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      in US Politics

      Secret Service extension for Trump’s adult children cost $140,000 in a month

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      Donald Trump’s adult children reportedly cost taxpayers $140,000 in Secret Service security in the month after the clan’s patriarch left the White House in January.Ordinarily, family members of a president lose their security detail when they leave office. But in the case of the four Trump siblings and two of their spouses, the former president issued a directive to extend post-presidency protections by six months.The costs, obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics, do not include security protections at Trump properties in New Jersey, Palm Beach and Briarcliff, New York. With those factored in, the total would likely be far higher, according to the group.According to the watchdog, records reveal that the Trump children maintained a “breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service”. Transport costs alone amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totaled at least $88,678.39.If that schedule is maintained, the group estimates, post-presidency protection costs could nearly $1m. The group has previously calculated that the Trump family made 12 times as many trips in three years as the Obamas made in seven.The arrangements, however, are not unique: former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W Bush also sought protection extensions, though in the case of Clinton and Obama their children were by then at, or close to, college-age.The Washington Post, which reported on Trump’s directive in January, found that extensions to Secret Service protections were also extended to former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien.Under federal law, Trump and his wife Melania are entitled to protection for their lifetime; their teenage son Barron receives his until he turns 16.The watchdog found that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went from their jobs at the White House to a 10-day vacation in Utah, racking up hotel costs of $62,599. After a month in Miami, they stayed at Trump’s Bedminster golf property for three days in late February.Eric and Lara Trump spent much of February at Trump’s Briarcliff property, interspersed with trips to New York, Miami and Palm Beach, at a cost of $12,742.Donald Trump Jr also spent time in New York City, on Long Island, and in upstate New York, racking up bills of $13,337.But Citizens for Ethics said the Secret Service did not provide records of spending at Trump businesses.“While it may be tempting to put the story of the Trump family’s profiteering in the past, we cannot until they have actually stopped directing taxpayer money into their own bank accounts,” the group said. More

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      in US Politics

      The sleazy, sordid Matt Gaetz scandal: are the walls now closing in on him?

