US Politics

Fauci: hospitalization figures a better guide to Omicron than case count But government’s top medical adviser warns public not to be fooled by data suggesting variant lacks severity of earlier variants The US government’s top medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has joined a growing body of experts who say hospitalisation figures form a better guide to the severity of the Omicron coronavirus variant than the traditional case-count of new infections.Teens and young adults driving record Covid cases in US, health officials sayRead moreReferring to the Omicron surge in the US as a “tsunami”, Fauci also cautioned the public not to be fooled by preliminary data suggesting the variant lacks the severity of earlier Covid-19 variants, such as Delta.“You have a virus that looks like it might be less severe, at least from data we’ve gathered from South Africa, the UK and even some from preliminary data from here in the US,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.“It’s a very interesting, somewhat complicated issue … so many people are getting infected that the net amount, the total amount of people that will require hospitalisation, might be up. We can’t be complacent in these reports. We’re still going to get a lot of hospitalisations.”On ABC’s This Week, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked if it was time to focus less on just the case count, which has soared close to 500,000 reported new daily infections. A number of experts have questioned if such reports cause unnecessary worry, and suggest deaths and hospitalisation data should better inform mitigation efforts.“The answer is, overall, yes,” Fauci said. “This is particularly relevant if you’re having an infection that is much, much more asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic, particularly in people who are vaccinated and boosted. “The real bottom line that you want to be concerned about is, are we getting protected by the vaccines from severe disease leading to hospitalisation?”The Biden administration has made improving vaccination rates a priority but concedes progress is slower than it would like. Fewer than 25% of US children are vaccinated, pediatric hospital admissions are surging and nationally only 62% of eligible residents are fully vaccinated with barely a third receiving a booster. “I’m still very concerned about the tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated at all because even though many of them are going to get asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic, a fair number of them are going to get severe disease,” Fauci said.Surging infection rates, Fauci told CNN, will likely cause disruption to everyday life, already evidenced in pressure on healthcare in several states and in other areas such as education and public transport. A number of universities and school districts will begin 2022 online and in New York City several subway lines have been suspended through staff shortages.Fauci said those concerns contributed to the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week to reduce the recommended isolation period for those who have tested positive but are asymptomatic from 10 days to five.“You’re certainly gonna see stresses on the system, the system being people with any kind of jobs, particularly with critical jobs, to keep society functioning normally. We already know there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities, that sometimes 30% of the people are ill.“The CDC is trying to get a position where people without symptoms who are infected, that you can get them back to work a little bit earlier if they remain without symptoms.”But he rejected criticism that the change was sparked by economic pressure rather than science. “In the second half of a 10-day period, which would normally be a 10-day isolation period, the likelihood of transmissibility is considerably lower,” he said. “For that reason, the CDC made the judgement that it would be relatively low risk to get people out.“You’re right [that] people are concerned about, ‘Why not test people at that time?’ I myself feel that that’s a reasonable thing to do. I believe that the CDC soon will be coming out with more clarification of that since it obviously has generated a number of questions about that five-day period.”The new mayor of New York, Eric Adams, said he thought the city was doing “an amazing job” of reacting to the shifting challenges of the pandemic, including transportation issues and having one-fifth of police out sick.US experts question whether counting Covid cases is still the right approachRead more“We are pivoting based on where the urgency is located. We’re not taking it one-size-fits-all, we’re thinking about it and making the right moves and decisions,” he told ABC.“I was with my police commissioner. We have a 20% sick rate but now we have officers coming back after the five days.“But we can’t live through variants. We spent $11tn on Covid and we don’t have another $11tn, so our lives can’t be based on what’s the new variant. No. We have to figure out, how do we adjust?“I say to those who are not vaccinated, ‘Stop it. It’s time to get vaccinated. It’s time to have the booster shots. You’re endangering yourself and you’re endangering the public and your family as well.’”TopicsBiden administrationAnthony FauciJoe BidenUS politicsOmicron variantCoronavirusnewsReuse this content More

One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollWashington Post releases survey showing ‘considerably higher’ number saying it is sometimes right to take up arms

