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      in World Politics

      Biden’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

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      For decades, The New York Times has tried to manage the image it once created for itself as a “progressive” newspaper. On various occasions, its ineptness at this game has been so patent that its reputation as the “paper of record” appeared irreparably tarnished. Its support of George W. Bush’s campaign to invade Iraq in 2003 is just one prominent example. Nevertheless, since no other US newspaper can compete with its brand, The Times not only holds pole position in reporting the news but is also assured of winning the race on most headline political stories in the US news cycle.

      Thanks to its stable of high-profile editorialists, its specially cultivated relationship with government insiders and the intelligence community, and its occasionally thought-provoking in-depth features, The Times commands the respect of an elite, “politically-aware” class of readers. Even when the paper’s editorial stance appears totally skewed on a major issue, its position will be deemed worthy of attention. Despite multiple failures, this particularly applies to US foreign policy.

      Influence Has Become Democracy’s Influenza

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      The key to The Times maintaining its image as a voice of progressive values lies less in its willingness to air progressive ideas than in the persistent belief Americans have that the Democratic Party is more progressive than the Republican Party. In other words, because Democrats read The Times, it has no need to sound progressive. Like the Democratic Party itself, The Times’ editorial policy over at least the past three decades has increasingly distanced itself from most traditional progressive themes, particularly on foreign policy.

      Still, the newspaper feels the need to at least seem progressive. It finds itself faced the difficult task of navigating very real pressures within the Democratic Party. With the arrival of a new Democratic administration and the continued suspense concerning what its policies will actually look like, The New York Times is now making an effort to assess the trends.

      In an article on March 11, Michael D. Shear, Carl Hulse and Jonathan Martin provide an example of tracking the trends. “Even as Mr. Biden’s stimulus victory lap will be embraced by the left,” they write, “he remains in the cautious middle so far on foreign policy, easing off on punishing the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for ordering the killing of a Washington Post journalist and imposing only modest sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader there.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Cautious middle:

      The position that defines how Democratic politicians may hold onto power and mainstream journalists hold onto their jobs. Only Republicans politicians and journalists may be allowed to deviate from it.

      Contextual Note

      Citing the notion of cautious middle would seem to imply that, in contrast, there may also be an incautious middle. But the concept is difficult to imagine. The expression sounds like a pleonasm. The whole point of placing oneself in the middle is to avoid being conspicuous. This raises the question of what The Times means by “cautious.” Does caution mean using one’s rational faculties to steer clear of danger, or does it signify abandoning one’s own principles and beliefs for the sake of survival?

      The two cases cited leave the reader wondering. President Joe Biden has promised no punishment for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whom the CIA blames as the man directly responsible for the murder of US resident Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who worked for The Washington Post. In contrast, Biden has imposed “modest sanctions” on President Vladimir Putin’s government and directly maligned Putin himself for the poisoning of a Russian citizen with no connections to the US. Does Biden think MBS has a soul? How afraid is Biden of Saudi Arabia? Should this really be called caution?

      Then there is the question of defining what The Times means by “the middle”? When polls show that a significant majority of Americans wish to see single-payer health care, the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, a $15 minimum wage and increased taxes on the wealthy, does it have any meaning to call Biden’s position — who appears to oppose all of these issues — “the cautious middle”? Perhaps The Times imagines Biden’s foreign policy position should be called “the cautious middle” because it sits somewhere between MBS and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, or between India’s Narendra Modi and the UK’s Boris Johnson.

      Historical Note

      The independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who has never sought the middle but always taken seriously the notion that the media’s first responsibility in a democracy is to stand up to power and challenge its orientations, has noticed how, with the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, most of the press — and in particular The New York Times and the Washington Post — have abandoned any pretense of critical appraisal of the sometimes incomprehensible caution of the new administration. He compares their reporting to “embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions,” bordering on hagiography.

