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Monday, December 14, 2020
POLITICO NIGHTLY: Trump’s vaccine is here. Where’s Trump?
So Long, Farewell - 20 January 2021 Version
The von Trapplings have so far only been singing about Covid. But current events compel them to add their sound of music once more, to farewell a president who just doesn't seem to want to leave office after being democratically fired.
RSN: Norman Solomon | Bernie Sanders and Progressives in Our Winter of Discontent
14 December 20
Progressives are on a roll. We have participated in a broad-based coalition that defeated Donald Trump at the polls. We have pushed critically important issues like the environment, voting rights and police reform to the forefront, we are helping to elect Progressive candidates nationwide who are passionate about and committed to these issues and we are well positioned to help move the new presidential administration in the direction of social advancement.
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Fund RSN, we’re on a roll.
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: RSN: Norman Solomon | Bernie Sanders and Progressives in Our Winter of Discontent
After a summer and fall dominated by the imperative of defeating Donald Trump, progressive forces are entering a winter of discontent. Joe Biden has offered them little on the list of top personnel being named to his administration. While Sanders wants to maintain a cordial relationship with the incoming president, he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. “The progressive movement deserves a number of seats – important seats – in the Biden administration,” Sanders said last week. “Have I seen that at this point? I have not.” Sanders foreshadowed the current situation back in mid-November, when he told The Associated Press: “It seems to me pretty clear that progressive views need to be expressed within a Biden administration. It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’ – and there’s some discussion that that’s what he intends to do – which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats – but which ignored the progressive community. I think that would be very, very unfortunate.” At this point, Sanders and avid supporters of the Bernie 2020 campaign have ample reasons to feel frustrated, even “enormously” insulted. It’s small comfort that Biden’s picks so far are purportedly “not as bad as Obama’s” were 12 years ago. That’s a low bar, especially to those who understand that Barack Obama heavily corporatized his presidency from the outset. And given the past decade’s leftward political migration among Democrats and independents at the grassroots, Biden’s selections have been even more out of step with the party’s base. Reporting on Biden’s overall selections as this week began, The Washington Post found that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Biden conveyed notable disregard for Sanders by nominating an OMB director with a long record of publicly expressing antagonism toward him. The Post just reported that “the transition team never reached out to” Sanders about “Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings.” Away from Capitol Hill, many progressive organizations are regrouping while “the Bernie movement” evaporates. Coalescing in its place are a range of resilient, overlapping movements that owe much of their emergent long-term power to his visionary leadership. Nationally, Sanders became a shaper of history in unprecedented ways. Unlike almost every other major candidate for president in our lifetimes, he has always been part of social movements. For 30 years, Sanders not only continued to have one foot in the streets and one foot in the halls of Congress; somehow, he often seemed to be relentlessly in both places with both feet. Bernie Sanders has fulfilled what the legendary progressive activist and theoretician Saul Alinsky described as a key goal of political organizers – to work themselves out of a job – so that other activists will become ready, willing and able to carry on. At this juncture, while Sanders is ill-positioned and uninclined to push back very hard against the evident trajectory of Biden’s decisions, many progressives are starting to throw down gauntlets against the corporate and militaristic aspects of the incoming presidency. While the lunacy of the Trumpian GOP is nonstop and corporate Democrats have control of party top-down power levers, the broad democratic left is now stronger, better-funded and better-networked than it has been in many decades, with greatly enhanced electoral capacities as well as vitality of its social movements. Those electoral capacities and social movements have long been intertwined with the tireless work of Bernie Sanders. But a crucial dynamic going forward into 2021 and beyond will be the resolve of progressives to methodically challenge the Biden administration. Senator Sanders is unlikely to have the leverage or inclination to lead the fight. Sanders has tried to call in some political chits, but Biden – probably figuring that Sanders won’t really go to the mat – does not seem to care much. Days ago, Sanders said in an interview with Axios: “I’ve told the Biden people: The progressive movement is 35-40 percent of the Democratic coalition. Without a lot of other enormously hard work on the part of grassroots activists and progressives, Joe would not have won the election.” Bernie Sanders was the catalyst for galvanizing the grassroots progressive power that propelled his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. His deep analysis, tenacity, eloquence, and bold actions created new pathways. As this century enters its third decade, the torch needs to be grasped by others to lead the way. Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
It Will Take Months Before Everyday People Get the Shots
First in line will be two groups considered to be exceptionally high risk -- health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities such as nursing homes. The groups are part of what federal health officials call Phase 1a of the vaccine distribution plan. Together they add up to about 24 million people. Residents of long-term care facilities have been especially vulnerable, accounting for about 40% of coronavirus deaths in the US. With cases soaring across the country, protecting the health of doctors and nurses is crucial. More than 240,000 health care workers have been infected with coronavirus and nearly 900 have died, according to the CDC. But state health officials and governors across the nation may not receive enough vaccines in the initial shipments for the top priority groups. States will have to prioritize who should get the vaccine first. And limited first shipments will ultimately affect when members of other groups down the line roll up their sleeves, leaving timetables fraught with uncertainly. Essential workers could be on deck Experts advising the CDC have recommended that the next group to receive the vaccine -- perhaps in January -- include essential workers, such as emergency medical technicians and police officers. Also included are older adults living in congregate settings or crowded conditions. The first part of the four-phase vaccine rollout might include people of all ages with underlying conditions such as diabetes and kidney disease considered to be at a higher risk of dying or getting severely ill from Covid-19. It's possible that the US will still be in the first phase of vaccination in March given the sheer numbers of people involved. Anyone healthy and under 65 who is not an essential or a high-risk worker should not expect to get vaccinated until later. The timetable will depend on the number of vaccines to get FDA approval and when that happens -- and, of course, how many doses are available. The vaccine requires two doses: one to prime the body, and then a few weeks later, a second shot to boost the response. The CDC estimates there are 21 million health care personnel, 3 million long-term care residents, 87 million essential workers, 100 million adults with high-risk medical conditions and 53 million others 65 and older. The federal government anticipates that 40 million doses of vaccine could be available in the US by the end of December if both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are approved. Vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday voted to recommend Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older. The vaccine this week received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration. Next phase could include teachers Again, depending on whether more vaccines have been approved, the second phase could begin by April. Phase 2 might include kindergarten-12th grade teachers and staff and other child care workers, as well as other critical workers such as retail workers and transportation workers. This group could also include people in homeless shelters and all people over 65 who were not already included in the first phase. Phase 1 and 2 combined would cover about 45% to 50% of the US population, according to an independent committee to help policymakers fairly allocate and distribute a coronavirus vaccine. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told the Senate in August he did not think the general public would be able to get vaccinated until the "late second quarter, third quarter 2021." April is the beginning of the second quarter of the year. What about the rest of the population? The rest of the population is going to have to wait for months before rolling up their sleeves for a vaccine. Phase 3 would include young adults, children and workers in industries essential to the functioning of society and at increased risk of exposure who were not included in the first two phases. Phase 4 would include everyone else. So healthy adults under the age of 65 and children may well have to wait until the spring or even the summer, depending on how many vaccines get approved, how quickly they can be manufactured and distributed, and how the debate goes over allocation. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that groups receiving the vaccine over the next four months will likely include those in "high priority groups." "I would project by the time you get to April, it will be ... 'open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high priority groups could get vaccinated," Fauci said. Pharmacy chains and big-box stores are also gearing up to deliver vaccines -- including places where people normally get flu shots, grocery store pharmacies and physician offices. |
ernie Sanders is not in a good political position right now. Yes, he continues to speak vital truths to – and about – power. His ability to reach a national audience with progressive wisdom and specific proposals is unmatched. And, during the last several decades, no one has done more to move the nation’s discourse leftward. But now, Sanders is in a political box.
