US Politics

OpinionUS politicsHow America’s broken democracy led to our abortion crisis Meaghan WinterThe majority of Americans support legal abortion. Redistricting has allowed extremism to flourish without fear of repercussion Mon 25 Oct 2021 06.29 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 14.28 EDTAmerica is at a crossroads when it comes to abortion. In 2021, state legislatures have passed an unprecedented 106 anti-abortion bills. State lawmakers in five states are preparing legislation similar to Texas’s SB 8, an effective total abortion ban that enshrines a new kind of vigilantism directed at medical providers and private citizens.In this dangerous moment, supporters of legal abortion must understand that raising our voices is not going to change anything unless we also push for major, immediate democratic reforms including ending the filibuster, enshrining federal voting rights, expanding the supreme court and establishing fair redistricting.I understand why those goals may simultaneously seem too wonky to follow and too ambitious to achieve. But we cannot fight for abortion rights without first repairing our democracy, because we will continue to lose.The conservative movement and its ideological and corporate patrons have locked in structural power at nearly every level of government, and our lawmakers don’t need to be responsive to public opinion or even long-enshrined civil and human rights. If we’re going to have any chance of protecting ourselves and each other, on numerous urgent fronts, we need to agitate for immediate, ambitious democratic reforms that will ensure that our courts uphold our rights, and our elected officials are responsive to the will of the people. Otherwise, our rallies are collective screams into the void.Many abortion rights supporters have moved away from calling themselves “pro-choice” and instead have embraced the reproductive justice model, which defines itself as a movement to ensure the human right to bodily autonomy and to parent or not parent in a safe and sustainable community. Current threats to our democracy make crystal clear that the struggles for reproductive freedom, voting rights and economic, racial and climate justice are inextricably linked.When I first began reporting on abortion, in 2013, when I’d ask abortion rights advocates why extreme anti-abortion state lawmakers seemed unafraid of running afoul of the majority of the American public, which supports legal abortion, they would answer, “gerrymandering”.As I soon learned, because Republicans have gerrymandered districts in states across the nation, it no longer matters whether their policies defy most voters’ beliefs and needs, because incumbents’ seats are safe almost no matter what.What we’re seeing now accelerated after the 2010 election, which had existential ramifications for our democracy only now becoming visible. Ahead of that election, during an all-important redistricting year, the Republican party and conservative and corporate donors heavily invested in state-level elections so that they could gerrymander and give themselves a competitive advantage for a decade. It worked. They flipped legislative chambers across the country, and states started ramping up their envelope-pushing anti-abortion bills, as well as voting restrictions designed to make it more difficult for voters to throw them out of office.In 2020, Democrats failed to flip a single state-level chamber. Republicans now control 30 legislatures during yet another redistricting year, jeopardizing any chance of a progressive agenda in many states as well as Democratic control of Congress next year.As states begin passing ever more extreme abortion restrictions and even bans, there’s little reason to believe that the courts will stop them unless Congress gets serious about reforming the court system.During the Trump administration, Republicans installed an unprecedented number of federal judges, many of them open ideologues with little experience on the bench, reshaping the judiciary for a generation. And, in case you’ve forgotten, McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, changed the Senate rules for confirming justices to push through Neil Gorsuch, ushered through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh despite credible accusations of sexual assault against him, and rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while voting in the 2020 election had already begun.The radical takeover of the courts was not a random fluke but the result of careful plotting and hundreds of millions of dollars investment by rightwing ideologues and billionaires – the same kind of long-term strategizing to change the rules of the game their allies used to gerrymander states and congressional districts.In other words, the same movement of extreme, partisan donors and strategists behind the ever-more radical state laws has also installed federal judges and supreme court justices who are poised to uphold those laws. The issue isn’t whether expanding the supreme court will throw into doubt the court’s legitimacy. The supreme court is already partisan and ideological and therefore illegitimate. What’s needed now is a major and swift corrective.That brings us to Congress. What about a federal law enshrining abortion rights? To achieve that – and so much more, including expanding the supreme court – Congress needs to end the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 members of the Senate to pass legislation instead of 50. Our current Senate delivers nothing close to fair representation, which, as I write this, is on painful display as Republicans have filibustered yet another urgently needed voting rights bill, while two Democratic senators representing small states have killed provisions in the Build Back Better package that are “pro-life” in the most literal sense – in support of healthcare and a viable planet. To have any chance of achieving reproductive justice in this country, we need to agitate for our members of Congress to end the filibuster now.It’s time to re-examine what we consider pragmatic. Sticking with the status quo means surrendering to the profound irony that a movement that branded itself as “pro-life” has helped usher in a ruling class committed not only to stripping away the social safety net but also doubling down on fossil fuels and imperiling the very existence of life on Earth.Trying to advocate for reproductive justice without also demanding that our lawmakers immediately reform our voting laws, Congress and the courts that have been rigged by corporate and authoritarian interest groups isn’t practical or hopeful – it’s misguided if not delusional. Instead, supporters of abortion rights must join the chorus calling to end the filibuster and expand the supreme court.
