US Politics

OpinionUS politicsAmy Coney Barrett says the supreme court aren’t ‘partisan hacks’. Oh really?David SirotaNever mind the court’s wildly rightwing bent and secretive ‘shadow docket’ – or Barrett’s refusal to recuse herself from a case involving a fossil fuel giant that employed her father Wed 15 Sep 2021 06.19 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 12.47 EDTWar is peace, freedom is slavery, and the supreme court is a dispassionate nonpartisan branch of government free of bias – this is the Orwellian fable that Justice Amy Coney Barrett is now asking Americans to believe.And Barrett is asking us to believe it not merely after the court’s wildly partisan ruling on abortion rights, but also just months after she promoted climate denialism to a national audience and refused to recuse herself as she helped secure a legal victory for the fossil fuel giant that employed her father for decades.This is a tale not just of cartoonish hypocrisy but also of deception – a frantic attempt to prevent more of the country from realizing the court is a corporate star chamber that has become one of the most powerful partisan weapons in American politics.First, the blatant hypocrisy: in an event that seems torn out of the pages of the Onion, Barrett this weekend appeared with the Senate’s Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell at a celebration of a University of Louisville facility he named after himself. After she was introduced by the most partisan Senate leader in American history, Barrett declared that the supreme court – which now includes three people who worked directly on the Republican campaign to pilfer the 2000 election – “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”.If that wasn’t absurd enough, Barrett then declared that judges must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too”.That demand for ethical vigilance came less than four months after Barrett discarded her own past recusal list and opted to participate in the adjudication of a major climate case against Shell Oil – the fossil fuel giant that employed her father for nearly three decades. Barrett declined to recuse herself even though an amicus brief was filed in the case by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group that her father helped steer – and even though one prominent supporter of the case said her father could be subpoenaed for a deposition because of his potential “direct knowledge of and operational involvement in how Shell managed climate threats”.But no recusal came – and, with Barrett’s help, the supreme court sided with Shell and other fossil fuel giants, delivering a big procedural win for the oil and gas industry.Barrett’s participation in that case followed her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she refused to acknowledge the undisputed science of climate change (and in which flaccid Democrats decided not to bother to push her on recusal). She cast her position as an attempt to avoid being opinionated about the matter, but of course refusing to stipulate basic scientific fact is the opposite of dispassionate. It is an ideological and partisan expression of Republican orthodoxy wholly disconnected from empirical data.And in case you thought Barrett’s zealotry, hypocrisy and conflicts of interest are germane only to one isolated case, remember that in the coming years, the fossil fuel industry will almost certainly ask the high court to shield it from legal consequences for its climate crimes.Barrett’s motives here, though, are not just about war-is-peace-ing her way through her own ridiculously obvious conflicts of interest. She is also trying to preserve the image of the court as a transcendent fount of apolitical morality at a time when more and more Americans may be finally – belatedly – realizing that the panel is, in fact, made up of hacks.As the Daily Poster has been reporting for quite a while, the panel has become the most conservative supreme court in modern history. This is a group of judges who now loyally rubber-stamp legal requests from the US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups bankrolling the politicians and the nomination campaigns that install rightwing appointees on the court. The justices have become so politically brazen that they now quietly issue landmark rulings in total secrecy through a so-called shadow docket.Despite this, corporate media has typically portrayed the court as a moderating force above politics, and even putatively liberal or centrist pundits have periodically touted some of the most rightwing justices.This propaganda campaign has worked – even as the court exacerbates the climate crisis, restricts abortion rights, tramples voting rights and issues ever-more-extreme rulings helping corporations crush workers, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they approve of the court’s work, according to the latest survey.However, that’s down a sizable six points since last year – which suggests that more of the country is beginning to realize that a fetid form of corporatism and partisanship is quietly rotting the judiciary from within.Barrett rightly senses that this realization threatens the perceived legitimacy of the justice system, and therefore could create momentum for real reform – whether it means term limits for supreme court judges or an expansion of the court.Any of those reforms are a threat to her power, and the power of all the corporate forces that bought high-court jobs for rightwing justices. So she’s trying to do whatever she can to prevent America from understanding how nefarious the upreme court has become.That’s what her speech was really all about – and we shouldn’t be fooled. We should be emboldened behind the cause of finally fixing a star chamber that is causing so much harm throughout the country and the world.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an 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
This article was originally published in the Daily Poster, a grassroots-funded investigative news outlet
