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      Armed … auditors? The IRS becomes the latest target of GOP misinformation

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      Armed … auditors? The IRS becomes the latest target of GOP misinformationSome Republicans have spread false information about how new funds will be used by IRS, stoking outrage and alarming experts The picture that the top Republican painted was both vivid and terrifying. He warned that additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service would lead to armed auditors banging down front doors to squeeze hard-earned dollars from working Americans.“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa with these?” Senator Chuck Grassley said on Fox News last week.TopicsUS newsAmerica’s dirty divideUS politicsBiden administrationRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Can Biden’s climate bill undo the fossil fuel industry’s decades of harm?

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      Can Biden’s climate bill undo the fossil fuel industry’s decades of harm?The US spent six decades losing the climate war as fossil fuel companies spread misinformation. It has finally gained significant ground The scientists’ warning to the US president on climate crisis was stark: the world’s countries were conducting a vast, dangerous experiment through their enormous release of planet-heating emissions, which threaten to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Some sort of remedial action was needed, they urged.This official alert was issued not to Joe Biden, who is poised to sign America’s first ever major legislation designed to tackle the climate crisis, but in a report given to his presidential predecessor Lyndon Johnson in 1965, a year when the now 79-year-old Biden was still in college.That it has taken nearly six decades for the US to tackle global heating in a significant way, despite being responsible for a quarter of all emissions that have heated the planet during modern civilization, is indicative of a lengthy climate war. Pernicious misinformation of the fossil fuel industry, cynicism and bungled political maneuvering have stymied any sort of action to avert catastrophic heatwaves, floods, drought and wildfires.If on Friday, as expected, the House of Representatives assents to the landmark $370bn in climate spending hashed out in the US Senate and sends it for Biden’s signature, it will be a watershed moment in a saga that can be measured in whole careers and lifetimes.Al Gore was a fresh-faced 33-year-old congressman from Tennessee when, in 1981, he organized an obscure hearing with fellow lawmakers to hear evidence on the greenhouse effect from Roger Revelle, his former professor at Harvard and one of the scientists who had cautioned Johnson 16 years earlier of a looming climate disaster.Gore is now 74, a former US vice-president and veteran climate advocate whose increasingly urgent warnings on the issue won him the Nobel peace prize when Greta Thunberg was barely four years old. “I never imagined I would end up devoting my life to this,” Gore said.“I thought, naively in retrospect, that when the facts were laid out so clearly we would be able to move much more quickly. I did not anticipate the fossil fuel industry would spend billions of dollars on an industrial scale program of lying and deception to prevent the body politic acting in a rational way. But here we are, we finally passed that threshold.”Gore considers the bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, as a “critical turning point in our struggle to confront the climate crisis” that will supercharge deployment of renewable energy such as wind and solar and push fossil fuels towards irrelevancy.Al Gore hails Biden’s historic climate bill as ‘a critical turning point’Read moreMany current Democratic lawmakers, who narrowly passed the bill through the Senate, also felt the weight of the moment, with many of them wearing the warming stripes colors showing the global heating trend. Some burst into tears as the legislation squeaked home on Sunday.“We’ve been fighting for this for decades, now I can look my kids in the eye and say we’re really doing something about climate,” said Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii and one of the tearful. “The Senate was where climate bills went to die and now it’s where the biggest climate action by any government ever has been taken.”The list of previous failures is lengthy. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, only for Ronald Reagan to rip them down. Bill Clinton attempted a new tax on pollutants only for a sharp backlash from industry to see the effort die. The US, under George W Bush’s presidency, declined to join the 1997 Kyoto climate accords and then, when Barack Obama was in the White House, botched climate legislation in 2009 despite strong Democratic majorities in Congress.Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, torched most of the modest measures in place to curb planet-heating gases and campaigned wearing a coalminer’s helmet. “I didn’t doubt we’d get there but there were times when the struggle became harder than I thought it would be, such as when Trump was elected,” Gore said.Climate change has inflicted increasingly severe wounds on Americans as their politicians have floundered or dissembled. Enormous wildfires are now a year-round threat to California, with the US west in the grip of possibly its worst drought in 12 centuries. Extreme rainfall now routinely drowns basements in New York, Appalachian towns, and Las Vegas casinos. The poorest fare worst from the roasting heatwaves and the continued air pollution from power plants, cars and trucks.James Hansen, the Nasa scientist, told Congress in a landmark 1988 hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here” and yet the escalating subsequent warnings appeared to make little difference. Shortly before a Senate deal was brokered, the climate scientist Drew Shindell said that the lack of action made him “want to scream” and that “I keep wondering what’s the point of producing all the science” if it’s only to be ignored.Much of the blame for this has been laid on the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades the disastrous consequences of its business model only to fund an extensive network of operations that concealed this information and sought to sow doubt among the public over the science.