ome Americans should receive the RSN: Trump Mobs Target Black Churches During DC Riots
14 December 20
“Where the Hell Does All This Money Go?”
Question posed by a reader today. Very well.
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14 December 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Trump Mobs Target Black Churches During DC Riots
Michael Balsamo and Ashraf Khalil, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Vandals tore down a Black Lives Matter banner and sign from two historic Black churches in downtown Washington and set the banner ablaze as nighttime clashes Saturday between pro-Donald Trump supporters and counterdemonstrators erupted into violence and arrests."
Police on Sunday said they were investigating the incidents at the Asbury United Methodist Church and Metropolitan A.M.E. Church as potential hate crimes, which one religious leader likened to a cross burning.
"This weekend, we saw forces of hate seeking to use destruction and intimidation to tear us apart," District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said Sunday. "We will not let that happen."
A video posted on Twitter showed a group of men appearing to take down a BLM sign at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church as others in the crowd shout, "Whose streets? Our streets." Another video showed people pouring an accelerant on a BLM banner and setting it ablaze in the street as others cheered and cursed antifa. Someone walks up about a minute later and uses a fire extinguisher to put out the flames.
"It pained me especially to see our name, Asbury, in flames," the Rev. Dr. Ianther M. Mills, the senior pastor at Asbury church said in a statement Sunday. "For me it was reminiscent of cross burnings. Seeing this act on video made me both indignant and determined to fight the evil that has reared its ugly head."
"We will move forward, undaunted in our assurance that Black Lives Matter and we are obligated to continue to shout that truth without ceasing," she added.
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization decried the attacks on the churches, partly faulting police for allowing white supremacists to "run rampant."
April Goggans, a lead organizer for Black Lives Matter's D.C. chapter, accused Bowser of "sitting silent and comfortable in your home as Trump send his goons in to brutalize your citizens." She said the mayor's statement was meaningless without action.
A spokesperson for D.C. police said Sunday that it was taking the offenses seriously and actively investigating.
The incidents came following weekend rallies in support of Trump's baseless claims that he won a second term, which led to dozens of arrests, several stabbings and injuries to police officers.
Police in the District of Columbia said they arrested nearly 30 people for a variety of offenses, from assault to weapons possession and resisting arrests and rioting. The violence broke out after sundown Saturday.
Four men were stabbed around 10 p.m. after a fight downtown, police said. At least one suspect, 29 year-old Phillip Johnson of Washington, was arrested on a charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. A police report obtained by The Associated Press said at least one of the victims identified Johnson as the person who stabbed him.
Eight police officers were also injured during the demonstrations, officials said.
The earlier rallies of mostly unmasked Trump loyalists were intended as a show of force just two days before the Electoral College meets to formally elect Democrat Joe Biden as the 46th president. Trump, whose term will end Jan. 20, refuses to concede, while clinging to unfounded claims of fraud that have been rejected by state and federal courts, and Friday by the Supreme Court.
A pro-Trump demonstration last month, which drew 10,000 to 15,000 people to the capital, also ended late on a Saturday evening with scattered clashes between Trump's allies and local activists near Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House.
On Saturday, police took more steps to keep the two sides apart, closing a wide swath of downtown to traffic and sealing off Black Lives Matter Plaza.
But while Saturday's rallies, including one on Freedom Plaza downtown, were smaller than on Nov. 14, they drew a larger contingent of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group known to incite street violence. Some wore bulletproof vests as they marched through town.
The group saw its profile raised after Trump in September famously told them to "stand back and stand by."
After the rallies ended, downtown Washington quickly devolved into crowds of hundreds of Proud Boys and combined forces of antifa and local Black activists — both sides seeking a confrontation in an area flooded with police officers. As dusk fell, they faced off on opposite sides of a street, with multiple lines of city police and federal Park Police, some in riot gear, keeping them separated.
Orlando Truitt, who is suing the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office after he was detained and had his cellphone seized while he was filming an arrest, is photographed Oct. 16, 2020, in the Colonial Village community of Sacramento. (photo: Xavier Mascarenas/SacBee)
He Filmed Arrest of Man Shouting 'I Can't Breathe.' Minutes Later, He Was in Handcuffs
Sam Stanton, The Sacramento Bee
Stanton writes: "Orlando Truitt was on a walk to a North Highlands market last February when he saw a neighbor walking home carrying bags of takeout Chinese food. Suddenly, a Sacramento sheriff's car pulled up and told the man to stop, Truitt said."
Within minutes, his neighbor had been tackled to the ground, and had five or six deputies on top of him, Truitt said.
So Truitt, a 66-year-old Black man and retired nurse, instinctively resorted to the same tactic countless other Americans have in recent years: He pulled out his cellphone and began recording the incident.
“I’m gonna die,” the man on the ground was yelling. “I can’t breathe. I’m dying. Help. Help me.”