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      There could have been no more fitting venue for the bellicose US congressman Matt Gaetz to launch his nationwide “America first” speaking tour than The Villages. Where better to perpetuate the fantasy that all is going well for a politician seen as the “ultimate Maga bro” than Florida’s ultra-conservative “Disney World for retirees”?The Republican loyalists who filled the ballroom of the Brownwood hotel and spa on Friday night didn’t come to hear whether the embattled Gaetz ever paid a 17-year-old minor for sex, took sleazy sex-trafficking trips to the Bahamas or assisted in his disgraced former “wingman” Joel Greenberg’s efforts to install cronies in well-paid positions of political power.But the scandal now engulfing Gaetz is truly one of the most remarkable, sleazy and tabloid-ready in recent American politics. Away from all the Donald Trump cheerleading by Gaetz and his fellow rightwing fire-starter Marjorie Taylor Greene during their national tour of distraction, it is hard to escape the notion that the walls are closing in.Much of the focus is on a justice department inquiry into the 39-year-old Florida congressman that, in recent days, is reported to have grown beyond initial sex trafficking allegations to an inquiry involving alleged corruption.According to the Associated Press, federal investigators are now looking into Gaetz’s connections with medical marijuana, and whether certain friends and associates with interests in the nascent yet lucrative industry in Florida influenced or enriched themselves from legislation the politician was sponsoring.Neither Gaetz or the justice department responded to requests for comment, and the FBI has previously told the Guardian that it “declines to confirm nor deny the existence or status of an investigation”.But it is the salacious side of the allegations, and his friendship with Greenberg, the former Seminole county tax collector now in jail on 33 federal charges from stalking to sex trafficking a child, which have garnered most attention.Gaetz, who represents a large swath of Florida’s panhandle, has tried to distance himself from Greenberg, despite an avalanche of evidence that the pair were close. It includes tweets showing the two friends with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis; receipts of Venmo payments from Gaetz to Greenberg in the same amount that Greenberg then immediately paid to a teenage girl; and a “creepy” voicemail the pair sent in 2019 to Anna Eskamani, a young Democratic state congresswoman.Perhaps the most damning development came a week ago when the Daily Beast published a stunning “confession” letter it said was written by Greenberg to Roger Stone, a close ally and political “fixer” of Trump, allegedly seeking a pardon from the then president in exchange for $250,000.Notably, it implicated Gaetz directly in paying numerous women for sex, including a girl who was 17 at the time and who is now said to be a sex industry worker. “My lawyers, that I fired, know the whole story about MG’s involvement,” Greenberg allegedly wrote in one text to Stone, according to the Beast.“They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”Stone acknowledged to the Beast that Greenberg had tried to hire him to secure a pardon from Trump, but denied seeking or receiving payment for his assistance.Gaetz, meanwhile, has always insisted the claim he had a relationship with a minor is “verifiably false”. In a bizarre, freewheeling appearance on Fox News in March, the same day the New York Times first reported the existence of the federal inquiry, Gaetz claimed he was himself the victim of an $25m extortion plot involving a justice department official.He also attempted to draw the Fox host, Tucker Carlson, into the scandal by claiming that Carlson and his wife had been to dinner with Gaetz and a female friend whom he said was later “threatened by the FBI”.A surprised Carlson said he did not recall meeting the mystery woman, and subsequently called it “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted”.Prosecutors, meanwhile, have a 15 May deadline to strike a plea deal with Greenberg, set by US district court judge Gregory Presnell in April. Greenberg’s attorney Fritz Scheller said after the hearing that his client was cooperating, telling reporters: “I am sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today.”Outwardly, Gaetz has remained defiant, ignoring some calls from within his own party to resign while still enjoying the support of Republican leadership. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has said he will not take any action unless charges are filed.But the scandal has caused two Gaetz aides to resign, and political opponents in Florida have stepped up their criticism as the Greenberg plea deal deadline approaches.Eskamani said she went public with the voicemail partly to expose the “bro culture” in Tallahassee politics within which, she said, Gaetz and Greenberg flourished.“Political institutions as a whole are very male-dominated, there’s a sense of privilege and often those in public office come from a family lineage or wealth or establishment,” she said. “It’s hard to get in if you don’t come from those experiences.“It’s not like Matt Gaetz created bro culture, but he absolutely benefited from it, exploited it and is being protected by it today. It’s slimy characters, tons of money, inappropriate use of power when it comes to lavish trips, and the use of sex and drugs to also exhibit your power. It’s just gross all around.”She added: “[But] there is no doubt in my mind that there will be charges he will face. I think it’s going to take time for the DoJ to build that case, but I feel confident there will be consequences for his behavior.” More

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      Liz Cheney a martyr to resistance as Republican party picks cult of Trump