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OpinionCoronavirusCovid kills a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. The vaccine mandate shouldn’t be controversialJill FilipovicTrue leadership means making the right decision even when it’s unpopular. Biden’s vaccine rule will save lives and get the economy on track Wed 15 Sep 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 11.15 EDTThe Biden administration’s decision to require vaccinations for large segments of the workforce has been predictably controversial among Trump loyalists, vaccine deniers and rightwing media.It’s also the strongest moment of Joe Biden’s presidency.Leadership and strength are defined by moments like this one: a leader doing the right and necessary thing even when they know they will face criticism and possibly political consequences. Too many politicians follow rather than lead; they listen to the loudest voices and cow to the most aggressive bullies. This is today’s Republican party, with its many officeholders who have spent the years since November 2016 demonstrating that there is no bottom to the humiliations they are willing to endure and the compromises they are willing to make if it means they will keep their seats, prostrating themselves before the altar of Trumpism.Biden, like every politician, no doubt fears losing power. But he’s shown here that he has the integrity to put American lives and the stability of the nation ahead of his own professional ambitions. By one estimate, the Biden vaccine mandate will mean 12 million more Americans get the jab. That’s 12 million more people who will then be extremely unlikely to be hospitalized or die of Covid-19. It’s 12 million more people who can help keep the US economy afloat, and who are helping to keep their communities safe.The new Biden vaccine rules also reflect this administration’s insistence on responding effectively to a complicated reality instead of reacting to those who yell the loudest. It is true that there is a subset of the US population – disproportionately white, Trump-voting evangelicals – who strongly object to the Covid vaccine and say they will refuse to get it, requirements be damned. But there’s also a group of people who simply haven’t gotten their act together, or haven’t felt incentivized to get inoculated. There’s a lot to say about these folks – that they’re selfishly putting their communities at risk, that they aren’t being good citizens – and each of us is certainly entitled to our own moral judgments.But the Biden administration isn’t in the business of finger-wagging; it’s in charge of making effective policy. And the vaccine rule is exactly that: it gives people an excellent reason to choose vaccination, and gives many (although not all) categories of workers the alternative of a weekly Covid test – an inconvenience, to be sure, but hardly an unfair imposition in the face of a pandemic that is killing a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. Significantly, the vaccine rule also mandates time off work for vaccination and recovery from any side-effects.Resurgent Covid numbers are dragging the US economy down, and Biden is looking at a dark winter if more Americans don’t vax up. March 2020 kicked off an unprecedented financial disaster, with scores of people (a huge number of them mothers) losing their jobs as bars and restaurants shuttered, travel ground to a halt, schools closed and sent young children home, and we collectively understood that there was a “before time” and we were now living in the after. We know now that lockdowns didn’t primarily cause this massive economic contraction; fear of Covid did. And we know that the economic growth we’ve seen since Biden took office is partly credited to his administration’s massive vaccine rollout coupled with much-needed financial assistance to most Americans, which got inoculations into arms and people back into the streets, on to airplanes, and into restaurants with money to spend.The vaccine rollout gave Americans the choice to get the jab and protect their communities and their country, or forego it out of political obstinacy. (Some people, of course, cannot get the vaccine for health reasons, but those people are a small minority and not the ones dragging down the US’s stagnated vaccination numbers.) Shamefully, a huge number of Americans have refused to do the right thing. Some rely on arguments about individual freedom, and don’t seem to connect their individual decision to a collective problem – viruses, after all, don’t respect declarations of bodily autonomy and “my body, my choice”.And those refusing vaccination are also putting our collective livelihoods and our country’s economic wellbeing at risk: as the Delta variant continues to rage, more Americans are staying home. That means they are no longer supporting local businesses as often. Some are making the difficult decision to quit or scale back their own work so they can keep their unvaccinated kids at home instead of risking sending them to schools unmasked and with unvaccinated adults. All of those seemingly individual decisions add up to a bigger and much more troubling whole.So the Biden administration decided to take bold and decisive action, even though officials surely knew there would be outcry. One has to imagine they’re gambling on a payoff – an economy that doesn’t crash, for example, or the quieter majority of Americans who support vaccination and really want to see the pandemic get under control – but they are taking a risk nonetheless. Doing the right thing isn’t exactly an act of valor, but in today’s political universe of reactionary rightwing cowards, it is laudable.Yet many mainstream media sources have focused on the objections and the potential political blowback instead of the necessity of this rule, and the leadership that implementing it exemplifies.That’s a choice, too. Cynical conservatives have realized they can turn even the most commonsense measures into convenient political footballs, sending political reporters and talking heads scrambling to analyze the political fallout of rational rules and good policy. That in turn only reinforces the power of these bad actors.We don’t have to fall for it. Many Americans would surely agree that we want leaders who follow the scientific consensus and make decisions based on what is best for public health and the country’s economic wellbeing, even when those decisions are hard. Most of us would surely agree that we want leaders who lead instead of spinelessly acquiescing to the whims of those who throw the biggest tantrums.Joe Biden is leading despite the very predictable conservative outbursts. He’s refusing to keep the nation held hostage to the least informed but most self-righteous among us.That’s leadership, even if the Fox News crowd doesn’t like it.
Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
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TexasTexas’s largest companies stay silent on state abortion ban despite outrageCorporations, including American Airlines and ExxonMobil, have not made statements about the ban that all but outlaws abortion Lauren ArataniWed 15 Sep 2021 04.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 04.51 EDTDespite the widespread outrage over a new Texas law that all but outlaws abortion in the state, only a handful of major companies have spoken out against the legislation that went into effect on 1 September.The law relies on private citizens to carry out the ban by allowing people to file civil lawsuits against anyone who assists a woman in getting an abortion after embryonic cardiac activity is detected. A divided US supreme court declined to block it, allowing it to remain in effect as its legality is worked out in lower courts.Salesforce offers to help staff leave Texas as abortion law takes effectRead moreTexas’s largest corporate employers, including American Airlines, ExxonMobil, Dell Technologies, Oracle Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Enterprises – all of which are headquartered in the state – have not made any public statements about the law.Texas has some of the most business-friendly tax and regulation laws in the country, making it unsurprising that many businesses, including Apple, Toyota and Tesla, have been luring millions of workers to Texas’s major cities through recent expansion of their operations in the state.After the law went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said that “a lot” of residents and businesses in the state approved of the law.“This is not slowing down businesses coming to the state of Texas, it is accelerating the process of businesses coming to Texas … They are leaving the very liberal state of California,” he told CNBC, a nod to the number of high-profile big tech companies that have opened Texas offices in recent years.In the interview, Abbott said that he speaks to Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, “frequently” and said Musk approves of the state’s social policies. Musk quickly responded on Twitter that he believes “government should rarely impose its will upon the people and when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness”.“That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics,” he added.While it may be easiest for companies to similarly stay away from “politics”, a recent poll has found that the college-educated workforce the major companies hope to attract to Texas are likely to stay away from the state because of the law. Nearly 75% of women and 58% of men said that Texas’s abortion ban would discourage them from taking a job in the state.“Other states are competing for people,” Tammi Wallace, CEO of the Greater Houston LGBT Chamber of Commerce, told Bloomberg News. “If you look at what our state is doing, and then you see another state where they’re not doing some of those things, you might say, ‘Well, the money’s good, but where do I want to raise my family?”Silence from major corporations is particularly notable given that companies have started to become vocal about progressive causes like LGBTQ rights, gender equality and racism within the last five years.Most recently, hundreds of companies and CEOs signed a statement against restrictive voting laws in April as Georgia’s legislature was passing a series of voting restrictions. The CEOs of American Airlines and Dell were vocally critical of similar voting restrictions that were going up through the Texas legislature.Companies have also been vocal about other abortion bans in the past. Leaders of more than 180 companies signed a statement in June 2019 that took up a full-page ad in the New York Times criticizing abortion restrictions in light of the blitz of abortion bans that were being passed in several states.“Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortions, threatens the health independence and economic stability of our employees and customers,” the statement read. “Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business.”When Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, signed an abortion ban in May 2019, leaders from major Hollywood studios, including Netflix and Disney, voiced concerns over the bill and said they would boycott filming in the state, which offers lucrative entertainment tax incentives.“I think many people who work for us will not want to work there,” Bob Iger, then-CEO of Disney, said at the time. A federal judge ultimately blocked the Georgia bill.Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation, said that the law had “just really hit companies by surprise” and that many companies were trying to come up with a response.In 2019, “there was a much longer runway as multiple states were passing restrictions in succession and a longer media spotlight”, Stark said.“There are many, many conversations being had behind the scenes with large, well-known brands,” Stark said, adding that the Don’t Ban Equality coalition, which organized the 2019 corporate statement, was working on a statement against the law they were hoping companies would sign.One exception to the general silence over Texas’s law is the cloud-based software giant Salesforce which is offering to help relocate employees out of the state if they so wish. Referring to the “incredibly personal issues” that the law creates, a message to the company’s entire workforce sent last week said any employee and their family wishing to move elsewhere would receive assistance.Bospar, a small California-based public relations firm, also said that it will offer $10,000 to its six Texas-based employees for relocation out of state because of the abortion ban.Among the few other companies who have spoken out against the Texas abortion ban are the dating app companies Match Group and Bumble, ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, Yelp and Benefit Cosmetics.The city council of Portland, Oregon, is also trying to boycott millions of dollars of goods and services coming out of Texas, including barring business-related travel to Texas, because of the ban.The Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the boycott a “a complete joke” on Twitter and said: “Texas’s economy is stronger than ever. We value babies and police, they don’t.”TopicsTexasAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has successfully fended off an effort to oust him from office in a special election. He overcame a Republican campaign to unseat him over his liberal policies on immigration, Covid-19 and crime. 
