MoJo Wire

Quick hits from the Mother Jones newsroom

  • The Latest Attempt to Stop Line 3 Hits a Snag in Tribal Court

    April 6, 2022

    Indigenous leaders and water protectors at a 2021 "Treaty People's Gathering" in Clearwater County, Minnesota, protesting the construction of Line 3Alex Kormann/AP

    Earlier this year, I wrote about a unique lawsuit aiming to stop the further construction of Line 3, a tar-sands oil pipeline built in 2021 that stretches for 330 miles across northern Minnesota and has been fought fiercely for nearly a decade by an Indigenous-led movement. The suit had an unlikely plaintiff: Manoomin, a grain known in English as wild rice that grows throughout the wetlands of northern Minnesota and holds immeasurable significance for Anishinaabe people. A 2018 White Earth law gave rights to the plant, part of an international rights of nature movement that seeks to flip dominant legal frameworks on their head. According to the complaint filed in August, the construction of the pipeline threatened Manoomin’s “inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”

    Through a novel legal maneuver that used the rights of nature, treaty law, and the independent jurisdiction of tribal courts, it seemed possible that Line 3 could be halted, at least for a bit.

    But the tactic didn’t pan out. On March 10, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals dismissed the August lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources filed by tribal leaders on behalf of Manoomin, citing a lack of legal precedent.

    The lawsuit targeted a permit by the Department of Natural Resources that allowed pipeline owner, Canadian corporation Enbridge, to pump 5 billion gallons of water from the ground to clear the route for the pipeline construction. Not only was this permit given, “abruptly, unilaterally and without formal notice to tribal leaders (quasi-secretly), and without Chippewa consent,” but it would also negatively affect the level and quality of the surrounding waterways where Manoomin grows, the complaint alleged.  

    The crux of the case was whether White Earth would be allowed to raise a legal claim in tribal court about something that happened off-reservation. When the Anishinaabe ceded their land to the United States, they retained what are called “usufructurary rights” to hunt, fish, and gather foods including wild rice as part of a series of treaties. The argument put forth by the mastermind of the case, White Earth tribal attorney Frank Bibeau, was that these treaty-protected rights extend into the ceded territories and could be enforced there by the White Earth Tribal Court. 

    The court disagreed. “Such exercises of sovereignty must take into account the longstanding legal and judicial framework,” wrote Judges George W. Soule, Lenor Scheffler Blaeser, and David Harrington in their conclusion. “A tribal court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to hear claims based on a nonmember’s allegedly unlawful activities that occur off reservation,” and treaty law does not “confer tribal court jurisdiction” off-reservation.

    The precedent they relied on is whats called the Montana doctrine, named for a 1981 ruling that allowed tribes to address “what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control international relations,” but the court maintained those powers do not extend to nonmembers off-reservation, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

    The judges weren’t outright dismissive of the historic lawsuit, though, commending the “efforts to expand jurisdiction by Band legislation and the use of Tribal Court to address matters such as raised in this case,” and encouraging similar efforts “as an exercise of inherent tribal sovereignty.”

    In response to the dismissal, White Earth attorneys Bibeau and Joe Plummer filed a brief on April 7 requesting the court to reverse its order.

    This lack of legal precedent presents a persistent problem for the rights-of-nature legal movement—a potentially transformative paradigm shift in environmental conservation that in the United States legal context remains almost entirely symbolic in its real world effects. It was thought that in the case of the Manoomin lawsuit, the addition of treaty rights and tribal court could combine to become one of the first successful rights-of-nature effort in the movement’s still-young history. With the release of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change this week that warned of the requirement for “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” the need for legal systems to adapt becomes all the more pressing. It would be even better if combating climate change and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty didn’t require unique legal strategies. And could be found in political will.

    This article has been updated to reflect a brief filed to oppose the order from the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals.

  • Obama’s Visit to the White House Highlights Fix to Get Cheaper Health Care for 1.2 Million

    April 5, 2022

    Chris Kleponis/Pool/CNP/Zuma

    More than a year into his presidency, Joe Biden trotted out his former boss, Barack Obama, to announce an improvement on the Affordable Care Act—and gin up some much-needed enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.

    The change is minor, but consequential. Today, the administration announced a proposed fix to the “family glitch”: a problem in which some family members of ACA enrollees are ineligible for the premium tax credit they need to keep their coverage affordable. When individuals purchase health insurance through their employer, the ACA subsidizes costs exceeding 9.83 percent of household income, which is the ACA’s barometer for affordability. But affordability is determined by how much it costs to insure an individual, not including the individual’s family members. Consequently, some low-income workers who spend more than 9.83 percent of their household income on employer-provided health insurance for themselves and their families do not receive the subsidy.

    Biden’s proposed rule would change that. There will still be a comment period, and it will take time to implement. But it’s something that Biden can do through executive order—avoiding the Sisyphean task of trying to convince gridlock experts like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—that will help 1.2 million people get cheaper health care.

    Today’s event marked an executive accomplishment—albeit one affecting a slim minority of the population—but it was primarily a bit of political theater by which Biden could reap the benefits of Obama’s charm. It was Obama’s first return to the White House in five years. The former president jokingly addressed “Vice President Joe Biden.” He reminisced on the difficulties of passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 despite strong Republican opposition. The two men laughed in front of cameras.