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      She is a champion of the hawkish foreign policy espoused by her father, a former US vice-president dubbed “Darth Vader”. She is a hardline conservative whose opposition to gay marriage pained her lesbian sister.Now Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney finds herself a likely martyr of the resistance to ex-president Donald Trump, earning plaudits from party moderates and even some Democrats for swearing allegiance to truth rather than lies.Cheney appears all but certain next week to lose her status as the sole woman in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. Members have been lining up to express a lack of confidence in her and instead tout Elise Stefanik, a pro-Trump congresswoman, as her successor.Cheney’s cardinal sin is to reject Trump’s “big lie” that last year’s election was stolen from him, increasingly the definitive loyalty test within the party. On the contrary, she has spoken out in public, tweeted that the false claim is “poisoning our democratic system” and even published a newspaper column urging colleagues to spurn the “Trump cult of personality”.The former president has fired back, branding her a “warmonger” and throwing his weight behind Stefanik. Future historians may regard it as a fork in the road for Republicans: a choice between a conspiratorial demagogue and a return to conservatism, institutionalism and fact-based reality. It seems clear that Cheney will lose, much to the despair of admiring “Never Trumpers”.“I think that there should be a line of Republicans around the block standing up to defend her,” Michael Wood, who won just 3% of the vote in a Republican primary in Texas earlier this month, told the MSNBC network. “This is probably the bravest woman in the western hemisphere.“She’s a modern-day Margaret Thatcher, an iron lady, and she’s being stabbed in the back not over policy differences; she’s being stabbed in the back because she won’t lie. It’s horrible what’s happening and I don’t know if I want to be in a party that doesn’t want somebody in it who’s speaking the truth.”Cheney, 54, is now the face of a Republican establishment that became a target of Trump’s wrecking ball populism but also has few friends on the left. She served at the state department, practised law at the International Finance Corporation and co-wrote a book with her father Dick Cheney, entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, that defended the George W Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture.In 2013, running for the US Senate in Wyoming, Cheney told Fox News that she believed “in the traditional definition of marriage” and disagreed on the issue with her sister, Mary, who is married to a woman. Mary responded on Facebook: “Liz – this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree – you’re just wrong – and on the wrong side of history.”In 2016 Cheney won election to Congress, serving as Wyoming’s lone member in the House, and soon became chair of the House Republican Conference, making her the No 3 Republican in the chamber. She survived an initial challenge earlier this year after she was among just 10 House Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment for inciting supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.But this time she has few public backers for a vote that could come as early as Wednesday. She has decided instead to go down with all guns blazing. In an opinion column in the Washington Post this week, Cheney insisted that she would defend basic principles irrespective of the short-term political price.She wrote: “I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.”Her stand has coincided with a recent book tour by her father’s old boss, Bush, in which he warned that the Trump-era Republican party has become “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Dick Cheney himself, now 80, has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office but is likely to be proud of his daughter’s position.Jake Bernstein, co-author of the book Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, said: “I think part of the reason for why Liz Cheney is doing what she’s doing is directly the result of her father in the sense that her father was the very embodiment of the Republican establishment for decades.“Whether you agreed or disagreed, they did have principles and an ideology and I think they are probably appalled that the Republican party has become a cult of Donald Trump. I assume that she’s in constant contact with her father and that she would stand up for that Republican party that’s been swept away in the age of Trump.”It is rare for Liz Cheney and liberals to find themselves on the same side of any argument, Bernstein acknowledged. “She’s still very conservative. She would never see eye to eye with Democrats on anything else but a belief in the institution of Congress and the democratic process. To believe that she is in any way a moderate politically says more about what Donald Trump has done to the Republican party than it does about her.”The author and journalist added: “One of the biggest recalibrations that is needed in American political discourse is that most of these Republicans are not conservatives: they don’t want to maintain conservative traditions, they don’t have a conservative ideology. They’re radical in their approach and to call them conservative is a misnomer. Liz Cheney is a true conservative in every sense of the word and she’s only a moderate in relation to the radicalism that has seized the Republican party.”The effort to purge Cheney is seen by critics as one of the most striking examples yet of Republicans’ shift away from focusing on a program of government in favor of dancing to Trump’s tune. Instead of policy, loyalty to Trump and “culture wars” are now the glue that hold the party together.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The thing that’s hard to remember is Cheney is an arch-conservative. She’s a hard-edged, small government, lower taxes figure and a leading voice on national defense but the Republican party is no longer organized along the axis of ideology; it’s organized along the axis of cult of personality.“This is a low point for the Republican party. It’s embarrassing and really gives you a sense of how unmoored it is from the issues facing the country.”Cheney appears to be a victim of Republicans’ strategy for winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections, which often hinge on a party’s most fervent supporters. Trump is still hugely popular with the grassroots and is seen as critical for both mobilizing voter enthusiasm and fundraising. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, appears to be betting on Trump to win him the speakership, even if it means legitimizing “the big lie”.In such a context, Cheney might have felt that she had nothing to lose by nailing her colors to the mast now. Tim Miller, writer-at-large at the Bulwark website and former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, said: “Say what you want about the Cheneys, I think that she has a deep, genuine respect for our democratic system and is genuinely outraged by the president’s actions after the election.” More

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      Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms surprises by not seeking second term