The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
One in three Americans believe violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a new Washington Post poll.Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midtermsRead moreThe survey, with the University of Maryland, was released on New Year’s Day – five days short of a year since rioters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden.According to the authors of The Steal, a new book on Republican attempts to fulfill Trump’s aim through legal action in key states, the rioters of 6 January 2021 “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.But it was still by far the most serious attack on the seat of federal government since the British burned Washington in 1814 and the Post poll comes amid a sea of warnings of growing domestic strife, even of a second civil war.The Post reported: “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34%, which is considerably higher than in past polls by the Post or other major news organisations dating back more than two decades.“… The view is partisan: The new survey finds 40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.”Other polls have found that more than half of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that Biden won the White House thanks to electoral fraud, and do not trust elections.As pointed out by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, authors of new book The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and People Who Stopped It, Trump was ultimately stopped by “the integrity of hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them … Republicans, some … Trump supporters”.Nonetheless, at a rally near the White House on 6 January, Trump told such supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause.“And if you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore”.Five people died, including a rioter shot by law enforcement and a police officer.The Post poll found that 60% of Americans said Trump bore a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the Capitol attack. However, 72% of Republicans and 83% of Trump voters said he bore “just some” responsibility or “none at all”.The Post reported: “A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified – but the 62% who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90% said violence was never justified.”The paper interviewed some respondents.Phil Spampinato, 73, from Dover, Delaware, and a political independent, said he first “contemplated the question of whether violence against the government might be justified” as a way of “defending your way of life” after he saw Republicans changing state laws to restrict voting by Democrats and to make it easier to overturn results.US ‘closer to civil war’ than most would like to believe, new book saysRead more“Not too many years ago,” Spampinato said, “I would have said that those conditions are not possible, and that no such violence is really ever appropriate.”Anthea Ward, a Republican 32-year-old mother of two from Michigan, said: “The world we live in now is scary. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it feels like a movie. It’s no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It’s a war between good and evil.”Ward said she did not approve of the Capitol attack. She also said she would not participate in violence over Covid-19 vaccine mandates – another social flashpoint.But, the Post reported, Ward did say other people could be justified in choosing to “express their second amendment right” if the government “infringe[d] their freedom of choice” over vaccines, “and nonviolent action such as protests were unsuccessful”.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More

The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague have produced an indispensable and alarming ground-level record of how Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election played out in precincts and ballot-counting centers in key statesIn their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animalsRead moreThe “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”.That real insurrection is the subject of this timely and important volume. The authors have used a stethoscope to examine the minutia of the American election process. The result is a thrilling and suspenseful celebration of the survival of democracy.The attempted coup was led by Donald Trump. Its intended denouement, in which the vice-president, Mike Pence, would ignore the votes of the six states above plus Washington DC in order to swing the election to Trump, was outlined in an insane memo written by the lawyer John Eastman, described here as “surely the most seditious document to emerge from the White House in American history”.That final act, of course, never happened. Not even Pence, the most sycophantic vice-president of modern times, could bring himself to violate the constitution so blatantly to keep his boss in the White House.But the genuine heroes, brought to life here, were the “hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them were Republicans, some were Trump supporters. They refused to accept his slander of themselves, their communities and their workers, and they refused to betray their sworn duty to their office and their country. They were the real patriots.”Bowden and Teague – the latter a Guardian contributor – take us through six battles that lasted from the night of the election, 3 November 2020, until Joe Biden’s