US Politics

Biden administrationBiden administration seeks to lift US refugee cap to 125,000 beginning 1 OctoberPlan comes as tens of thousands of Afghan refugees are on military bases awaiting resettlement R More

Biden administrationBiden’s UN speech will try to convince member states that ‘America is back’But president will contend with skepticism in wake of Aukus, disagreements over Israel and the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal Julian Borger in WashingtonMon 20 Sep 2021 16.25 EDTFirst published on Mon 20 Sep 2021 15.13 EDTJoe Biden will make his first speech to the United Nations as president on Tuesday, seeking to “close the chapter on 20 years of war” and begin an era of intensive diplomacy.Biden will however have to contend with hostility from China, an open rift with France and widespread scepticism among UN member states over his commitment to multilateralism following disagreements over Israel, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a nuclear submarine deal that took adversaries and allies by surprise.The White House sees the speech to the UN general assembly as a chance to reclaim the global initiative and convince UN member states that “America is back”, as Biden promised when he took office.It will be followed by a week of bilateral meetings, a US-hosted Covid summit on Wednesday aimed at drumming up more funding for global vaccine distribution, a meeting of leaders of the Pacific-oriented Quad group– India, Australia and Japan – on Wednesday, and a UN security council meeting on climate insecurity on Thursday.“It’s an important, consequential week for President Biden and his leadership on the world stage,” a senior administration official said.Tuesday’s speech, the official added, will “center on the proposition that we are closing the chapter on 20 years of war, and opening a chapter of intensive diplomacy, by rallying allies and partners and institutions to deal with the major challenges of our time.”However, Biden is arriving in New York just days after the disclosure of a new security agreement between Australia, the UK and US, which will involve helping Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.The announcement of the Aukus deal has deepened tensions with China, which portrayed it as a hostile act, and with France, which had a contract to supply Australia with French vessels and which was blindsided by Aukus.In his speech, Biden will say he wants to avoid a new cold war with the world divided into blocks.“He believes in vigorous, intensive, principled competition that does not tip over into conflict,” a senior US official said.However, at the start of UN general assembly’s summit week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, expressed concern that US-Chinese rivalry was stopping progress on urgent global issues.Guterres told CNN that the efforts of US climate envoy John Kerry to reach a compromise with China have “largely failed because the Chinese have said … we cannot have cooperation on climate or anything else”.“I believe that we need to avoid a new cold war, because the old cold war was more easy to manage. It was clear. Now things are more complex,” the secretary general said.Biden starts the week with the added burden of a serious fracture in western cohesion. France is still furious at being taken by surprise by the Aukus agreement and warning there will be further diplomatic fallout.On Monday, Biden was trying to set up a phone call with French president Emmanuel Macron, and US secretary of state, Tony Blinken, was seeking a meeting with his counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian, in New York, but the French were being elusive.The state department said the schedules of Blinken and Le Drian were “dynamic”. A French official said no bilateral meeting was planned.Richard Gowan, the UN director for the International Crisis Group, said that the Aukus row “will fit in with a narrative that has emerged around Biden that he talks a good multilateral game, but when it comes to the crunch on a lot of issues he is still a bit of an America First-er.”In May, the US blocked the UN security council from making a statement calling for an end to Israeli-Palestinian violence, while Israel was conducting a bombing campaign aimed at Hamas in Gaza, with heavy civilian casualties.Sherine Tadros, the head of the New York office of Amnesty International, said that Biden will benefit from the comparison with Donald Trump, who was openly hostile to the UN, and delivered bellicose speeches from the lectern.