US Politics

Joe Biden‘Have at it’: Joe Biden dares vaccine mandate opponents to take him onPartisan pushback comes as CDC releases study finding those who were not fully vaccinated recently were 11 times more likely to die of Covid Joan E Greve in Washington and Richard Luscombe in MiamiFri 10 Sep 2021 15.13 EDTFirst published on Fri 10 Sep 2021 14.08 EDTJoe Biden has dared political opponents plotting legal challenges to his large-scale workforce vaccine mandates to “have at it” – as one Republican governor promised to fight the White House “to the gates of hell” over the new coronavirus rules.A growing number of senior Republicans, including US senators, state governors and leading party officials, announced on Friday they would support or pursue legal avenues to try to block the president’s edict.Biden tells Republicans threatening to sue over vaccine mandate: ‘Have at it’ – live Read moreIn an address at the White House on Thursday, Biden said his new orders would affect 100 million workers and help “turn the tide of Covid-19” in the US.Among the most vocal was the South Carolina governor, Henry McMaster, who, in a tweet, painted the tussle over compulsory vaccination as a battle for personal freedoms.“Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian,” he wrote.But on Friday, Biden did not appear to be flummoxed by the promised, largely partisan, resistance to his adminitration’s new workplace requirements.The new rules are part of his six-pronged strategy to tackle the Delta-variant fueled resurgence of the pandemic.“Have at it,” he said during a morning visit to a middle school in Washington on Friday, when a reporter asked for his response to Republicans threatening lawsuits.“We’re playing for real here, this isn’t a game. And I don’t know of any scientist out there in this field that doesn’t think it makes considerable sense to do the six things I’ve suggested,” the president said.Referring to Republicans such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, currently embroiled in a lengthy legal fight over the right to ban mask mandates in schools, Biden added: “I am so disappointed that, particularly some Republican governors, have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities.”Republicans began seething over the new regulations almost as soon as the president finished delivering his remarks on Thursday afternoon, with some calling a vaccine mandate on private businesses with more than 100 workers “unconstitutional”.Others, such as Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey, insisted it would not survive legal scrutiny.“This is exactly the kind of big government overreach we have tried so hard to prevent in Arizona – now the Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way,” Ducey said in a tweet.“This will never stand up in court,” he added. “The vaccine is and should be a choice. We must and will push back.”The partisan pushback came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out studies on Friday one of which found that those who were not fully vaccinated in recent months were 11 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than the fully vaccinated. It was one of three major studies published by the federal agency that focus on the sustained high efficacy of the three Covid vaccines available in the US, against the highly infecious Delta variant.Meanwhile, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said the party’s executive intended to file a lawsuit as soon as the mandate was enacted.“Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied,” she said in a statement.“Like many Americans, I am pro-vaccine and anti-mandate. Many small businesses and workers do not have the money or legal resources to fight Biden’s unconstitutional actions and authoritarian decrees, but when his decree goes into effect, the RNC will sue the administration to protect Americans and their liberties.”This is a reversal from Biden’s stance in July, when White House press secretary Jen Psaki said such mandates were “not the role of the federal government”.In Texas, US senator Ted Cruz, who refused to certify Biden’s election victory on the night of the 6 January Capitol insurrection, seized on a retweet by Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, that he insisted was an acknowledgement that the administration knew its actions were illegal.The original message that Klain retweeted, by NBC journalist Stephanie Ruhle, referred to the emergency workplace safety rule by the occupational and safety and health administration (Osha) as “the ultimate work-around for the federal government to require vaccinations.”The use of the phrase “work-around”, and Klain’s subsequent retweet of it, is a damaging admission, in Cruz’s view, because courts are allowed to evaluate the intention and purpose of policies.“He said the quiet part out loud,” the senator tweeted. “Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care.”In a subsequent post, Cruz said: “The feds have no authority to force employers make their employees get vaccinated.”Not all Republicans, however, are opposed to Biden’s move. Governor Phil Scott of Vermont retweeted the White House announcement of the new strategy and added: “I appreciate the president’s continued prioritization of vaccination and the country’s recovery as we move forward.“As Vermont’s experience shows, vaccines work and save lives. They are the best and fastest way to move past this pandemic.”Prominent health experts supported Biden.One, Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, told the New York Times: “It’s going to fundamentally shift the arc of the current surge. It’s exactly what’s needed at this moment.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More