election was finally certified by Congress early on 7 January last year.Their book performs a vital service, demonstrating just how well our tattered democracy managed to function despite vicious partisanship and all the new challenges created by the pandemic. For the first time, I understood how brilliantly new machines used to count the votes performed, the intricacies of opening outer and inner envelopes, capturing the images of both then preserving the vital paper ballots inside, making it possible to confirm electronic results with a hand count in case of any failure in technology.In Arizona, the elections department conducted “the mandatory hand count of election day ballots from 2% of the vote centers and 1% of the early ballots as required by Arizona law and it yielded a 100% match to the results produced by the tabulation equipment”.Scott Jarrett was co-director of elections in the populous Maricopa county, and he is one of the crucial bureaucrats celebrated here: “A pale slender young man … dressed in a plain gray suit, the very picture of an earnest functionary, a man happily engaged in the actual machinery of government and quietly proud of his own unheralded importance and competence.”In a public hearing crowded with crazed conspiracy theorists, Jarrett carefully explained how only one of the two “encrypted memory cards (both with tamper-proof evidence seals)” was transported from various polling centers to the main counting location, “so that the results on one card could be double-checked against the other as well as the precinct ballot report they had generated. Backing up that memory were, of course, the actual ballots that had been run through the machines. The memory cards and the ballots were sealed and delivered by “two members of different parties”, escorted by county sheriffs.Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, noted that if the eyes of some in the audience were glazing over, he just wanted “people that are watching this” to understand “we don’t glaze over”.The authors point out that Hickman was touching on a fundamental feature of The Steal, the factitious narrative concocted by Trump and his cronies: conspiracy theorists depend on ignorance.“They begin with distrust: only a sucker believes the official story. They then replace the often tedious, mundane details of an intricate process … with a simpler narrative”: theft.They invent colorful stories about a “deal struck with a late Venezuelan dictator to deliver tainted election machines, or a plot to preprint fake ballots in the dead of night”. This creates what cognitive scientists call “a community of knowledge”.The big problem that didn’t exist even 30 years ago is the speed with which such idiotic stories are spread through the internet and by the Twitter feed of a malevolent president like Trump, exploding the reach of such stories and their power to undermine democratic norms.March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican readsRead moreThe book reminds us that democracy itself depends on a modicum of trust. That is why Trump’s ability to persuade so many Americans of the truth of so many lies has had such a disastrous effect on our body politic.Bowden and Teague have performed a singular service by revealing the details that disprove Republicans’ unceasing inventions about voter fraud.The problem is that so many Republicans will continue to ignore the lessons of this book. American democracy could still be destroyed by the torrent of voter suppression laws already passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures, spurred by lies invented by Trump and amplified by insidious “journalists” like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, whose perfidy is brilliantly dissected in these pages.If democracy does prevail, it will survive because of the ability of authors like Teague and Bowden to make the truth even more compelling than Fox News fictions.
The Steal is published in the US by Atlantic Monthly Press
TopicsBooksUS elections 2020US politicsUS domestic policyUS political financingDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

Republicans aim to sow outrage, Trump-style, with an eye on 2022 midterms Republicans embrace the culture war battles Trump waged, as a strategy for winning back control of the House and SenateThe debate was ostensibly over a stop-gap spending bill that would avert a government shutdown. But Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, seized the opportunity to accuse Democrats of supporting “unconstitutional” vaccine mandates, critical race theory, “woke gender ideology” and open borders. A vote to fund the federal government, he warned, was a vote to allow “tyranny over the American citizen”.The speech infuriated Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio.“Tyranny?” Ryan fumed on the House floor. “What are you people talking about? We’re talking about universal preschool, and they have it as a communist indoctrination of the American student. It’s insane.”Ryan’s frustration crystallized a dilemma for Democrats as they defend paper-thin majorities in Congress next year: how to talk about their legislative victories when Republicans are talking about everything else.Emboldened by a string of off-cycle electoral victories, Republicans are embracing the culture war battles that Donald Trump waged from the White House as a strategy for winning back control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.