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David Sirota | Bernie Sanders Is Fighting for a $2,000 Check for You on the Senate Floor
David Sirota, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders is prepared to fight to win $2,000 survival checks for all. While Senate Democrats were prepared to do nothing to challenge Mitch McConnell, Sanders is pledging to filibuster a Pentagon veto override to provide real help for millions of Americans struggling to survive."
or most of the last few decades, budget standoffs in Washington tended to follow the same script: Republicans threatened to block some domestic spending bill or fully shut down the government unless Democrats agreed to let the GOP own the libs with something bad like a JPMorgan giveaway, a tax break for the rich, or a draconian cut to a social program.
When Democrats controlled Congress, they never mustered the courage to respond with their own version of the same shrewd tactics. Even toward the end of the Bush era when the Iraq War was deeply unpopular, they never made a serious attempt to hold up a bloated GOP-written Pentagon bill in order to try to get their way on a progressive initiative.
But at the end of one of the worst years in recent history, it seems things are changing.
In a long overdue script-flipping move, Sen. Bernie Sanders is now moving to halt a major defense bill until and unless Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell allows a full vote on legislation to give millions of starving Americans $2,000 in emergency aid. That legislation passed the House yesterday over opposition from a majority of House Republicans, who tried their best to deny their own constituents much-needed aid.
Now the bill is in McConnell’s hands, and Sanders is pulling a McConnell on McConnell. He is imperiling the GOP boss’s top priority — the defense bill that authorizes pay increases for soldiers, military training, new weapons systems, while also complicating attempts to draw down troops deployed in Afghanistan. That McConnell-backed legislation could be stalled unless he agrees to Sanders’ demands and stops obstructing a progressive priority.
The Vermont independent appears ready to play hardball: He is doing his best impression of Marc Maron’s cameo in Almost Famous, effectively screaming “lock the gates!” and threatening to force Senate Republicans to remain in Washington, rather than flee while the country withers. The American Prospect reports:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with the backing of the Senate Democratic caucus, is prepared to make life miserable for Senate Republicans if they do not put a clean vote on the floor to increase one-time emergency payments to most Americans approved in the recent COVID relief package from $600 to $2,000.
Sanders has the procedural means at his disposal to keep the Senate in session all the way to New Year’s Day, inconveniencing Senators of both parties, particularly the incumbent Republicans from Georgia, who are in their final full week of campaigning for runoff elections on January 5….
The Senate operates on the principle of unanimous consent. It’s not impossible to get things done if one Senator objects, but it’s quite a bit slower. The majority needs to hold votes and waste time to muscle past an objecting Senator. For this reason, Sanders can prevent quick passage of the defense bill override, the only thing McConnell really wants to accomplish in the last week of the Senate session.
This ramps up pressure on McConnell to just hold a vote on the $2,000 checks. Senators don’t want to be stuck in Washington on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day if they can prevent it.
It is hard to predict the outcome here. The Prospect notes that McConnell can deploy some nasty countermeasures of his own that could complicate things. Meanwhile, Sanders may currently have support from liberal stalwarts such as Ed Markey — but Democrats have traditionally played the feckless Washington Generals to McConnell’s Globetrotters.
In particular, they have been loath to stand up to Republicans fraudulent accusations of sedition and their propagandistic demands to “support the troops” whenever anyone so much as questions military spending. Indeed, rank-and-file Democratic politicians in Washington typically surrender the moment any Republican waves a flag in defense of a military budget so bloated that even professional auditors cannot adequately assess its books.
Has the party suddenly found some intestinal fortitude? We’re about to find out.
Of course, up until this point, Democratic congressional leaders have embarrassed themselves, allowing Joe Biden’s ancient austerity ideology and Kamala Harris’s sudden silence to convince them to avoid driving a harder bargain with McConnell, even as Republican president Donald Trump gave them political cover to demand more.