    You can’t blame Biden’s attempt here: People like Obama. Sure, his approval rating dipped after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law—he joked today that the website crashing didn’t help—and Republicans regained the House in the 2010 midterms, stifling Obama’s ability to get much else done. But by the time Obama left office, 58 percent of Americans approved of his job performance, not far behind President Clinton’s approval rating (61 percent), according to the Pew Research Center.

    And, after a decade of Republican promises to repeal and replace Obamacare—and three Supreme Court challenges that failed to undo the law—people are starting to get used to Obama’s signature legislative achievement. In 2017, more people viewed the ACA favorably than unfavorably, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and that trend has continued to the present day. In March 2022, 55 percent of Americans approved of the ACA, while 42 percent didn’t.

    Why? Because, even if the law isn’t perfect, people like having health insurance. Protections for people with preexisting conditions are hugely popular, as is the rule that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26. Unlike the infrastructure bill, whose benefits it will take years to reap, Obamacare has immediately and measurably improved people’s lives.

    But, whether because of flawed messaging, the material benefits of culture wars, or the insufficiency of technocratic fixes, it’s been hard for voters to feel that Democrats have actually helped them. The midterms might be a foregone conclusion. But if Democrats want to win the next presidential election, or any, they need to keep finding ways to make people’s lives better—and brag about it.

  • At a Campaign Rally, Trump Mocked a Congressman’s Name

    April 3, 2022

    Former former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally for Georgia GOP candidates at Banks County Dragway in Georgia.Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Constitution Journal/AP

    Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.

    Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case fellow Republican Meijer. 

    “A guy who spells his name ‘M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it ‘MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? ‘MY-er.’ I said, ‘How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”

    “Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said, ‘How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer’? ‘MY-jer’? They said it’s ‘MY-er.’ How the hell do you get ‘MY-er’ out of it?”

    While Trump may have thought he was making a great joke, people in Michigan may not have been so amused. The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent-sized Dutch American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated.

  • Poll: Americans Really Didn’t Like How Republicans Treated Ketanji Brown Jackson

    April 2, 2022

    ZUMA

    As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote in her curtain-raiser, Republicans were well aware going into the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson that they had very little to criticize in Jackson’s record, and were therefore likely to resort to hypocritical, dark-money attacks to oppose President Joe Biden’s nominee.

    But dark-money attacks would end up taking a backseat to false, malicious smears that inevitably devolved the Jackson hearings into a Republican conspiracy circus. Notably, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others tried, falsely and deceptively, to portray Jackson as soft on child pornography defendants, perhaps in an attempt to signal their allegiance to the party’s bizarre QAnon fringe. (Read more here on the right’s history of turning child abuse into a political weapon.) 

    A Quinnipiac poll released late last week shows that their bad faith strategy may have backfired. More than half (52 percent) of respondents disapproved of how Republican senators handled the process, and only 27 percent approved. Democratic senators got a much more favorable review: 42 percent approval vs 32 percent disapproval. (These ratings were the reverse, more or less, of how people viewed senators’ handling of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, notes the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.) 

    But don’t expect Cruz and Hawley to care much about the broader public reception. The intended audience for their malicious performances absolutely ate it up—and that’s likely all that matters to these senators.

  • Republicans, Fearing Questions From Their Spouses, Draw the Line at Cocaine Orgies

    March 31, 2022

    ZUMA

    In his first term, North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been an embarrassment. We’ve seen his awful political chattering, like calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug”, and then the more personally damning, like getting arrested for driving with a revoked license. 

    But none of that seems to have pissed off GOP leadership the way Cawthorn’s most recent controversy has after the 26-year-old Republican alleged in an interview to have received invitations from lawmakers to participate in orgies while also witnessing these lawmakers do cocaine. (Specifically, Cawthorn said he saw someone doing a “key bump.”) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy swiftly summoned Cawthorn into his office for a talk. Local Republicans got even more unhappy. And some in the North Carolina GOP, including US Senator Thom Tillis, are beginning to put more public weight behind a primary challenge.

    This could be, the GOP has indicated, the end for Cawthorn. “I just told him he’s lost my trust,” McCarthy said in a rare public rebuke Wednesday, adding that there wasn’t any evidence to back Cawthorn’s claims. “I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.” 

    “I told him you can’t make statements like that, as a member of Congress, that affect everybody else and the country as a whole.”

    But do Americans really share McCarthy’s frustration? As someone who has never attended a drug-fueled sex party—though truly no judgment if you have—I can say with full confidence Cawthorn’s allegations do not affect my life. But the clear panic Cawthorn’s claims have triggered within a party that has otherwise extended gratuitous tolerance to members hobnobbing with white supremacists is noteworthy here. It’s all to wonder what’s behind the urgent concern rankling Washington after Cawthorn opened his mouth.