Truitt said he felt an obligation to record the incident, that as a member of the community it was his duty.
What he didn’t bargain for was being handcuffed for the first time in his life, being searched, having his cellphone taken from him and being detained while deputies ran a background check on him.
The ordeal is now the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit against Sheriff Scott Jones and deputies, with Truitt alleging he was intimidated by deputies and subjected to an unlawful search and seizure, excessive force and interference of his First Amendment rights to record law enforcement actions in public.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Sacramento civil rights attorney Mark Merin, who filed the lawsuit. “These people are so insensitive, just dismissive of the rights of the public to record their activities that we feel compelled to do it.”
The Sheriff’s Office did not offer a comment after being provided a copy of the lawsuit.
But Merin and the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union say it is the latest example of overreaction by law enforcement when they see bystanders recording their actions in public.
“I’d say it’s been an issue that has cropped up increasingly when law enforcement feels they’re under pressure,” said ACLU senior staff attorney Sean Riordan. “In the border region, there were similar issues when there were calls for reform of the Border Patrol and Border Patrol agents were increasingly going after people who were recording incidents in public places.”
Riordan said there is no doubt that bystanders have a legal right to make such recordings.
“I think the most important general principle is courts time and again have recognized that the First Amendment strongly protects the right of individuals to record law enforcement activity in public places,” he said. “I can’t imagine a legitimate rationale for the conduct that’s alleged in the (Truitt) complaint.”
The lawsuit, which includes a transcription from the cellphone video Truitt recorded before a deputy took his phone and turned off the camera, describes the deputies detaining the man turning their attention toward Truitt as he moved closer into the street to record them while the suspect begged them to get off him.
“The officers did not get off of the man but instead verbally berated him: ‘Stop! Just stop! Knock it off! Cut the s---!,’” the suit says. “Additional officers pulled-up in patrol vehicles and began to arrive at the scene.”
One of the new arrivals was Deputy Kyle Zimmerman, the lawsuit says, who began talking to another deputy and pointed at Truitt as he continued to record.
Zimmerman then walked over to Truitt, the suit says.
“Hello. How’re you doing?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’m fine,” Truitt answered.
“Do you mind if we take a look at the video and see what happened?” Zimmerman asks.
“No,” Truitt answers.
“For investigation purposes and stuff like that?” Zimmerman asks, but Truitt still refuses.
“No? Alright, then,” Zimmerman said. “What’s your name and information?”
“You don’t need — you don’t need my name,” Truitt answers.
Zimmerman responds by telling Truitt he is standing in the roadway and “I could detain you,” the lawsuit says.
Truitt took a step back to stand on the sidewalk, but that wasn’t good enough, the suit says.
“Okay. Then you’re gonna get searched,” Zimmerman says, according to the suit. “I’m gonna search for an ID.”
“You don’t have a reason to search me,” Truitt says.
“I actually do,” Zimmerman responds, adding, “You were in the roadway...
“It’s actually an infraction to be in the roadway. Unless you are crossing the street. But you were not.”
Next, Zimmerman asks for another deputy’s help to search Truitt — who insists, “Don’t touch me” — as Zimmerman tells the other deputy to take Truitt’s phone and the recording is ended, the suit says.
The search alleges Truitt was subjected to unreasonable search and seizure, prolonged detention, excessive force and other violations.
It seeks compensatory and punitive damages “in an amount sufficient to deter and to make an example of (sheriff’s officials) because their actions and/or inactions, as alleged, were motivated by evil motive or intent (and) involved reckless or callous indifference to constitutionally protected rights.”
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. (photo: Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
Russian Government Spies Are Behind a Hacking Campaign That Has Breached US Agencies and a Top Cyber Firm
Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments, along with other U.S. government agencies, as part of a global espionage campaign that stretches back months, according to people familiar with the matter."
Officials were scrambling over the weekend to assess the nature and extent of the intrusions and implement effective countermeasures, but initial signs suggested the breach was long-running and significant, the people familiar with the matter said.
The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The same Russian group hacked the State Department and the White House email servers during the Obama administration.
The FBI is investigating the campaign, which may have begun as early as spring, and had no comment Sunday. The victims have included government, consulting, technology, telecom, and oil and gas companies in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, according to FireEye, a cyber firm that itself was breached.
All of the organizations were breached through the update server of a network management system made by the firm SolarWinds, FireEye said in a blog post Sunday.
The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert Sunday warning about an “active exploitation” of the SolarWinds Orion Platform, from versions of the software released in March and June. “CISA encourages affected organizations to read the SolarWinds and FireEye advisories for more information and FireEye’s GitHub page for detection countermeasures,” the alert said.
SolarWinds said Sunday in a statement that monitoring products it released in March and June of this year may have been surreptitiously weaponized in a “highly-sophisticated, targeted . . . attack by a nation state.”
The scale of the Russian espionage operation appears to be large, said several individuals familiar with the matter. “This is looking very, very bad,” said one person. SolarWinds products are used by more than 300,000 organizations across the world. They include all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, the world’s top electronic spy agency, according to the firm’s website.
Its clients also include the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies.
“This is a big deal, and given what we now know about where breaches happened, I’m expecting the scope to grow as more logs are reviewed,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. “When an aggressive group like this gets an open sesame to many desirable systems, they are going to use it widely.”
Russian spies believed to have hacked FireEye
FireEye reported last week that it was breached and that hacking tools it uses to test clients’ computer defenses were stolen. The Washington Post reported that APT29 was the group behind that hack. FireEye and Microsoft, which were investigating the breach, discovered the hackers were gaining access to victims through updates to SolarWinds’ Orion network monitoring software, FireEye said in its blog post, without publicly naming the Russians.
Reuters first reported the hacks of the Treasury and Commerce departments Sunday, saying they were carried out by a foreign government-backed group. The SVR link to the broader campaign was previously unreported.
The matter was so serious that it prompted an emergency National Security Council meeting on Saturday, Reuters reported.
“The United States government is aware of these reports, and we are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation,” said National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot. He did not comment on the country or group responsible.
At Commerce, the Russians targeted the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency that handles Internet and telecommunications policy, Reuters reported. They have also been linked to attempts to steal coronavirus vaccine research.