Meaghan Winter is a freelance magazine writer and author of the book All Politics is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States
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OpinionUS politicsTrump’s judges will call the shots for years to come. The judicial system is brokenShira A ScheindlinIn just one term, Trump was able to appoint 33% of US supreme court justices and 30% of US appellate judges. They’ll serve for life Mon 25 Oct 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 14.44 EDTFor many Americans, Donald Trump will be remembered as the first US president to be twice impeached, to have supported, or even incited, an insurrection against democracy, and for allowing thousands to die due to his abject failure to lead the nation in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. But for many other Americans, his true legacy will be his enduring impact on the third branch – the federal judiciary.Americans don’t have faith in the US supreme court any more. That has justices worried | Russ FeingoldRead moreThe expansion of executive power, and the diminishment of legislative power due to partisan gridlock, is a well-known story. Governing by executive order has become the new normal. But it is the stealthy and steady rise of the power of the judicial branch that has caught many Americans off-guard.Federal judges have life tenure. Once they are appointed they remain in office until they retire or die. The president appoints every federal judge and these appointments have very long-term consequences. A look at Trump’s record of appointments reveals a relentless commitment to cementing his peculiar and idiosyncratic ideology. In short, he and his sidekick, former majority leader Mitch McConnell, did all they could to entrench an actively conservative judiciary.The numbers tell a clear story. There are a total of 816 active federal judges comprising the supreme court, the 13 appellate courts, and 91 district courts. In just one term Trump was able to appoint 28% of those judges due to past and continuing vacancies. Most importantly, he appointed 33% of America’s nine supreme court justices and 30% of the appellate judges. The vast majority of his appointments were white males – not one of his 54 appellate judges is Black. But what really stands out is the age of his appointees. The average age of his appellate judges was 47 (five years younger than those selected by Barack Obama). Six of those were in their 30s, and 20 were under 45. By contrast, of the 55 appellate judges picked by Obama – in eight years, not four – none were in their 30s and only six were younger than 45.Trump’s judicial appointments will shape American jurisprudence for decades to come. The Federal Judicial Center has found that this age disparity means that Trump judges will serve 270 more years than Obama’s judges, and they will decide thousands more cases. Moreover, the average tenure for a supreme court justice has increased from 15 years in the early 1970s to 27 years in more recent years, due in large part to the younger age of the justices at the date of appointment.The Trump legacy of judicial appointments is most apparent in the recent behavior of the supreme court. A new term has been coined – the shadow docket – which refers to the sudden uptick in emergency requests filed by the government. In the 16 years preceding the Trump presidency only eight such requests were filed, and, of those, only four were granted. By contrast, during Trump’s four-year term, 41 such applications were made, of which 24 were granted – a 70% success rate that supported Trump’s policies. These cases are heard without full briefing, without oral argument, and often result in a single-sentence order as opposed to a full reasoned opinion.One such decision overturned, by a 5-4 order, a Wisconsin trial court order allowing an extension for the receipt of absentee ballots. The last-minute supreme court decision issued the day before the election caused chaos and confusion. A second example of how the now safely pro-Trump court supported his policies involved his administration’s rule prohibiting migrants from seeking asylum in the US before seeking it in the countries through which they had travelled. The lower court suspended enforcement of this unprecedented rule, but the supreme court allowed the ban to take effect immediately even as the case proceeded through the lower courts. Another particularly disturbing example involved four death penalty cases where a lower court halted four executions because the use of pentobarbital to kill the prisoners would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In a 5-4 ruling, issued after 2am, the stay was overturned and at least one of the executions carried out – the first federal prisoner to be executed in 17 years.Most recently, in yet another emergency appeal, the supreme court by a 5-4 margin, refused to block the newly enacted Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, allowing that rule to be enforced for the foreseeable future. This emergency request was brought by abortion providers after the very conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, to which Trump had appointed six judges, stopped the trial court from holding a hearing as to whether the new law could take immediate effect. A month later a trial judge blocked the law from taking effect and the fifth circuit promptly reversed. The Department of Justice is now appealing that decision to the supreme court.In each of these cases, the supreme court deprived the affected parties of a chance to be fully heard and often deprived the appellate courts of the chance to review the ruling of the trial courts. This unprecedented haste, and acquiescence to the importuning of the executive branch, gave the appearance that the supreme court was no longer an independent and co-equal branch of government but rather a partner of the Trump-led executive branch.Many Americans now question the court’s integrity and are jumping on the bandwagon of seeking supreme court reform. Proposals for reform include imposing term limits on supreme court justices to ensure that no one justice or group of justices controls the outcome of cases for decades to come. It is noteworthy that the three justices Trump appointed were 48, 49 and 53 at the time they joined the court, guaranteeing decades of influence by those justices. A variation on this proposal would require mandatory retirement by all federal judges at the age of 70 or 75.Another more controversial proposal is to expand the court. This proposal is, in part, a response to the widespread belief that two of President Obama’s appointments were stolen. The first was the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia. Obama’s nominee to fill that seat was stonewalled by Republicans for 10 months, purportedly due to the proximity to the upcoming presidential election, while the second was the record-breaking speedy confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before a presidential election.Other proposals include reform of the shadow docket by requiring briefing, argument, and a reasoned opinion on all emergency matters; imposing a code of conduct and ethics on supreme court justices similar to that binding lower court judges; requiring a 6-3 super-majority before finding a federal statute unconstitutional; and requiring that Congress consider any presidential nomination within a fixed period of time – perhaps 45 days after nomination.The growing support for some or all of these reforms by many non-partisan organizations, academics, and Democratic politicians, is a response to the discontent created by Trump’s unprecedented manipulation of the appointment process for federal judges, designed to ensure that his politics and policies will control the lives of future generations. Trump’s brazen capture of the supreme court, engineered with the help of the Republican Senate majority, requires a bold response. If reform efforts fail, which is likely given the arcane Senate rules, Trump will have succeeded in entrenching his regressive, if not destructive, political agenda. This may be good for Trump’s legacy but it is surely bad for the country.