    Well, it looks like the answer might be the anxiety of spouses wondering if their dearly beloveds could be one of those who may or may not have invited Cawthorn to an orgy. That’s according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona, who asked Republicans why this controversy has finally forced them to draw the line with Cawthorn:

    We may never know if Cawthorn’s claims were ever real. (For the record, McCarthy said that Cawthorn either exaggerated or was not telling the truth.) But let this whole episode show you that for Republicans, hell hath no fury like a spouse suddenly wondering if you’ve attended a cocaine-fueled orgy.

  • Please Pray For Buddy the Cat, Who Is Recovering From a Vicious Dog Attack

    March 25, 2022

    Pennsylvania SPCA

    Earlier this week, two twisted individuals in Philadelphia sicced their dogs on a black cat named Buddy. They encouraged the dogs, repeatedly shouting, “Good boy!” as the cat yowled. The incident was captured on surveillance footage which I won’t share here because I don’t recommend watching it. But, hey, you know how to use Google.

    I am pleased to announce that Buddy is “hanging in there,” in the words of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which has been providing the little guy with round-the-clock care. I might be biased, since I’m the proud owner of a little black cat who bears a strong resemblance to Buddy, but tell me this photo of the kitty hooked up to all sorts of machines doesn’t bring a tear to your eye:

    Today, the PSPCA shared a video of a heavily sedated Buddy contentedly kneading a blanket—and melting my heart.

    Buddy was a stray, HuffPost reports, but received food and water from a local family. PSPCA is accepting donations for Buddy’s medical care. Meanwhile, local authorities are on the lookout for the two men responsible for the attack. If found, they could face felony animal cruelty charges.

    Buddy is not out of the woods yet, but PSPCA is “cautiously optimistic” he’ll pull through. Please send this beautiful boy some good vibes.

    5:15 p.m. ET: Two juvenile suspects have surrendered to authorities, the PSCPCA said in a statement. They have been taken into custody pending a custodial determination hearing.

  • An Expert Weighs in on Ukraine Bioweapons Lab Conspiracy

    March 24, 2022

    Russia's Vladimir Putin.Kremlin Pool/Russian Look via ZUMA Press

    The New York Times ran a piece Wednesday about US right-wingers parroting Kremlin talking points and swapping pro-Russian conspiracy theories with Moscow—most notably the unproven claim that the US government has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

    As the Times reported, war-related mentions of “bioweapons labs” in Russian- and English-language media and social media have more than doubled since early March, when Moscow gave the theory a fine boost. On March 6, its Defense Ministry released a televised statement in which Russian officials claimed to have uncovered “traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.”

    Just a few days later, on March 9, Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whose clips, as my colleague David Corn first reported, are being incorporated into the state media’s official propaganda strategy—dutifully aired the Defense Ministry’s statement. “Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe, is in fact, totally and completely true,” Carlson said. “Whoa!” (He was referring to Senate testimony by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who responded to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) by saying that Ukraine does have “biological research facilities,” which US officials are worried could fall into Russian hands.) 

    On the day after Carlson’s broadcast, as Corn reported, Putin’s minions issued a memo with “recommendation for coverage” that ordered state media outlets to use Carlson clips on their programs. The same memo also dealt with the biolab conspiracy, Corn writes:

    [It] highlights this bioweapons allegation as a top talking point for Russian media, noting the message should be that the “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe.” The document goes further, encouraging its recipients to allege that the “the United States is working on a ‘biogenocide of the Eastern Slavs.’”

    That’s a nutty claim. Yet it’s not unreasonable to distrust US government officials, too, on the topic of military conflicts. You may recall the Pentagon Papers, or the military’s coverup of civilian casualties in Syria, or the Air Force’s lies about nuclear mishaps. And who can forget how the Bush administration used bogus claims that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade and occupy. The resulting lack of trust makes it easy for our adversaries, foreign and domestic, to cast doubt upon government claims.

    So I reached out by email to a person who knows a thing or two about the subject: an American bioweapons expert with security clearances who has worked closely with government officials but is not connected to the administration. This expert agreed to be quoted anonymously, and the upshot was that America’s primary post-Cold War mission in Eastern Europe has been the safeguarding and containment of some very scary stuff.

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unsuccessful 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the USSR dissolved and Ukraine gained independence and recognition by the West, my source noted, and “that left a big problem, because Ukraine still housed all manner of nuclear and chemical weapons from the Soviet era, left behind—thousands of warheads, in fact.”

    The Nunn-Lugar Act of 1991 created a pool of money to pay the Ukrainians to get rid of their WMDs. And—”to their ever-lasting regret!” the source said—Ukraine agreed to denuclearize. For a number of years, “the US has quietly been helping Ukraine to dismantle its Soviet-era chem/bio stuff. It seems possible that some US expertise (and possibly a small number of US personnel?) remains in Ukraine, established to retire safely the Soviet-era WMD. I have no specific idea what chem/bio matériel was left behind. So, at the core of those right-wingnut conspiracy theories may be a small kernel of truth, but one that’s being distorted beyond any (responsible) recognition.” 

    “Prior to Putin’s war,” the expert summarized, “the US had certainly paid the Ukrainians to dismantle WMD, and also sent experts to help with it. But given the little of that story that is public knowledge, so much of that collaborative de-armament work was done secretly/covertly—for obvious and understandable reasons.”