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      The mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was seen as a possible running mate for Joe Biden in last year’s presidential election, said late on Thursday she will not seek a second term in office.Bottoms, 51, who was elected mayor in 2017 and is just the second Black woman to lead the city, did not provide a specific reason for her decision and did not say what she would do next, when she announced the surprise news.“It is with deep emotions that I hold my head high, and choose not to seek another term as Mayor,” Bottoms wrote on Twitter.In a morning press conference on Friday, Bottoms, visibly tearful, cited challenges during her tenure including a March 2018 cyber-attack on the city during the early months of her term; social justice protests after the murder of George Floyd, where police aggressively clashed with demonstrators; and being mayor during the administration of Donald Trump, whom she described as “the madman in the White House”.Bottoms was clear that family reasons were not behind her decision to step down. She also said she would not be accepting a position at Walgreens after her term is finished, addressing rumors that she would be working with her close friend and Walgreens chief executive, Roz Brewer.Bottoms also said that her decision was not because of doubts that she could win a second term in office. As Bottoms stated, polling numbers show that if a mayoral election was held today, she would win the race without a runoff.“I don’t know what’s next for me personally and for my family. But what I do know is that this is a decision made from a position of strength, not weakness, said Bottoms.Bottoms had previously been fundraising money for her re-election efforts, including hosting a virtual fundraiser with Joe Biden, and now donations will be returned, she said.She said in her letter to social media that the decision came “as [my husband] Derek and I have given thoughtful prayer and consideration to the season now before us”.“Multiple credible polls have shown that if the race for Mayor were held today, I would be re-elected,” read the statement.It also listed a number of Bottoms’ achievements in office, including ending Atlanta’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that placed detainees in the Atlanta city jail; helping to elect Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice-president; and the Democratic victories of the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in Georgia.Bottoms’ sudden reversal on re-election is surprising, given her growing popularity in the Democratic party.Bottoms was an early endorser of Biden and played a crucial role in promoting his 2020 campaign.She was also offered a cabinet position under Biden, one she turned down last December, citing her mayoral responsibilities in Atlanta.Bottoms now said that if she had known of someone at the time who “could step up” and be the mayor of Atlanta, she “likely would have made another decision” when she was offered the cabinet position.“I wanted to finish what I started and I didn’t see who could step in and lead this city,” she said.Apart from the crises of Covid-19, a cyber-attack and police killings,Atlanta was scored with an increase in violence last year. In addition to a record number of homicides, the most since 1996, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, eight people, the majority of Asian descent, were killed in a mass shooting at two area spas.Bottoms had publicly stated that she believed race played a role in the shooting suspect’s motive.Bottoms had made national headlines after being sued by Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, for ordering a face mask mandate for Atlanta, publicly calling the governor’s leadership “irresponsible”.The mayor’s handling of Brooks’s death has been met with criticism, especially following the reinstatement of officer Garrett Rolfe this week, who shot Brooks, after a review board found the city had not followed its own disciplinary procedures.Now there will be fevered speculation about who will run the largest city in Georgia, including another go for two-term past mayor Kasim Reed. More

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      in World Politics

      Immigration Is the Solution for the Falling US Birth Rate

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      Germany faces a major crisis. The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care. There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis.

      First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate. The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies — not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits — and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any European Union country gets is France at 1.88.

      The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes and support the increasingly aging population.

      Germany’s Refugees Face a Future Without Angela Merkel

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      That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world (after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda).

      This headline-grabbing decision, five years later, has been a remarkable success. The million refugees have prospered, reports the Center for Global Development:

      “Today, about half have found a job, paid training, or internship. On arrival, only about one percent declared having good or very good German language skills. By 2018, that figure had increased to 44 percent. … Such successful integration also has impacted the local German population. For example, between 2008 and 2015, the number of employees in companies founded by migrants grew by 50 percent (to 1.5 million). It has also mobilized civil society. A survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research suggests that 55 percent of Germans have contributed to the integration of refugees since 2015.”

      In 2015, nearly everyone in the media — German, European, international — referred to the millions of desperate people trying to get into Europe as an “immigration crisis.” They should have given it a different label: the immigration solution to Europe’s demographic crisis. Germany wisely chose to take advantage of this opportunity, while the countries of Eastern Europe, by and large, have embraced demographic suicide.

