04 January 21
The Challenge of Fundraising in January
There is a perception that if you ran a fundraising drive in December you raised enough money to pay for operations for the year. No that’s not true!
We do raise — a little — more money in December but we raise less money in January so those two months tend to cancel each other out. The trick is to avoid very bad fundraising in January. That sounds easy but unfortunately it’s not.
Fundraising is challenging in these times, it takes everything we’ve got.
Lend us your support.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
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CA 95611
04 January 21
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Reader Supported News
Trump Is Fighting Section 230 for the Wrong Reason
Steve Randy Waldman, The Atlantic
Excerpt: "Why I changed my mind about Section 230."
n the United States, you are free to speak, but you are not free of responsibility for what you say. If your speech is defamatory, you can be sued. If you are a publisher, you can be sued for the speech you pass along. But online services such as Facebook and Twitter can pass along almost anything, with almost no legal accountability, thanks to a law known as Section 230.
President Donald Trump has been pressuring Congress to repeal the law, which he blames for allowing Twitter to put warning labels on his tweets. But the real problem with Section 230, which I used to strongly support, is the kind of internet it has enabled. The law lets large sites benefit from network effects (I’m on Facebook because my friends are on Facebook) while shifting the costs of scale, like shoddy moderation and homogenized communities, to users and society at large. That’s a bad deal. Congress should revise Section 230—just not for the reasons the president and his supporters have identified.
When the law was enacted in 1996, the possibility that monopolies could emerge on the internet seemed ludicrous. But the facts have changed, and now so must our minds.
In the early 1990s, emerging digital technologies created a quandary. Online public forums, on which users are able to post whatever they’d like, were one of the earliest and most exciting applications of digital networks. But hosting such a forum was arguably akin to a newspaper publishing a Letters to the Editor page without bothering to read the letters, which would be a prescription for legal catastrophe.
In two landmark cases, courts began to grapple with the issue. In 1991, a federal court ruled that the online service CompuServe was a mere distributor, rather than a publisher, of the material that it hosted, and so was not liable for its content. Its competitor Prodigy, however, was deemed to be liable in a New York state court ruling four years later, because Prodigy moderated user forums. By acting as an editor and not a mere conduit, the court reasoned, Prodigy made itself a publisher rather than a distributor.
In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, a law meant to crack down on digital smut. From a decency perspective, the legal standard that had emerged from the CompuServe and Prodigy lawsuits seemed, well, perverse. Prodigy was liable because it had tried to do the right thing; CompuServe was immune because it had not. So Section 230 of the act stipulated that providers of internet forums would not be liable for user-posted speech, even if they selectively censored some material.
Much of the Communications Decency Act was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court, but Section 230 survived. It quietly reshaped our world. Courts interpreted the law as giving internet services a so-called safe harbor from liability for almost anything involving user-generated material. The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes Section 230 as “one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet.” The internet predated the law. Yet the legal scholar Jeff Kosseff describes the core of Section 230 as “the twenty-six words that created the internet,” because without it, the firms that dominate the internet as we have come to know it could not exist. Maybe that would be a good thing.
Services such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not mere distributors. They make choices that shape what we see. Some posts are circulated widely. Others are suppressed. We are surveilled, and ads are targeted into our feeds. Without Section 230 protections, these firms would be publishers, liable for all the obscenity, defamation, threats, and abuse that the worst of their users might post. They would face a bitter, perhaps existential, dilemma. They are advertising businesses, reliant on reader clicks. A moderation algorithm that erred on the side of a lawyer’s caution would catch too much in its net, leaving posters angrily muzzled and readers with nothing more provocative than cat pics to scroll through. An algorithm that erred the other way would open a floodgate of lawsuits.
But the internet is not Facebook or Twitter, and it shouldn’t be. Fifteen years ago the major social-media platforms barely existed. Was the internet better or worse? The online public square, now dominated by Twitter, was then constituted of independent blogs aggregated by user-curated feeds. Bloggers are publishers, legally responsible for their posts, but the blogosphere was not noted for its blandness. White-hot critique was common, but defamation and abuse were not—except in unmoderated user comments, for which bloggers could disclaim responsibility, thanks to Section 230.