    I was curious whether my source agreed with former Pentagon official Andrew Weber—and Nuland, for that matter—about Moscow’s possible motivation for spreading false claims about bioweapons in Ukraine. Indeed, the person said, “Putin might try to use the existence of any existing Ukrainian labs that deal with chem/bio, and whatever US connections these may—or may not—have, as a pretext under some kind of false-flag operation. Putin often accuses his adversaries of precisely the same thing that he’s doing.”

  • Madeleine Albright Dies at 84

    March 23, 2022

    Jay Godwin/Planet Pix/Zuma

    Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state, died today of cancer, her family said in a statement. She was 84.

    Born in Prague to a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution during World War II, Albright immigrated to the United States in 1948. As ambassador to the United Nations during Bill Clinton’s first term, she sparred with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, blocking his bid for a second term. Around this time, the United States failed to take decisive action against the genocide in Rwanda, which Albright later called “my deepest regret from my years in public service.”

    As secretary of state during Clinton’s second term, she worked to resolve conflicts in the Balkans, promoted NATO expansion, and was an early proponent of US military action in Iraq—although she opposed the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion.

    In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “During her tenure,” the announcement of her prize states, “she worked to enlarge NATO and helped lead the Alliance’s campaign against terror and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, pursued peace in the Middle East and Africa, sought to reduce the dangerous spread of nuclear weapons, and was a champion of democracy, human rights, and good governance across the globe.”

  • We’re Already Seeing the Consequences of Our Failure to Fund Covid Relief

    March 22, 2022

    White House/Zuma

    Last week, President Biden approved a budget that included no additional Covid spending. None.

    The consequences will be drastic. A federal program that reimburses health care providers for vaccinating, testing, and treating uninsured patients is set to end by April 5. The government will scale back its allocations of monoclonal antibodies. And the White House just announced that it won’t have enough funding to purchase fourth vaccine doses for all Americans.

    How can this happen after all we’ve learned? Both political parties are responsible: President Joe Biden had proposed $22.5 billion in additional Covid funding, while many Republicans opposed any further Covid spending at all. A coalition of Democrats then refused the alternative option of repurposing individual states’ unspent pandemic relief funds. Add in concerns about the budget deficit, and, in the end, Covid efforts ended up with no funding at all.

    But a still-mutating virus isn’t bound by the government’s whims. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic last week, “Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary.” Public health experts warn that the coronavirus is not yet endemic, and that it’s too early for the government to get complacent.

    The government’s failure to include Covid relief funding in its budget could have serious repercussions down the line. It could discourage the roughly 27 million uninsured Americans from seeking treatment if they become sick with Covid. It will thwart the United States’ attempt to export vaccines to countries that still need them, potentially allowing new variants to emerge as the virus continues to circulate. And it could leave the United States unprepared for the Omicron subvariant that is already increasing case counts in Europe.

    We’ve been here before. Covid case counts are plummeting. Masks are coming off. Many yearn to put the pandemic behind us. That doesn’t mean we have the luxury of not preparing for what we know is potentially coming.

    It seems that tests, vaccines, and hospital beds are always available when you don’t need them, and never when you do. Thanks to our collective failure to plan ahead, we’re screwing ourselves over in the event of another Covid surge. Now, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t come to that.

  • Here’s a Helpful Video Explaining Republicans’ 2022 Policy Agenda

    March 22, 2022

    Andrew Spear/Getty

    The Republican Party is expected to win the 2022 midterms. Mostly, this has been pegged to discontent with the Democratic Party and the fact that the president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. And that has left it unclear what the Republicans’ policy agenda actually constitutes. While House Republicans have said they want to implement a redux of the 1994 “Contract with America” (they’re getting help from original architect, and bad person, Newt Gingrich), it’s unclear if that’s the policy of the party. Mitch McConnell told a reporter that he’d “let [them] know” when he had figured out the Senate Republican agenda. And Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s plan—while ticking traditional Republican boxes of xenophobia and hatred of the poor—has not been accepted by McConnell.

    But, last night, we got a step closer to figuring out the core of the Republican message in 2022. Here’s a video that explains the basics of the policies:

    I found that helpful.

    It outlines the fundamentals of the GOP’s platform: Four of five members of the party don’t believe in democracy enough to admit that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The imagery is well placed here. It leaves one Republican waving his hand in a room of people staring ahead, silent. That’s just enough space to pretend the party has good folks there, fighting back. Usually, news highlights the loud, even bombastic, defenses of Trump by budding authoritarians. But this clip is a more solid explainer. It’s the silent complicity of adults trying to stand very still.

    It’s particularly interesting because this video is from a GOP Senate debate in Ohio. As happened often in 2020, the race has been haunted by the question: Who will Trump endorse? This groveling has been, it seems, fun for the former president. And, as the Associated Press noted, the race is the most indicative in the country—with all the candidates gleefully sucking up—of how much the GOP has changed.

    The current frontrunner is Mike Gibbons, former co-chair of Trump’s campaign in Ohio and a businessman who dabbled in racism against Asians in a podcast in 2013. But he has gotten less attention on the national level than the two can-you-believe-they-went-kind-of-fascist? candidates: J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel.