“These forces have been far more active and effective in the United States than in other countries,” said Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science who has written on the false information spread by industry on climate crisis.“For more than 20 years, American public opinion has been heavily influenced by the ‘merchants of doubt’, who sold disinformation designed to make people think that the science regarding climate change was far more uncertain than it actually was.”Industry lobbying and generous donations have ensured that the Republican party has fallen almost entirely in line with the demands of major oil and gas companies. As recently as 2008, a Republican running for president, John McCain, had a recognizable climate plan but the issue is now close to party heresy, despite rising concern among all Americans, including Republican voters, about climate-induced disasters.The strategy of misinformation “worked even more than its originators imagined”, Oreskes said, noting that every single Republican senator voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, lambasted the bill as “Green New Deal nonsense” out of step with Americans’ priorities, even as much of his home state of Kentucky lay underwater from its worst flooding on record, killing dozens and inundating whole towns.The continued, staunch opposition to any meaningful climate action by Republicans means the climate wars in American politics are not likely to draw to a close anytime soon. But climate advocates hope the gathering pace of renewable energy and electric car adoption will soon be unstoppable, regardless of any attempted backsliding if Republicans regain power.The question will be how much damage to a livable climate will be done in the meantime. The climate bill is expected to help slash the emissions of the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter, by about 40% this decade, which should prod other countries to do more. Crucial, upcoming UN climate talks in Egypt suddenly look a more welcoming prospect for the American delegation.“In the prior administration, I think the rest of the world lost faith in the United States in terms of our commitment to climate,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser. “This doesn’t just restore that faith in the United States, but it creates an opportunity zone that other countries can start thinking about.”But almost every country, including the US, is still not doing enough, quickly enough, to head off the prospect of catastrophic global heating. The climate wars helped enrich fossil fuel corporations but cost precious time that the new climate bill does not claw back.“It was a celebratory and joyful moment when the legislation finally passed but we can’t let this be a once in a lifetime moment,” Gore said. “The path to net zero (emissions) requires us to move forward and a lot of the hard work lies ahead.”TopicsClimate crisisAl GoreUS politicsBiden administrationTrump administrationObama administrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans vote against insulin bill as price soars, dismaying diabetics

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      Republicans vote against insulin bill as price soars, dismaying diabeticsCost of the life-saving drug will remain many times higher than in other affluent countries after Republicans defeated the measure During the Covid-19 pandemic, Erin Connelly had to ration insulin while transitioning to a different health insurance plan. When Connelly heard the Biden administration was planning to cap the price of the life-saving drug, she was delighted. She was soon to be disappointed.The prices of insulin has soared in the US in recent decades and is more than eight times higher in the US than in 32 comparable, high-income nations, according to a Rand Corporation study.With an average list price of $98.70 per unit in the US, compared with $7.52 in the UK, US insulin sales account for nearly half the pharmaceutical industry’s insulin revenue, though the US makes up only about 15% of the global market.Many diabetics require several vials of insulin a month, in addition to the costs of medical supplies and monitoring equipment. A 2022 study by CharityRx found 79% of Americans with diabetes or who care for someone with diabetes reported taking on credit card debt to pay for insulin, with an average debt of $9,000. One in four Americans have reported rationing insulin due to the high costs, which can be fatal.As part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the Senate this week, the Biden administration proposed a $35 monthly cap on the cost of insulin in the private market. But the proposal was blocked by Republicans. Connelly, a type 1 diabetic from Illinois who was diagnosed at the age of 33, said she was “devastated”.“I believe the profit margin on my life must be really good, otherwise, we would be a bigger focus and a bigger part of these healthcare negotiations,” she said. “People are actually dying from this and it’s beyond price gouging. They’re holding us for ransom.