U.S., Britain and Canada say Russian spies are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research
In 2014 and 2015, the same group carried out a wide-ranging espionage campaign that targeted thousands of organizations, including government agencies, foreign embassies, energy companies, telecommunications firms and universities.
As part of that operation, it hacked the unclassified email systems of the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department.
“That was the first time we saw the Russians become much more aggressive, and instead of simply fading away like ghosts when they were detected, they actually contested access to the networks,” said Michael Daniel, who was White House cybersecurity coordinator at the time.
One of its victims in 2015 was the Democratic National Committee. But unlike a rival Russian spy agency, the GRU, which also hacked the DNC, it did not leak the stolen material. In 2016, the GRU military spy agency leaked hacked emails to the online anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in an operation that disrupted the Democrats’ national convention in the midst of the presidential campaign.
The SVR, by contrast, generally steals information for traditional espionage purposes, seeking secrets that might help the Kremlin understand the plans and motives of politicians and policymakers. Its operators also have filched industrial data and hacked foreign ministries.
Because the Obama administration saw the APT29 operation as traditional espionage, it did not consider taking punitive measures, said Daniel, who is now president and chief executive of the Cyber Threat Alliance, an information-sharing group for cybersecurity companies.
“It was information collection, which is what nation states — including the United States — do,” he said. “From our perspective, it was more important to focus on shoring up defenses.”
But Chris Painter, State Department cyber coordinator in the Obama administration, said even if the Russian campaign is strictly about espionage and there’s no norm against spying, if the scope is broad there should be consequences. “We just don’t have to sit still for it and say ‘good job,’ ” he said.
Sanctions might be one answer, especially if done in concert with allies who were similarly affected, he said. “The problem is there’s not even been condemnation from the top. President Trump hasn’t wanted to say anything bad to Russia, which only encourages them to act irresponsibly across a wide range of activities.”
At the very least, he said, “you’d want to make clear to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that this is unacceptable — the scope is unacceptable.”
So far there is no sign that the current campaign is being waged for purposes of leaking information or for disruption of critical infrastructure, such as electric grids.
SolarWinds’ monitoring tool has extremely deep “administrative” access to a network’s core functions, which means that hacking the tool would allow the Russians to freely root around victims’ systems.
APT29 compromised SolarWinds so that any time a customer checked in to request an update, the Russians could hitch a ride on the weaponized update to get into a victim’s system. FireEye dubbed the malware that the hackers used “Sunburst.”
“Monday may be a bad day for lots of security teams,” tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.
Martin Luther King Jr., center flanked by John Lewis to his right and Ralph D. Abernathy to his left march near Selma, Alabama on March 22, 1965. (photo: Anonymous/AP)
Liz Theoharis | Pandemic Lessons for the Rest of Us: Or Vaccine Thinking Applied to All of American Life
Liz Theoharis, TomDispatch
Theoharis writes: "Call it a cruel stroke of history that Congress should be deliberating on the welfare of millions only a few weeks before Christmas, especially since so many of the key players call themselves 'Christians.'"
Sadly, it's that end-of-the-year moment again when I ask all of you for money to keep this website afloat in the midst of the pandemic from hell. Believe me, this isn’t how I like to spend my time either, but your contributions are truly the only thing that keeps us going. So I’ve written my sole funding appeal letter of this year to all TomDispatch subscribers, including in it, of course, that very plea for donations without which -- no exaggeration -- TD will sooner or later simply cease to exist. If you haven't seen that letter but the mood strikes you anyway, you can just go right to the TD donation page and contribute. Honestly, I can't begin to tell you what your contributions, which come in from all over this divided country and beleagured planet of ours, mean to me. A million thanks in advance! Tom]
To my mind, the single most shocking thing in recent weeks wasn't Donald Trump's never-ending rants about election fraud or the fact that 60% to 80% of Republicans doubt that Election 2020 was a fair one or that Rudy Giuliani became the latest presidential associate to end up with Covid-19. It was a Rand Corporation study showing that, between 1975 and 2018, the equivalent of $2.5 trillion (no, not "billion"!) was transferred annually from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. (In those years, even the 2% to 9%-ers essentially twiddled their financial thumbs.) Such a transfer of wealth, close to $50 trillion, should stagger the imagination.
And yet, unbelievably enough, in this Covid-19 year of ours, America's billionaires have simply continued to add to their treasure trove in an overwhelming fashion as significant parts of that 90% went down hard. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, between March and September, in the midst of a devastating pandemic, the net worth of America's 643 richest people rose from $2.95 trillion to $3.8 trillion. It's since topped $4 trillion and a new study suggests that those billionaires could make out $3,000 stimulus checks to everyone in this country and not have a cent less than they had when the pandemic began. And yet, at this moment, with millions of Americans out of work, Congress can barely imagine offering them, at best, the most minimal kind of helping hand, though its generosity when it comes to the Pentagon budget is beyond compare. In such a context, TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, offers a suggestion about what the remarkably speedy hunt for a Covid-19 vaccine shows might be possible when it comes to the inequality that may be the most striking aspect of American life in the twenty-first century. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Pandemic Lessons for the Rest of Us
Or Vaccine Thinking Applied to All of American Life
artin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?":
“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent.”
King concluded that American society was degrading human life by clinging to old thinking rather than turning to bold, visionary solutions -- words that (sadly enough) ring even truer in our day than in his.
In late October as the coronavirus pandemic raged, the Economic Policy Institute released a study showing that it isn't just morally right but an economic necessity to deal with poverty in this country and fast. “If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy," as that study put it, "the health and well-being of the nation are at stake. What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity, and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”
Even as, almost two months later, we remain trapped in an unprecedented crisis of spreading illness, there is increasingly clear evidence that, were those in power to make other choices, we would no longer need to live burdened by the social ills of old. Oddly enough, because of the Covid-19 crisis, we're being reminded (or at least should be reminded) that, in reality, solutions to many of the most pressing issues of our day are readily at hand if those issues were prioritized and the attention and resources of society directed toward them. In a moment overflowing with lessons, one of the least discussed is that scarcity is a lie, a political invention used to cover up vast reserves of capital and technology facilitating the enrichment of the few and justifying the pain and dispossession of so many others. Our present reality could perhaps best be described as mass abandonment amid abundance.