“Lean into the culture war,” was the title of a June memo from the leader of the House Republican Study Committee, Indiana congressman Jim Banks.The “culture war” offensive comes as Democrats, facing deep economic malaise and historical headwinds, race to deliver on the president’s domestic agenda, which includes an ambitious social policy package that faces serious legislative hurdles, hampered by Democratic holdout senator Joe Manchin.“We have a plan to give you a better country, and they have a ploy to win back power for themselves,” said New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We are tackling the tough problems of the economy and the pandemic. They seek only to win power and will say or do anything to achieve that.”The party controlling the White House typically loses seats in the first midterm elections of a new presidency. With Biden’s plunging poll numbers, uncertainty over the centerpiece of his legislative agenda and Republicans’ redistricting edge, Democrats are increasingly dour about their chances. In the House, Democrats can only afford to lose a handful of seats; in the Senate they cannot afford to lose a single one.Maloney said selling their economic achievements – a popular, bipartisan infrastructure law and a poverty-reducing pandemic relief package – is critical for Democrats. But he said the party must also aggressively confront the Republican cultural assault. He urged Democrats to call out the opposition party’s embrace of “dangerous and reckless conduct”, which includes amplifying Trump’s false claims of a stolen election and downplaying the seriousness of the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.On social issues, he believes that Republicans have pushed too far, particularly on the issue of abortion. As the supreme court considers whether to weaken or overturn the landmark Roe v Wade precedent, Democrats are loudly trumpeting their support for women’s reproductive rights, as they try portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party determined to ban abortion.“We’re dealing with a Republican party that wants to ban abortion in all 50 states, bring back mass incarceration and burn books,” he added. “We’re not just going to respond, we’re going to be on offense.”Grievance politics is not a new strategy for Republicans. In 1968, Richard Nixon employed the “Southern Strategy” to exploit white racial grievances coded in language such as “law and order” and “states’ rights”. But as partisanship grows and the parties become increasingly hostile to one another, so too has the potential political benefit of cultural warfare that inflames division and energizes their base.A recent report by the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution, titled Competing Visions of America, found that 80% of Republicans believe that “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity”. By comparison, just 33% of Democrats agree. Meanwhile, 70% of Republicans say “American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s” while more than six in 10 Democrats say it has changed for the better.As Democrats negotiate amongst themselves over how to pass Biden’s signature domestic policy bill, Republicans have been seeding outrage over – and fundraising off of – all manner of perceived injustices from cancel culture to Dr Seuss to the 1619 Project. They are hammering the administration over its handling of immigration at the southern border and Democrats over rising crime rates in cities. And Biden’s efforts to pursue racial equity as part of his governing agenda has drawn accusations of racism from conservatives who say the efforts discriminate against white people.Republicans are also leading the charge against the administration’s vaccine mandates for companies with more than 100 employees, which they say is an example of “radical” Democratic overreach.On that issue, Republicans are speaking to their base, which is disproportionately unvaccinated. An NPR analysis found that the stronger a county’s support for Trump in the 2020 election, the lower its Covid-19 vaccination rate. But Republicans are betting that opposition to vaccine mandates, terms of personal liberty, will resonate beyond their base.In legal challenges to the mandates, Republican leaders argue that the vaccine mandates will worsen the nation’s supply chain problems and exacerbate labor shortages that have arisen during the pandemic.But with the Omicron variant circulating, Democrats believe public sentiment is firmly behind them. Americans increasingly support vaccine mandates for workers, students, and in everyday public life, according to a recent CNN poll, which found 54% in favor of requiring vaccinations for employees returning to the office.The challenge for Republicans is to avoid alienating moderate voters in the suburbs with their efforts to energize their supporters who are deeply loyal to Trump and have come to expect their politicians to loudly voice their grievances.Republicans believe their unexpected success in Virginia, a state Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020, provides a playbook.In November, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the race for Virginia governor after pledging to ban critical race theory from the state’s public schools. Democrats were surprised by the potency over culture war fight over education, allowing Youngkin to rev up the conservative base while appealing to suburban parents’ frustrations over Covid-19 school closures and masking protocols in classrooms.