      He notes how Biden and his Democratic colleagues are not alone in seeking shelter within the “cautious middle.” So are most journalists, even Republican stalwarts working for the media. He cites the case of New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks who, as a philosophically-focused Republican, “spent his career penning paeans to ‘personal responsibility’ and the ‘culture of thrift,’ but is now writing stories about how ‘Joe Biden is a transformational president’ for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Taibbi speculates that Brooks may be undergoing the same “evolution” as Biden, leading him to some kind of safe haven where those who have some power over his future — his employer, The New York Times — want to be sure he will not deviate from the party line. Taibbi compares Brooks to a lot of people in the corporate press “who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead.”

      Being in the cautious middle is now perceived by many to be the key to survival in the new political-media complex, even if being in the middle rhymes with irrelevance, inefficacy and refusal to implement or even take into account the will of people. The political middle is no longer the position in the center of people’s real interests or even of the spectrum of popular opinion. The middle appears to exist as a theoretical point of absolute stasis in which changing as little as possible while finding ways to reassure the discontents by acts of verbal bravado defines a decent strategy of governance.

      In 2008, Barack Obama ran as the anti-George W. Bush candidate. Once in office, Obama maintained most of Bush’s heritage, from disastrous tax cuts for the rich to maintaining and prolonging the Bush wars that he had railed against. Biden has come into office as the anti-Donald Trump, ready to bring things back to a middling “normal” presumably defined by the status quo of the Obama period. Just like Obama, President Biden appears to have accepted the new “middle” defined by his predecessor rather than realizing his own stated ambition during the 2020 campaign to become a “new FDR,” the Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s decisively overturned the policies of his Republican predecessors.

      For the moment, Biden is showing no signs of listening to the needs of the populace beyond offering a quick fix of injected cash ($1,400). And, apart from the symbolic move of rejoining the 2015 Paris climate accord, Biden has maintained nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy legacy, including refusing to cancel Trump’s sanctions on Iran that followed the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with the Iranians. A mere reduction of those sanctions might have modestly pointed toward a return to the status quo ante-Trump. In his various actions concerning China, Iran and Saudi Arabia and even Venezuela, Biden appears to be paying homage to Trump’s leadership rather than blazing a new path in international diplomacy.

      In a famous moment during a vice-presidential debate in 1988, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen cut his young opponent, Dan Quayle, down to size with a remark that followed Quayle’s attempt to compare himself to President John F. Kennedy. Bentsen reminded Quayle that he had served under the assassinated president before concluding, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen was a child of 12 when Roosevelt began the first of his four terms as president. If he were alive today, Bentsen might have the gall to say to Biden: You’re no FDR.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Death row inmates await Biden's promise to end federal executions