Relegated to the sidelines as Democratic leaders were willing to accept another middle finger from McConnell, Sanders did what I saw him routinely do when I worked for him in the House 20 years ago and what he’s successfully done his entire career: He reached across the aisle to find an unlikely Republican ally (in this case Sen. Josh Hawley) to forge a left-right coalition against a corrupt center that was all too happy to tell America “let them eat cake” during an economic crisis.
Though Sanders has always been dishonestly derided by critics as an unserious policymaker and tactician, this is his patented maneuver that he’s pulled off over and over again. This time around, he is bolstered by a crop of younger House progressives who have been willing to both demand $2,000 checks and question the Pentagon budget. And his brinksmanship has already proved far more successful than anything Democratic leaders were willing to try, insofar as the Sanders-Hawley alliance helped create the political pressure for at least $600 checks rather than nothing.
No doubt, the ultimate outcome here is important — the difference between $600 and $2,000 is a make-or-break, life-and-death difference for millions of people struggling to avoid starvation, eviction and medical bankruptcy.
But Sanders’ gambit is a potential sea change moment in contemporary politics. For once, Republicans are being put in a tough spot to try to simultaneously justify rejecting a wildly popular proposal for direct domestic aid while rubber-stamping policies that allow for hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon spending — and they have to try to somehow rationalize that insanity during a pandemic and economic emergency.
As a chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House and then as ranking member of the Budget Committee in the Senate, Sanders has spent decades trying to indict the immorality of federal policies that expand the war machine while skimping on basic human needs. For the most part, his crusade generated eye rolls, sighs, and chuckles from the Washington media and the professional political classes of both parties.
But as Sanders now threatens to lock the gates, nobody is laughing.
The Justice Department announced Tuesday it would not bring federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers in the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. (pictured in a memorial). (photo: Jazqueline Larma/AP)
Justice Department Declines to Prosecute Cleveland Officers in Death of Tamir Rice
Vanessa Romo, NPR
Romo writes: "The U.S. Department of Justice will not charge any of the officers involved in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a Black 12-year-old boy who was killed by police in Cleveland in 2014. The department has closed its investigation."
The Justice Department announced it found insufficient evidence to "support federal criminal charges against Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback."
In a statement released Tuesday, the department said it notified Rice's family attorneys about the decision on Monday "and today sent a letter to Mr. Rice's family explaining the findings of the investigation and reasons for the decision."
Video footage of the killing, which happened in daylight on Nov. 22, 2014, shows the child was shot within two seconds of the police arriving at the scene. Loehmann, who fired two bullets into Rice, and Garmback allege they believed he was carrying a gun. In fact, the boy was playing with a toy air pellet gun near a playground at a city recreation center.
The officers were responding to a 911 call during which the caller said there was a man — "probably a juvenile" — pointing a gun — "probably fake" — at people on the playground. However, the dispatcher failed to relay to the responding officers the fact that the subject of the call was likely a child with a toy.
Rice died early the next morning at a Cleveland hospital.
Outrage over the boy's death, which followed that of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police in July 2014 and Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Mo., that August, was a leading narrative in the nascent Black Lives Matter movement that has emerged as a national call for police reform.
There were no prosecutions in the case. In December 2015, a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against Loehmann and Garmback.
In its statement Tuesday, the Justice Department said the officers "repeatedly and consistently stated that Officer Loehmann gave Tamir multiple commands to show his hands before shooting, and both officers repeatedly and consistently said that they saw Tamir reaching for his gun."
"Based on this evidence and the high burdens of the applicable federal laws, career prosecutors have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Tamir did not reach for his toy gun; thus, there is insufficient evidence to establish that Officer Loehmann acted unreasonably under the circumstances," the department said.
The statement noted Loehmann and Garmback were the only two witnesses in the near vicinity of the shooting.
Loehmann was fired nearly three years after Rice's death for lying on his application to the Cleveland police.