“It’s the oldest trick in the book,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert and host of Words To Win By. “It’s creating some sort of an ‘other’ so that we don’t notice that they’re actually the cause of our problems.”In Virginia and elsewhere, she said Democrats were caught “flat-footed” by concerns over critical race theory, a concept that, until recently, few outside of academia had ever heard of. Instead of confronting it, she said Democrats’ instinct was to deny support and dismiss the charge as a right-wing talking point, neither of which satisfied voters.Democrats need “an explanation for the rightwing’s origin story of ‘this is why you’re suffering white man in the post-industrial midwest’,” Shenker-Osorio said. “Unless we can talk about race, about gender, about gender identity, our economic promise isn’t going to land.”Columnist Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, put it another way: “Once again, the Democrats showed up to a culture war gunfight brandishing a 2,000-page piece of legislation.”While Democrats agree they have a problem, they are at odds over how to fix it.Some argue that the party has moved too far left on cultural issues, a shift that has alienated non-college educated white voters and, increasingly, working-class Latino and Black Americans. Another cohort believes that instead of trying to recapture the voters who have abandoned the party, Democrats should find a message that appeals to a diversifying electorate.Proponents of this approach believe Democrats should respond to the right’s attacks by adopting what they call a “race-class narrative”, which Shenker-Osorio helped develop.The approach explicitly accuses Republicans of using racism or racial dog whistles as a divide-and-conquer tactic to sow distrust, undermine faith in government and protect the wealthy. When applied, the message not only defangs Republican attacks, it motivates and mobilizes voters of all races, its advocates argue.“Our task is to make the idea of joining together across our differences – the idea of multiracial solidarity, as a means to collectively get these shared values that we all want – sexier than the grievance politics that the right is selling,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Way to Win.In a recently published memo, advocated candidates use the “blows are landing because our agenda and accomplishments remain so far undefined in the minds of voters”.Among its messaging recommendations, the group urges Democrats to contrast the party’s economic vision with a “Republican party that is beholden to Maga extremism” while doing more to sell their legislative achievements and highlight the steps they’ve taken to combat Covid.“The good news is that these are not insurmountable challenges,” the memo states.An increasingly vocal coterie of liberal critics believe the outlook is grimmer: that Democrats are staring into the political wilderness unless they are able to win back some of the non-college educated voters who abandoned the party.Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and election analyst, believes Democrats have moved too far left on social issues like crime and immigration and is in need of a complete rebrand. He said Trump’s gains with non-college educated Hispanic voters was a “real wake-up call” that Democrats need to change course.“We need a durable majority,” he said. “You can’t build a durable majority by ignoring socio-cultural concerns and the values of these huge swaths of the population.”Where Democrats agree is that they must deliver on their promises while in power.“We’re really just at the beginning of what needs to be a substantial change in the way the American economic model works,” Teixeira said. “And to do that, it’s not enough to just win one election and pass some stuff. We need to win a number of elections and pass even more stuff … It’s not much more complicated than that.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

New York presses ahead with New Year’s Eve party despite record Covid cases ‘We’re fighting our way through this,’ says outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio, but decision is in contrast to public health messaging New York City’s leaders are pushing ahead with plans for the annual New Year’s Eve party in Times Square despite record numbers of new Covid infections driven by the Omicron variant.Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is set to step down at midnight on Saturday, told NBC’s Today show that pressing ahead with the public celebration would show “that we’re moving forward, and we want to show the world that New York City is fighting our way through this.“It’s really important to not give up in the face of this,” he added.De Blasio has already scaled back celebrations from the “full-strength” celebration he originally approved. Crowds will be limited to 15,000, down from 60,000 pre-pandemic, and everyone who enters must wear a mask.But the decision to press ahead comes in contrast to public health messaging from Washington and decisions in other large, populous cities, including San Francisco and Atlanta, to cancel their events.On Wednesday, White House health advisor Dr Anthony Fauci said he approved of small, at-home New Year’s Eve gatherings among vaccinated and boosted individuals but urged Americans to cancel plans to attend larger gatherings.“If your plans are to go to a 40- to 50-person New Year’s Eve party with all the bells and whistles and everybody hugging and kissing and wishing each other a happy new year, I would strongly recommend that this year we do not do that,” Fauci said at a Covid-19 briefing.De Blasio said Thursday: “Our health-care leadership believes this is the right way to do it.” He said his administration had not held discussions about canceling or reducing the “ball drop” event further.