    Vance, backed by the Silicon Valley money of Peter Thiel, had a Washington Post profile wondering how he kind of stopped believing in democracy. (It used his beard to explain it?) And Mandel got the Politico treatment, in which 75 people told the publication he had “been nothing if not an eager reader and rider of political currents.” (I have to mention here that Mandel and Gibbons squared up at another debate in a near fight, by the way.) 

    In any case, the gist of both Vance and Mandel is that, at the end of the day, people running for the US Senate will do anything to get power. Each right-wing radicalization can come down to the simple fact that a lot of Americans like what they’re doing. Vance and Mandel thought it would help them get elected. So, they went for it. Anti-democracy can be a career move, too, after all.

    While both Vance and Mandel trail Gibbons, they are outpolling the one person who raised their hand: Matt Dolan.

    To be clear about a small point here, it’s not even that these Republicans are saying it would run contrary to the “betterment” of the country for Trump to drop his continuing coup chatter. It is that they are afraid to even say the party should “move on” from the last election for political gain.

    No one asked them to concede Trump lost. No one asked them to say he broke democracy. All they’d have to say is something like: “Real people care about real issues—kitchen table! meat and potatoes! honest folks!—and I want to talk about that to win in 2022.” Even this dirge of candidate-speak is just too much for them though.

  • About One Child Per Second Has Fled Ukraine Since the Start of the Russian Invasion

    March 20, 2022

    A girl on a train from Kyiv that arrived in Przemysl, Poland in March.Picture Alliance/Getty

    More than 10 million people in Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nation’s High Commissioner on Refugees said on Sunday. This staggering number, and other new estimates from the UN, quantify the scale of the exodus of Ukrainians from what was a thriving and tranquil country up until the Russian army invaded, unprovoked, less than a month ago. 

    About 3.3 million of this 10 million have left the country and become refugees in neighboring nations. More than 1.5 million of those refugees are children, the UN’s children’s fund, UNICEF, said earlier this week—amounting to almost one child per second leaving Ukraine. “Every day in Ukraine from the start of the war, more than 75,000 children have become refugees,” a UNICEF spokesman said at a press briefing. “Every single minute, 55 children have fled their country. That is, a Ukrainian child has become a refugee almost every single second since the start of the war.”

    Ukrainian refugees have scattered through nearby countries in Eastern Europe. The majority, about 2 million, have gone to Poland, while half a million have fled to Romania. Smaller numbers have fled to Hungary, Moldova, and Slovakia. About 184,000 have gone to Russia.

    Millions of other Ukrainians have been displaced within their own country, the chief of UNHCR Filippo Grandi said on Sunday on Twitter.

    The European Union has already enacted friendly legislation to ease the transition of Ukrainian refugees: One week into the Russian invasion, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Ukrainians would be given rights to live and work in the EU for three years. (The US has also offered some Ukrainians temporary protected status.) 

    The EU’s response to Ukrainian refugees has earned accolades around the globe, but it has also surfaced reminders of the less friendly treatment that Syrian refugees received in some European countries when they attempted to flee war within their own borders. This included pledges of hundreds of millions in EU funds to crack down on refugees arriving in Greece, and instances of officials in Hungary using tear gas and water canons on refugees.

  • Omicron Hospitalized Black Adults at Shockingly High Rates

    March 19, 2022

    A file photo showing a healthcare worker at a hospital in Harlem, New York City.Anthony Behar/Sipa via AP

    With the Omicron surge finally cresting in the U.S., new data has begun to emerge showing the scale of the damage it caused—and the different populations it hit the hardest, especially among historically marginalized Americans.

    On March 18, the CDC released a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found that the racial disparities that have manifested throughout the pandemic persisted through its most recent wave. According to the data, hospitalization rates among non-Hispanic Black adults during Omicron’s peak was nearly four times as high as rates among white adults. To arrive at its conclusions, CDC investigators gathered and analyzed data on a representative sample of adult patients, constituting about 8 percent of those hospitalized from July 1, 2021 to January 31, 2022. 

    Racial disparities in hospitalizations and deaths have cropped up in virtually every stage of the pandemic. From 2019 to 2020, life expectancy among Black and Latino Americans dropped by three years. While no single factor can account for these differences, experts have speculated that the gap stems from a disproportionate lack of access to healthcare among Americans of color, racism in the medical system, and increased rates of vaccine hesitancy. 

    The report also found that booster shots played a much more significant role in keeping down hospitalization rates than was initially expected. The rate among adults who received boosters was three times times lower than the rate among unboosted adults and 12 times lower than unvaccinated adults. Counties and public health experts have condemned the federal government for muddled messaging on boosters during the start of the Omicron wave, which forced many Americans attempting to determine their third-dose eligibility to sort through a whirlwind of contradictory rulings. 

  • Trump Splits With Pence. But Insists That They’re Still Friends.

    March 17, 2022

    Kevin Dietsch/ZUMA

    Were you under the impression that Mike Pence could join Donald Trump’s all but confirmed reelection bid? Probably not! For both men, and for yourself, that would take an enormous, Herculean bout of political amnesia to forget that the former president’s supporters once sought to hang Pence—and that Trump seemed very chill with those threats.