OpinionSeptember 11 2001The Guardian view on the 20th anniversary of 9/11: no end in sightEditorialThe devastating al-Qaida attack, and America’s response, had far-reaching consequences which are still developing Fri 10 Sep 2021 12.49 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Sep 2021 13.29 EDTA new and deadly era began when the planes sliced into the twin towers on the morning of 11 September 2001. That evening, the historian Tony Judt wrote that he had seen the 21st century begin. The nearly 3,000 lives stolen by al-Qaida were only a small part of the toll. The horror began a chain of events that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, including huge numbers of civilians abroad and many US military personnel. It is still unfolding.If the killing of the plot’s mastermind Osama bin Laden a few months before the 10th anniversary perhaps let some hope that an end to that new era might be in sight, there can be no such false confidence at the 20th. The establishment of a Taliban government in Kabul, two decades after the US ousted the militants for harbouring Bin Laden, has underscored two things: that far from reasserting its global supremacy, the US looks more vulnerable today; and that the echoes of 9/11 are still reverberating across the region – but will not stay there.Al-Qaida itself survives and others claim its mantle. In the west, the threat from Islamist terrorism endures – from 7/7 and the Madrid train bombings, to the attacks at Manchester Arena, the Berlin Christmas market and Vienna – though the nature of the threat has shifted, from a heavily financed, complex and internationally organised plot to more localised, less sophisticated attacks. This week, 20 men went on trial over the 2015 massacre at the Bataclan concert hall and other sites in Paris. Ken McCallum, MI5’s chief, said on Friday that the agency had prevented six “late stage” terrorist plots during the pandemic, and that with the Taliban’s triumph, “more risk progressively may flow our way”.The determination to pursue a military solution fed the political problems, as history should have warned. (A Rand Corporation study of 248 terrorist groups worldwide suggested that only 7% were ended by military force.)In Afghanistan, the refusal to accept a Taliban surrender paved the way for America’s longest war and ultimate acceptance of defeat. Islamic State arose from the ashes of the invasion of Iraq. Extraordinary renditions, torture, the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and the unwillingness to acknowledge or atone for civilian deaths at the hands of US forces or their allies all stoked the fire. These abuses and crimes were not anomalies but intrinsic to the war on terror. Men swept up in the aftermath are still held at Guantánamo Bay.Around the world, basic rights were erased at home too. The US saw a massive expansion of presidential power; the veneration of secrecy; the destruction of norms; the normalisation of Islamophobia; the promotion of a narrative linking immigration and terrorism, breeding broader intolerance; and the encouragement of the belief that ordinary citizens were in a state of war. It is not hard to draw the line to the rise of Donald Trump and white supremacy, or rightwing populism elsewhere. In the US, far-right terror groups were behind most attacks last year; in the UK, police have said that the fastest growing terror threat is from the far right. The biggest perils to the US now appear not external but internal. The future of a divided and distrustful country looks increasingly precarious, its status in the world weakened.Whatever many in the country once believed, American citizens cannot be isolated from the dangers of the outside world; trouble is not “always someplace else”. On 9/11, the country transitioned from a dream of unending tranquility at home to a nightmare of forever war. With the return of soldiers from Afghanistan, the US is more distanced from the enemy. But the conflict continues by other means, and without boots on the ground, drone strikes are more likely than ever to claim the lives of civilians as well as terrorist suspects. The US, and the west, cannot be safe at home while insecurity reigns abroad.TopicsSeptember 11 2001OpinionAl-QaidaUS politicsAfghanistaneditorialsReuse this content More