Indeed, the myth of scarcity, like other neoliberal fantasies, is regularly ignored when politically expedient and conjured up when the rich and powerful need help. The pandemic has been no exception. Over the last nine months, the wealth of American billionaires has actually increased by a third to nearly $4 trillion, even as tens of millions of Americans have filed for unemployment and more evictions loom than ever before in U.S. history. Now, politicians in Washington are haggling over a “compromise” relief bill that offers little in the way of actual relief, especially for those suffering the most.
At the same time, with the health of everyone, not just the poor and marginalized, at risk, the government has proven itself remarkably capable of mobilizing the necessary resources for decisive and historic action when it comes to producing a Covid-19 vaccine in record time. That the same could be done when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable and abolishing poverty should be obvious, if only the nation saw that, too, as a crisis worthy of attention.
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way
In 1918, with an influenza pandemic raging in the United States, cities closed down and doctors prescribed painkillers like aspirin as a national debate (remarkably similar to the present one) raged over the necessity of quarantine and masks. At that time, the country simply had to wait for those who were infected to die or develop immunity. Before it was over (in a far less populous land), at least 675,000 Americans perished, more than in every one of our wars since the Civil War combined.
A century later, when the Covid-19 pandemic exploded this March, the country ground to a similar terrifying halt, but under different conditions: for one thing, the shutdown was accompanied by the promise that the government would invest billions of dollars in a potentially successful vaccine produced far faster than any ever before. Nine months later, after the Trump administration had funneled those billions into research and had guaranteed the manufacture and purchase of viable vaccines (radically reducing the business risk to pharmaceutical companies in the process), it appears that we are indeed there. Last month, multiple companies released trial data for just such vaccines that seem to be nearly 95% effective; and Great Britain has, in fact, just rolled out the first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine with the U.S. not far behind. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer's vaccine for emergency use.
A long list of grave questions remains when it comes to the oversight of, and accountability of, those private companies that now hold the health of the world in their hands. Already, the British government has granted Pfizer, which stands to earn billions by beating the competition to market, legal indemnity from any complications that may arise from its vaccine, and the Trump administration has made similar agreements. Much also remains uncertain when it comes to how American-produced vaccines will be fairly distributed, here and across the world, and whether they will be safe, effective, and free. (I recently signed onto a public letter to the incoming Biden administration calling for a "people’s vaccine.")
Still, it does seem that the historic speed with which this novel virus could eventually be curbed by just such a vaccine (or set of them) is likely to prove astonishing. Historically, on average, successful vaccines have taken 10 to 14 years to develop. Until now, the fastest effective one ever produced was the mumps vaccine and that took four years. Nearly as remarkable is how so many people have received the news of the coming of those coronavirus vaccines as if it were the norm. If anything, in a time of constant, rapid technological revolution, there's a noticeable impatience, stoked by Donald Trump and others, that it's taken this long.
The Covid-19 vaccine experience does show one thing, however -- what can be done when the resources of this country are marshalled to immediately address a crisis-level issue. Imagine if the same approach were taken when it came to systemic racism, climate change, or the poverty that has only deepened in the midst of the pandemic crisis. Indeed, if the political will were there, Americans could clearly tackle massive problems like hunger and homelessness no less effectively than developing a vaccine, instead of spending millions of dollars on cruel attempts to drive the homeless away by redesigning park benches and other urban architecture to repel those with nowhere to stay. After all, in cities like San Francisco, where homelessness is rampant, there are more vacant houses than there are homeless people.
Although the politics of austerity generally reign supreme on both sides of the aisle in Congress (especially when it comes to antipoverty programs like welfare), it's also true that public spending is regularly and abundantly martialed to solve issues that affect certain parts of society -- namely, the private sector and the military. From subsidies to major companies like big agriculture to critical R&D expenditures for Silicon Valley to public university research that benefits private industry, funding from the state is often the invisible backbone of American business operations and advances. Likewise, spending on the military makes up more than half of the federal discretionary budget, funding everything from the 800 American military bases that circle the planet to expensive and risky new technologies and war machines.
Lessons from the Pandemic
Back in March, the writer Arundhati Roy spoke of the pandemic as "a portal." She was perhaps suggesting that the widespread suffering caused by Covid-19 could open a doorway into a future in which we humans might begin to treat ourselves and the planet with greater devotion. In another sense, however, the pandemic has also been a portal into our past, a way of showing us the conditions that have laid the groundwork not just for the devastation that now consumes us but for possibly far worse to come.
No one could have expected this exact crisis at this exact moment in exactly this way. Yet, before Covid-19, society was already teetering under the weight of poverty and inequality, and a sober look at history offers clues as to why the United States now has the highest Covid-19 case tally and death toll in the world. Too many have died because our country’s preexisting conditions of systemic injustice have gone untreated for so long and those in power never seem to learn the applicable lesson of this moment: pandemics spread along the fissures of society, both exposing them more and deepening them further.
Before Covid-19, there were already 140 million people in this country who were poor or a $400 emergency -- one job loss, accident, illness, or storm -- away from poverty. Across America that meant close to 80 million people were uninsured or underinsured, 60 million people had zero (zero!) wealth other than the value of a family car, more than a million people were defaulting on federal student loans annually, and more than 62 million workers were making less than $15 an hour, with more than two million in Florida alone making only $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage. And that's just to begin down a nightmarish list.
For Pamela Sue Rush and about 1.5 million other people, it meant a lack of access to piped water and sewage systems. Before Pamela, who is Black, contracted Covid-19 and died in July, she lived in a mobile home in Lowndes County, Alabama, where human waste festered in her backyard because she didn’t have proper plumbing, and in a state that still hasn't expanded Medicaid, and in a country that has no federal guarantee of either healthcare or clean water. Covid-19 may have been the immediate cause of her death, but the underlying one was racism and poverty.
During these pandemic months, a popular notion has been that the virus is a great equalizer because everyone is susceptible. Yet the human and economic toll has been anything but equal across society. It will take more time to find out just what the mortality rate among the poor has been, but it's already clear that those of us with compromised immune systems, disproportionately poor and people of color, are at greater risk of hospitalization and death from the coronavirus, and early reports suggest that poorer counties have higher death rates. An unsurprising but alarming new study found that more than 400,000 Covid-19 cases are associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums, forcing people out of the safety of their homes; such numbers will only worsen this winter as evictions continue, if such moratoriums aren't extended into the new year.