President-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Covid-19 pandemic on December 29 in Wilmington, Delaware. (photo: Mark Makes/Getty)
Biden Pledges New Covid-19 Relief Package and to Invoke Defense Production Act
Jerusalem Demsas, Vox
Demsas writes: "Striking a grim tone in Wilmington, Delaware, President-elect Joe Biden warned that defeating Covid-19 through widespread vaccination will be the 'greatest operational challenge we've ever faced as a nation.'"
Biden says he expects “incredible opportunities for our nation in the years ahead,” declaring that the economy is “poised to come back.” However, to get there, Biden newly pledged to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate private industry manufacturing of protective equipment and vaccines. The president-elect also promised Congress that he would propose another Covid-19 relief package early next year.
As Vox’s Alex Ward has explained, the DPA, which President Donald Trump has used to provide some medical equipment, would allow the federal government to require that companies fulfill its orders before they complete any other commercial orders.
In early December, Biden announced a goal of 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days, but vaccine distribution woes imperil this benchmark. Biden himself threw cold water on this goal in his remarks when he pointed out that the Trump administration’s goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the year’s end is extremely unlikely seeing as the United States has only vaccinated “a few million” people so far.
Earlier on Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received her first shot of the Moderna vaccine in Washington, DC, on live TV. Biden received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on December 21, also on live TV as part of his bid to increase confidence in the safety of the inoculation. And Vice President Mike Pence received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine a few days earlier.
Along with his goal of mass vaccinations, Biden also recently pledged two other priorities: universal mask-wearing and reopening the majority of schools within his first 100 days. He reiterated the importance of both of these objectives in this speech, noting that Congress needed to allocate funds to schools so that they can reopen.
“It’s not small what we’re asking of you, but we’re in this together,” Biden said, acknowledging the difficulty of asking people to continue social distancing and mask-wearing for several more months. Though Biden’s speech was focused on charting a clear course to defeating the virus, in his self-described best-case scenario — where a million Americans a day are receiving the vaccine — the country could be well into 2021 before coming close to herd immunity.
It’s a long, cold Covid-19 winter
Biden’s remarks come as Covid-19 cases have surged to their highest levels over the holiday season. On December 28, the day before Biden’s address, the United States recorded over 189,000 new cases and almost 1,900 deaths.
Vox’s German Lopez analyzes weekly where each state is on Covid-19 cases, infection rates, and test positivity rates based on data from the New York Times and the Census Bureau. As of his most recent pre-holiday update on December 16, not a single state had “fewer than four daily new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people.” Lopez writes that daily case rates are the “most straightforward way to measure whether any place is experiencing a big coronavirus outbreak.”
While experts have not definitively traced a surge due to Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, expectations are that cases and deaths will spike in the coming weeks.
In this Sept. 25, 2007, photo, an Iraqi traffic policeman inspects a car destroyed by a Blackwater security detail in al-Nisoor Square in Baghdad, Iraq. (photo: Khalid Mohammed/Ap
UN Says Trump Blackwater Pardons Violate International Law
John Bowden, The Hill
Bowden writes: "A United Nations panel on Wednesday said that President Trump's pardons for several former Blackwater contractors convicted of killing more than a dozen civilians in Baghdad violated international law."
Reuters reported that the U.N. working group on the use of mercenaries condemned the action in a statement, calling Trump's decision to pardon the four men an affront to justice and insult to the memory of those killed.
"Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said the group's chair, Jelena Aparac, according to the news agency.
“These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level," Aparac continued.
Trump last week moved to pardon the four men along with a handful of former GOP congressmen and a number of loyalists close to his 2016 campaign.
The pardons for the former Blackwater contractors were met with sharp criticism from Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the top American officials in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq at the time of the 2007 killings, who called it “hugely damaging, an action that tells the world that Americans abroad can commit the most heinous crimes with impunity” in a joint statement obtained by Reuters.
Now known as Academi, the private security services company faced heavy criticism over the 2007 incident and lost its license to operate in Iraq from the country's government as a result. The company also faced accusations of other human rights abuses as a result of the WikiLeaks release of thousands of documents related to the Iraq War in 2010.