OpinionSeptember 11 2001After 20 years, Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal has finally ended the 9/11 eraBen RhodesThe US’s departure has prompted a national sense of shame and a recognition there will be no victory in the ‘war on terror’Ben Rhodes was a US deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration Fri 10 Sep 2021 12.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Sep 2021 12.43 EDTForeign policy, for better or worse, is always an extension of a nation’s domestic politics. The arc of America’s war in Afghanistan is a testament to this reality – the story of a superpower that overreached, slowly came to terms with the limits of its capacity to shape events abroad, and withdrew in the wake of raging dysfunction at home. Viewed through this prism, President Joe Biden’s decisive yet chaotic withdrawal comes into focus.The story begins with trauma and hubris. On September 11 2001, American power was at its high-water mark. The globalisation of open markets, democratic governance, and the US-led international order had shaped the previous decade. The spectre of nuclear war had been lifted, the ideological debates of the 20th century settled. To Americans, mass violence was something that took place along the periphery of the post-cold war world. And then suddenly, the periphery struck the centres of American power, killing thousands.As a young New Yorker, I saw a plane plough into the World Trade Center and the first tower fall. I smelled the air, acrid from burnt steel and death, for days afterwards. Like most Americans, I assumed my government would retaliate against the people who did this. But President George W Bush’s administration had larger ambitions. Speaking days after 9/11 to an audience that included the US Congress and British prime minister, Tony Blair, Bush declared: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”Out of this trauma, the American public supported Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” as a kind of blank slate, with details to be filled in by his administration. Most Americans were afraid, wanted to be protected, and were rooting for their government to succeed. Within weeks, Congress granted Bush open-ended powers to wage war, passed the Patriot Act, and set to work reconstructing the US national security apparatus. But rapidly toppling the Taliban and scattering al-Qaida did not meet the ambitions of Bush, who had likened this conflict to the second world war and the cold war. Instead of wiping out al-Qaida’s leadership (who escaped into Pakistan) and coming home, the Bush administration decided to build a new Afghan government and then promptly shifted its attention to Iraq – while tarring its political opponents as weak and unpatriotic. The die was cast.The objectives of those early years – to defeat every terrorist group of global reach and also build liberal democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq – appear unfathomable with the distance of 20 years, but they were broadly accepted after September 11, in a climate of American hegemony and post-9/11 fervour. By 2009, when Bush’s presidency ended amid the ruins of Iraq and the wreckage of the global financial crisis, it had become clear that those objectives were unachievable, and that American hegemony itself was receding.But the US national security establishment had been charged with achieving those objectives, and was therefore both invested in their completion and increasingly detached from shifting public opinion.The Obama presidency, which I was a part of for eight years, was a gradual reckoning with this reality. Paradoxically, the 2009-2011 troops surge in Afghanistan coupled diminished ambitions and increased resources: the US, Obama concluded, could not defeat the Taliban militarily, but needed to create time and space to defeat al-Qaida and build up an Afghan government to fight the Taliban. This conclusion reflected public opinion: in the politics of post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-financial crisis America, there was zero tolerance for terrorist attacks and zero appetite for nation building. This was the view that Biden, then vice-president, represented in the White House situation room – arguing against the surge on the grounds that we had to understand the limits of what could be achieved in Afghanistan.By May 2011, the killing of Osama bin Laden removed what many Americans regarded as the original rationale for the war in Afghanistan, just as the surge was approaching its endpoints. At the same time that our counter-terrorism mission achieved its greatest success, the expansive new counter-insurgency campaign was proving far more difficult than promised, suggesting that Biden’s warnings had been prescient. In June 2011, the American drawdown began.Obama’s downsized ambitions for the “war on terror” triggered harsh reactions from both the jingoistic right and the US national security establishment. For prominent military leaders, congressional hawks, and thinktank warriors who had set out to achieve these impossible objectives, Obama was insufficiently committed to the missions. To admit otherwise, you would have to accept that the mission itself was flawed – and that was a bridge too far for national security elites shaped by post-1989 American exceptionalism. For the Republican party, which had promised great victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was impossible to acknowledge there were any limits to our power; instead, it was easier to shift focus to other perceived threats to the US and American identity, which now came not just from “radical Islam”, but from any available Other – be it a black president or immigrants at the southern border.As president, Donald Trump waged war against a shifting cast of enemies at home with far more gusto than he approached Afghanistan. For a time, he maintained an awkward detente with hawkish elements of the US