      The naysayers had a field day back in 2015 with their predictions of political failure for Merkel and social chaos for Germany. Today, Germany continues to be the strongest European economy. It has struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic but is now rapidly scaling up its vaccinations. And the anti-immigrant backlash, represented by the far-right Alternative for Germany, has ebbed, with the popularity of the party falling to 11% in recent polls. Meanwhile, with its liberal platform on immigration, the Green Party has surged to 25% and may well win the elections in September.

      It’s useful to bear the German experience in mind as the United States once again tackles its own “immigration crisis.”

      Immigrants Are a Gift

      The United States has been the exception to the demographic rule for industrialized countries. The US fertility rate, at 1.73, is also well below replacement. But because of a constant stream of immigrants, America has managed to grow at a healthy clip.

      Embed from Getty Images

      That began to change in the 2010s. According to the latest census numbers, the US grew at the second-slowest rate over the last decade since the founding of the country. The culprits were a declining fertility rate — the birthrate has declined 19% since peaking in 2007 — and a reduction in the number of immigrants. The impact of the pandemic — in terms of mortality, long-term disability and anxiety over economic insecurity — will only make matters worse.

      America has always depended on immigrants and undocumented workers. That dependency has only grown more acute over the years. Let’s take a look at four critical sectors.

      Between half and three-quarters of the farmworkers who ensure a supply of food to the American population are undocumented workers, and many of the rest are recent immigrants. The pandemic hit farmworkers and food manufacturing workers hard, and even the Trump administration had to acknowledge them as essential workers in reducing their risk of deportation (though not providing them additional protection against infection).

      Even before the pandemic hit, the food sector faced a shortage of workers. “In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers,” according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Congress (read: Republicans in the Senate) has failed to provide a legal framework for what remains an essential workforce, pandemic or no pandemic, though the recent Farm Workforce Modernization Act has a shot of passing with bipartisan support to provide a million undocumented farmworkers with legal status.

      The health-care sector similarly depends on immigrants. Of the nearly 15 million people working in the health sector, about 18% are immigrants. COVID-19 is going to exact a heavy toll on this sector, though. According to a recent Washington Post poll, one in three health-care workers are thinking about exiting the profession: “Many talked about the betrayal and hypocrisy they feel from the public they have sacrificed so much to save—their clapping and hero-worship one day, then refusal to wear masks and take basic precautions the next, even if it would spare health workers the trauma of losing yet another patient.”

      Even without pandemic-related job changes, the United States has been looking at a major upcoming nursing shortage: over a million new registered nurses are needed by 2022. Nursing schools are just not keeping up with the demand created by retirement.

      Manufacturing, challenged by foreign competition and outsourcing, has infamously declined in the United States. Despite the spread of automation, this sector too needs more workers. There are currently 500,000 job openings, and one recent report estimates 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.

      Then there’s domestic work, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Home health aides, child-care providers, housecleaners: the vast majority are women and more than one-third are foreign-born. “By 2026, care jobs will constitute one of the fastest growing professions in the country, and we will need more caregivers and nannies than we have ever needed before,” writes the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “Home-based elder care is already the single fastest growing occupation in our entire economy due to the rapidly growing aging population.”

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      Home health aides directly take care of aging Americans. But the United States needs younger workers across all professions to keep alive federal programs like Social Security that support aging Americans. The cohort of people aged 55 to 64 grew by 70% between 2000 and 2016 while the working-age population expanded by only 15%. That’s bad news for people looking to retire in the future on their Social Security benefits.

      Fortunately, immigrants have come to the rescue. They are overwhelmingly working age and have a higher participation rate in the labor force than the native-born. Their contributions to Social Security help keep the system afloat. The undocumented have been even more generous, providing an estimated $12 billion to the Social Security system through payroll taxes in 2010 alone (without much hope of ever drawing from the system themselves).

      Even with these contributions, however, Social Security is still expected to face a major funding shortfall by 2035 under current projections. One answer: more immigrants. If this story were a fairy tale, the immigrant would be the goose that lays the golden egg. Immigrants didn’t just build America. They are essential to the health and prosperity of the country today. Immigrants are the gift that keeps on giving.