“As we see things like Covid and different viruses come in and attack bodies in ways that we don’t understand, we’re seeing higher rates of people with type 1 diabetes later in life like I was, so this should be a primary concern for public health officials,” she said.Thanks to budgetary rules the proposal needed 60 votes to pass in the Senate. It received 57, with all Democrats and seven Republicans voting in favor of the proposal, though the Senate parliamentarian did allow the cap on co-pays for Medicare, the government health insurance program for those 65 and older.The vote incited criticism against Republicans from diabetes advocates who have been pushing for legislation to cap the cost of insulin in the US.But even a cap on private insurance co-pays wouldn’t have affected the real price of insulin in the US. The proposal would merely have limited the co-pay for the price of insulin to $35 for those with private insurance, with insurance expected to cover the difference. It would also probably have resulted in increases for insurance premiums. Those without insurance would still have been expected to pay exorbitant prices for insulin.“The co-pay caps aren’t price caps. All they effectively do is if you have insurance or Medicare, the $35 is your maximum co-pay,” said Laura Marston, co-founder of the advocacy group the Insulin Initiative and a type one diabetic. “That doesn’t change the underlying price of what someone without insurance pays for insulin, which in and of itself is concerning and scary from a patient’s point of view because I know first-hand how hard it can be as a type 1 diabetic in this country to get and keep health insurance.”Marston pointed out that pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly have supported the insurance co-pay caps. While she was disappointed by the failure of the co-pay cap proposal, even if she feels it fell short of a real solution to the problem, she is also concerned about the lack of political will to take on the pharmaceutical industry and cap the actual prices of insulin.More than 100,000 Americans died in 2021 from diabetes. More than 30 million Americans are diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and over 7 million require daily insulin – all type 1 diabetics and many type 2 diabetics.For now diabetics and their families who were hoping for some relief are back where they started – paying exorbitant fees for a life-saving medicine.“We’ve been trying to no avail to get an actual insulin price cap introduced that would say to insulin makers, you cannot charge more than say, we’ll just say $20 a vial, or basically you cannot charge more than what you charge in other countries for insulin. And it felt like it fell on deaf ears as soon as this co-pay cap was introduced,” said Marston. “I don’t know why they introduced something seemingly half hearted, not really designed to be a solution to the problem.”TopicsDiabetesPharmaceuticals industryBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased? | Kate Aronoff

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      Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased?Kate AronoffThe bill is a devil’s bargain between the Democrats, the fossil fuel industry, and recalcitrant senator Joe Manchin. Yet it’s better than nothing “We’re pleased,” ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, said on an earnings call last month, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act. He called the bill, now making its way through the US Congress, “clear and consistent”. After it passed the Senate Sunday evening, Shell USA said it was “a step toward increased energy security and #netzero”. The world is currently on track to produce double the amount of coal, oil and gas in 2030 than is consistent with capping warming at 1.5C. To state the obvious: climate policy should strike fear into the hearts of fossil fuel executives, not delight them. So what have some of the world’s worst polluters found to like about a historic piece of climate legislation?Guilt by association only goes so far: that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed is undoubtedly good news. It will do a lot of good things. Democrats face the distinct possibility of being locked out of power for at least a decade after midterm elections this November, when they’re expected to lose the House of Representatives. Republicans won’t be keen to recognize that another party’s candidate could win the presidency, let alone reduce emissions. That something being called climate policy passed at all is thanks to the tireless work the climate movement has done to put it on the agenda, and the diligent staffers who spent late nights translating that momentum into legislation.But it also reflects just how much power the fossil fuel industry has amassed. The IRA is the product of a devil’s bargain struck between (among others) Democrats and Joe Manchin, speaking on behalf of his corporate donors. In exchange for his agreeing to vote for some $370bn worth of genuinely exciting climate spending, the West Virginia senator has demanded sweeping permitting reform and an all-of-government greenlight for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Many of the worst provisions are slated to be passed in future legislation this September. The IRA itself contains a remarkable poison pill, requiring that 60m acres of public waters be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before the federal government could approve any new offshore wind development for a decade.Then again, maybe the oil and gas CEOs have finally come around, and such sweeteners are a distraction from the real story. After decades of lobbying against climate policy perhaps they’ve seen the inexorable march of history towards decarbonization and decided to hitch their wagons to it. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this show before. Over a decade ago the likes of BP and ConocoPhillips joined the US Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of green groups and corporations that set about trying to pass climate legislation at the start of the Obama presidency. The House of Representatives went on to pass the hulking carbon pricing bill it supported, only to see it die in the Senate.For corporate members of USCAP the situation was a win-win. With one hand they helped craft legislation so friendly to their interests that it would leave their core business model – pouring carbon into the atmosphere – mostly untouched. With the other hand they tried to make sure nothing passed at all. As the political scientist Jake Grumbach has shown, several corporate members of the coalition were simultaneously paying generous membership fees to the American Petroleum Institute, the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations working actively to kill it. The same was true this time around; the critical difference this time is that their bill passed.Understanding what’s just happened demands a longer view. For decades, oil and gas executives have worked to create a political climate wholly allergic to comprehensive climate action. Part of that has been lobbying against climate legislation, of course, working to undermine bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and spread disinformation. But for nearly a century the same corporations have conducted an all-out attack on the ability of the US government to get big, good things done.Climate change is ultimately a planning problem: there is no entity other than the state that can electrify the country, expand the grid, build prodigious amounts of mass transit and wind down coal, oil and gas production in time to keep warming short of catastrophic levels. For all its many shortcomings, the FDR-era New Deal sought to construct a state capable of tackling such complicated problems. The right – supercharged by fossil fuel funding – set out to destroy it, polluting our politics with the idea that efficient markets are the only reasonable answer to what ails society. Predictably, they railed against the Green New Deal, too, which rejected that logic. That’s not the result of some cadre of conniving CEOs waking up every morning and deciding to destroy the planet. They just happen to sell the lifeblood of capitalism and aren’t eager to be booted from that business.That the IRA’s most promising elements are a series of modest incentives to get corporations to do the right thing on climate – that demanding they actually do so feels so far out of reach – is the result of this long-running and largely successful ideological quest. This bill is woefully inadequate, featuring a cruel, casual disregard for those at home and abroad who will live with the consequences of boosting fossil fuel production as a bargaining chip for boosting clean energy. And it’s almost certainly better than nothing.
      Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
      TopicsEnvironmentOpinionClimate crisisUS politicsBiden administrationUS CongressFossil fuelsOil and gas companiescommentReuse this content More

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      Pelosi defends Taiwan visit amid China tensions: ‘Never give in to autocrats’

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      Pelosi defends Taiwan visit amid China tensions: ‘Never give in to autocrats’‘We cannot stand by as China proceeds to threaten Taiwan,’ says speaker in op-ed, but trip poses diplomatic headache for Biden 01:00Having landed in Taiwan amid soaring tensions with China’s military, the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, defended her controversial trip to the self-ruling island, saying she was making clear that American leaders “never give in to autocrats” in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.“We cannot stand by as [China] proceeds to threaten Taiwan – and democracy itself,” said Pelosi’s piece, published just as the veteran California congresswoman’s plane touched down on Tuesday. “Indeed, we take this trip at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.”Given that Pelosi’s trip presents a serious diplomatic headache for the Joe Biden White House, there had been much speculation about the motivations behind the controversial visit. In her op-ed Pelosi struck a hard line against China’s position that her trip was a provocation and placed it in the context of a broader global struggle over political freedom.In the article Pelosi said: “We take this trip at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy. As Russia wages its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine, killing thousands of innocents – even children – it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats.”Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is unfolding during a tour of Asian nations this week. Her diplomatic mission aims to punctuate a foreign policy career that has seen her defend human rights and democratic values abroad. But it has infuriated China, which claims Taiwan as a province of its own and has threatened retaliation over the visit. The US officially supports a “one-China” policy but in practice treats Taiwan as an economic and democratic partner.She is the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since the Republican Newt Gingrich went there as the House speaker in 1997, going there even after Biden recently said the American military did not think it was a good idea for her to travel there.Chinese state media reported that fighter jets were flying across the Taiwan strait just as Pelosi’s plane landed in the island’s capital, Taipei.Analysts do not expect China to follow through with a hostile military act, at least not while Pelosi is there. But already on Tuesday authorities in China had announced a ban on imports from more than 100 Taiwanese food companies, which many had interpreted as retribution over Pelosi’s trip.If her piece in the Washington Post is any indication, none of it fazed Pelosi, who in 1991 unfurled a banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square hailing the pro-democracy student activists killed there two years earlier.Pelosi’s op-ed said it was 43 years ago that the US Congress passed an act recognizing Taiwanese democracy that thenpresident Jimmy Carter signed into law.