establishment, signing off on a small surge in Afghanistan. His disregard for the Afghan people was initially manifest through increased civilian casualties. After he removed national security advisers like HR McMaster and John Bolton, it morphed into a deal with the Taliban that cut out the Afghan government and set a timeline to withdraw American troops. To the right, national security was tied up with white identity politics at home. To the left, terrorism was more evident in the Capitol insurrection than in distant lands. Trump’s withdrawal barely registered in US politics.The lesson we failed to learn from 9/11: peace is impossible if we don’t talk to our enemies | Jonathan PowellRead moreIn this context, there was no way Biden was going to cancel Trump’s deal and extend America’s presence in Afghanistan. Having long doubted the capacity of the US military to reshape other countries, he was not going to continue a policy premised on that assumption. Given the existential threat to American democracy that clouded his transition into power, Biden presumably felt that the purpose of his presidency was to pursue policies responsive to restive public opinion – from a sweeping domestic agenda to a foreign policy for the middle class.Biden’s decision, and the haste with which he carried it out, provoked a firestorm among much of the US national security establishment for several reasons. First, because Biden’s logic carried a rebuke of the more expansive aims of the post-9/11 project that had shaped the service, careers, and commentary of so many people. Second, because unlike Trump, Biden is a part of that establishment – the former chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, a Washington fixture for decades. Biden’s top aides also come from that establishment. These are not illiberal isolationists. Instead, Biden and his team saw the war in Afghanistan as an impediment to dealing with other external threats: from a Russia waging an asymmetric war on western democracy, to a Chinese Communist party aiming to supplant it.Most importantly, the abandonment of Afghans to the Taliban, and Biden’s occasionally callous rhetoric laying the blame on Afghan security forces, who had fought on the frontlines for years, evoked a sense of national shame – even if that emotion should apply to the entirety of the war, and not simply its end. Indeed, in the chaotic days of withdrawal, the predominant concerns in US politics often had little to do with Afghans. The evacuation of Americans, the danger of Islamic State Khorasan Province, and the loss of US service members eclipsed the gargantuan Afghan suffering. Overwhelming public support for Biden’s decision, though undercut by dissatisfaction with the process of withdrawal, confirmed Biden’s core instinct: the thing most Americans agree upon is that we went to Afghanistan to take out the people who did 9/11 and prevent further attacks, and it was past time to abandon the broader aims of post-9/11 foreign policy, no matter the subsequent humanitarian cost.In short, Biden’s decision exposed the cavernous gap between the national security establishment and the public, and forced a recognition that there is going to be no victory in a “war on terror” too infused with the trauma and triumphalism of the immediate post-9/11 moment. Like many Americans, I found myself simultaneously supporting the core decision to withdraw and shuddering at its execution and consequences. As someone who worked in national security, I have to recognise the limits of how the US can shape other countries through military intervention. As someone who has participated in American politics, I have to acknowledge that a country confronting virulent ethno-nationalism at home is ill-suited to build nations abroad. But as a human being, I have to confront how we let the Afghan people down, and how allies like Britain, who stood by us after 9/11, must feel in seeing how it all ended.It is a cruel irony that this is the second time the US has lost interest in Afghanistan. The first time was in the 1990s, after much of the mujahideenwe supported to defeat the Soviets evolved into dangerous extremists, plunged the country into civil war, and led to Taliban rule.The final verdict on Biden’s decision will depend on whether the US can truly end the era that began with 9/11 – including the mindset that measures our credibility through the use of military force and pursues security through partnerships with autocrats. Can we learn from our history and forge a new approach to the rest of the world – one that is sustainable, consistent, and responsive to the people we set out to help; that prioritises existential issues like the fight against the climate crisis and genuine advocacy for the universal values America claims to support?A good place to start would be fighting at home to strengthen our multiracial and multi-ethnic democracy, which must be the foundation of America’s global influence. That effort must include welcoming as many Afghan refugees as we can. What the US needs at the end of the 9/11 era – more than any particular policy, or assertion that “America is back” – is to pursue the kind of politics that makes us a country that cares more about the lives of other human beings like the Afghans we left behind, and expresses that concern in ways other than waging war.