In a democracy, public conversation is a kind of collective cognition. Before the internet, Americans thought together in pamphlets and newspapers. On the early internet, we thought together in blogs and journals. Today we think together on Twitter and Facebook and within the shrinking circle of journalism’s survivors. Which internet did a better job of keeping Americans informed? Which internet was more open, in the sense of permitting unknown voices with valuable insights to gain a hearing?
Forums where people can chat and post would continue to exist without Section 230. We know this because few countries offer internet platforms such sweeping protections but small user forums are everywhere. What distinguishes the United States is that it is home to gigantic, ad-driven sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.
In practice, the effect of Section 230 has not been to enable experimentation or free expression but to allow leading websites to operate on a massive scale. When you are legally responsible for what happens on your site, you have to moderate the content that appears there. But moderating well is hard. You hope to encourage thoughtful participation of parties who might be hurt by incautious speech but also parties who might feel stifled by overcaution. Moderation becomes harder as the scale and scope of a community grow. Speech that would be great fun in a mixed-martial-arts forum might be disruptive or even harmful in a forum for trauma survivors. Managing a community of both would be challenging. A pluralistic society embraces a wide variety of communities, porous but meaningfully distinct, each with its own culture. In law, the phrase “community standards” signifies a deference to the heterogeneity of norms regarding appropriate expression. In an ironic, even Orwellian, turn, social-media titans have repurposed the phrase to describe their own one-size-fits-all rules, to which every community must now defer or be excluded from the arteries of contemporary civil society.
Without Section 230, the costs and legal jeopardy associated with operating user forums would grow with the size of the forum. Courts apply speech laws with careful sensitivity to context. Most of the time, “I’m gonna kill you!” is not a criminal threat. Occasionally it is. In smaller forums with well-defined norms, it’s easy for both users and moderators to tell the difference. In a nowhere land of everybody, it’s just hard to know. With less context but deep pockets, large forums would have to err on the side of dull caution. Small forums would not.
A more plural internet would be a freer internet, as different communities could have wildly divergent standards about permissible expression. By creating the conditions under which we are all herded into the same virtual space, Section 230 helped turn the internet into a conformity machine. We regulate one another’s speech through shame or abuse, but we have nowhere to go where our own expression might be more tolerable. And while Section 230 immunizes providers from legal liability, it turns those providers into agents of such concentrated influence that they are objects of constant political concern. When the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey are routinely (and justifiably!) browbeaten before Congress, it’s hard to claim that Section 230 has insulated the public sphere from government interference.
Before the internet, we had a communications ecosystem that included network television, metropolitan daily newspapers, niche journals and magazines, and theater and film that audiences chose with their feet to attend. A film might be breathtaking and provocative but not appropriate for prime-time TV. Contemporary social media have swallowed this diversity of forums. Revising Section 230 would be a blow to platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It would force them into the niche that network television once occupied: ubiquitous but consequently bland. A new legal standard should encourage websites to moderate content posted by users (as Section 230 was intended to do), and it should recognize that forums for mixed-martial-arts fans and trauma survivors might apply different norms. But a new standard should not immunize hosts from risk of liability (as Section 230 does) even after notice that material they are hosting is defamatory, threatening, or otherwise unlawful.
In many cases, providers will be correct—and courageous—not to take down material to which some party objects, even under threat of lawsuit. Making affirmative choices about what a broader public ought to see, in spite of controversy, is the very essence of what it means to be a publisher. Online publishers should enjoy the same legal protections as the countless pamphleteers and newspaper editors who came before them, but they should also bear the same responsibility to justify their choices.
Courage requires human judgment, the shirking of which forms the basis of the social-media business model. If made liable for posts flagged as defamatory or unlawful, mass-market platforms including Facebook and Twitter would likely switch to a policy of taking down those posts automatically. Incentives would shift: Mass platforms would have to find a balance among maximizing viewership, encouraging responsible posting, and discouraging users who frivolously flag other people’s posts. They would no longer get a free pass when publishing ads that are false or defamatory. Even these platforms’ highest-profile users could not assume that everything they posted would be amplified to millions of other people.
Vigorous argument and provocative content would migrate to sites where people take responsibility for their own speech, or to forums whose operators devote attention and judgment to the conversations they host. The result would be a higher-quality, less consolidated, and ultimately freer public square.