Shira A Scheindlin is a former United States district judge for the southern district of New York. She is the co-chair of the board of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a board member of the American Constitution Society
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Trump administrationHow a secretive conservative group influenced ‘populist’ Trump’s tax cutsRecordings from a 2019 panel discussion of the Council for National Policy reveal tax cuts were sparked by personal conversations Jason Wilson@jason_a_wMon 25 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 03.02 EDTDocuments and recordings obtained by the Guardian shed new light on a powerful and secretive rightwing network and the influence it was able to exert on Trump administration policies favoring the super-rich.The recordings include speeches given to the Council for National Policy (CNP) by conservative media stars including Dennis Prager, emerging Republican power players such as Charlie Kirk, and close economic advisers to Donald Trump.Some of the previously published recordings appear to no longer be publicly available.The Guardian’s independently sourced recordings offer an insight into how much influence conservative economic thinkers – from bodies representing the interests of some of the richest individuals in the country – were able to exert on the supposed populist Trump.Trump Organization and senior executive charged with tax crimesRead moreIn particular, a panel discussion at CNP’s February 2019 meeting suggests that Trump decided one of his most far-reaching economic policies on very limited evidence – on the basis of a personal conversation.The panel involved Bill Walton, president of CNP; the Washington Times columnist and former member of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority Richard Rahn; Jonathan Williams, chief economist at the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec); and Stephen Moore, a one-time Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve board, whose nomination was withdrawn following revelations in the Guardian that he had failed to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony.The panelists offered a favorable assessment of the Trump administration’s economic performance, but also used the platform to claim credit for pushing the administration in the direction of radical free-market policies.Moore claimed that he, together with Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council from 2018, had persuaded the thenpresident to offer unprecedented corporate tax cuts.He described a meeting with Trump where they argued that the US’s corporate tax rate, relative to those among certain Asian and European competitors, was effectively a penalty on US companies, stating: “Look, you know, we’re at 40% – they are 20%. This is a big problem.”Moore said that they explained these tax differences using charts, “because Donald Trump likes to look at pictures, he doesn’t like to read”.According to Moore: “Trump looked at this and he said: ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” instead proposing “not 20%. I want 15%,” with the number coming back to an effective 20% rate only after Senate negotiations.Trump’s tax cuts slashed effective corporate tax rates in half, while providing other measures benefiting wealthy corporations.The cuts have been blamed for widening inequality, and worsening deficits, with a large amount of the savings going to stock buybacks according to business reporters and economists. The Congressional Research Service pointed out that any positive effects, like wage or GDP growth, were transient, and had petered out by the end of the quarter in which the cuts were put into effect. This reveals the power of the CNP, a little known body whose members are deeply secretive about their meetings. CNP attendees’ access to this picture of the inner workings of the Trump administration, and the players who helped set its course, is the result of adherence to a strict code of silence. In introducing the panel, the CNP conference director,Mary Margaret Hathaway, enjoined participants to secrecy, reminding them to “not record any speaker remarks”.Hathaway continued: “CNP meetings are off-limits to the press. So please be aware of who you’re talking to.”She added, “Don’t grant any interviews and if you run into a reporter asking questions about the event, please let a member of the CNP staff or leadership team know.”Despite her warnings, the organization itself made the recordings obtained by the Guardian, and uploaded them on their website in a manner that made them accessible to any internet user.Other recordings obtained by the Guardian include talks at 2018 and 2019 meetings by senior Republicans including Senator Tom Cotton and the US congressman Steve Scalise; and former governors including Scott Walker and Sam Brownback.The CNP was founded in 1981 by influential, Christian-right activists, including Tim LaHaye, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich, who were also involved in founding and leading the Moral Majority.Initially, they were seeking to maximize their influence on the new Reagan administration. In subsequent years, CNP meetings played host to presidential aspirants like George W Bush in 1999 and Mitt Romney in 2007, and sitting presidents including Donald Trump in 2020.The Guardian previously reported on a leak of the group’s 2020 membership list.TopicsTrump administrationDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Anthony FauciFauci predicts Covid shots for kids five to 11 will be available by early November Government’s chief medical adviser makes prediction after FDA review panel finds that benefits for group outweighs risks Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 24 Oct 2021 16.16 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 16.17 EDTVaccines to protect children ages five to 11 from Covid-19 will be available in the US in early to mid-November, Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s chief medical adviser, predicted on Sunday.A review panel of the US food and drug administration (FDA) found last week that the benefits of Pfizer-BioNTech shots for the younger age group outweighed the risks, setting up an advisory meeting on Tuesday of outside FDA experts who are expected to recommend emergency use authorization.With final approval from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) likely to come the following week, Fauci said he believed pediatric vaccines would start going into arms in short order.“If all goes well, and we get the regulatory approval and the recommendation from the CDC, it’s entirely possible if not very likely that vaccines will be available for children from five to 11 within the first week or two of November,” Fauci told ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.