Robert Kennedy at a protest against coronavirus pandemic regulations in Berlin, this August. (photo: Clemens Bilan/EPA)
ALSO SEE: RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle.
He's Tragically Wrong About Vaccines
Kerry Kennedy Meltzer | Vaccines Are Safe, No Matter What Bobby Kennedy Says
Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, The New York Times
Excerpt: "I love my uncle. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong."
y hospital, along with hundreds of others across the country, recently began to administer the first Covid-19 vaccines. My social media feed is filled with pictures of friends and colleagues, sleeves rolled up, writing about how much this vaccination means to them. In an otherwise dark year, it’s a moment of hope.
And yet, not everyone is celebrating the historic vaccine rollout. I stopped following my uncle Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a noted anti-vaccination activist — on social media in 2019, when he was posting misinformation about the dangers of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the midst of an outbreak.
When I take a look at his Facebook page now, I find a post about the Covid-19 vaccine that says, “We clearly have a systematic problem when government health regulators have utterly abdicated their responsibility to safeguard public health and refer safety concerns about shoddily tested, zero-liability vaccines to pharmaceutical companies.”
Arms sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE have been criticized by human rights groups. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty)
US Approves Sale of $290 Million in Bombs to Saudi Arabia
Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Borger writes: "The US state department has approved the sale of $290 million in bombs to Saudi Arabia as part of a flurry of arms deals with Middle Eastern dictatorships in the last weeks of the Trump administration."
Arms deals with Middle East dictatorships are being rushed through by Trump, critics say, despite opposition over human rights records
Critics of the sales say they are being rushed through despite broad congressional and public opposition to such military support because of the human rights records of the regimes involved and in the case of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the huge civilian death toll from the war in Yemen.
The state department’s defence security cooperation agency announced the approval of sale of the GBU-39 small diameter bomb munitions and related equipment to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. On the same day, the agency also announced approvals for the sale of AH-64E Apache helicopters worth $4bn to Kuwait, $104m in defensive equipment against missile attack for the plane of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as well as $65.6m in precision targeting equipment for Egyptian warplanes. Egypt has been criticised for the civilian impact of its counter-insurgency campaign in north Sinai.
On Wednesday, a New York thinktank is planning to sue Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the proposed sale of $23bn worth of advanced weaponry, including drones and stealth warplanes to UAE, saying the administration has failed to meet legal requirements to provide a full rationale for the sale, and to consider the impact on US security and world peace.
The state department said the sales supported “US foreign policy and national security objectives by helping to improve the security of a friendly country that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic growth in the Middle East”.
In the case of the UAE arms deal, the administration claimed it enabled the UAE “to deter increasing Iranian aggressive behavior and threats”. The deal was agreed after the Emirates agreed to normalise relations with Israel, and analysts believe the arms sales to the Saudis and to Kuwait are in part incentives for them to follow suit.
Critics of the arms deals said they were destabilising and rewarded human rights abuses.
“The Trump administration is rushing through with parting arms gifts to Saudi Arabia despite its deplorable human rights record,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident murdered by the Saudi regime in 2018
“President Trump’s lame duck Middle East arms bonanza continues,” William Hartung, the director of the arms and security programme at the Centre of International Policy think tank, said. “Selling more bombs to Saudi Arabia given its history of indiscriminate air strikes that have killed thousands of civilians in Yemen should be a non-starter. If Congress can’t block it, the Biden administration should do so when it takes office.”
“Congress and the new administration should also review the sale of equipment to Egypt in light of its brutal and counterproductive counter-terror campaign in the Sinai, which has involved severe human rights abuses, the killing of innocent civilians, and the driving of thousands of families from their homes,” Hartung added.
In a lawsuit expected to be filed on Wednesday, the New York Centre for Foreign Policy Affairs will accuse Pompeo’s state department of rushing the sale of drones and F35 fighter jets to UAE, ignoring the requirements of the arms export control act, to consider the impact on world peace and US security, and the administrative procedures act, “requiring that the department provide a reasoned explanation for its decision”.