Beyond the toll of the virus itself, the economic fallout has been devastating for the poor. Between six and eight million people have fallen below the federal poverty line since March (although that measure is an old and broken standard). The true numbers are undoubtedly far higher. The last 38 weeks have seen unemployment claims greater than the worst week of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Some economists are now talking about a possible quick bounce back once the virus is controlled and yet the long-term damage is only beginning to reveal itself. After all, 10 years after the Great Recession, a time when little in the way of long-term relief was provided, the majority of workers had still not recovered from it. That this crisis is already significantly deeper and wider should give us pause as we consider what the next decade will look like if this country doesn't alter its bleak course.
The fissures in our society were vast before Covid-19 hit and they've only broadened. A vaccine will address the most visible of them, but we as a nation will continue to stumble from crisis to crisis until we learn the most important lesson this moment can teach: that our yet-to-be-United States will only heal as a society when every person’s needs are met. In a pandemic, one person without food, water, healthcare, or housing puts everyone at risk. The same is, in fact, true in non-pandemic times, for a society riven by poverty and deprivation will always be unstable and vulnerable.
Martin Luther King once told a crowd in St. Louis that “we must learn to live as brothers or perish together as fools.” Today, the balance is tipping perilously toward the latter category, as Congress painfully debates a thoroughly anemic relief bill that promises little for most Americans and sets a dangerous precedent for the coming months. In a recent letter to Joe Manchin, the self-proclaimed "centrist" senator from West Virginia, Reverend William Barber II (my co-chair on the Poor People’s Campaign) wrote:
“I am ashamed of this nation. I know you want to do the right thing, and Republicans are tying your hands, but please don’t call this a 'centrist plan.' It’s more cynical than centrist. It’s damn near criminal that millions are hurting, billionaires are getting richer, sick people are dying, poverty is expanding, and the Senate can’t do the right thing.”
Indeed, the most important things to note in the coming stimulus bill are these: it protects corporations (that have not protected their workers) from any accountability or legal responsibility; it continues to bail out the rich, not the rest of us, with no provisions for stimulus checks and insufficient funding to states and municipalities; it lowers unemployment benefits to $300 per week (based on wages of $7.50 an hour) rather than $600 per week (based on $15 an hour); it is not only significantly less than the nation needs, but less than what was on offer months ago. The cynicism of this relief bill lies in the way it diminishes life for political gain and corporate profit and in the false contention that this is the most that's available to us, the best the nation can do.
The Ghosts of Christmas Present
Call it a cruel stroke of history that Congress should be deliberating on the welfare of millions only a few weeks before Christmas, especially since so many of the key players call themselves "Christians." This holiday season and the winter beyond it promise to be a long, dark portal to who knows where, as temperatures drop, Covid-19 cases continue to rise, and poverty and homelessness are transformed into so many more death certificates. The timing of Congress's new "relief" bill is particularly wicked if, as a Christian, you were to remember the details of Jesus’s birth in that manger in Bethlehem.
After all, he was born a homeless refugee to an unmarried teenage mother and had to flee to Egypt with his family as a baby because the ruling authorities already deemed that this poor Palestinian Jewish boy would grow up to be a threat to the established order of injustice. But the powers and principalities of his day were never the only ones who mattered. There were always those who recognized in his birth that, to right the wrongs of society, to protect the lives of countless innocent victims, another way was possible, if society started with the poor and marginalized, not with those already full to the brim.
It's too bad that some of the congressional representatives who call themselves Christian are so unwilling to take a moment to consider the homeless revolutionary who was long ago sent to lead a moral movement from below. They should remember that the story of Christmas celebrates the birth of a poor, brown-skinned leader who, in the Gospel of Luke, is born to “scatter those who are proud, bring down rulers from their thrones, but lift up the humble. He fills the hungry with good things but sends the rich away empty.”
In a time when more children are on the brink of being born into poverty, homelessness, and state-sanctioned violence, rather than, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths” of the wealthy and corporations, Americans would do well to recognize that scarcity could vanish and that it’s time to address systemic inequality.
Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: B&T)
Facebook Faces Most Serious Breakup Threat Yet From Lawsuits
Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Hill
Excerpt: "The twin lawsuits filed against Facebook this week by the government and more than 40 attorneys general are the most serious effort to break the social media giant up to date."
The cases, which differ slightly, focus on the allegation that Facebook made acquisitions in an effort to decrease competition in the social network marketplace and ultimately worsened the quality of options available to consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission and 48 state and territory attorneys general propose a solution to that issue: divestiture.
Specifically, they ask for judges to spin off the photo-sharing app Instagram and the messenger service Whatsapp, which were acquired in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
The complaints use internal communications to build a narrative around the intent behind the purchases.
Very early on in its suit, the FTC highlights a 2008 email from CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that “it is better to buy than compete.”
Similar correspondences are brought up relating to both major purchases. The states’ lawsuit highlights that before acquiring Instagram, Zuckerberg responded yes to an executive asking if a goal of purchasing the app was to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
It also reveals several communications before the purchase of WhatsApp showing executives worried about messaging apps challenging Facebook.
“We are facing a huge threat with messaging competitors,” the company’s director of product management at the time emailed in 2012. “[T]his is the biggest threat to our product that I’ve ever seen in my 5 years here at Facebook; it’s bigger than G+, and we’re all terrified.”
Beyond just that the acquisitions were motivated by quashing potential rivals, the plaintiffs will have to prove there is consumer harm stemming from the acquisitions.
The states’ complaint argues that Facebook’s conduct has deprived users of innovations, quality improvements and consumer choice. It drills down on quality of privacy protections as something that users have lost.
“The underlying theory of robust antitrust litigation is that the incumbents would be providing a better product and/or a better product at a lower price if they were facing really competitive forces in a functioning market,” David Dinielli, a former special counsel with the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a senior adviser at the Omidyar Network, explained to The Hill. “And that's exactly the theory of these cases as well.”
The FTC’s suit makes the case that Facebook’s monopolization of the market has also hurt advertisers by leaving them with higher prices and lower quality options for where to run their ads. However, some onlookers have questioned whether that loss can be quantified.