“The bar is low,” Tadros said. “There is no doubt there is reengagement … But when you look at Afghanistan, when you look at the Gaza war, the UN was circumvented by the Biden administration and treated as a Plan B.”In normal times, Biden would have found it easier to smooth over cracks by schmoozing with fellow leaders, but Covid-19 and New York City rules for preventing its spread have made that difficult.He is due to hold only one bilateral meeting in New York on Tuesday, with Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, before returning to Washington, where he will meet Britain’s Boris Johnson.TopicsBiden administrationJoe BidenUnited NationsAukusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS politicsGuess what the three Democrats blocking lower medication prices have in common?David Sirota and Andrew PerezA bill in Congress would allow Medicare to use its bulk-purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. Big Pharma is not pleased Mon 20 Sep 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Mon 20 Sep 2021 11.21 EDTThe three conservative Democratic lawmakers threatening to kill their party’s drug pricing legislation have raked in roughly $1.6m of campaign cash from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industries. One of the lawmakers is the House’s single largest recipient of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash this election cycle, and another lawmaker’s immediate past chief of staff is now lobbying for drugmakers.The threat from Democratic representatives Kurt Schrader (Oregon), Scott Peters (California) and Kathleen Rice (New York) comes just as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group announced a seven-figure ad campaign to vilify the Democratic legislation, which aims to lower the cost of medicines for Americans now facing the world’s highest prescription drug prices.At issue is House Democrats’ initiative to let Medicare use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. That power – which is used by other industrialized countries to protect their citizens from exorbitant prices – has been promised by Democrats for years, and party leaders have been planning to include it as part of their sprawling $3.5tn infrastructure reconciliation effort.On Wednesday, Schrader, Peters and Rice helped vote the measure down in the powerful energy and commerce committee, blocking the legislation before it could come to the House floor for a vote. Even if the bill were to ultimately make it to the floor through another committee – which remains a possibility – Democrats have only a four-seat majority that allows them to pass legislation, so they can’t afford to lose any more votes.“I understand that the pharmaceutical industry owns the Republican party and that no Republican voted for this bill, but there is no excuse for every Democrat not supporting it,” said the Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders after the vote.The trio of Big Pharma Democrats are jeopardizing a plan based on HR 3, the Elijah E Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act. The Congressional Budget Office has said the drug pricing legislation, named for the late Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, would save the government $456bn and “reduce prices by 57% to 75%, relative to current prices” for various medicines.The measure would direct federal health regulators to negotiate prices of 25 high-priced drugs in the first year of implementation and 50 drugs in subsequent years, and the new negotiated prices would be available to both Medicare and private insurers.Polls show that the idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices is wildly popular – to the point where swing-state Republicans and swing-district Democrats, and even former President Donald Trump, have expressed support for it.Schrader and Peters are among the two biggest recent Democratic recipients of pharmaceutical industry donations, according to OpenSecrets. The pharmaceutical and health products industries are collectively the second biggest donor to both lawmakers over the course of their careers, giving them almost $1.5m in total. Peters is the House’s top recipient of pharmaceutical industry donations in the 2022 election cycle.Big Pharma doesn’t want us to expand Medicare. We have to fight them | Bernie SandersRead morePeters and his family were worth an estimated $60m in 2018, making him one of the wealthiest lawmakers in Congress, according to OpenSecrets. His wife is the president and CEO of Cameron Holdings, an investment firm whose portfolio company provides manufacturing and packaging for pharmaceutical companies.Schrader’s net worth, meanwhile, was pegged at nearly $8m. The Oregonian reported in 2008 that he received “a quite large inheritance” from his grandfather, who was “vice president and director of biochemical research and development at Pfizer” – the drugmaker whose political action committee is now Schrader’s third largest career donor.The congressmen on Tuesday offered their own drug pricing proposal, which would allow Medicare to negotiate prices only under limited conditions, such as when a company no longer has exclusive marketing rights on an older drug but there are no competitors. That proposal was also backed by the Democratic representative Stephanie Murphy (Florida), the co-chair of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, who is the House’s fifth largest recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industries.Earlier this year, Peters’ campaign saw a surge in donations from pharmaceutical company executives after he organized a letter with nine other Democratic lawmakers informing the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that they opposed