Noting the UAE’s involvement in the Saudi-led air war in Yemen, the lawsuit calls for an injunction to stop the sale, which was narrowly approved by the Senate earlier in December.
The spate of arms sales comes as Joe Biden’s transition team is complaining it is not being properly briefed by the Pentagon on ongoing military operations, as is customary for an incoming administration in the weeks preceding inauguration, on January 20.
“Literally dozens of written requests for information are outstanding as we speak,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told National Public Radio.
Tobias Ellwood, chair of the UK parliament’s defence committee and a former junior defence minister, speculated on Twitter: “I wager Trump blocking Biden’s access to US national security agencies, including intelligence briefings and friendly force locations, is because he has a couple of significant operations up his sleeve which may get the green light before 20 Jan[uary].”
The UK, the world’s second biggest arms merchant, resumed arms sales to Saudi Arabia in June after a year-long pause, ordered after a court of appeal ruling that ministers had ignored evidence that Saudi airstrikes in Yemen broke humanitarian law. The court found that the government had failed to assess the civilian death toll from the Saudi-led air war directed against Houthi forces in Yemen.
In July the trade secretary, Liz Truss, said sales would restart after an official review concluded there had been only “isolated incidents” of airstrikes in Yemen that were in breach of international law. As a consequence, Truss argued, the undertaking given by the government to halt sales “falls away”.
UK export statistics do not break down buyers by country, but 60% of the country’s £11bn ($15bn) weapons sales in 2019 were to the Middle East, down from nearly 80% in 2018, before the court order.
The leading UK arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, sold £15bn-worth of arms to the Saudi Arabia over the five years of its intervention in Yemen, principally supplying and maintaining Tornado and Typhoon aircraft used in bombing missions.
California's largest and saltiest lake, the Salton Sea. (photo: David McNew/Getty)
Will California Finally Fulfill Its Promise to Fix the Salton Sea?
Mark Olalde, High Country News and Desert Sun
Olalde writes: "Red flags flutter outside the schools in Salton City, California, when the air quality is dangerous."
Juarez, a mother of three and active volunteer at the schools, often received calls to pick up her 7-year-old son, Lihan, when sudden nosebleeds soiled his outfits. But she couldn’t leave her job, harvesting vegetables in the fields that form square oases in the Coachella Valley. So she began packing fresh clothes for him every day, before COVID-19 halted in-person learning. “It’s OK. Just go to the office,” she’d say. “The ladies will help you change.”
The doctor’s diagnosis was unclear: Perhaps Lihan had allergies. Then, Juarez’s 17-year-old daughter began suffering headaches and respiratory issues. Finally, Juarez got a runny nose and sore throat that lasted for days when the dust blew.
Juarez blames California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea. Only a few miles east of the family’s neatly kept house, it’s a cobalt-blue patch on Southern California’s Colorado Desert, a roughly 325-square-mile oblong oddity that’s twice as salty as the ocean.
It’s also toxic — a looming environmental and public health disaster. The Salton Sea’s shoreline is receding, exposing a dusty lakebed known as the “playa.” This sandy substance holds a century’s worth of agricultural runoff, including DDT, ammonia, possibly carcinogenic herbicides like trifluralin and other chemicals. Its windborne dust travels across Southern California and into Arizona, but nearby communities — many of them populated by Latino farmworkers — bear the heaviest burden.
The problem isn’t new. Yet California, though largely responsible for fixing it, has barely touched the more than 25 square miles of exposed playa. It’s been almost two decades since an agreement was signed in 2003, committing the Imperial Irrigation District, the Colorado River’s largest user, to conserve water that once flowed from farms into the lake and send it to other districts. Knowing the lake would recede, the state committed to mitigating the health and environmental impacts. The state and federal governments have spent about $70 million so far, largely on salaries and studies. Meanwhile, the high-water mark has fallen nearly 10 feet, and salinity continues to rise.