“The reality is advertising costs have fallen something like 40 percent in the past few years,” Asheesh Agarwal, a former assistant director at the agency’s office of policy planning and current deputy general counsel at the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, said. “I guess you could say ‘well gee they would have fallen even further if not for these acquisitions,’ but that's a very hard case to make and then you're left with this kind of nebulous theory.”
Facebook’s main response to the lawsuits so far is that regulators had the chance to block the acquisitions at the time, but chose not to.
“This is revisionist history," Facebook's general counsel Jennifer Newstead said in a statement. "The most important fact in this case, which the Commission does not mention in its 53-page complaint, is that it cleared these acquisitions years ago. The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final."
However, there is a distinction between choosing not to challenge a merger and approving of it.
In fact, the FTC’s letter to Facebook about Instagram at the time explicitly says that not continuing the investigation “is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred.”
The agency has split up consummated hospital mergers before, proving there is at least some precedent.
Another argument that Facebook may make is that the market that the complaint defines is too narrow and that the company faces plenty of competition now from platforms like TikTok.
The complaints define the relevant market as being social networks dependent on digital advertising, excluding “online video or audio consumption-focused services such as YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu.”
“I think there is a tension between how they talk about the fact that … Instagram and WhatsApp were adjacent products that could step into Facebook's space, but then don't really talk about the fact that there's dozens of those products right now,” Neil Chilson, former FTC chief technologist and senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, said. “They'll have to present a compelling argument for why TikTok and LinkedIn aren't in the same sort of position.”
If the plaintiffs do prove that Facebook’s acquisitions violated antitrust law and that divestiture is the best method for relief, spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp will still pose a challenge.
The platforms have been integrated into Facebook’s larger framework and share back end resources like computer servers.
Zuckerberg has also planned to further integrate Instagram and WhatsApp by merging their chat functions with Facebook’s. However, that may not be a problem given that the states’ case proposes platform interoperability as an avenue for relief.
Jennifer Gyrgiel, an assistant professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School who specializes in social media, stressed that unwinding being hard doesn’t make it impossible.
“It's just going to take time and planning,” they told The Hill. “And then there are companies that can acquire pieces of Facebook.”
Both apps have massive user bases, and while they have benefited greatly from Facebook’s help there’s no obvious reason to think they would flounder if left alone.
The last time that the government mandated a breakup of a company at the scale of Facebook’s was in 1984 when the Bell System was split into seven independent telecom providers.
For Matt Stoller, director of research at the anti-monopoly organization the American Economic Liberties Project, the two lawsuits filed this week, along with the DOJ’s suit against Google, could constitute the most important antitrust case since the Bell breakup.
“First of all, these are very important companies that are extremely powerful, so trying to address their monopolistic behavior will have significant impacts on our media and communication markets,” he said. “Second is that it could restructure antitrust law … and then third, it signifies a broader political shift in how Americans relate to corporate power.”
Bethlehem, 21, an ethnic Tigrayan survivor from Mai-Kadra, Ethiopia, kisses her daughter’s hand as she cooks for her family inside a temporary shelter at Village 8, the transit center near the Lugdi border crossing, eastern Sudan, Nov. 22, 2020. (photo: Nariman El-Mofty/AP)
Shadowy Ethiopian Massacre Could Be 'Tip of the Iceberg'
Fay Abuelgasim, Nariman El-Mofty and Cara Anna, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The only thing the survivors can agree on is that hundreds of people were slaughtered in a single Ethiopian town."
Witnesses say security forces and their allies attacked civilians in Mai-Kadra with machetes and knives or strangled them with ropes. The stench of bodies lingered for days during the early chaos of the Ethiopian government’s offensive in the defiant Tigray region last month. Several mass graves have been reported.
What happened beginning Nov. 9 in the agricultural town near the Sudanese border has become the most visible atrocity in a war largely conducted in the shadows. But even here, much remains unclear, including who killed whom.
Witnesses in Mai-Kadra told the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International that ethnic Tigrayan forces and allies attacked Amhara — one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups but a minority in Tigray. In Sudan, where nearly 50,000 people have fled, one ethnic Amhara refugee gave The Associated Press a similar account.
But more than a dozen Tigrayan refugees told the AP it was the other way around: In strikingly similar stories, they said they and others were targeted by Ethiopian federal forces and allied Amhara regional troops.
It’s possible that civilians from both ethnicities were targeted in Mai-Kadra, Amnesty now says.
“Anyone they found, they would kill,” Tesfaalem Germay, an ethnic Tigrayan who fled to Sudan with his family, said of Ethiopian and Amhara forces. He said he saw hundreds of bodies, making a slicing gesture at his neck and head as he remembered the gashes.
But another refugee, Abebete Refe, told the AP that many ethnic Amhara like him who stayed behind were massacred by Tigrayan forces.
“Even the government doesn't think we're alive, they thought we all died,” he said.
The conflicting accounts are emblematic of a war about which little is truly known since Ethiopian forces entered Tigray on Nov. 4 and sealed off the region from the world, restricting access to journalists and aid workers alike. For weeks, food and other supplies have run alarmingly low. This week Ethiopia’s security forces shot at and briefly detained U.N. staffers making the first assessment of how to deliver aid, a senior Ethiopian official said.
Ethiopia's government and the Tigray one have filled the vacuum with propaganda. Each side has seized on the killings in Mai-Kadra to support its cause.
The conflict began after months of friction between the governments, which now regard each other as illegitimate. The Tigray leaders once dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, but Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sidelined them when he came to power in 2018.
Long-held tensions over land in western Tigray, where Mai-Kadra is located, between Tigrayans and Amhara have added fuel to the fire.
Amnesty International said it confirmed that at least scores, and likely hundreds, of people were killed in Mai-Kadra, using geolocation to verify video and photographs of the bodies. It also remotely conducted “a limited set of interviews.”
But Mai-Kadra “is just the tip of the iceberg,” Amnesty researcher Fisseha Tekle told an event on Tuesday as fears grow about atrocities elsewhere in Tigray. “Other credible allegations are emerging ... not only in Mai-Kadra but also” in the nearby town of Humera, the town of Dansha and the Tigray capital, Mekele.
In Mai-Kadra, witnesses told the visiting Ethiopian rights commission they saw police, militia and members of a Tigray youth group attack Amhara.
