from rights groups. The plaintiffs in the case are also demanding the U.S. government allow the return of the thousands of Haitian asylum seekers deported from the Del Rio encampment. Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which filed the class-action lawsuit, says the Biden administration’s policies harm vulnerable people. “We believe that the lawsuit will force the administration to be accountable for what we continue to see as anti-Black racism within the immigration system,” she says. “Immigration is a Black issue. We cannot disconnect that from the reality after what we saw under the bridge in Del Rio.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
A group of 11 Haitian asylum seekers has filed a class-action lawsuit against the Biden administration, accusing the government of physical and verbal abuse, racial discrimination, denial of due process, and other severe rights violations while they were forced to take shelter under a bridge in the borderlands of Del Rio, Texas, in September. It was in Del Rio where U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback whipped Haitian asylum seekers as they waded across the Rio Grande. One of the plaintiffs says she was, quote, “terrorized by officers on horseback.” As part of the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are also demanding the U.S. government allow the return of the thousands of Haitian asylum seekers deported from the Del Rio encampment.
We’re joined right now by Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which is part of the class-action suit. Guerline recently won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Congratulations, Guerline, and welcome back toDemocracy Now!Can you talk about the —
GUERLINEJOZEF:Thank you so much, Amy. Thank you so much for having me.
AMYGOODMAN:Can you talk about the significance of this lawsuit?
GUERLINEJOZEF:Absolutely, Amy. We believe that the lawsuit will force the administration to be accountable for what we continue to see as anti-Black racism within the immigration system. We clearly understand from the testimonies and reports of the people who were abused, the witnesses and potential victims of what happened, including Mirard Joseph, who is the gentleman we all saw in that picture being grabbed by the officer on horseback, pushing and really abusing him.
So, the whole lawsuit is really in solidarity of the people who came and asked for safety, the people that the administration have decided to disappear by expelling and deporting them, by silencing their voices and their stories. So this is why we felt it was necessary to hold the administration accountable.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And, Guerline, so far, the Biden administration has allowed over 120 deportation flights, with about 14,000 migrants of Haitian descent being deported. Are all of them being sent back to Haiti?
GUERLINEJOZEF:Absolutely, which is a painful reality for our community. As of September, the people we saw under the bridge, close to 11,000 of them have been deported and expelled, including the gentleman we saw on the picture. And under President Biden, as you mentioned, 120 flights have been sent to Haiti, even in the middle of the extreme uprising, as we have spoken about before, as we see the country continues to go under extreme political unrest. At the same time, the United States is putting a Level 4 — do not travel to Haiti — and asking U.S. citizens who are in Haiti to leave the country immediately, and then deporting asylum seekers, people who have come here simply in search of protection, sending them back to Haiti.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And the administration has also begun a new Remain in Mexico program for asylum seekers. How is the Mexican government dealing with those who are told to remain in Mexico, if they are from Africa or Haiti or non-Spanish-speaking countries?
GUERLINEJOZEF:What the government has done, they have expandedMPP, Remain in Mexico, which we really call the migrant persecution protocol. As of right now, they have expanded it to include everyone from the Western Hemisphere, including people from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil.
And what does that do? For Haitians specifically, they are in limbo, because Title 42 is still in full effect. That means they can expel and deport them under Title 42, and then return them to Mexico underMPP, or just leave them to be unable to get protection, understanding that Black people in Mexico cannot hide. They are extremely vulnerable, extremely visible. That’s why we stand against Title 42, againstMPP, and demand that the administration provide a safe and orderly way for people to get protection and ask for asylum.
So we are really pushing really hard and standing with our plaintiffs, with our brothers and sisters in social protection. And we will hold President Biden and the entire administration accountable for what we all witnessed, the horrific pictures, the horrific videos that we saw. They must be held accountable.
AMYGOODMAN:So, you have 11,000 Haitians deported back to Haiti. But in other immigration news, the Biden administration has announced plans to allow 20,000 more immigrant workers into the U.S. temporarily via the H-2B visa program, because companies are saying that they don’t have enough workers. Sixty-five hundred of the visas will be set aside for applicants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti. Can you talk about what’s going on here, deporting thousands and thousands, and then, what, will some of the people who have been deported be brought back up?
GUERLINEJOZEF:Absolutely not, not under that program. That’s why we are asking for the administration to bring the people back, because at the same time, as you just mentioned, Amy, it doesn’t make sense. And we also understand that it is extremely impossible for people to even get access to the U.S. Embassy in Haiti. So, even if that program was in effect, how will the people have access to the program? And why will they deport Haitians coming into the country and then say they will provide visas for people in search of protection?
So, we are calling on all of those to be held accountable. We are making sure that people have access to whatever protection that are afforded to them under the law. And we will continue to push to make sure that asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border are protected no matter where they are from, but also understanding that the anti-Black racism is at the root of what we are watching. And we want to make sure people understand that immigration is a Black issue. We cannot disconnect that from the reality, after what we saw under the bridge in Del Rio.
AMYGOODMAN:Guerline Jozef, we want to thank you for being with us, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
By the way, tune in to our holiday special on Friday when we speak toNSAwhistleblower Edward Snowden and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges. Next week, we’ll bring you a 25th anniversary special, as well as an hour with Noam Chomsky, as part of our year-end conversations.
That does it for today’s show.Democracy Now!is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Mary Conlon. Our general manager is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude and Dennis McCormick.
You can accessDemocracy Now!at democracynow.org and check outDemocracy Now!onInstagram, onFacebook, onYouTubeand beyond. Tell your friends about independent, international, investigative news hour that isDemocracy Now!I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Remember, wearing a mask is an act of love.