FBI Director Christopher Wray. (image: Daily Beast)
Democrats Ask FBI Director Wray to Open Criminal Probe Into Trump After Leaked Phone Call
Allan Smith and Alex Moe, NBC News
Excerpt: "A pair of House Democrats are asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to open a criminal probe into President Donald Trump after a leaked phone call showed him pleading with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn his state's election."
Reps. Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice wrote that they believe Trump "engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes."
"As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes," Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York wrote in a letter to Wray on Monday. "We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president."
During the call, a recording of which was obtained by NBC News, Trump asked Raffensperger "to find" enough votes for him to erase President-elect Joe Biden's margin of victory in the state.
"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have," Trump said. "Because we won the state."
The phone call, which went on for about an hour, featured Trump repeatedly pushing Raffensperger to alter the vote total while launching a barrage of discredited conspiracy theories at him and his staff. The president went as far as suggesting that should Raffensperger, a Republican, not act in accordance with Trump's wishes, he could be criminally liable.
"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated."
Raffensperger and his office's general counsel, Ryan Germany, spent the call swatting down the president's claims — at times telling him his specific allegations of fraud were flat-out wrong.
"Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong," Raffensperger said at one point.
In their letter, Lieu and Rice allege, "The evidence of election fraud by Mr. Trump is now in broad daylight."
"Given the more than ample factual predicate, we are making a criminal referral to you to open an investigation into Mr. Trump," the lawmakers wrote.
The president has spent much of the past two months working to overturn the election results, pressing lawmakers in swing states to disregard the vote totals in their states and backing legal challenges that have fallen short — drawing sharp criticism from Democrats and some Republicans.
But the recording of his conversation with Raffensperger has led to a more severe response from Trump's Democratic opponents. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Sunday that the president's conduct was "impeachable," while Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said it "merits nothing less than a criminal investigation."
When asked at a House Democratic leadership news conference on Monday whether the House should take any action over the call, Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he had not read the transcript of the conversation, but, "We're not looking backward, we're looking forward to the inauguration of Joe Biden on Jan. 20.” Jeffries emphasized that House Democrats are focused on addressing the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis in the new Congress.
A rally in Brunswick, Georgia, to protest the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial: Lawyers Aim to Prevent Court From Using the Term 'Victim'
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "Lawyers for a Georgia father and son accused of pursuing and shooting dead an unarmed black man in street ambush have asked a court to forbid prosecutors from using the term 'victim' at their murder trial."
Term would ‘inject prejudice’ into trial, say attorneys for a Georgia father and son accused of shooting unarmed black man
In a motion filed with the superior court of Glynn county on 30 December, attorneys for Gregory and Travis McMichael insist that use of the word to describe 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery would be prejudicial to their defense.
“The purpose of this motion is to prevent the prosecution from ignoring its duty to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that crimes were actually committed and that the McMichaels committed the crimes as charged,” states the four-page motion, signed by lawyers Franklin and Laura Hogue, Robert Rubin and Jason Sheffield.
“Due process requires minimal injection of error or prejudice into these proceedings. Use of terms such as ‘victim’ allows focus to shift to the accused rather than remain on the proof of every element of the crimes charged.”
Arbery was killed on 23 February last year in Brunswick, Georgia, while out jogging. Prosecutors allege that Gregory McMichael, 64, a retired police detective, and his son Travis, 34, chased Arbery in their truck and initiated a confrontation that ended with Travis McMichael shooting Arbery dead.
The McMichaels, who are white, deny charges of felony murder, aggravated assault and false imprisonment. They remain in jail without bond.
A neighbour, William Bryan Jr, who recorded the shooting on his cellphone, denies charges of murder and an attempt to commit false imprisonment.
All three men remain in jail without bond.
Arbery’s killing sparked outrage in the local community and nationally, particularly after it was revealed that local law enforcement initially refused to arrest the suspects and a prosecutor, who later recused himself, wrote a memorandum explaining why he believed the killing was legally justified.
The McMichaels told detectives they believed Arbery, a trained electrician, was responsible for a string of burglaries in their neighbourhood, and merely wanted to ask him about them. They were arrested on 7 May, more than two months after the shooting, when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case.