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      Through notes passed under cell doors with string and conversations whispered through air ducts, death row prisoners in Indiana are debating whether Joe Biden will fulfill his campaign promise to halt federal executions.Biden hasn’t spoken publicly about capital punishment since taking office four days after the Trump administration executed the last of 13 inmates at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row inmates are held.That six-month run of executions cut the unit from around 63 to 50. Biden’s campaign website said he would work to end federal executions, but he has not specified how.On Monday the supreme court added to potential challenges confronting Biden on the matter, when it said it would consider reinstating the death sentence for the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The justices agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Trump administration. The initial prosecution and decision to seek a death sentence was made by the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice-president.In emails with the Associated Press through a prison-monitored system they access in the two hours a day they are let out of their 12ft by 7ft cells, four death row inmates said Biden’s silence has them on edge, wondering if political calculations will lead him to back away from commuting their sentences to life or endorsing legislation striking capital punishment from US statutes.“There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promises,” said Rejon Taylor, 36, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing an Atlanta restaurant owner.Everyone on federal death row was convicted of killing someone, victims often suffering brutal deaths. The dead included children, bank workers and prison guards. One inmate, Dylann Roof, killed nine Black members of a South Carolina church during Bible study in 2015. Many Americans believe death is right for such crimes.Views of capital punishment, though, are shifting. One report found people of color overrepresented on death row nationwide. Some 40% of federal death row inmates are Black, compared with about 13% of the US population. Support for the death penalty has waned and fewer executions are carried out. Virginia recently voted to abolish it.The prisoners expressed relief at Donald Trump’s departure after he presided over more federal executions than any president in 130 years. The fear that guards will appear at cell doors to say the warden needed to speak to them – dreaded words that mean an execution is scheduled – has receded.They described death row as a close-knit community. All said they were reeling from seeing friends escorted away for execution by lethal injection.“When it’s quiet here, which it often is, you’ll hear someone say, ‘Damn, I can’t believe they’re gone!’ We all know what they are referencing,” said Daniel Troya, sentenced in 2009 in the drug-related killings of a Florida man, his wife and their two children.The federal executions during the coronavirus pandemic were likely super-spreader events. In December, 70% of the inmates had Covid-19, some possibly infected via the air ducts through which they communicate.The AP attended all 13 executions. Five of the first six inmates executed were white. Six of the last seven were Black, including Dustin Higgs, the final inmate put to death, on 16 January for ordering the killing of three Maryland women.Memories of speaking to Higgs just before his execution still pain Sherman Fields, who is on death row in the killing of his girlfriend.“He kept saying he’s innocent and he didn’t want to die,” Fields, 46, said. “He’s my friend. It was very hard.”The easiest step for Biden would be to simply instruct the justice department not to carry out executions, though that would leave the door open for a future president to resume them. Inmates know Biden, while a senator, played a key role in passing a 1994 crime bill that increased federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.“I don’t trust Biden,” Troya said. “He set the rules to get us all here in the first place.” More

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      in US Politics

      Mayorkas blames Trump for border woes as Republicans attack Biden

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      The Biden administration is facing mounting pressure over a surge of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the US, with the numbers seeking asylum at a 20-year high that is placing federal facilities and shelters under immense strain.The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to the political talk show circuit on Sunday to press the administration’s case that it is doing all it can. He continued to refer to the problem as a “challenge” not a “crisis”, attempting to put blame squarely on the previous incumbent of the White House, Donald Trump.“It is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told CNN’s State of the Union. “There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration.”On ABC’s This Week, Mayorkas highlighted the tougher aspects of Joe Biden’s border policy, stressing that the administration was still expelling families and single adults under a regulation known as Title 42. He insisted largely Central American migrants arriving in increasing numbers were being given a clear message: “Do not come. The border is closed. The border is secure.”But prominent Republicans have seized on the border difficulties as an opportunity to attack Biden for being soft on immigration.There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration“This is a crisis,” Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, has said. “I don’t care what the administration wants to call it – it is a crisis.”Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas and ardent Trump loyalist, lambasted the secretary’s position as “nonsense”.In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cotton characterized the Biden administration’s stance as “basically saying the United States will not secure the border, and that’s a big welcome sign to migrants from across the world [saying] the border is wide open”.He went on to make lurid allegations, backed up with no evidence, that the focus on unaccompanied children at the border was allowing criminals smuggling fentanyl and other drugs as well as people on “terrorist watch lists” to slip into the US undetected.Political steam over border affairs has been building for two months. In one of his first acts as president, Biden scrapped Trump’s hardline policy of sending unaccompanied children seeking asylum back to Mexico.Under Biden’s guidelines, unaccompanied minors were exempted from the Title 42 rules and shielded from expulsion. That was deemed in line with the president’s pledge to achieve a “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system.On Sunday, Mayorkas said the new approach addressed the humanitarian needs of migrant children “in a way that reflects our values and principles as a country”. But in the past few weeks, the numbers of minors seeking asylum has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced capacity to process the children in line with immigration laws.He is basically saying the United States will not secure the borderMore than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children are being detained in Custom and Border Protection (CBP) facilities in Texas and Arizona. As a backlog of cases has built up, more than 500 have been kept in custody for more than 10 days, well beyond the 72 hours allowed under immigration law.There have been reports of overcrowding and harsh conditions in federal facilities in Texas. The Associated Press reported that some children were said by immigration lawyers to be sleeping on the floor after bedding ran out.The government has tried to move as many children as possible into shelters run by the US Refugee Office, but they in turn have become stressed. There are now more than 9,500 children in shelters and short-term housing along the border. Non-governmental groups working with migrants and refugees have been forced to scramble to deal with the sudden demand for shelter.As the administration struggles to keep a grip on events, it is also coming under criticism from Republicans and media outlets for refusing to allow reporters inside the beleaguered CBP facilities where children are being held. On Friday, Mayorkas visited El Paso in Texas with a bipartisan congressional delegation. Reporters were not allowed to follow them.The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, called the move “outrageous and unacceptable”. In a tweet, he said: “No press. No cameras. What is Biden hiding?”Quizzed by Fox News Sunday about the apparent lack of accountability, despite Biden’s promise to bring “trust and transparency” back to public affairs, Mayorkas said the administration was “working on providing access” to border patrol stations.But he added: “First things first – we are focused on operations and executing our plans.”While the political heat is rising at the border, moves are under way in Washington to try and find a longer-term fix to the age-old immigration conundrum. Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would give “Dreamers”, undocumented migrants brought to the US as children, a pathway to citizenship.The legislation has an uncertain future in the Senate, given its 50-50 split and the need to reach 60 votes to pass most major legislation.Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois who has introduced a similar Dream Act to the Senate five times in the past 20 years, told CNN that he thought he was close to securing the necessary 60 votes. He also decried the current debate about whether there was a “crisis” or “challenge” at the border.“We need to address our immigration laws in this country that are broken,” he said. “What you see at the border is one piece of evidence of that, but there’s much more.” More