      Whenever a goose starts laying golden eggs, however, someone invariably starts talking about wringing the poor animal’s neck and impoverishing everyone involved.

      The Politics of Immigration

      The Republican Party remade itself into an anti-immigrant force before Donald Trump entered the political scene. Tea Party insurgents called for closing the border with Mexico. David Brat, an unknown economist, ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 Virginia race by hammering at the immigration issue. Trump, however, took immigration and ran with it, promising to build a new wall along the southern border, shut down travel from predominantly Muslim countries and make it nearly impossible for refugees and asylum-seekers to find haven in the United States.

      Because of Trump’s success in turning his extreme positions into federal policy, immigration largely disappeared as an electoral issue in 2020. The Republican Party focused instead on economic attacks (Joe Biden as a “socialist”) and cultural broadsides (the perennial racist and misogynist dog whistles).

      But with the Democrats back in the White House and in control of Congress, immigration will likely become again a major campaign issue in the midterm elections. The economy is on an upswing, the pandemic is waning and the Biden administration has been competent and relatively scandal-free. Without an actual platform of their own since they decided to turn their party into a personality cult, the Republicans will inevitably characterize the influx of people over the border as a “crisis” and the president’s “biggest failure.”

      The numbers at the border have indeed increased, with the influx for April near a 20-year high. Despite the Republican Party criticisms, these numbers are not the result of Biden administration policies. The number of people apprehended at the border, for instance, spiked in 2018, under Trump, at more than 850,000, which obviously had nothing to do with President Biden.

      The surge so far this year is largely seasonal, a result of pent-up demand from the COVID-19 border closures and a function of all the applicants stranded south of the border by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The numbers already appear to be plateauing. And the number of unaccompanied minors being held in Border Patrol facilities dropped dramatically in the last week.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration has reversed many of Trump’s policies, canceling funding for the border wall, reversing the “Muslim travel ban” and dismantling the “Remain in Mexico” program. Without any fanfare, the president also allowed the ban on guest-worker visas to expire at the end of March. Pictures of joyful family reunifications at the border are now replacing Trump-era images of children separated from the parents.

      The administration has also pledged to address the root causes of migration by funding initiatives in Central America that will reduce violence and corruption, stabilize economies and address humanitarian crises. That, of course, is easier said than done given the authoritarian leadership in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Tasked with tackling this issue, Vice-President Kamala Harris is well aware of the folly of funneling aid into corrupt governments, and she is reportedly lining up civil society representatives to meet on upcoming visits to the region. A long-term strategy of fostering political and economic transformation in the region, however, won’t win any points with Republicans or most voters in the United States in the short term.

      The recent kerfuffle around refugee policy illustrates the political stakes. As a candidate, Biden promised to bring US policies on refugees and asylum in line with international standards and raise the annual ceiling to more or less the level of the Obama years. Because of a failure to file the necessary paperwork, however, the number of refugees admitted into the United States in the first months of the Biden administration remained extremely low. Because refugees are often conflated in the public mind with immigrants — and the administration’s immigration policy was getting poor marks in the polls — the president tried to get away with suppressing the number of incoming refugees. Challenged by members of his own party, Biden again reversed himself, returning to the previous promise of a cap for the remainder of this year of 62,500 and an annual ceiling of 125,000 for 2022.

      The back-and-forth on refugee policy is an unusual deviation from an otherwise consistent set of policies coming from the administration. It’s a sign that immigration will continue to be subject to finger-in-the-wind calculations rather than rational debate. It’s a shame that it will require enormous political courage to embrace policies that are in the best interest of the United States, whether from the point of view of the labor force, the sustainability of the social welfare system or the livelihoods of the newest residents of the country.