“You never want to get ahead of the FDA in their regulatory decisions, nor the CDC and their advisers on what the recommendation would be, but if you look at the data that’s been made public, the data look good.”Pfizer has claimed its coronavirus vaccine is 91% effective in the five-11 age group. The extension of vaccine availability to those younger than 12 is seen as a key step in getting a pandemic that has killed more than 735,000 in the US under control.Despite polls showing that more parents than previously are willing to allow their children to be vaccinated, there remains significant hesitance. Only one third of parents with children ages five to 11 say they will vaccinate their child right away, according to Kaiser, while one in four say they will not allow it under any circumstances.“We know we have a lot of work to do,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.“Those survey data look very much consistent with where we were with adults last December, when we rolled out vaccines for adults. We have done a huge amount of hard work over the last 10 months, education, communication, providing information, getting vaccines to really convenient places.”Walensky said vaccines for children would be available nationwide in tens of thousands of venues from pediatrician and primary care offices, children’s hospitals, pharmacies, school clinics and community health centers.“We’re doing absolutely all of that hard work now,” she said. “As soon as we have both the FDA authorization and the CDC recommendations there will be vaccine out there so children can start rolling up their sleeves.”TopicsAnthony FauciUS politicsCoronavirusInfectious diseasesVaccines and immunisationChildrennewsReuse this content More

Joe BidenPelosi ‘very confident’ Democrats will reach deal to salvage Biden agendaDemocratic infighting has threatened to upend Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda less than a year after taking office Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 24 Oct 2021 15.44 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 15.45 EDTHouse speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed confidence on Sunday that a deal between Democrats to salvage Joe Biden’s ambitious social agenda was “pretty much there”, paving the way for a possible vote in Congress later this week.Her upbeat words came as the president was meeting in Delaware with the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic holdout Joe Manchin to put the finishing touches on what has become a scaled-back package central to Biden’s Build Back Better initiative.Manchin, of West Virginia, was one of two moderate Senate Democrats, along with Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, resisting the original $3.5tn cost of the social spending bill. Manchin had indicated he would be more comfortable with something closer to $1.5tn, and raised objections over Biden’s flagship clean power plan (CPP) that would have imposed emission controls on power companies.“We will have something that will meet the president’s goals, I feel very confident about that,” Pelosi said on CNN’s State of the Union.“We’re almost certain [we have a deal], it’s just the language of it. It will not offend, shall we say, the concern that Senator Manchin had about the CPP. The point is to reach your goals, and the president’s goals of reaching the emissions, the pollution and all the rest … there are other ways to reach the goal.”The Democratic infighting had threatened to upend Biden’s domestic agenda less than a year after taking office. The votes of both Manchin and Sinema, who has insisted she would oppose any effort to reverse Trump-era tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, are crucial in a divided 50-50 Senate.Adding to the administration’s frustration has been the blocking by Democratic House progressives of a parallel $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate approves the massive social spending package touted by those on the left of the party, particularly the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.Pelosi, who had set a 31 October deadline for the infrastructure bill to pass, did not disclose what elements of the original social safety net bill would have to be compromised or dropped to meet the lower price tag acceptable to the moderates. But she indicated that welfare components such as expanded healthcare and the child tax credit would likely survive.Possibly on the chopping block, however, were long-held Democratic goals such as paid family leave and expanding Medicare for hearing, vision and dental. Pressed on whether those elements would survive, Pelosi was non-committal, using phrases including: “That’s our hope,” and “That’s what we’re fighting for.”“Right now Senate leader Schumer, Senator Manchin and the president are having the meeting on some of the particulars that need to be finalized, and I’m optimistic that we can do that,” Pelosi said. “One basket was climate, the jobs bill, a bill for the children, for the future of healthcare, strengthening the affordable care act, expanding Medicaid and Medicare.”Pelosi also insisted that the administration had “an array” of alternative options to “probably more than pay for the plan” even if Sinema’s opposition ruled out a reversal of the Trump tax cuts.“We had the rescue package at $1.9tn, we have the infrastructure bill over a trillion dollars, [so] that’s around $3tn. And we’ll have this in at $2tn,” she said. “Nobody has done anything that remarkable. So while it isn’t everything that was put out originally, it takes us down a path where we can continue investments.”Pelosi was asked if she supported the prosecution and jailing of those who resisted congressional subpoenas to testify before the House committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Last week the House held Trump ally and former adviser Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for ignoring a subpoena.“I do,” she said. “People said well, this hasn’t happened before, [but] we haven’t had an insurrection incited by the president of the United States and [with] one of his toadies having advanced knowledge.“It’s important for us to find the truth about what happened on 6 January and the assault on the constitution, our congress and our capital, but it’s also important in terms of the separation of power and the checks and balances of the constitution.”TopicsJoe BidenNancy PelosiUS politicsUS CongressDemocratsHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

OpinionPollutionLethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stallingDavid BondThere is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.31 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.32 EDTThis week the EPA announced a new roadmap to research, restrict, and remediate PFAS – a group of industrial “forever chemicals” that have been linked to cancer and are found in our food, water, and even our blood. President Biden is requesting $10bn in the infrastructure bill to address PFAS. But this new attention still falls short of what’s required to confront an unprecedented crisis that affects the health of the entire United States and countless people across the world.EPA unveils new strategy to address US contamination of ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreToday, toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere we’ve thought to look for them. As engineered, these synthetic chemicals glide through air and water with ease, evade all natural processes of decay, and inflict debilitating injuries even at exceedingly low levels of exposure. The petrochemical industry has its fingerprints all over the ubiquity of PFAS, yet that very ubiquity is now being used as an excuse against doing anything about it. PFAS are becoming too toxic to fail.The EPA’s hyped national PFAS testing strategy bemoans how “impossible” it is for the EPA “to expeditiously understand, let alone address, the risks these substances may pose to human health and the environment.” Overwhelmed by rampant PFAS contamination, the EPA is asking the petrochemical industry to study these chemicals one by one in the hopes of eventually building enough data to regulate them. Yes, one by one. The timeline proposed will take another century (or two) to make its way through the entire family of PFAS, which now number in the thousands.The manifold ways that PFAS makes a mockery of our regulation of toxins cannot be the end of our ability to prosecute petrochemical malfeasance. Rather, this should be the start to fixing everything that went wrong.The companies behind PFAS knew about its toxicity for decades, but that knowledge was hidden in corporate archives and subject to shamefully lax government oversight.When 3M and DuPont learned about alarming patterns of birth defects and cancers in their own workers at PFAS plants in the 1970s and 1980s, both companies smothered the evidence. In the 1970s, the navy and air force looked the other way when they found PFAS migrating off their bases and into nearby communities. By the 1990s, 3M and DuPont both realized that their PFAS operations were polluting municipal drinking water at levels they considered harmful. As revealed by investigative reporting and dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, corporate executives helped destroy the evidence while giving false assurances to residents and regulators alike.Over the past century, the petrochemical industry had countless opportunities to recognize the dangers of PFAS and install safeguards. Instead, they launched even more PFAS into the world. In defiance of their own internal scientific appraisals of the deadly effects of PFAS, 3M and DuPont integrated these chemicals into a widening array of industrial ingredients, firefighting equipment, and consumer goods. Incredibly, both companies also disposed PFAS waste into watersheds providing drinking water to more than 20 million Americans and irrigation to farms in 13 states.Over the past 50 years, 3M and DuPont manufactured more than enough PFAS to contaminate the drinking water of every single American. PFAS was sold to plastics plants, carpet and shoe factories, and oil and gas drilling sites across the US, where it was routinely discarded by the ton into the environment. Some industries even endorsed the distribution of PFAS-laden waste to farmers as a soil supplement.Now worried about impending liability, the petrochemical industry and the military are busy torching stockpiles of PFOA and PFOS (the two PFAS compounds closest to being regulated) despite growing concern that burning merely redistributes these inflammable toxins, especially into the poor communities of color where waste incinerators cynically base their operations. As the US and Europe move towards regulating some PFAS chemicals, the petrochemical industry is moving PFAS operations to more permissive regimes in Brazil, China, India, and Russia.Each time the question of containing PFAS came into view, 3M, DuPont, and now Chemours launched a perfluorinated blitzkrieg. They flooded the zone. And looking back, a rather demented product defense strategy becomes apparent: total contamination. Rather than controlling PFAS toxicity, the petrochemical industry universalized it.By the time sickened industrialworkers and farmers demanded action, lawyers pried open the corporate archive, and the EPA started issuing voluntary guidelines for a handful of PFAS compounds, it was almost too late to clean up the mess. The poison was out of the bag. An EPA review released this week identified more than 120,000 sites in the US alone that are probably contaminated with PFAS.There is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group. This alarming reality trips up the comparative methods typically used to study toxicity and public health. It is also becoming a rather shameless legal argument in courtrooms across the country.When PFAS was discovered in my hometown of Bennington, Vermont, the plastics factory that emitted these chemicals for decades landed on a novel defense: that PFAS are so pervasive that it’s impossible to determine who is responsible. Residential trash with trace amounts of PFAS and the world at large, the company argued, were the real perpetrators of our PFAS troubles, not the plastics factory that accepted delivery of PFAS by the truckload for more than 30 years.And now American Chemistry Council lobbyists and defense attorneys for the petrochemical industry are hard at work nominating PFAS contamination to the welcoming committee of a brave new world of total contamination. It’s a planetary future they cast as inevitable, surprisingly democratic, and without any liable author. According to their victim-blaming PR campaign, anyone who has worn a Gore-Tex rain jacket or thrown away a McDonalds wrapper is just as guilty as the companies that illegally hid the toxicity of PFAS while spewing millions of pounds of this poison into our lives.PFAS are everywhere, but this disconcerting fact should not distract us from the petrochemical operations holding the smoking gun – smoking, in no small part, because they are still emitting PFAS. The omnipresence of PFAS does not lessen the threat they pose to our health, but it does mean we need bolder ways of prosecuting these environmental crimes against humanity.Yet instead of toughening regulation of the petrochemical industry, the EPA and many state agencies are throwing their hands up at the sheer ubiquity of the problem.Regulatory agencies are proposing natural “background levels” for a synthetic chemical conjured up a mere 75 years ago – in effect giving tacit approval for the history of gross negligence that got us here. That’s not all. The agencies shift blame for this predicament to residents by listing household items containing trace amounts of PFAS alongside factories that emitted it by