    Well, Trump has effectively made it official, telling the Washington Examiner this week that he very likely wouldn’t pick Pence to be his running mate. “I don’t think the people would accept it,” he explained, citing Pence’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election results as the defining catalyst for the break-up.

    “Mike and I had a great relationship except for the very important factor that took place at the end,” he continued. “We had a very good relationship. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.”

    “I still like Mike,” Trump added.

    Pence is likely to welcome the latest remarks. In recent weeks, the former VP, who is reportedly mounting his own presidential bid, has signaled a break with Trump, particularly as his pro-Putin views have become problematic for Trumpist Republicans. “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” Pence told GOP donors days after Trump called the Russian leader a “genius.”

    Of course, Pence declined to directly condemn his former boss. And judging by Trump’s efforts to characterize their relationship as still friendly despite the breakup, we can expect the two men to continue pretending that they’re still on good terms. After all, there are political benefits for both of them.

  • It’s a Big Deal that the Fed Raised Interest Rates Today

    March 16, 2022

    Bloomberg/Bloomberg

    It finally happened: For the first time since 2018, after months of murmurs, the Federal Reserve rose interest rates.

    As I wrote previously, it has been clear for the past few weeks that the Fed would begin raising rates. For most of the pandemic, the rate has been near zero. Raising rates is a big deal, and it could (likely will!) have material effects on your life. There’s a reason that the Wall Street Journal has it splashed on its website’s homepage in aggressively large font, replacing its ongoing coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

    The idea behind Wednesday’s move is to combat inflation. Prices have risen far above the targets set by the central bank, causing particular strain at (as you may have heard) the gas pump. A traditional view of interest rates is that raising them is monetary policy that helps curb inflation. In the speak of someone who doesn’t droll over stock returns, this means the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to try to stop prices from increasing but in doing so it could also slow down the whole economy.

    In this way, the central bank is edging a dangerous path. Yes, raising rates could help cool inflation, but it would likely do so by raising unemployment—which could harm workers, cause suffering (among a smaller set of people than are hit by inflation, but much more acutely), and wreck the economic recovery that has bounced us back from Covid-19’s shock.

    Here’s the wonk version of Jerome Powell, Fed chair, basically saying we’re trying to stop prices rising without ruining workers’ lives: “The plan is to restore price stability while also sustaining a strong labor market. That is our intention and we believe we can do that. But we have to restore price stability.”

    Some economists, even on the left, are hopeful we can edge interest rates up without hiking them aggressively. But this kind of action has a dark history. As I’ve written before, in the ’70s, the Fed was part of ushering in an era of austerity in the name of fixing inflation. We’ve barely peaked, as I wrote in a cover story for the January + February issue, at what a tiny bit of worker power looks like when the government doesn’t set things up in the traditional neoliberal mode that has dominated for the past five decades. We’re now risking going right back.

    The bottom line: We’re at a precarious moment. The Fed, in its own technocratic way, is deciding much about how the economy functions—both for bankers and everyday workers. While it explains itself in the language of finance, often clouding the decisions, it’s worth keeping a close eye on what happens next. It was the Covid-19 emergency economic measures that helped us through the crisis, but as the pandemic becomes less of an emergency, will we just enter a new crisis? Just a “normal” one.

    In many ways, what happens next will be determined by Powell. There are at least some indications that he could move aggressively to tamp inflation, even if it hurts workers. That’s scary. That could mean he is going to be like Paul Volcker—the Fed chair in the 1970s who had a recession named after him. Still, Powell’s entire tenure as chair has defied the expectations of many. We’ll have to wait and see.

  • Politics as Usual May Sound Nicer Than Trumpism. But It’s Still Killing the Planet.

    March 16, 2022

    Raskin at a February confirmation hearing.Ken Cedeno/Cnp/ZUMA

    In a political era dominated by Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, it’s easy to feel nostalgia for the normal politics of just a few years ago. Of course those politics remain alive and well and, as they did before, continue to do their own sort of damage to the country and the planet. This week’s example is the defeat of Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s top bank regulator because she believes the United States’ central bank shouldn’t ignore climate change when making decisions. It’s a reminder that while politics as usual wasn’t as violent or immediately threatening, neither was it proving to be a workable system sustaining our democracy or planet. If the country is the proverbial frog, then outside money and special interests are the water being slowly warmed to a boil. 

    Raskin pulled her name from contention once Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) joined every Republican in opposing her nomination. “Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday afternoon upon withdrawing her nomination. (Just like the good old days!)

    A former Federal Reserve governor and deputy Treasury secretary, Raskin was well qualified for the job. But she also believes in climate change, and in the Fed’s responsibility not to exacerbate, within the confines of its decision-making authority, this existential threat to the planet. In 2020, she urged the Fed not to prop up fossil fuel companies as part of the governments’ coronavirus economic rescue spending. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote in the New York Times. “U.S. regulators can—and should—be looking at their existing powers and considering how they might be brought to bear on efforts to mitigate climate risk,” she wrote last year. So, naturally, the fossil fuel industry opposed her nomination. Manchin, who comes from a coal state and is close to the industry, cited her energy beliefs in opposing her nomination.