      Republicans, with their steadfast commitment to political divisiveness and firearms, love to shoot themselves in the foot. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to follow suit. Maybe a delegation of Syrian-Germans can come to America on a speaking tour to explain how a “crisis” is really an opportunity.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      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 Elections

      Fox News made me do it: Capitol attack suspect pulls ‘Foxitis’ defense

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      The lawyer for a Delaware man charged over the Capitol attack in January is floating a unique defense: Fox News made him do it.Anthony Antonio, who is facing five charges including violent entry, and disorderly conduct and impeding law enforcement during civil disorder, fell prey to the persistent lies about the so-called “stolen election” being spread daily by Donald Trump and the rightwing network that served him, his attorney Joseph Hurley said during a video hearing on Thursday. Antonio spent the six months before the riots mainlining Fox News while unemployed, Hurley said, likening the side effects of such a steady diet of misinformation to a mental health syndrome.“Fox television played constantly,” he said. “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitis’ or ‘Foxmania’, and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him.”Antonio’s segment was somehow only the second most notable part of the hearing. Another defendant shouted obscenities, sending the proceedings into near chaos at one point.Hurley’s argument calls to mind the infamous “the devil made me do it” defense, although you might argue the devil has nothing on the prolific manipulators at Fox News. And while there is certainly an element of believability to the harmful nature of persistent rightwing propaganda effectively manipulating a person’s ability to distinguish fact from reality – I’ve written here and in my newsletter about something I only half-jokingly refer to as “Fox News brain cancer”, something like a shared psychotic disorder that slowly sucks the life out of people and ruins their ability to connect with their families – it remains to be seen whether or not there is any legal merit to such a claim. Legal experts I’ve talked to certainly don’t think so.Multiple videos obtained by the FBI from the day of the riot appear to show Antonio as especially active in the chaos. He is seen wearing a bulletproof vest featuring a patch of the anti-government extremist group the Three Percenters. At one point in video footage he can be seen shouting at officers: “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.” It was a revolutionary sentiment spread by radical rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert and others on the day.Elsewhere, Antonio is seen with a riot shield that appeared to be stolen from law enforcement, squirting water on an officer being dragged into a crowd, stealing one’s gas mask, and jumping through a broken window into the Capitol.Fox News has continued to spread misinformation about what happened that day.The network is being sued for billions of dollars for by two voting machine companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, for spreading lies about their role in the “theft” of the election. More

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      in World Politics

      After Long Wavering, a Waiver

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      During last year’s presidential election campaign, candidate Joe Biden promised “absolutely” and “positively” to support the waiver of US patents to permit the unencumbered manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines in the rest of the world. Once Biden was elected, the words “absolutely” and “positively” apparently lost some of their absoluteness and positivity, becoming synonyms of “possibly” and “hopefully.” The hesitation ended on Wednesday when the US committed to back the idea of a temporary patent waiver.

      The New York Times legitimately called Biden’s unexpected agreement with a principle promoted by more than 100 countries “a breakthrough,” after noting that until Wednesday the US had been “a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend intellectual property protections in an effort to ramp up vaccine production.” Biden’s representative to the WTO, Katherine Tai, nevertheless emphasized that this dramatic reversal should be thought of as exceptional: “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines.”

      For a Few Billion Dollars More

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      Digging a little deeper into the perspective for change, Michael Safi at The Guardian offered the Biden administration “two cheers” rather than the three The Times appears to believe it deserves. This follows from Tai’s realistic assessment of how things are likely to play out: “Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Consensus-based:

      Designed to protect vested interests, even in the face of a majority and the logic of history and health itself

      Contextual Note

      Times reporters Thomas Kaplan and Sheryl Gay Stolberg remain faithful to the patented meliorist approach the paper applies to nearly all policies conducted by a Democratic president. They emphasize the constructive process now underway at the WTO in a piece that echoes The Beatles song, “Getting Better All the Time.” The Biden administration seems to be telling the world: I’m changing my scene and doing the best that I can.

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      In contrast, the coverage by The Washington Post (owned by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos) spends most of its ink suggesting the proposed waiver probably is fundamentally a flawed idea, leaving the impression that not much if anything will come of it. According to its pessimistic take, “Tai cautioned that the discussions to proceed with negotiations over the waiver’s text would ‘take time.’ Current and former officials said that a final agreement could differ significantly from the proposed waiver, which India and South Africa first introduced in October, and that deliberations could fall apart entirely.”