“It made a solemn vow by the United States to support the defense of Taiwan [and] to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means … [a] grave concern to the United States,” Pelosi’s piece added, noting that her trip sent an important message nearly six months after Russia invaded Ukraine and unbalanced global peace.“Today,” Pelosi continued, “America must remember that vow. We must stand by Taiwan, which is an island of resistance.”TopicsNancy PelosiTaiwanChinaBiden administrationJoe BidenUS foreign policyAsia PacificnewsReuse this content More

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      How Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ‘pattern of life’ allowed the US to kill al-Qaida leader

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      How Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ‘pattern of life’ allowed the US to kill al-Qaida leader After a decades-long hunt the simple habit of sitting out on the balcony gave the CIA an opportunity to launch ‘tailored strike’ In the end it was one of the oldest mistakes in the fugitive’s handbook that apparently did for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top al-Qaida leader killed, according to US intelligence, by a drone strike on Sunday morning: he developed a habit.The co-planner of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had acquired a taste for sitting out on the balcony of his safe house in Sherpur, a well-to-do diplomatic enclave of Kabul. He grew especially fond of stepping out on to the balcony after morning prayers, so that he could watch the sun rise over the Afghan capital.According to a US official who briefed reporters on Monday, it was such regular behavior that allowed intelligence agents, presumably CIA, to piece together what they called “a pattern of life” of the target. That in turn allowed them to launch what the White House called a “tailored airstrike” involving two Hellfire missiles fired from a Reaper drone that are claimed to have struck the balcony, with Zawahiri on it, at 6.18am on Sunday.It was the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the Egyptian surgeon who by the time he was killed had a $25m bounty on his head. Zawahiri, 71, was held accountable not only for his part as Bin Laden’s second in command for 9/11, with its death toll of almost 3,000 people, but also for several other of al-Qaida’s most deadly attacks, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which killed 17 US sailors.The mission to go after the al-Qaida leader was triggered, US officials said, in early April when intelligence sources picked up signals that Zawahiri and his family had moved off their mountainside hideaways and relocated to Kabul. Following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan last August, and with the support of the Haqqani Taliban network, Zawahiri and his wife, together with their daughter and grandchildren, had moved into the Sherpur house.MapIn their telling of events, US officials were at pains to stress that under Joe Biden’s instructions the mission was carried out carefully and with precision to avoid civilian casualties and US officials said no one else was killed or wounded in the attack.Social media images of the strike suggested the use of a modified Hellfire called the R9X with six blades to damage targets, sources familiar with the weapon told Reuters. They caused surprisingly little damage beyond the target, suggesting they may be a version of the missile shrouded in secrecy and used by the US to avoid non-combatant casualties.The US president was first apprised of Zawahiri’s whereabouts in April, and for the next two months a tightly knit group of officials delved into the intelligence and devised a plan. A scale model of the Sherpur house was built, showing the balcony where the al-Qaida leader liked to sit. As discussions about a possible strike grew more intense, the model was brought into the situation room of the White House on 1 July so that Biden could see it for himself.The president “examined closely the model of al-Zawahiri’s house that the intelligence community had built and brought into the White House situation room for briefings on this issue”, a senior administration official told reporters.The White House made further claims to bolster its argument that the attack was lawful, flawless and with a loss of life limited to Zawahiri alone. Officials said that engineers were brought in to analyse the safe house and assess what would happen to it structurally in the wake of a drone strike.Lawyers were similarly consulted on whether the attack was legal. They advised that it was, given the target’s prominent role as leader of a terrorist group.Biden, by now quarantined with Covid, received a final briefing on 25 July and gave the go-ahead. It was a decision in stark contrast to the advice he gave Barack Obama in May 2011 not to proceed with the special forces mission that killed Bin Laden in a raid on his safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.On Monday evening, Biden stood on his own balcony – this one in the White House with the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial as his backdrop – to address the nation.