the ton annually, as if those are equivalent sources; agencies refrain from sampling groundwater near industries suspected of using PFAS; agencies stack science committees with industry lobbyists while putting up roadblocks for independent scientists to participate; agencies applaud a pyrrhic victory of finally deciding to regulate PFOA and PFOS some 20 years after they learned about their toxicity while the petrochemical industry happily churns out a witches’ brew of new unregulated PFAS chemicals; and agencies endorse incineration as a PFAS disposal method while acknowledging that there is no evidence that combustion destroys these flameproof chemicals. And, of course, they make grand commitments to keep studying the problem in the hopes of taking action in, oh, a decade or so.Revealed: more than 120,000 US sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreThe point is clear: by way of regulatory indifference, delay, and now despair, responsibility for the toxicity of forever chemicals is shifting from the corporations who profited from them to the communities who must now live with them.All is not lost. While PFAS inspires paralysis in state agencies, people living on the frontlines of this crisis – in rural towns next to military bases, working-class neighborhoods adjacent to plastics factories, communities of color near incinerators burning PFAS – insist we do everything we can, now. They demand an immediate stop to all releases of PFAS. They demand we compel the industry and the military to start cleaning up sources of PFAS contamination. They demand we ban PFAS as a family of chemicals, not only in the US but across the world. They demand we pass the PFAS Accountability Act, legislation that insists manufacturers retain liability for all the damage PFAS inflicts after they leave the factory. And they demand we hold polluters fully accountable for the decades of damage they’ve done.These communities insist polluters pay for water filtration systems for every affected home and business, medical monitoring for the lifetime of worry that people in polluted communities now carry, and independent scientific monitoring for the generations that PFAS will haunt affected areas.The EPA and state agencies must follow their lead. We cannot retreat into a broken system of indifference and carefully planned inaction. Nor can the ubiquity of PFAS become an excuse for those that profitably manufactured this mess. Any further delay would be an epic dereliction of duty.
David Bond is the associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College. He leads the “Understanding PFOA” project and is writing a book on PFAS contamination
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Bernie Sanders‘Finally doing right’: Democrats’ big bill offers Sanders chance to deliver The progressive senator is close to realizing many of his policy goals – but can he unite the party behind Biden’s plan?Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoSun 24 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTWhen making the case for progressive policy, the veteran leftwing senator Bernie Sanders often cites public opinion. “Poll after poll,” he’ll say, before running through a list of ambitious initiatives that the “vast majority of the American people want”, from lowering the cost of prescription drug prices to expanding Medicare, establishing paid family and medical leave and confronting the climate crisis.Versions of these programs – initiatives once considered nothing more than liberal pipe dreams – are at the heart of Joe Biden’s sprawling domestic policy bill pending before Congress. But despite the popularity of the specific proposals, the legislation has a polling problem. Poll after poll shows that most Americans have no idea what’s actually in the bill.Furious, Sanders livestreamed a panel discussion on Wednesday titled What’s in the Damn Bill?. To the thousands of viewers who joined the broadcast, Sanders said the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar spending package was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild the American economy in fairer and more equitable way.“This is not radical stuff,” he said. “This is finally doing right by the American working class and having the courage to stand up to big-money interests.”After decades of furious speech-making from the political fringe, followed by two popular but ultimately unsuccessful bids for the presidency, the democratic socialist from Vermont is – against all the odds – the closest he’s ever been to delivering on the policy ideas that have defined his political career.Whether Sanders succeeds in his quest for a legislative legacy could determine the fate of Democrats in next year’s midterm elections – and of Biden’s presidency.“He has the most power and influence that he’s had at any point in his political career,” said Faiz Shakir, his chief political adviser. “He’s at the apex here. But as he’s acquired more power, so, too, has he acquired more responsibility.”Shakir said Sanders’ approach had changed because the environment had changed. Whereas before Sanders was pushing against the system, now he is at the center of the policy decisions, working within a Democratic party that has embraced much of his expansive platform.As chair of the powerful Senate budget committee and a member of the Democratic leadership, Sanders has been deeply involved in negotiations over the size and scope of the spending package. If and when an agreement is reached, he will play a lead role in drafting the legislation, which Democrats plan to steer through Congress over the unified opposition of Republicans.“In many ways he’s the author of this,” Shakir said. “And that’s one of the many reasons I think you see him rising to the occasion, rolling up his sleeves and making sure he is putting in all of his legislative efforts to get this across the finish line.”Initially Sanders proposed a $6tn budget blueprint, then settled for a framework that was nearly half that. Now he is working closely with Democrats in Congress and at the White House to reach a deal even smaller in scope that will satisfy the objections of the party’s centrists without sacrificing progressive priorities.Sanders knew his opening bid was unrealistic, given the dynamics of the Senate. But he hoped it would widen the parameters of the debate and ultimately what was possible. Progressives have repeatedly cited their willingness to accept a $3.5tn plan, and continue to negotiate downward, as proof of their commitment to dealing in good faith, compared with the centrists in their party, who they argue have not been forthcoming.As Democrats scramble to cobble together a deal, it’s the holdout senators Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, who hold effective veto power over which policies will survive and which must be dropped. Their objections have potentially imperiled plans for free community college, raising taxes on the wealthy and a climate program that would help the US meet its ambitious emissions goal.But every concession made to accommodate them moves the bill further and further from Sanders’ initial vision, leaving progressives deeply worried that Democrats will squander what they view as their best chance in decades to transform the American economy and confront the climate crisis.The California congressman Ro Khanna, who was among a group of progressives summoned to the White House for an Oval Office meeting this week, was optimistic that Democrats were close to a deal that progressives could accept, if not celebrate.