Newsom, a first-term governor beset by challenges including the pandemic, extreme drought and severe wildfires, boosted turnout among Democrats with a flurry of late campaigning. In the final days of the race, he appeared alongside President Joe Biden and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who formerly represented California as a US senator and attorney general

Gavin Newsom will remain California governor after handily defeating recall attempt More

CaliforniaGavin Newsom will remain California governor after handily defeating recall attemptCalifornia voters resoundingly reject choice to replace Democratic governor, who faced a battle for his political life01:48Maanvi Singh in Oakland@ More

OpinionAlexandria Ocasio-CortezAOC’s guide to getting noticed at parties: drape yourself in the garments of class warVan BadhamThe backlash to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Tax the rich’ Met Gala dress was instant and glorious Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.42 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.48 EDTAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not the only celebrity to take a political statement as her date to the Met Gala. The actor Cara Delevingne celebrated the “American Independence” theme of the visually dazzling annual ball in a vest that read “Peg the Patriarchy”. The US congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was resplendent in a “suffragette gown” made of trailing “Equal rights for women” banners. The actor Dan Levy donned Aids-era queer art. The Trump-baiting football megastar Megan Rapinoe carried a dainty purse embossed with the words “In gay we trust”.‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreBut it was AOC in a slyly bridal white Aurora James dress who made the most impact of the evening. James is an immigrant to the US, a black woman who built her brand from hard-work beginnings, selling her clothes in Brooklyn’s neighbourhood markets. Yet the congressional representative from New York’s 14th district bared her shoulders above James’ orchid-like couture creation not merely as a celebration of local effort and enterprise. The back of AOC’s gown came adorned with the words TAX THE RICH in the red Pantone shade “Beheaded Capitalist”.The backlash was instant and glorious. It was something of a delight to watch the US right prioritise a conniption about economic redistribution over so many immediate visible opportunities to be sexist and homophobic. Then again, the theme of “America” has always been implicitly twinned with “money” and, while capitalism happily finds markets to exploit among girls and queers, collectivised wealth has never been the radical chic it prefers to embrace.A symbolic case in point is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the host and beneficiary of the Met Gala. It’s a taxpayer-funded institution, legislated into existence to serve a century-old mission to “be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year”. Yet its famous Costume Institute must fundraise for itself, hence seeking voluntary contributions from rich people in the form of $35,000-a-head tickets to this disgusting, decadent, fabulous Met Gala annual party. This week’s event raked in $16.75m.There are those who condemn the fatuous, end-of-empire-level-indulgence event that sees Debbie Harry turn up as a floating ribcage while the more-money-less-talent Kardashian women conspicuously underwhelm on the couture front every year. I am not one of them. I say let the rich eat all the cake they want if paying for it means a kid from a poor community can experience, for free, the transformative joy of an accessible art museum. Or get care in a hospital. Or go to school. Find any way at all to squeeze the money out of them – indeed, this is the very principle of taxation.How lovely to see in the photography of a celebrity gala event that it’s a principle shared by AOC, whose dress was not actually a performance of faux activism but a press release in the form of wearable art summarising the activism she has made meaningful where it matters. The seismic leftward shift she’s effected on Democratic party politics and the political discourse beyond it has provided Joe Biden the vanguard for leftist policy ambition unthinkable to decades of party predecessors. It was the new US president – not AOC – who published on social media on Tuesday: “A teacher shouldn’t pay more in taxes than an oil company. We’re going to cut taxes for the middle class by ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their share.”The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreI adore AOC. Not merely for her meticulous congressional preparation and policy work, her skilled questioning, or her Jacinda Ardern-like ability to calculate the most impactful ratio of ideological purity to ruthless pragmatism – remember, AOC did not waste her radical progressivism on a doomed minor-party project, but brought it with her to the centre of real power. I also adore her because she pre-empted criticism of her Met Gala appearance with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, the brilliant Canadian media theorist who predicted the internet back in the 1960s. Those awed by AOC’s adept use of social and other media to brand, communicate and radicalise others may wish to consider that she may have absorbed something of use from the man who pointed out “sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard”.In this way, she imparts in her person a specific instruction to urban young women desperate to be noticed, and yet overwhelmed by inaccessible standards of celebrity glamour, surgical beauty and unaffordable livery on show at the Met Gala. It’s “before you order the dress, do the reading”.There’s always one surefire way to get noticed at parties and it isn’t rocking up in a dress made from sequinned pantyhose, or aping the style of one of those 1970s dolls with big skirts that used to decorously cover the toilet paper. It’s to arrive AOC-style – in the blood-spattered garments of fighting class war.TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezOpinionMet Gala 2021US politicsDemocratscommentReuse this content More