“We’ve got to send a message to the world. New York City is open,” he said, adding that the festivities at Times Square would “show the world that New York City is fighting our way through this”.Incoming mayor Eric Adams cancelled his inauguration party, but is still scheduled to take his oath in Times Square soon after the ball drop. He expressed hope on Thursday that 2022 would be “a new beginning of our resiliency”.New York governor Kathy Hochul released figures on Thursday showing that the city, state and country are all breaking records for newly confirmed Covid-19 infections. New York state has set a new high in the average number of daily reported cases for the last 11 days.Across the state, more than 7,700 are currently hospitalized with the virus and the number is increasing. The city reported a record number of new, confirmed cases – more than 39,590 – on Tuesday, according to New York state figures.“As we approach the New Year it is vitally important that we don’t let our guard down in our fight against the pandemic,” Hochul said. “We have the tools and we know what works – mask up, get vaccinated, get boosted, and exercise caution in large gatherings, especially this weekend.”The decision to press on with the Times Square party has received criticism from other elected officials. Mark Levine, who takes over as Manhattan borough president tonight, called for the event to be cancelled.“We are not doing enough to slow this,” he said on Twitter. “Now is the time to act. Time is of the essence.”That warning comes as one fifth of the city’s police force is out due to virus infections, according to NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea.Kelly Doran, an emergency physician with NYU Langone, tweeted: “Pretty unreal to me that NYC is still holding its big New Year’s Eve bash tomorrow when Covid cases are higher than ever, hospitals are having to call in visiting help & cancel elective surgeries, and FDNY is pleading with the public not to call 911.”As many as 20% of the city’s restaurants and bars are temporarily shuttered and owners report a sharp drop in trade. On Thursday, some of the thousands of tourists visiting the city for New Year said they were not unduly inconvenienced by the sharp rise in Covid infections.“We prefer to go to places where there are less people. On New Year’s eve we will stay in our hotel,” said Antonio Palmeri, visiting from Turin with friends. “But it is our dream to be in New York so we are happy to be here.”Tourists visiting the bronze charging bull on lower Wall Street on Friday said while they were anxious about the number of cases, they wanted to continue enjoying their visits.“The reality is that everyone is fatigued by the pandemic, and at this point everyone knows they should be doing what they can to stay safe, but at this point we’re in a fuck it phase,” said Ben Martin, visiting from Boston.“If the government is telling us to be less careful by cutting quarantine times in half, and we should go back to work, we’re all in the space of like whatever…We don’t have the energy to keep stressing as much.”TopicsNew YorkBill de BlasioUS politicsCoronavirusOmicron variantnewsReuse this content More

How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the DemocratsMark BlythJoe Manchin torpedoed his party’s key bill for the same reason Italy protected the sparkling wine – the local growth model If you get a bad taste in your mouth when you hear the name Joe Manchin – the fossil fuel industry-backed senator from West Virginia who torpedoed his own party’s “Build Back Better” bill just before Christmas – you might want to reach for a glass of something to wash it away.Given that it’s New Year’s Eve, there’s a reasonable chance you’re guzzling a glass of prosecco, which now accounts for just under half of all bubbly drunk globally. While this may take the taste away momentarily, there’s also an odd thing about prosecco I want you to consider. How that glass of Italian bubbly came to be in your hand gives us a window into understanding how a Democratic senator can derail a multitrillion dollar climate-focused national programme that promised huge amounts of money for his own state.No, really. Stay with me here.The stories of prosecco wine and West Virginia coal are classic examples of a regional “growth model”. Growth models describe the “how we make money” bit of an economy, plus the political and electoral coalition that supports it. Think of all the social, political and regulatory structures that build up over time around making and selling a certain good, and all the folks whose jobs and incomes depend upon it.Think of Germany and car exports. From workers to unions to production hubs, to supply chains, to institutional investors, there is an entire ecosystem that supports this way of making a living and the identities and interest it supports. When that is challenged, those who benefit from the model do not sit idly by. Now think of Treviso, Italy, where they make prosecco.Last year a sociologist called Stefano Ponteunpacked the growth model behind prosecco. Prosecco was first bottled in 1924, but it was not until the early 2000s that anglo-millennials got a taste for the stuff and global demand blew up. Prosecco was defined at the time by the grape used to make it, glera, and not by its place of origin (like how all “real” champagne must come from Champagne), which meant that the brand was not protected. In fact, the actual village of Prosecco was about 150km away from the main growing areas and had never grown the grape that makes the drink.Dire end to Biden’s first year as Manchin says no on signature billRead moreSome enterprising British importers wanted to stick as much prosecco as they could into bottles, which would have taken control (and value) away from local producers. Rising to defend the “prosecco miracle” as it was called, the then minister of agriculture, Luca Zaia, a member of the rightwing La Lega party, expanded the “denominazione d’origine controllata DOC” to cover the distant village of Prosecco, which gave this rather generic product a claim to geographical exclusivity.That in turn paved the way for a successful Unesco world heritage claim a few years later, further cementing the region’s claim to the product. The result was a major expansion of production, and prosecco hit €500m in sales in 2019. In short, those who benefited from the growth model rose to defend it.But there were other challenges to this success. This massive expansion of production brought challenges from environmentalists – wine is essentially an agribusiness – and from local residents. But those who benefited from the growth model again leapt to defend it, this time by painting the industry as an example of small-scale, pastoral sustainability – part of a high-end wine-making tradition going back centuries.In fact, as the historian Brian Griffith details, this pastoral and authentically local framing of Italian wine was originally a project of the fascist period. After the first world war, Italy was saddled with vast overproduction of low-quality domestic wines and enmeshed in a moral panic over working-class drunkenness. Wine industry interests close to the government of Mussolini sought to make Italian wines articles of middle-class consumption and a source of national unity. And they used state-backed mythmaking to do so.Medical authorities stressed “the advantages of responsible … wine consumption”. National exhibitions of regional wines were sponsored by the state. Indeed, the whole idea of “gastro-tourism” in Italy was invented in the 1930s by the wine lobby. As Griffith puts it, “the roots of today’s … Italian wines stretch back not to antiquity … but … to the interwar years”. The result was the development of an agribusiness growth model. The prosecco story a century later was just one more turn of this wheel.Now what does all that tell us about Manchin and West Virginia?The Democratic party story on Manchin and West Virginia was that coal was a dying industry, it employed few people and Build Back Better provided a way out. It was simply a question of giving Manchin enough “sweeteners” and it would eventually pass. But Manchin first vetoed the “clean electricity” provisions of the bill and then ran down the clock long enough to kill it. Why did he do this? Because his job is to defend the growth model against challengers, just as it was for the folks in Treviso.As Adam Tooze has noted, by some estimates “nearly one-third of [West Virginian] GDP in 2019 can be attributed to fossil fuels [which] makes decarbonisation a mortal threat”. Now add to this the fact that West Virginia has the lowest labour force participation rate in the US and huge healthcare issues stemming from chronic illness and opioid abuse, and you end up with a fiscal nightmare kept afloat by current growth model. Given this, the notion that the best-paid jobs in the state ($77,000 a year) will be traded away by the state’s leading elected official for some promises on “retraining” and a “Green New Deal” is simply not credible.Growth models are hard to change. Those who profit from them fight to defend them. From Alaska to the Dakotas, to Texas and Louisiana, the core of the GOP electoral coalition, all these states have carbon-heavy growth models. Like the Italian wine industry, they are a creation of the state in the 20th century. They are embodied with myths and are supported by powerful coalitions. Few in Treviso are keen to dismantle the prosecco growth model. Why should West Virginia, and with it the other carbon states of the US, be any different?
Mark Blyth is a political economist at Brown University
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Harry Reid obituaryVeteran Nevada senator who shepherded and protected Obamacare on its difficult passage into law During a long, combative career in US political life, Harry Reid, who has died aged 82, made his most telling contribution as Democrat majority leader in the Senate. There, in 2010, he pushed through and then vigorously defended President Barack Obama’s groundbreaking healthcare reforms.Given the huge strength of Republican feeling against “Obamacare”, the president needed a streetfighter to drive his measures through to the statute book – and Reid was the man for the job. Quietly spoken but toughened by a hard early life and years spent swimming in the shark-infested waters of Nevada politics, he fought through the deeply polarised atmosphere that surrounded Obama’s health reforms to shepherd the Affordable Care Act through the Democrat-controlled Senate.Just as importantly, he defended that landmark piece of legislation – which aimed to extend health insurance to more than 30 million uninsured people – against repeated attempts at derailment by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In particular, he orchestrated Senate