The politicians admit they’re years behind schedule, but they’re adamant that the course has been corrected, the money is being put to good use and the future is bright. Currently, 16 state employees are planning projects to tamp down dust or rebuild wetlands, and that will grow to 26 once new positions approved in the latest budget are filled. They’ve also nearly finished permitting projects that will cover 30,000 acres, a little more than a third of the area that could eventually be exposed.
Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, who represents the region surrounding the lake, is optimistic. “I believe 2021 will be a new story of the state of California living up to its responsibility and liability in terms of investing in what it signed up for at the Salton Sea,” he said.
Still, the state must overcome funding issues, disagreements with the feds, permitting bottlenecks, and decades of inertia.
For years, the government stood still.
Over tens of thousands of years, as it meandered across the West, the Colorado River occasionally filled the Salton Sea. The lake’s most recent iteration formed between 1905 and 1907, when an engineering disaster diverted the river into the basin. It has since been fed largely by agricultural runoff from the Imperial and Coachella valleys. It soon became clear that salinity levels would continue increasing. Since then, millions more people have begun relying on the Colorado River, even as climate change threatens the waterway. In response to competing demands, the 2003 agreement diverted water from the Imperial Valley. That meant that the lake’s level was guaranteed to drop. So, in 2007, the state released a sweeping proposal with an $8.9 billion price tag — unfortunately, just as the Great Recession took hold. “Folks got sticker-shocked and did not really pursue a full rehabilitation-restoration approach,” Garcia said.
Still, the agreement included 15 years of inflows to temporarily control salinity while the state decided on a plan. By late 2020, the California Natural Resources Agency had completed one dust-suppression project covering a mere 112 acres; the goal for the end of that year was 3,800 acres. “For a very long time, the enormity of the challenge at the sea was frankly overwhelming, and there was very little action at the state level until 2014 or 2015,” said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, the lead department tasked with restoring the sea.
That one completed site, the Bruchard Road Dust Suppression Project, looks like someone tried to farm the surface of the moon. Tractors dug long, straight furrows through the white, sandy playa to catch the windblown dust. But more expensive wetland habitat restoration is needed; the lake has long been an important feeding ground along the Pacific Flyway, a migratory bird route on the Western Seaboard.
In order to “fix” the sea, government agencies, led by the state, will need to flood, plough or plant tens of thousands of acres to control dust, and rebuild habitat. They’re racing against the clock. An estimated 131 square miles of playa will be dry and exposed to the air by the time the lake reaches a degree of equilibrium — meaning the inflow from three small waterways and agricultural runoff will maintain a smaller lake — in 2047.
For a shallow body of water, the Salton Sea holds a large amount of sunk costs. Years of studies, salaries, and office supplies have been purchased, but few shovels have been put to work.
But Arturo Delgado, an assistant secretary with the Natural Resources Agency and the state’s Salton Sea czar, pointed out that a portion of the more than $355 million set aside for the lake — 99 percent of it from bonds — needed to be spent sorting out permits and access to a complex checkerboard of state, tribal, federal and private land. “The bulk of the funding that has been appropriated to date for the Salton Sea program has not been spent,” he said.
As of late November, state agencies had used about $53 million, most of it going to ledger entries, including “studies and planning activities,” “staffing and other design costs” and “annual surveys to monitor bird and fish populations.” Glaring zeros marked the “expended” column next to several construction budgets.
Years of indecisiveness mixed with land-access and permitting issues have bogged down the process; the state’s own efforts to clean up the ecological disaster got stuck in the compliance process. “Frankly, the permitting is probably more expensive right now than the actual projects,” said Tina Shields, water department manager at the Imperial Irrigation District, which, separate from the state, completed about 2,000 acres of dust suppression on its own land around the lake.