      CNN more prudently highlights the fact that the US proposal “is preliminary and will not guarantee the global patent rules are lifted right away. But the Biden administration’s signal of support amounts to a major step that aid groups and Democrats had been pressing for.” It nevertheless appears to offer Biden his third cheer when it explains that the president “ultimately decided to support the waiver in line with his campaign pledge.” It quotes US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s claim that Biden “put people over patents.” 

      But CNN points clearly to the true obstacle: “Members of the WTO must unanimously decide whether to loosen the restrictions. And while the US had been a hold out, other countries — including the European Union and Switzerland — have also resisted the step.” In other words, Biden may have killed two birds with one stone. By letting Europeans do the dirty work, he could save his standing with Big Pharma — surely the main reason for his hesitation — while appearing to stay true to the progressive principle of putting people over patents. Interestingly, France’s President Emmanuel Macron may be playing the same game.

      Historical Note

      The Guardian reminds its readers that the proposal is limited to “waiving patents on Covid vaccines — but not on treatments or other technology used to fight the disease.” Whereas the US media presented the question as one of moral duty versus economic interest, both The Guardian and Al Jazeera point to the practical question implied by the waiver: “If approved, the waiver would theoretically allow drugmakers around the world to produce coronavirus jabs without the risk of being sued for breaking IP rules.” For the developing world, feeling free from an imminent attack by corporate lawyers is indeed a kind of liberation.

      In other words, the proposed waiver would leave the world a long way from the optimistic scenario originally evoked by health experts and scientists in early 2020 that Alexander Zaitchik described in his exposé of Bill Gates’ influence on the WTO: “Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies.” The idea at the time was to mobilize everyone and maximize resources. This implied patent pooling.

      The health professionals facing the outbreak of COVID-19 understood both the scope of its threat and the dangers of an insufficiently coordinated organization to counter it. They also knew what the consequences of patent protection might turn out to be. The adoption of the agreement Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995 and TRIPS-plus in 1999 marked a landmark moment in the trend economists and politicians have celebrated with the term “globalization.” The specific rules applying to pharmaceuticals have been in place since 2005. In 2015, the website Infojustice highlighted the fact that the TRIPS agreement had established a regime in which “patents grant the patent holder a monopoly on the market that allows the blocking of price-lowering generic competition and the raising of prices which restricts affordable access to medicines.”

      The history of the past two decades has demonstrated to the global south the risk existing patent laws represent for their health and welfare. In 2015, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights drew “attention to the potential detrimental impact these treaties and agreements … may have on the enjoyment of human rights as enshrined in legally binding instruments, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social. Our concerns relate to the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labour standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement.” 

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      COVID-19 changed everyone’s perception. So long as the world was not faced by a politically toxic pandemic, the developed world was free to use its superior wealth and force to impose its rules on the rest of humanity. Any serious campaign to understand the fundamental asymmetry that was continually and silently aggravating the gap between the rich and poor nations was easily stifled. Thomas Piketty could write erudite books about the gap and what was driving it. But most people in the West had bought into the belief system promoted by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman, conveying the message that thanks to globalization and American technology, the world was now flat.

      In an ideal scenario, the Biden administration will now begin to put pressure on Europe and Switzerland to emulate America’s courage in backing the proposed waiver. It will also pressure US vaccine providers to share their technology and know-how with the rest of humanity by convincing them to show not just their leadership but also their commitment to human health above profit. With or without patent protection, there is no danger of their becoming unprofitable, not with the power they have and an ever-expanding marketplace for health. But what we are witnessing, as they resist even temporary waivers, is the rentier’s obsession with automatically induced maximum profit making the question of health benefits a secondary consideration.

      In the months to come, the world will be attentively observing the political and economic games now being played out. At some point, COVID-19 will begin to fade away. The world will then face the fear of the next contagion and perhaps begin seriously to struggle with a strategy to counter the effects of climate change. Awareness of the stakes is already much higher than in the past. It is time for the political class to begin assessing the risk that represents for their own future.

      *[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