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      US to house some migrant families in hotels in shift by Biden administration

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      Some migrant families arriving in the US will be housed in hotels under a new program managed by nonprofit organizations, according to two people familiar with the plans, a move away from for-profit detention centers criticized by Democrats and health experts.Endeavors, a San Antonio-based organization, will oversee what it calls “family reception sites” at hotels in Texas and Arizona, the sources said. The organization, in partnership with other nonprofits, will initially provide up to 1,400 beds in seven different brand-name hotels for families deemed vulnerable.The opening of the reception centers would mark a significant shift by the administration of Joe Biden. In January, Biden issued an order directing the justice department not to renew its contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities. However, the order did not address immigration jails run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Roughly 1,200 migrants were being held in two family detention centers in Texas as of Wednesday, according to an Ice spokeswoman. A third center in Pennsylvania is no longer being used to hold families. The spokeswoman did not comment on the plan to house families in hotels.The number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border has climbed as Biden has rolled back some of the hardline policies of former president Donald Trump. Biden, who took office on 20 January, has faced criticism from Republicans. Some Democrats opposed re-opening a Trump-era emergency shelter for children.The hotel sites, set to open in April, will offer Covid-19 testing, medical care, food services, social workers and case managers to help with travel and onward destinations, according to the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter. Staff will be trained to work with children.It remained unclear whether migrants would be required to wear ankle bracelets or be subject to any other form of monitoring, the people said.The families will arrive at border patrol stations and then be sent to the hotel sites to continue immigration paperwork, the two sources said. They could leave the reception centers as soon as six hours after arrival if paperwork is completed, they test negative for Covid-19 and transportation has been arranged.Biden officials have said migrant families will be “expelled” to Mexico or their home countries under a Trump-era health order known as Title 42. But more than half of the 19,000 family members caught at the border in February were not expelled, with many released into the US.The housing of some migrants in hotels was reported by Axios earlier on Saturday.Endeavors will also operate a new 2,000-bed shelter for unaccompanied children in Texas, the sources said.The Biden administration has struggled to house a rising number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US-Mexico border. More than 500 children were stuck in crowded border stations for more than 10 days as of Thursday.The new family and child facilities are expected to ramp up bed capacity gradually, the people familiar with the effort said. More