Ben Rhodes is author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made. He served as a deputy national security adviser for Barack Obama from 2009-2017
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CaliforniaCalifornia passes landmark bill targeting Amazon’s algorithm-driven rulesThe legislation would require warehouses to disclose to government agencies the quotas used to track workers Kari PaulFri 10 Sep 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Sep 2021 07.58 EDTCalifornia has passed a landmark bill taking aim at Amazon and the controversial, algorithm-driven rules that govern the lives of its warehouse workers.The first-of-its-kind law was passed by the state senate this week and will soon land on the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom, who has not yet signaled whether he will sign it.Under the bill, warehouses will be required to disclose to government agencies – and to the employees – the quotas and metrics used to track workers. It would ban penalties for “time off-task”, which discourage workers from using the bathroom or taking other necessary breaks. It also prohibits retaliation against workers who complain.Amazon warehouse workers could get second vote on forming unionRead moreThough the bill applies to all warehouse jobs in California, its passage has called attention to Amazon, where workers have described brutal conditions under which productivity metrics are key and every move is surveilled. Some have even reported having to urinate in bottles on the job to avoid being penalized for taking time to use the bathroom.“Amazon is really kind of an outlier at this point in terms of the sophistication of their technologies,” said Beth Gutelius, a research director at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development.Workers at the tech behemoth live in fear of being fired for being marked as having too much “time off-task” or working too slowly, said Yesenia Barrera, a former Amazon warehouse worker who now organizes with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a non-profit workers’ rights group“It is really stressful and physically demanding to keep up,” she said. “They never tell us how much we are doing, you are never really sure how well you are doing – we are just told to keep going.”She said she first found out she was being tracked when she injured herself on the job and her manager was able to see through the scanning technology that she had stopped working. Amazon has a rate of injury that is 80% higher than that of non-Amazon warehouses, according to a recent report by a coalition of labor unions.“This bill would show workers how much they are doing and create a standard that is going to lessen injuries,” Barrera said.The bill is a “good start” in addressing the new paradigm of labor and surveillance, said Christian Castro, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Allowing workers to see their own productivity statistics “puts the power back into worker hands”, he said.“At the end of the day, this is about safety,” he said. “People should be able to go to work and come home safely.”The law comes as Amazon is increasingly facing pressure to address concerns about its warehouse conditions. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest US labor groups, voted in June to make unionizing Amazon employees one of its top priorities after a separate unionization effort in Alabama failed after intense pressure from Amazon.Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has in the past acknowledged some of the criticisms, saying in a letter to shareholders in April, “We need to do a better job for our employees.” Amazon did not respond to request for comment about the new law.Gutelius said that if the law is passed, she believed Amazon would only apply the changes to its California warehouses. But she was hopeful the law would put pressure on other states and federal legislature to do the same.“This is something that should really should be addressed across the country,” she said. “This bill will put pressure on our national policymakers to address the question of how we’re guiding workplaces into the 21st century.”TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsAmazonWorkers’ rightsnewsReuse this content More

US politicsAl Sharpton calls on Biden to fight the filibuster: ‘If we can’t depend on you here, when can we?’ The veteran civil rights leader is determined to dismantle the centuries-old Senate tool in the battle for voting rights – will Biden join him?Lauren Gambino in Washington@ More

ChinaBiden tells Xi US and China must not ‘veer into conflict’ in first call for monthsWhite House says leaders agree to engage ‘openly and straightforwardly’ amid US frustration at lack of progress in advancing countries’ relations Helen Davidson and agencies@ More

On Thursday night, the US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the US Justice Department would launch a federal lawsuit against Texas over the extreme abortion law that the state introduced last week. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Moira Donegan about what all of this means for Roe v Wade

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