“The streets were still lined with bodies yet to be buried” days later, the commission said. One man who looked at identity cards of the dead as he cleared away the bodies told Amnesty International that many of them said Amhara.
But several ethnic Tigrayans who have fled blamed Ethiopian and allied Amhara regional forces for killings in the same town at the same time, saying some asked to see identity cards before attacking.
In some cases, they said they recognized the killers as their neighbors.
Samir Beyen, a mechanic, said he was stopped and asked if he was Tigrayan, then beaten and robbed. He said he saw people being slaughtered with knives, and dozens of rotting corpses.
“It was like the end of the world,” he recalled. “We could not bury them because the soldiers were near.”
Cut off from their homes, refugees now wait in Sudan in bare concrete houses or under shelters lashed together from plastic and branches, playing checkers with Coca-Cola bottle caps or stretching out on mats to sleep, seeking a brief escape from ghastly memories.
The AP has been unable to obtain permission to travel to the Tigray region and has been unable to independently verify the reports of the massacre. Neither Amnesty International nor the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission agreed to requests to speak with witnesses they interviewed.
The Ethiopian commission, an entity created under the country’s constitution, called its findings preliminary. Its researchers were allowed by the federal government to visit Mai-Kadra, but when asked whether it was being allowed to also investigate other alleged atrocities, spokesman Aaron Maasho replied, “We’re working on it.”
The U.N. human rights office this week called for independent investigations into the conflict, but Ethiopian officials have rejected what they call interference, saying this week the government doesn't need a “babysitter.”
To assume the government can’t do such work itself “is belittling,” senior Ethiopian official Redwan Hussein told reporters on Tuesday.
The prime minister has called the killings in Mai-Kadra “the epitome of moral degeneration” and even expressed suspicion that the perpetrators may have fled to Sudan and could be hiding among the refugees. Abiy offered no evidence, only pointing to the number of young men among the refugees — though roughly half are women.
The prime minister also has rejected allegations of abuses by the Ethiopian defense force, saying it “has not killed a single person in any city” during the conflict.
But the Tigray leader, Debretsion Gebremichael, blamed the “invading” federal forces for the killings, telling the AP that “we’re not people who can commit this crime, ever.”
The ethnic frictions and profiling must stop, the U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned this week, saying they are “fostering divisiveness and sowing the seeds for further instability and conflict" — in a region already rife with both.
Wolves. (photo: Scott Flaherty/USFWS)
Gray Wolf Recovery and Survival Require Immediate Action by the Biden Administration
The Revelator
Excerpt: "One species whose fate once again hangs in the balance is the gray wolf, which the Trump administration this October removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act in most of its range."
resident-elect Joe Biden will soon step into a tangled web of critical foreign and domestic issues affecting Americans. As his administration begins work to address these complex challenges, issues that affect other species on Earth must not be lost in the shuffle.
This delisting affects more than wolves: Numerous species and ecosystems depend on wolves for their long-term health. The most recent example of this comes from preliminary research results in the Yellowstone ecosystem indicating wolves exert a "predator cleansing effect" that may delay and decrease the size and spread of the devastating chronic wasting disease in native ungulates.
But the Trump administration did not listen to the science, starting in 2019, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a rule to remove gray wolves in the lower 48 states from the endangered species list.
The proposal, which would put wolf management in the hands of the states instead of the federal government, produced immediate outrage. A historic 1.8 million public comments opposed the delisting, and 86 members of Congress (in both House and Senate), plus 100 scientists, 230 businesses and 367 veterinary professionals, submitted letters of opposition. Even the scientific peer reviews commissioned by the Service itself found the proposal had inadequate scientific support.
Despite this overwhelming opposition and flawed science, the Service went ahead and stripped gray wolves of protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. In the process it also ignored the fact that gray wolves are still functionally extinct in the majority of places they once inhabited.
Why States Can’t Protect Wolves
Prior to this year's comprehensive delisting, gray wolves living in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah and California were already being managed by state wildlife agencies. In most of these states, this so-called "management" has been a debacle, as the agencies are often staffed and directed by hunters interested in "harvesting" wildlife for personal gain or, in the case of trophy hunting, ego gratification. If wolves are eating deer and elk in order to survive, these hunters view the predators as unacceptable competition.
For many of these state decision-makers, the attitude toward wolves is at best reluctant tolerance — far from what it should be: a desire for full recovery of the species and compassionate co-existence.
Idaho provides the worst example of wolf mismanagement at the state level. Over the 12-month period ending June 30, 2020, the state allowed the killing of at least 570 of the 1,000 wolves estimated to exist there. The only thing that prevented it from authorizing even more killings was a provision that would have returned management to the federal government if population levels fell below an established threshold. This is completely unacceptable. Until state-agency staffing is more balanced, representing both the interests of hunters and those who appreciate wildlife alive, the agencies have no business making management decisions about wolves.
The bottom line is wolves need continued federal protection if they're to survive and fully recover.
How to Restore Federal Protections
The Biden administration could begin ensuring protection of wolves through three initial actions.
First it should reverse the recent decision to delist gray wolves. The incoming secretary of the Interior could easily and immediately withdraw the rule in order to settle the inevitable lawsuit(s) that will challenge the legality of the delisting.
Second it should put all gray wolves in the lower 48 states under Endangered Species Act protection once again. The entire history of federal wolf protection has been piecemeal and fractured. Defining numerous different "distinct population" segments and pursuing delisting on a region-by-region or state-by-state manner does not facilitate full wolf recovery throughout their historic range; it only results in significant numbers of wolves being shot and trapped, and repeated challenges in court.
Third, once all gray wolves are again under the full protection of the Act, the administration should have the Fish and Wildlife Service finally develop a comprehensive nationwide gray wolf recovery plan. This plan is required under the Act but has never been made. The gray wolf was first protected way back in 1974; the Service has had more than 40 years to complete such a plan. It is long overdue. Once the recovery plan is completed, the Biden administration should have the Service implement it and monitor the results of the implementation. These actions will go a long way toward ensuring the recovery and long-term survival of gray wolves in the lower 48 states.
As one of North America's most iconic and ecologically important species, gray wolves can and should represent the very best of our conservation efforts and science. This will benefit not just wolves, but all other threatened species in the United States. President-elect Joe Biden has the power to make that a reality.
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