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      Kamala Harris sidesteps question of her role to take Biden's message on the road

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      White House aides and allies stress it’s still too early to define the type of portfolio Kamala Harris will have as vice-president. They bristle at the suggestion that Harris would be confined to one project or focus on just one subject area, as some previous vice-presidents were pegged to do.But over the last week, the former California senator has once again taken on an increasingly familiar mantle: top surrogate for promoting the Biden administration’s agenda.On the one hand that’s a powerful position: it puts Harris – the first female vice-president in US history and probably a strong future contender for its first female commander-in-chief – at the forefront of US politics. But on the other, it is the latest example of Harris being used on an ad hoc basis, lacking a defining mission or role.In the days since Joe Biden signed his $1.9tn stimulus package Harris has embarked on a cross-country tour to sell the impact of the new law. She made stops in Nevada, Colorado and then Georgia last week. She is expected to make more trips in the coming days.“I really believe that this will support our economy,” Harris said during her stop in Colorado.The vice-president’s tour, days after an administration passes a massive piece of legislation into law, is not entirely unusual. It’s in part a move to assuage fears that this stimulus could follow the same fate as the $800bn rescue law in 2009. After passage of that bill, critics argued that the Obama administration was not aggressive in responding to Republican attacks about the bill. At the same time, liberals have argued that law did not go far enough.So this time, the Biden administration is trying to pre-empt similar critiques about his rescue package.Roy Neel, who served as a chief of staff to the then vice-president, Al Gore, said it was clear the Biden administration wants to use Harris as a sort of “floater” – someone who isn’t consigned to one corner of the administration or its initiatives.“They’re saying basically what the president wants her to be which is sort of a floater, to work on anything that’s important at the time,” Neel said. “Right now, selling the stimulus is one of the most important things to him.”For Harris, though, the trip stacks on top of her undertaking a media campaign in West Virginia and Arizona while the stimulus bill was still making its way through Congress. But that push partially backfired on Harris and resulted in proxy sparring with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of the senators Harris ostensibly set out to win over.Harris’s trips over the last week suggest that the Biden team still see her as a potent salesperson and rather than assign her to run briefings with governors on Covid relief, as Mike Pence did when he served as vice-president to Donald Trump, or when Biden oversaw the Obama administration’s recovery efforts early on.Still, that has prompted multiple questions about Harris and how she will be involved in the Biden administration. Why not run the Covid meetings right now like Pence did, officials have been asked, instead of Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York?“We do know that she is a potent tool and it’s clear that the Biden administration is more than happy to deploy her in support of its signature initiatives so far,” said Yusef Robb, a veteran Democratic strategist. “Look, Kamala Harris is exciting, talented and can personally speak to people of color, women, parents and others who have been most affected by the pandemic.”At the same time Harris has also been visible on the foreign policy front, a move that might prove beneficial in the future if the current vice-president ever ended up running for president and needed to highlight her experience with world leaders. She has reportedly begun regular private lunches with the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a meeting that other presidents have usually taken themselves. She has also had one-on-one conversation with a number of world leaders early on in the administration.That is really good for her because it doesn’t pigeonhole her into any one government function like the environment or healthcare or somethingNeel said that suggests that Biden is “comfortable including and relying on the vice-president to be involved in things where she doesn’t have much of a background”.Neel added: “That is really good for her because it doesn’t pigeonhole her into any one government function like the environment or healthcare or something. So he’s obviously using her everywhere it makes sense as part of the team.”Democrats stress the Biden administration is in its earliest days and the role Harris will play is still forming.Her rise has been extremely fast compared with previous vice-presidents. She did not finish her first term in the Senate before Biden picked her as vice-president and before that was attorney general of California. But her background as a prosecutor, which resulted in a viral moment or two in the Senate, has not been visibly utilized since she became vice-president – yet.Harris’s future, though, depends on the success of Biden’s administration. If Biden leaves office popular, Harris will be regarded as the heir apparent.“She is pushing forward Joe’s vision for America, just like she said she would,” Robb added. More

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      'A similar challenge': how Joe Biden echoes Kennedys on US foreign policy

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      It was a popular Washington sport: find the past president who best explained Donald Trump. There was a touch of Andrew Jackson’s populism, a dash of Richard Nixon’s skulduggery, a sprinkling of Ronald Reagan’s myth-making. But now all that is over, who are the closest matches to Joe Biden?