“We’ve finally broken through,” he said. “And we will take the win because it establishes the principle that investments in people are needed in a democracy.”Republicans, however, view the imprimatur of a self-described socialist as a political gift.Progressives are now heavy-weights in the Democratic party | Gary GerstleRead moreUnified in their opposition to the spending bill, they have warned that the legislation is an attempt to fundamentally remake the American government in the image of a European-style social democracy while claiming the additional spending will stoke inflation and hurt economic dynamics.“This bill represents Bernie Sanders’ socialist dream,” the Republican senator John Barrasso said during a press conference, raising a 2,000-page draft of the Democrats’ spending package. “It is a nightmare for American taxpayers.”With no room for error, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Democrats. To pass, the bill will require the support of every Democrat in the Senate, a caucus that ranges the ideological spectrum from the democratic socialist Sanders to the conservative centrist Manchin.The senators have competing world views. Whereas Sanders believes the bill has the potential to be “one of the most important pieces of legislation since the New Deal”, Manchin has warned that the scale of it risks “changing our whole society to an entitlement mentality”.Sanders has publicly and privately sought to persuade Manchin and Sinema to support Biden’s agenda. It hasn’t always been diplomatic.Tensions escalated dramatically last week, when Sanders placed an op-ed in Manchin’s home state newspaper detailing how an expansion of the social safety net would help the people of West Virginia, which has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. In a statement, Manchin fired back that “no op-ed from a self-declared independent socialist” would sway him.Behind closed doors, Manchin and Sanders continued to tangle, with the West Virginian reportedly making clear that he was comfortable passing nothing.Publicly, the senators have signaled that they are making progress. When they ran into each other outside the Capitol last week, Manchin threw his arm around Sanders and asked reporters to take a picture of them.As they returned to their cars to leave, Manchin shouted: “Never give up, Bernie.”Sanders hardly needed the encouragement.Sanders has become a ubiquitous presence on the Sunday political talkshows. He traveled to Indiana and Iowa in an effort to drum up support for the bill, intentionally visiting parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump. When he’s not selling the budget bill, he’s working to craft it, aides say.The planet is in peril. We’re building Congress’s strongest-ever climate bill | Bernie SandersRead moreSanders successfully lobbied the White House to back a plan to extend new dental, vision and hearing benefits to the tens of millions of American seniors on Medicare, a measure initially left out of the proposal. The senator’s healthcare push put him at odds with House leadership, who would prefer to permanently strengthen the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, or to expand Medicaid services to poor adults in mostly Republican-led states that refused to do so under the healthcare law.Biden said on Thursday that including all three benefits would be a “reach” but suggested a voucher program for dental coverage was possible. Though greatly pared back, it would nevertheless be a victory for Sanders, who has long sought to make Medicare the foundation for a national health insurance program, which he calls Medicare for all.As part of negotiations, Sanders has worked closely with the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, especially the chairwoman, Pramila Jayapal, the Washington congresswoman who has emerged as a leader in negotiations over the president’s agenda.In a showdown last month, House progressives threatened to derail a vote on a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill championed by centrists as a way to maintain leverage over the much larger spending bill.The Senate had already passed the public works bill, with the support of all 50 Democrats and 19 Republicans, so it fell to House progressives to, in their parlance, “hold the line”. Sanders offered his vocal support for the blockade, which Khanna, a deputy whip of the progressive caucus, said was “critical” to keeping progressives unified.On the day of the promised vote, Biden ventured to Capitol Hill to meet with the bitterly divided House Democrats. But instead of rallying support for an immediate vote, the president effectively agreed with progressives that the two pillars of his agenda were inextricably linked. The vote was delayed and the infrastructure bill remains stalled, bound up in the bigger battle over the spending package.The maneuver was hailed as a major tactical victory by progressive activists, who have long lamented the tendency of liberal lawmakers to cave to pressure from Democratic leaders during heated policy fights.But Biden’s position frustrated a number of centrist Democrats, particularly those from swing districts who had hoped the president would sign the infrastructure bill into law, allowing them to start campaigning on new funding for roads, bridges and expanded broadband.Progressives, meanwhile, argue that a failure to deliver on their campaign promises would also be politically perilous.Anna Bahr, who served as Sanders’ national deputy campaign secretary in 2020 and is the co-founder of the new consultancy firm Left Flank Strategies, said the debate over Biden’s agenda had helped elevate new progressive leaders. The effect has been a show of force by progressives that she believes will motivate voters and candidates next year.“There’s a family in Congress of like-minded people – there’s a voting bloc,” she said. “The possibility – the likelihood – of moving on some of the issues that Sanders had for so many years been the lonely voice on is absolutely inspiring for a lot of people, especially young people.”On Wednesday night, Sanders was joined by a panel of progressives to help lay out the proposals in the Democrats’ bill. It was a messaging mission, but the forum also provided an occasion to celebrate the ascendancy of the progressive movement in American politics.Introducing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders hailed the New York congresswoman as “one of the outstanding, in my view, political leaders in this country”.Beaming on screen, Ocasio-Cortez thanked him for the introduction. “That’s very kind coming from the OG leader.”TopicsBernie SandersUS politicsJoe BidenDemocratsUS CongressUS SenateUS domestic policyfeaturesReuse this content More