“I authorized the precision strike that would remove him from the battlefield once and for all,” Biden said. “This measure was carefully planned, rigorously, to minimize the risk of harm to other civilians.”Biden’s insistence that no one other than the al-Qaida leader was killed in the attack was amplified repeatedly by US officials. The narrative given by the White House was that Zawahiri was taken out cleanly through the application of modern technological warfare.Skepticism remains, despite the protestations. Over the years drone strikes have frequently proved to be anything but precise.In August last year one such US drone strike in Kabul was initially hailed by the Pentagon as a successful mission to take out a would-be terrorist bomber planning an attack on the city’s airport. It was only after the New York Times had published an exhaustive investigation showing that the strike had in fact killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children, that the US military admitted the mission had gone tragically wrong.Perhaps mindful of the doubts that are certain to swirl around the Zawahiri killing for days to come, the White House said that the Sherpur safe house where the drone strike happened had been kept under observation for 36 hours after the attack and before Biden spoke to the nation. Officials said that Zawahiri’s relatives were seen leaving the house under Haqqani Taliban escort, establishing that they had survived the strike.TopicsAyman al-ZawahiriAfghanistanTalibanSouth and central AsiaJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Russian man spent years as puppeteer behind US political groups, officials say

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      Russian man spent years as puppeteer behind US political groups, officials sayAleksandr Viktorovich Ionov charged over accusations he sought to spread division and propaganda and meddle in elections A Russian man orchestrated a yearslong effort to puppeteer political groups in Florida, Georgia and California to sow discord in the US, spread pro-Russia propaganda and meddle in American elections, justice department officials alleged on Friday.Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov of Moscow was charged with conspiring to have US citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government, according to a justice department statement. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.The indictment against Ionov was linked to a raid by federal agents of the Uhuru Movement’s headquarters in St Petersburg, Florida, on Friday, the Tampa Bay Times reported, citing US officials.The Uhuru Movement belongs to the African People’s Socialist party and purports to unite “African people as one … for liberation, social justice, self-reliance and economic development”.At a news conference on Friday, a Uhuru leader declared openly that his group was “in support of Russia” and dismissed the raid as an attack meant to isolate Africans in the US who are fighting for liberation.“We can have relationships with whoever we want to make this revolution possible,” said the leader, Eritha “Akile” Cainion.The movement’s St Petersburg headquarters recently made headlines for unrelated reasons after a man using a flamethrower set fire to a flag flying outside the building, leading to his arrest.According to the justice department, Ionov was acting on behalf of the FSB Russian intelligence agency when he financially supported the groups at the center of the case, none of which are explicitly named in the indictment. He allegedly ordered them to publish pro-Russian lies and coordinated actions by them intended to further Russian interests.The department also claimed Ionov influenced a US political group in Florida under his control to interfere in local elections, supporting the St Petersburg, Florida, political campaigns of two people in 2017 and 2019. It listed the group and individuals as “unindicted co-conspirators” but did not name them.From at least December 2014 to March 2022, the department said, Ionov and at least three other Russian officials engaged in a malign foreign influence campaign targeting the US.Separately, the US treasury department on Friday imposed sanctions on Ionov, his fellow Russian national Natalya Valeryevna Burlinova, and four Russian entities it accused of backing the Kremlin’s mission of interfering in elections abroad, including in the US and Ukraine.According to the justice department, the four entities in question are: the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which Ionov founded and presides over; Ionov Transkontinental; Stop-Imperialism; and the Center for Support and Development of Public Initiative Creative Diplomacy (Picreadi).The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on the indictment or the US sanctions, which among other things block the property in American jurisdiction of those named.Reuters contributed this reportTopicsUS politicsRussiaFloridaBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans rush to label economic slowdown as ‘Joe Biden’s recession’

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      Republicans rush to label economic slowdown as ‘Joe Biden’s recession’Republicans are quick to call a recession as the administration points to brighter employment numbers Prices are rising in the US at the fastest rate in four decades. The Fed raised interest rates again. And new data showed the American economy shrank for a second consecutive quarter, intensifying fears of a recession and handing Republicans a potent line of attack just months before the midterm elections.For embattled Joe Biden, Thursday’s gross domestic product figures were the latest in a string of worrying economic developments clouding his presidency this week. The news came as Democrats celebrated a breakthrough on the president’s long-stalled economic agenda after Senator Joe Manchin announced his support for a version of the plan in a shock reversal for the West Virginia holdout.Joe Biden hails Senate deal as ‘most significant’ US climate legislation everRead moreWith control of Congress in the balance, Republicans seized on the turn of events to accuse Democrats of deepening economic disarray with their spending plans. Widespread pessimism about the state of the economy has shaped up to be Biden’s biggest political vulnerability, weighing down his approval ratings and threatening Democrats’ chances in November.Moments after the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the highly anticipated GDP report on Thursday morning, Republicans declared the economy well into the throes of “Joe Biden’s recession” and blamed Democrats’ policy initiatives for making life costlier for Americans.