    Republicans also argued that Raskin would exceed her authority to go after the fossil fuel industry. “President Biden was literally asking for senators to support a central banker who wanted to usurp the Senate’s policymaking power for herself,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued. It’s one thing to argue that the Fed shouldn’t be setting climate policy, but the argument that it should do nothing is also a kind of climate policy—just a much worse one. 

    Republicans saw a few other blemishes on Raskin’s resume, some more admirable than others. She’s a believer in regulating banks, which made her unsuitable to Republicans, even to fill a position that regulates banks. (Republicans have in fact only once agreed to confirm a nominee to this position—a Trump pick—which was created through the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2008 financial crash.) Raskin had also done private sector work that raised red flags, including surrounding an incident when she put in a call to the Fed, her former employer, on behalf of a technology company where she sat on the board. The company, Trust Reserve, subsequently got an account at the Fed, a boon for its business and for the $1.5 million in stocks that Raskin held as a result of working with it.

    The revolving door is also an unsavory yet common part of politics as usual. Meanwhile, the Trumpist threat to democracy, as demonstrated by a violent assault on the US Capitol, is attention grabbing and immediate. But Raskin and her rejection remind us that the way things generally used to—and still do—work isn’t a workable solution for the country or the planet either.

  • We’re Actually Getting Close to Year-Round Daylight Saving Time

    March 15, 2022

    I feel like the prehistoric sun-worshippers would be with me on this one.Andrew Matthews/PA Wire/Zuma

    There’s one thing we should all agree on: Early sunsets in the winter are terrible.

    The sun simply should not set at 4:30 p.m., before the average 9-to-5 worker leaves the office. No sunsets before 5 p.m., period. For the love of God, end our winter misery and give us those glorious afternoon sun rays.

    Literally everyone in the Senate agrees with me. This afternoon, the upper chamber of our esteemed government passed, by unanimous consent, a measure to make Daylight Saving Time permanent year round. The Sunshine Protection Act promises that you’ll never have to adjust your clock again. It will also mean more afternoon light in the winter—plus fewer transition-related heart attacks and strokes.

    Daylight Saving Time was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a way to conserve candles in the summer. (I’m partial to old Ben—he became my hometown’s namesake when he refused to buy the townspeople the church bell they wanted and, “sense being preferable to sound,” gave them a bunch of books instead.) DST was observed in the US in the summer to conserve energy during the world wars, but our annual practice of springing forward and falling back wasn’t permanently established until the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Now, after more than five decades, is finally the time to agree to bring that glorious after-work sunlight into the winter months.

    Still, the support of senators from all 50 states apparently isn’t enough for a lot of people. Some say that winter sucks no matter how the clocks are set. I can’t argue with that.

    But then there are the contrarians who think changing the clocks is a good thing. The most prominent is probably Josh Barro, who has written about our experiment with year-round DST in 1974 and concluded that “people hated it.” Who knows? Maybe people were opposed because it was a Nixon policy. It was the ’70s. They didn’t know any better. (We also have tools in 2022 that we lacked 50 years ago—namely, computers. One in four Americans works from home full time. Those dark mornings will be a lot easier to handle in your PJs.)

    Another argument against DST is that it will make religious practices like Jews’ sunrise prayers less convenient. Jews also have a pretty famous religious practice observed before sunset on Fridays, and year-round DST would remove the burden of them having to rush home from work in the winter. You take what you can get. Another solution that doesn’t involve not seeing the sun for months? Flexible work hours and expanded work-from-home options for people whose professions permit it.

    The most annoying argument I saw is that kids will have to walk to school in the dark in the winter. I present to you myself waiting for the school bus in the dark at 6:58 a.m. in 2013.

    Not only do many kids already do this (see: me), but there’s a simple solution that would be much less disruptive to parents than two years of at-home schooling: start the school day an hour later. Kids need the extra sleep, anyway.

    Finally, my editor, an absolute fool, has one more argument against year-round DST. He masochistically enjoys waking up early to run before work. He thinks that post-work activities—like drinking in a bar—are best enjoyed after sundown.

    I run after work, because I’m a normal human being. And I won’t dignify his anti-daylight-drinking stance with a response.

    So, kvetch all you want. If Congress can make it happen, I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

  • Team That Owes Most of Its Success to a Russian Oligarch Now Wants Other Teams to Be Punished For It

    March 15, 2022

    Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

    There is no shortage of people whose lives have been upended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nearly 3 million Ukrainians have had to flee their country. More than 1,000 of them have been killed. Tragedies of this magnitude affect every corner of our interconnected world and demand, at best, a healthy dose of empathy and, at worst, some kind of reality check.

    Unless you are Chelsea, the London soccer club owned—until recently—by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who tried (and failed) to pull off one of the most callous moves of sports bullshit in recent memory today. 

    First, some context. In 2003, Abramovich bought the English football club Chelsea. In the years after, his goal and timeline were clear: “World domination by 2014.” And, basically, it has worked.