      A huge portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging in the Oval Office makes the obvious connection between two men who inherited epochal crises and prescribed epochal remedies. But the room’s other contents suggest an affinity between the oldest man ever elected president and the youngest: John F Kennedy.
      Biden keeps a photo of himself meeting Pope Francis behind his desk, leaving no one in any doubt he is the second Catholic president. Kennedy was the first. Biden displays a bust of Robert F Kennedy, the 35th president’s brother and attorney general, beside the fireplace. The Oval Office also contains a 332g moon rock brought back by the Apollo missions, the posthumous realisation of Kennedy’s dream.
      So it was that in his first prime time TV address, last week, Biden pivoted from the coronavirus pandemic to exult in America landing a rover on Mars. He did not add that China, which last month put a spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, intends to put a rover on the surface too. A space race is under way between two global superpowers. Sound familiar?
      “It is very hard to exaggerate how much all of JFK’s beliefs and policies were shaped by the cold war,” argues Lawrence Haas, author of a new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire. “In the case of space, he was far less interested in the magic of space than he was in losing the space race to the Soviets.

      “He greatly feared the impact of Soviet advances on America’s competition with the Soviets for influence throughout the developing world. This was a time when countries and peoples across several continents were choosing sides: whether to be loyal to freedom and democracy and through that to the United States or communism and through that to the Soviet Union.
      “JFK obsessed over America’s image in the world. He took office when the United States was behind the Soviets in space and he agonised over it, certainly through 1961 and didn’t begin to relax about it until at least 1962 and then into 1963 when we were really making advances in the aftermath of his announcing the goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely to earth by the end of the decade.”
      In a 1962 memo to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who chaired the National Space Council, Kennedy asked if America had a chance of beating the Soviets. Haas adds: “Whether it was space or civil rights or a whole variety of other domestic issues, JFK crafted them through the prism of foreign policy in general and the cold war in particular.”
      ‘An alternative model of governance’
      Kennedy, a former senator, became president aged 43 at an inauguration featuring Robert Frost. Sixty years later to the day, Biden, a former senator, became president aged 78 at an inauguration featuring Amanda Gorman. Both poets sought to project optimism about the future but inherited a sense of American hegemony under existential threat. More

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      Win the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich

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      The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More

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      'Climate facts are back': EPA brings science back to website after Trump purge

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      Canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax, climate crisis information has returned to the website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of Joe Biden’s promise to “bring science back”.
      The revival of a page dedicated to the climate emergency reverses Donald Trump’s order in 2017 to drop all references to it from government websites, and prioritises the Biden administration’s pledge to “organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis”.
      In a statement, Michael Regan, confirmed by the US Senate last week as the federal agency’s new head, said: “Climate facts are back on the EPA’s website where they should be. Considering the urgency of this crisis, it’s critical that Americans have access to information and resources so that we can all play a role in protecting our environment, our health and vulnerable communities.”
      Trump’s decision to drop the EPA’s climate informational page was just one of many controversial moves that angered environmentalists during his single term of office. He pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement, rolled back countless environmental regulations and protections and appointed a scandal-ridden climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to lead the EPA.

      Analysts, however, considered the Orwellian removal from the world wide web of scientifically accepted climate data and information to be especially heinous.
      In a Guardian article last October, Michael Mann, one of the world’s most eminent climate experts, likened the following month’s presidential election to “a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil” and said Trump’s re-election would have made it “essentially impossible” to avert a global climate catastrophe. More