“Biden and Democrats are responsible for our shrinking economy, and they’re only trying to make it worse,” said Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.GDP, the broadest measure of economic activity, fell by an annual rate of 0.09%, following a 1.6% annual decline in the first three months of the year, according to the commerce department. The numbers recorded two consecutive quarters of declining economic output, a common – but not official – definition of recession.On Thursday, Biden dismissed fears that the US was in a recession, arguing that the economy was “on the right path”.“There’s going to be a lot of chatter today on Wall Street and among pundits about whether we are in a recession,” Biden said on Thursday afternoon. “But if you look at our job market, consumer spending, business investment, we see signs of economic progress in the second quarter as well.”In anticipation of the report, the White House has sought to convince Americans that two quarters of economic decline does not necessarily mean the US is in recession, particularly because unemployment remains low, job growth robust and household savings elevated.Biden stressed those sources of strength in the economy during an earlier appearance on Thursday, concluding: “That doesn’t sound like a recession to me.”The president also urged Congress to move quickly to pass his economic agenda that the White House argues will help ease the financial burden on American households by lowering the costs of healthcare and prescription drugs.Biden did pause to take a victory lap on Thursday, interrupting his meeting with the CEOs of five US businesses to announce that the House had enough votes to pass a sprawling bipartisan package designed to strengthen American manufacturing and increase the US’s competitiveness against China.The bill, which next goes to his desk for signatures, will “make cars cheaper, appliances cheaper, and computers cheaper”, Biden said in a statement. “It will lower the costs of every day goods.”But Republicans said the Democrats’ climate, healthcare and tax plan, formerly known as “Build Back Better” and recast as the “Inflation Reduction Act”, would only cause further financial hardship, especially after they passed a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package last year.“The definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” the Republican congressman Vern Gale Buchanan of Florida wrote on Twitter. “Yet here we are now entering a recession and Democrats are trying to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on Green New Deal priorities and raise taxes on America’s job creators.”Soaring inflation – now running at 40-year highs – led the Federal Reserve on Wednesday to increase interest rates in an effort to bring down prices, the second such increase in just over a month.Labelling the downturn a recession may be more politically charged than economically precise. Recessions are officially declared by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private research group, and usually only after the decline is over.“Bottom Line,” Diane Swonk, chief economist for KPMG, said on Twitter, “We are not in a recession – yet. But the current environment is [not] healthy. The cure will be painful but is necessary to avoid an even worse outcome. Rock & hard spot. Scars likely. Hard.”The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said the US economy is in a state of transition, from a period of fast-paced growth to a period of more sustainable growth.Recession, she explained, is generally viewed as a “broad-based weakening of our economy” that includes “substantial job losses and mass layoffs, businesses shutting down, private sector activities slowing considerably”.“That is not what we are seeing right now,” she said.Yet even without an official determination of whether the US is in a recession, polling has found that most Americans believe it is: something likely to cause Democrats pain at the ballot box in November’s crucial elections.According to a recent CNN poll, 64% of Americans “feel” the economy is in recession, including 56% of Democrats and 63% of independents. The same survey found that four in 10 view the economy as “very poor”, an 11-point rise since the spring.Biden defended his administration’s actions, arguing that the economic stimulus plan was “the reason why we still had teachers in school, kids going to school, the reason why we had cops on the beat, the reason we had essential workers,” during the depths of the pandemic. But he admitted that the “vast majority of Americans have no idea what the recovery plan did”.Now, with their congressional majorities hanging in the balance, Democrats must persuade voters to trust their economic leadership as they rush to pass Biden’s economic agenda, which they vow will help, not hurt American pocketbooks.Manchin, who just weeks ago appeared to walk away from his party’s economic plans over concerns that it would worsen inflation, said his newfound support for the measure was based on assurances that it would not.Explaining his decision, Manchin told reporters: “This is truly going to be around inflation reduction.”TopicsBiden administrationInflationEconomicsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More