The state is appropriating some funds, but the federal government has been slow to pitch in. The U.S. Department of Agriculture kicked in about $8 million for dust-suppression projects, and over the past five years, the Bureau of Reclamation spent about $11 million on water-quality monitoring, wetlands projects along polluted rivers that empty into the lake, and studies on the feasibility of using salty water for dust mitigation.
When the Natural Resources Agency is finally ready for large-scale builds, the budget could get in the way. Individual construction sites are expensive, with one roughly 4,000-acre project set to break ground in 2021 costing an estimated $200 million. Another 160-acre design will cost $20 million. Cleanup along the New River, one of three small waterways flowing into the lake, comes with a $28 million bill.
And while California regularly calls on bonds to fund large projects, that money can’t be used for operations and maintenance. Crowfoot acknowledged that the state lacks a mechanism to fund long-term monitoring and upkeep. At the beginning of 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised an additional $220 million, but that was predicated on a bond. When the pandemic hit, that idea and a parallel measure Garcia introduced in the Legislature both died, although Garcia said he’ll reintroduce his bill in 2021.
For now, the state lacks a better funding plan. “We don’t have the reserves that we had prior to COVID-19,” Garcia said. “That money has been invested in our emergency response.”
If the Salton Sea restoration were to reinvigorate the Pacific Flyway, it would likely begin at the wetlands around Red Hill Bay on the lake’s southeastern corner, where various agencies are constructing new habitat. An October visit found it far from inspiring. A flat patch of dirt covered several hundred dry acres, dotted with a few dead trees. A sign, complete with typos, showed a hopeful rendering of a functioning wetland and promised: “Estimated construction in 2016.”
Representative Raul Ruiz, a Demoract from California, introduced the federal Salton Sea Public Health and Environmental Protection Act in November to streamline permitting and unlock additional federal dollars. He acknowledged the delays, but called the Red Hill Bay Restoration Project “proof of concept that we can get a shovel-to-ground project started,” adding, “My No. 1 goal was to break ground on a project to rip that inertia to pieces and to start building momentum.”
The son of farmworkers, Ruiz grew up just miles from the lake. He returned home to practice medicine after studying at Harvard, and he still wears gym shoes with his suits, as if he’s about to run into the emergency room. Ruiz, who was struck by the high rates of respiratory illnesses in the area, compares the lake to a patient “in need of triage.”
A 2019 study conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California’s medical school and a local nonprofit called Comite Civico del Valle estimated that nearly one in four elementary school children in northern Imperial County, the area nearest to the Salton Sea’s exposed and emissive playa, suffered from asthma, about three times the national average. “Exposing this population to more and more poor air quality — in particular, particulate matter small enough to penetrate the lung-blood barrier that also carries toxins like arsenic, selenium, and pesticides — would be devastating to the public’s health,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz said that divergent visions had stalled progress, while egos got in the way. Since entering Congress in 2013, he has tried to rally local lawmakers and called on the federal government to take a more active role. Juarez, in Salton City, welcomes the efforts but believes that if this problem affected a wealthier, whiter area like Palm Springs, it would’ve been addressed already. It’s a sentiment her elected representatives share. So, she asked, “Why is nothing getting done?”
In 2020, the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District slapped the state and feds with notices of violation for failing to complete dust-control projects. The Imperial Irrigation District wants the state to act, too, citing the 2003 water transfer agreement. California politicians argue the federal government needs to step up because the Bureau of Reclamation owns much of the land underneath the lake. The feds insist they occupy a supporting role, and agency heads from Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refused to attend a September congressional hearing to discuss the government’s role in cleaning up the lake.
The people in Salton City and other towns around the retreating lake are still waiting. For Juarez, who began working in the fields when she was just 15, the clock is ticking on the American dream her family built in the California desert. It’s difficult to find hope in stepwise permit approvals while dust fights through cracks in her home. She takes her children to the doctor every six months and worries about Lihan. “I’m nervous, and I’m scared to see my son like that,” Juarez said.
She doesn’t want to move away but is finally considering it. “I don’t want to stay here and see my kids sick,” she said.
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