US universities Abolish Trump-era ‘China Initiative’, academics urge, amid racial profiling criticism Stanford University professors say the programme is fuelling racism and harming US competitiveness, rather than uncovering spies in universities Vincent Ni China affairs correspondentTue 14 Sep 2021 22.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 22.02 EDTCalls are growing to abolish a controversial Trump-era initiative that looks for Chinese spies at US universities, which critics say has resulted in racial profiling and harmed technological competitiveness.In a letter sent to the Department of Justice, 177 faculty members across 40 departments at Stanford University asked the US government to cease operating the “China Initiative”. They argue the programme harms academic freedom by racially profiling and unfairly targeting Chinese academics.The letter follows the acquittal last week by a US federal judge of a researcher accused of concealing ties with China while receiving American taxpayer-funded grants. “We understand that concerns about Chinese government-sanctioned activities including intellectual property theft and economic espionage are important to address,” the Stanford academics wrote. “We believe, however, that the China Initiative has deviated significantly from its claimed mission: it is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fuelling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.”The Guardian view on anti-Chinese suspicion: target espionage, not ethnicities | EditorialRead moreOn Thursday, a federal judge in Tennessee acquitted Anming Hu, an ethnic Chinese nanotechnology expert at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who had been accused of concealing his ties to Beijing while applying for research funding to work on a Nasa project. The judge said the US government hadn’t proven its case.“Given the lack of evidence that defendant was aware of such an expansive interpretation of Nasa’s China funding restriction, the court concludes that, even viewing all the evidence in the light most favourable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud Nasa,” US district judge Thomas Varlan wrote in a 52-page ruling.Responding to the decision, the Department of Justice said “we respect the court’s decision, although we are disappointed with the result”, according to US media. Hu’s attorney, Phil Lomonaco, said the academic was focused now on recovering his tenured position at the University of Tennessee.“Many universities should have learned from the experience that professor was forced to endure,” Lomonaco said. “The Department of Justice needs to take a step back and reassess their approach on investigating Chinese professors in the United States universities. They are not all spies.”‘There’s a better way’The high-profile trial came after a series of arrests of US-based researchers who had been accused of not properly disclosing their work in China in recent years. After a jury deadlock, Hu’s case ended in mistrial in June. An FBI agent admitted that he had “used false information to justify putting a team of agents to spy on Hu and his son for two years”, according to local news reports.Confronting hate against east Asians – a photo essayRead moreThe Trump-era China Initiative began in 2018. In justifying such an operation, Department of Justice said on its website: “The Department of Justice’s China Initiative reflects the strategic priority of countering Chinese national security threats and reinforces the president’s overall national security strategy.” It also publishes a list of successful prosecutions – with the latest one on 14 May.But critics say while it is necessary for the US to protect its national security, such a programme that targets an entire ethnic group would end up in discrimination against Asian Americans – in particular those who are of Chinese origin.On 30 July, 90 members of the US congress urged the Department of Justice to investigate what they called “the repeated, wrongful targeting of individuals of Asian descent for alleged espionage”, in a letter to attorney general Merrick Garland.Last week, Democratic congressman Ted Lieu demanded the Justice Department apologise to Hu. “You should stop discriminating against Asians. You should investigate your prosecutors for engaging in what looks like racial profiling. If Hu’s last name was Smith, you would not have brought this case,” he wrote.Hate crimes in US rise to highest level in 12 years, says FBI reportRead moreThe recent round of calls came in the wake of growing violence against Asians in the US. According to an FBI annual report last month, the number of reported crimes against people of Asian decent grew by 70% last year, totalling 274 cases.Margaret Lewis of Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, who has been calling on the US government to rethink its approach to research security, said: “I understand the need to be concerned about the Chinese government’s behaviour that incentivises violations of US law, but the US should first not engage in rhetoric that fuels xenophobia and racism.“It worries me that people with certain characteristics might fall under suspicion,” she said. “Let us not pretend there’s no concern about Beijing, but there’s a better way to do it. Getting rid of the name is the first step.”TopicsUS universitiesChinaDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS foreign policyAsia PacificnewsReuse this content More