BooksIn Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024 Mike Pence and Marco Rubio are among presidential alternatives examined by a writer with knowledge and accessLloyd GreenSun 24 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTDonald Trump is a defeated one-term president who cost the Republican party both houses of Congress. Yet three-quarters of Republicans want him to again run in 2024, polling that has other aspirants keeping their heads well down.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreJoe Biden is politically vulnerable, his job approval underwater, his coalition fraying. He could meet the same fate as Trump – sans residual enthusiasm.The next Republican nominee could easily be the next president. Against this backdrop, David Drucker’s Baedeker to the current crop of wannabes is a perfectly timed and well-informed contribution.As senior political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, a conservative paper, he knows of whom and what he writes. Better yet, he has access. In Trump’s Shadow is chock-full of tidbits and trivia, the stuff on which political junkies and journalists thrive.Drucker names an array of Republican presidential hopefuls, among them long-shots such as the Texas governor, Greg Abbott; the Nebraska senator Ben Sasse; and Trump’s last national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.Drucker delivers deeper dives on former vice-president Mike Pence; the Florida senator Marco Rubio and governor, Ron DeSantis; Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton; and the governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan. In doing so, he covers the Republican ideological spectrum.Drucker also reports on an interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and retreat. Not surprisingly, Trump has kind words for Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state; contempt for Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader; and disdain for Liz Cheney, the congresswoman from Wyoming and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney who turned against Trump over the Capitol riot.“She’s a psycho,” says the very stable genius.Trump has, however, had time to grow appreciative of “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, the Texas senator whose father and wife Trump attacked viciously during the primaries in 2016.Amid such Trumpian cacophony, Drucker reminds us of just who within the GOP is laying groundwork for runs for the White House, and how realistic their hopes might be. It is a tricky and contorting dance. But though Trump can dominate coverage, he cannot completely extinguish ambitions. Drucker pulls back the curtain on other figures’ schemes, dreams – and hard political infrastructure.Take Pence. Once a congressman from Indiana, then its governor, he began preparing for the top step on the ladder the moment he was elected Trump’s VP. Pence established a separate political operation within the White House and a fundraising Pac of his own, the Great America Committee. He used it to pay expenses while stumping for Republicans around and across the country.Trump was fine with that. It meant Pence would not look to his boss to pay his travel bills. The veep had a stash of his own.Since leaving office, Pence has also launched Advancing American Freedom, a political non-profit which touts “conservative values and policy proposals”. More importantly, it is stocked with Trump loyalists. Kellyanne Conway, the mother of “alternative facts”. Larry Kudlow, chief White House economic adviser. Newt Gingrich, once speaker of the House, a colleague on the right. All are there.Drucker also sheds light on Pence’s defiance of Trump and service to the republic, in the aftermath of a defeat by Biden which Trump sought to overturn with lies about electoral fraud. As a traditional conservative, Drucker writes, Pence was skeptical of the power of the vice-president to unilaterally steal an election. Before he certified results, he sought a legal opinion, which debunked Trump’s false claim that he could.When Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, on 6 January, some chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. Others erected a makeshift gallows. Pence was forced to hide, but he refused to leave.Ten months on, Team Pence seems not to know what to think or say. It was “a dark day in the history of the US Capitol”, Drucker records Pence telling one crowd. But Pence later told Fox News “the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January”.The political momentum is clear. Pence’s own brother, a congressman from Indiana, voted against certifying the election. This week, Greg Pence was the only no-show in the House on the vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying the 6 January committee. Two-thirds of Republicans deny that the Capitol riot was an attack on the government. The right has a new Lost Cause.Drucker also does justice to Rubio, capturing the senator’s tendency to “chase the latest shiny object”, be it immigration reform in 2013 or police reform after the murder of George Floyd. He’s “the butterfly”, according to one Republican strategist.“Marco goes to every brightly colored flower and sticks his nose right in the middle of it, [then] takes a little bit of honey and stands in front of it to see if anyone’s looking at the flower.”Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseRead moreIn 2016, Rubio won three Republican nominating contests but was battered by Trump in his home state, losing the Florida primary by nearly 20 points. Before 2024, he will face a stern Senate challenge from Val Demings, an African American ex-cop and impeachment floor manager.Demings has out-raised Rubio recently but Rubio has $3m more in the bank. This, remember, is a politician who once purportedly told a friend: “I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning, and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.”He also has a history of credit card problems. Imagine what a President Rubio might do with the national debt.If nothing else, Drucker reminds us that though Trump rules Red America, like rust, ambition never sleeps. The starter’s flag on the race for the Republican nomination has yet to fall. In Trump’s Shadow is fine preparatory reading.
In Trump’s Shadow is published in the US by Twelve
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