HR 3. Schrader and Rice co-signed the letter.It’s worth noting that Peters, Schrader and Rice all voted in favor of HR 3 in the previous Congress. Politico wrote in May that Peters “said he cast that vote knowing it had no chance of becoming law at the time. He said he supported it only to ‘start a conversation about lowering the cost of prescription drugs’.”Rice, Schrader and Peters have seats on the House energy and commerce committee, which is writing the party’s prescription drug plan, and they used those positions to help block the measure there on Wednesday, preventing it from moving to the floor.Last December, House Democrats’ steering committee voted to put Rice on the energy and commerce panel instead of the progressive New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.On Tuesday, Rice explained that she opposes the drug pricing measure because “I do not support advancing policies that are not fiscally responsible and jeopardize the bill’s final passage.”Schrader’s longtime top aide, Paul Gage, left the congressman’s office earlier this year, according to Legistorm, and quickly started lobbying for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the powerful Washington drug lobby.Gage has been lobbying Congress on drug pricing issues and HR 3, according to ethics records. PhRMA raised more than $500m in 2019, and the organization is one of the top lobbying spenders in DC.On Wednesday, PhRMA announced it is launching an ad campaign against House Democrats’ drug pricing efforts. “Politicians say they want to negotiate medicine prices in Medicare,” one ad warns. “But make no mistake: What politicians mean is they’ll decide which medicines you can and can’t get.”The Blue Dog Coalition’s political action committee has been making monthly payments to a consulting firm led by the coalition’s former communications director, Kristen Hawn.Hawn is also a partner at the bipartisan public affairs firm ROKK Solutions, which has worked for PhRMA.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
Andrew Perez is a senior editor at the Daily Poster and a cofounder of the Democratic Policy Center
This article was originally published in the Daily Poster, a grassroots-funded investigative news outlet
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Politics booksTrump may be gone, but Covid has not seen off populism It is liberal fantasy to imagine that poor handing of the pandemic has lessened the allure of Modi and Bolsonaro. They are learning fast how to subvert votingJan-Werner MüllerMon 20 Sep 2021 05.00 EDTWhen the pandemic struck, newspaper opinion pages were full of pieces predicting the end of authoritarian populism. Surely Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro couldn’t survive their mishandling of Covid-19? Finally, people were waking up to the reality of what these leaders represented.Trump may not have lasted, but the expectation that the pandemic might see off populism is mistaken. Liberal observers have long assumed that populists are by definition incompetent demagogues. But populism is not all about promising simplistic solutions in a complex world and, contrary to a complacent liberal narrative, populist leaders are not incapable of correcting failed policies. The threat of authoritarian populism is compounded by the fact that these leaders are learning from each other – though what they are copying are not more effective strategies to combat the pandemic, but techniques for disabling democracy.When despairing about the rise of populism, liberals have been eager to identify underlying causes. And indeed, there are striking similarities in the way far-right populist leaders govern in different parts of the globe: Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jarosław Kaczyński, Viktor Orbán, Modi, and, as a hopefully historical example, Trump. But similar outcomes do not prove similar causes. Rather, the reason for the emergence of what we might as well call a far-right populist art of governance is that leaders can copy each other’s best (or worst) practices. They are busy perfecting the art of faking democracy: ballot boxes are not stuffed on election day, but between them we see voting rules manipulated, media outlets taken over by business leaders friendly to the government, and civil society systematically intimidated and therefore election outcomes are rarely in doubt. Liberals, meanwhile, are drastically underestimating their adversaries.Populist leaders are not all nearly as incompetent and irresponsible as Trump and Bolsonaro’s handling of Covid would suggest. Their core characteristic is not that they criticise elites or are angry with the establishment. Rather, what distinguishes them is the claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority”.At first sight, this might not sound particularly nefarious. And yet this claim has two consequences deeply damaging for democracy: rather obviously, populists assert that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values. Rather, populists allege that their rivals are simply corrupt, or “crooked” characters. More insidiously, the suggestion that there exists a “real