resistance to House amendments that would have emasculated Obamacare, and in 2013 brokered a deal that ended a partial government shutdown engineered by Republicans in protest at the legislation. Obamacare aside, in Washington Reid was a centrist Democrat, and for the liberal wing of the party far less dependable than his firebrand counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi. He was opposed to abortion, supported the 1991 Gulf war, and at first backed George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, although in 2007 he came out against the second conflict there. He also raised more than a few hackles when he observed that Obama had been helped in his presidential campaign because he was “light-skinned”.But Reid survived that problem, as he survived so many others on the road to his elevated position in the Senate, and Obama acknowledged the early encouragement that Reid had given to his presidential aspirations. To the Democrats, he was a usefully blunt, outspoken scrapper who was happy to tackle the Republicans head on – and was prepared to publicly call Bush a “liar” and a “loser”. Although a pragmatist, he would not cut deals with the Republican leadership on what he saw as vital issues. “I know my limitations,” he once said. “I haven’t gotten where I am by my good looks, my aesthetic ability, my great brain or my oratorical skills.” Reid’s strengths were his sheer energy and political shrewdness, honed during a long rise to the top from difficult beginnings. He was born in Searchlight, Nevada, a tiny, searingly hot former gold-mining town in the Mojave desert, in a shack that had no toilet or hot water. Until the 1950s, Searchlight was best known for a notorious brothel called the El Rey, where it was said that Reid’s mother, Inez (nee Jaynes), did the laundry. His father, Harry Sr, was a miner and an alcoholic; in 1972 he shot himself.There was no high school in Searchlight, so Reid had to stay with relatives 40 miles away in Henderson, outside Las Vegas, where he went to high school at Basic Academy. His lucky break came there in the burly shape of Mike O’Callaghan, the school’s football and boxing coach. Young Reid was tough: he boxed as a middleweight and played on the football team. “I’d rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight,” he said later.An ambitious young man, he graduated from Utah State University, where he became a Mormon. He went to Washington DC and found a job with the US Capitol police, who are charged with protecting Congress, while he worked for a law degree at George Washington University. From there he returned to Nevada to become a prosecutor and, shortly after his father’s suicide, married Landra Gould, the daughter of Jewish immigrants.He soon became involved in Democratic politics, first in Henderson and then statewide. By 1968 he was a member of the state assembly and in 1970 was asked by his high school mentor, O’Callaghan, to run with him. O’Callaghan was elected governor of the state and Reid became his lieutenant governor.In 1974 he ran for the Senate, but was narrowly beaten by Ronald Reagan’s friend Paul Laxalt. In 1975 he stood, again unsuccessfully, for mayor of Las Vegas, a city dominated by gambling, tourism and entertainment.From 1977 to 1981 he was chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a job that was to be the making of him. When he was offered a bribe of $12,000 by Jack Gordon, the Las Vegas gambling and prostitution operator, Reid tipped off the FBI. At the moment when Gordon produced the money, FBI agents rushed in; he was sentenced to six months in prison. In 1981, a bomb was found under Reid’s car, which he always blamed on Gordon’s heavies. After that, the more respectable elements of the US gambling industry supported Reid, although his opponents repeatedly tried to tar him with suggestions of ethical violations.In 1982 he was elected to the House of Representatives from the Las Vegas district, and served there until 1986, when he entered the Senate for the first time. He was re-elected easily in 1992, but six years later was nearly beaten in a high-spending campaign that his Republican opponent, John Ensign, a man with casino connections, freely conceded was “nasty”. Nonetheless, Reid and Ensign eventually became good friends as Nevada’s two senators.By 2004, when Reid’s time for re-election came around again, Nevada’s population had grown so fast that many of his constituents had never heard of their senior senator. So Reid raised a lot of money for a campaign to make himself known. He became the leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate in 2005 after Tom Daschle failed to be re-elected, and after the 2006 election – when the Democrats benefited from the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – he was confirmed as the Democrats’ majority leader, serving in that role until 2015.He retired from the Senate as minority leader by not seeking re-election in 2016, following injuries in an accident with exercise equipment in his home. In 2018 he revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.Reid was known in Washington for his terse manner. In a tribute to him in 2019, Obama joked: “Even when I was president, he would hang up on me.” Shortly before his death, Las Vegas’s airport was renamed after him.Reid is survived by Landra and by their four sons and one daughter. Harry Mason Reid, politician, born 2 December 1939; died 28 December 2021TopicsUS politicsNevadaUS SenateUS healthcareBarack ObamaobituariesReuse this content More