    Over the last twenty or so years, Abramovich has poured money into Chelsea. His wealth has transformed it from another contender in the English soccer pyramid to a perennial champion. Chelsea have won 18 major trophies since then, the most of any English club during that time. And it’s redefined how football works. Abramovich’s fortune—built from Putin’s kleptocracy—set the model for a slew of nation-states to buy football clubs. Just ask Manchester City, or Paris Saint-Germain, or Newcastle. (Or, actually, don’t ask Newcastle: Their manager wouldn’t even answer if the killing of 81 people in Saudi Arabia was wrong because, well, Newcastle is now basically owned by Saudi Arabia.)

    This rush of other nation-states into football has somewhat dulled Chelsea’s supremacy. But not too much. They are currently champions of Europe. Their last major trophies was just a few months ago, back in February. On that day, as Abramovich looked down from the stands, the club won the FIFA Club World Cup, completing “the lot” under the Russian—they’d won every single major trophy during his reign.

    Less than two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. And since then, it’s all gone to shit.

    Abramovich’s ties to Putin have always been hard to write about. As David Klion describes in an excellent profile in Jewish Currents:

    The reserved, gray-bearded Abramovich is notoriously litigious toward critics who seek to detail his close ties to Putin. Last year, he successfully sued the British journalist Catherine Belton, who claimed in her 2020 book Putin’s People that the Russian president dictated Abramovich’s major purchases, including his decision to buy Chelsea. He also extracted an apology from a British newspaper for calling him a “bag carrier” for the Russian president.

    But, since the invasion, Abramovich’s free reign in London came to an end. After intense pressure, the British government finally took action.

    Last week, the United Kingdom sanctioned Abramovich, meaning his various assets, including Chelsea, were effectively frozen. With its financial backer in legal limbo, Chelsea was permitted to keep playing games and paying its players, but could not sell tickets or merchandise. 

    Now, here’s the part where, if you are Chelsea, you eat it. You take the hit and move on. You’ve lived and been rewarded—as fans and as a club—by the money that is fueling a war and you admit, hey, that was fucked up. 

    But, no. They did not do that. Chelsea instead acted like idiots. They drew a line in the sand over a domestic cup match this weekend against Middlesbrough, a club in the second division of English soccer. The club sent out a public request that Middlesborough not invite their fans, too. “It is important for the competition that the match against Middlesbrough goes ahead, however it is with extreme reluctance that we are asking the FA board to direct that the game be played behind closed doors for matters of sporting integrity,” read a statement on Chelsea’s website.

    Oh, an unfair advantage? Of having less fans than the other side? That’s an insane statement from  Chelsea, a club still (technically) owned by a Russian apparatchik, a club that last year tried to launch a breakaway league, a club with quite possibly the most shameless fans on Earth—that now suddenly cares about “sporting integrity.” Give me a break!  As Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough chairman, said: “Chelsea and sporting integrity do not belong in the same sentence.”

    Chelsea’s appeal was so remarkably tone-deaf that it did something not even Abramovich’s billions could do: make Boris Johnson’s government look good! In response to the club’s bizarre demand, an anonymous UK official told Politico that, in short, Chelsea should get lost.

    Get lost, they did. After “constructive talks” with the FA, England’s governing authority for professional football, Chelsea quietly rescinded its request. 

    With apologies to the many fans who were dying to watch the Blues take on the eighth-ranked squad in the EFL Championship, there are bigger problems in the world. Take a cue from your government and “spend less time” worrying about one game and more time rooting for your team to not be run by a warmonger. 

    The best kind of sporting integrity is not punishing your opponent for your oligarch owner’s bill finally coming due. 

  • Barack Obama has Covid

    March 13, 2022

    Jeff J Mitchell/Getty

    On Sunday, exactly two years after Covid was declared a national emergency, former president Barack Obama has caught the virus, he announced via Twitter:

     

    This is a breaking news post. We’ll update it with new information as needed.

  • It’s Confirmed: The 2020 Census Did In Fact Undercount Black, Hispanic, and Native American Residents

    March 10, 2022

    People protest the possibility of a citizenship question on the census in 2019.J. Scott Applewhite/File/AP

    Advocates for a fair census feared this would happen: The nation’s 2020 headcount undercounted Black, Hispanic, and Native American residents of the US, while white people and Asian Americans were overcounted, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday.

    The overall population count was largely accurate, despite the difficulty of tallying people during a pandemic. Among the ethnic groups that were undercounted, Hispanics stood out: They were omitted at more than three times the rate they were in 2010. The census impacts everything from the locations of schools and grocery stores to our congressional maps and the distribution of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding. An undercount in a population can mean a decade of diminished economic and political power.

    The 2020 census was plagued not only by a pandemic, but by confusion over former President Trump’s desire for a citizenship question, which immigrant rights groups feared could lead to an undercount among undocumented people. The Constitution mandates a headcount of all people permanently residing in the United States, regardless of citizenship status.

    The Census Bureau calculates undercounts by analyzing government records and performing extensive surveys of 10,000 census blocks. It then compares these datasets to the existing census numbers. Overcounts could result from people being counted twice or the accidental inclusion of dead people. Undercounts represent people who have been passed over entirely.

    The new report tells how accurate census data is nationally. State-level data are set to be released this summer.