people” implies that there are some who are not quite real – figures who just pretend to belong, who might undermine the polity in some form, or who are at best second-rate citizens.Obvious examples are minorities and, in particular, recent immigrants, who are suspected of not being truly loyal to the polity. Think of Modi’s policy of creating a register of genuine citizens. Ostensibly, this is about identifying illegal immigrants; but especially in combination with new refugee policies that effectively discriminate against Muslims, its actual message is all too clear to Hindu nationalists. Or think of Trumpists who would never really engage in argument with critics, but simply denounce the latter as “un-American”.Populists reduce political issues to questions of belonging, and then attack those who are said not to belong. That is not a matter of mere rhetoric. Sooner or later, the appeal to the real people – and the exclusion of supposedly fake people – will have effects on streets and squares: Trump rallies have been associated with a local increase in assaults. The concept of “trickle-down aggression” – coined by the feminist philosopher Kate Manne – captures this dynamic.Populist leaders present themselves as the great champions of empowering the people, and yet always exclude particular people. The shameless attempts by US Republicans to suppress the vote (and subvert election outcomes) are playing on the sense that the “real America” is white and Christian – and that black and brown people should not really be participating in politics in the first place. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is gearing up to repeat Trump-style claims about a stolen election, should he lose the vote next year; he will have learned that, beyond casting doubt on the legitimacy of those not casting a ballot for you, bringing at least parts of the military to your side might be decisive.In Hungary, Orbán has long provided a model from which others can learn how to stretch laws to the limit in order to create pliable courts and media organisations. They can also study subtle tactics of how to mislead the EU and the Council of Europe long enough to entrench partisan advantages.When Poland’s Law and Justice Party returned to power in 2015, it could reach for Orbán’s manual of how to build an autocracy under the eyes of the EU. Like the Hungarian leader, it learned the lesson that, during its first time in office, it had wasted political capital on culture wars, instead of capturing independent institutions. To keep oneself in power, one must control the judiciary, the election system and TV in particular – once that has happened, one can wage culture wars and incite hatred against minorities to one’s heart’s content.None of this is to say that the new authoritarian systems are invincible, but we need to better understand their innovative techniques. Some are so dangerous because they are getting technologically more sophisticated: Pegasus spyware, the use of private companies to spread misinformation, or the extensive use of social media by leaders such as Modi (the world’s most tech-savvy populist) are only the most obvious instances. Still more dangerous than digital autocracy, though, is the ability of authoritarians to disable democracy, while at the same time advancing democratic-sounding justifications for their actions.What is happening in the US and the UK is a prime example. The push by the Johnson government to make the presentation of voter ID mandatory can look reasonable on paper: nobody is against the prevention of voter fraud. Northern Ireland already has such measures in place, as do countries on the continent. But, as we should have appreciated by now, legal measures can be deployed to, in effect, shrink the demos, the political body, for partisan purposes: minorities, the unemployed and especially the poor – lacking drivers’ licences and passports for travel abroad – are most likely not to have the time and resources to secure the required forms of ID. We have also learned the hard way that the staffing of election commissions is not some bureaucratic trifle (as Tom Stoppard observed long ago, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting”), but can make the difference between keeping and losing democracy.‘We the people’: the battle to define populismRead moreWhy do populists so often get away with these kinds of measures? We have not grasped the extent to which they have succeeded in imposing their distorted understanding of basic democratic practices. The vast majority of those identifying as Republicans regard voting as a “privilege” tied to responsibilities, while Democrats respect it as an unconditional right.It is not true that masses of people are longing for strongmen and are turning away from democracy. But it has become easier to fake democracy. That is partly because defenders of democracy have not argued for its basic principles well, and partly because they keep underestimating their adversaries.TopicsPolitics booksUS politicsViktor OrbánCoronavirusPolandHungaryBrazilfeaturesReuse this content More

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