In May 2020, the Guardian obtained video of an incident involving Arbery and police at a park in Brunswick in 2017, in which officers attempted to tase him after finding him alone in his car. Arbery complied with instructions. Lawyers for his family accused Glynn county police of harassment.
Along with the motion asking for the exclusion of “prejudicial” terms, the McMichaels’ lawyers filed a document pertaining to “safety and decorum of the courtroom” and requesting that spectators be forbidden from wearing attire containing perceived political or racially charged slogans.
The motion cites previous hearings in which “spectators who have aligned themselves with the prosecution” attended court wearing masks featuring the words “Black Lives Matter”, “I can’t breathe” and “Justice for George Floyd”.
Previously, the lawyers have asked for only one photograph of Arbery to be allowed to be shown to jurors, and that the prosecution turn over “Arbery’s disciplinary, criminal, and mental health records” along with his cellphone records and contents of his social media accounts.
No trial date has been set. The Guardian was unable to reach the Cobb county district attorney’s office, which is handling the prosecution, for comment.
President-elect Joe Biden acknowledges the crowd at a rally for Georgia's Democratic candidates for the US Senate, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, on December 15, 2020, in Atlanta. (photo: Joshua Lott/WP/Getty Images)
The Enormous Stakes for Georgia's Two Senate Runoff Elections, Explained
Ella Nilsen, Vox
Nilsen writes: "The fate of President-elect Joe Biden's legislative agenda hinges on the outcome of two US Senate races in Georgia on January 5."
Winning Georgia won’t give Democrats unfettered control in Washington.
The Georgia races are critical because they will determine whether Democrats will take control of the Senate — and, therefore, political power in Washington. With Biden headed to the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still in control of the US House, Democrats will control the executive branch and at least half of the legislative branch once Biden takes office later this month.
Winning both Georgia seats would give Democrats unified control of the executive and legislative branches, albeit with very slim majorities. But even if Democrats surpass expectations and manage to pull out two wins in Tuesday’s Senate runoffs, their ability to pass legislation through Congress will be severely hampered from the get-go. The two Georgia seats would grant them only 50 seats in the Senate, plus Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as a crucial tie-breaker for simple majority votes.
No matter who wins on Tuesday, Democrats will have to contend with Senate Republicans, most notably Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial thorn in the side of Democratic policy. Most bills need to clear a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. Therefore, even if Democrats have control of the Senate, they still need around 10 Republican votes to get much done.
Passing Democratic bills will be extremely difficult in a 50-50 Senate. It will be tough to even pass broad bipartisan bills. But winning Georgia’s seats is the only thing that guarantees that Democrats — rather than McConnell — will have a say on which bills come to the Senate floor for debate. It would also give them the ability to more easily confirm Biden’s Cabinet picks, or his nominees to the federal judiciary and US Supreme Court.
“It’s fundamentally a different situation than 2009 where we had 59 Democratic senators,” Phil Schiliro, who served as President Barack Obama’s legislative director, told Vox. Schiliro remembered the Obama White House had a difficult enough time trying to peel off a few Republican senators here and there to cross the filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
“If Republicans are in control, it’s not a matter of finding one, two, three, four senators,” to side with Democrats, Schiliro said. It’s more a matter of whether McConnell lets Biden’s desired bills see the light of day.
Without the Senate, Biden’s chance of passing bills decreases
Much like Obama after his 2008 election, Biden is coming into office during a time of crisis that will require a swift continued response from his administration and Congress.
Even with the first vaccines being administered in the United States, the Covid-19 pandemic is regularly hitting new peaks of over 200,000 cases per day. Top public health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci have warned of a post-Christmas holiday “surge upon a surge” of additional Covid-19 cases expected.
Biden’s immediate top priorities coming into office are curbing the pandemic and reinvigorating a stagnant economy, likely through a green infrastructure package. He needs buy-in from Congress to do both. Biden can do some things on his own, like signing executive orders, or instructing his federal agencies to reinstate Obama-era regulations on issues ranging from civil rights to protecting the environment.
Working with a split Congress could prove far more difficult. After months of prolonged deadlock between the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House, Congress recently passed a bipartisan $900 billion bill containing additional stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and food and rental assistance for needy families. Biden and Democratic leaders have been clear they want to do more, but any additional assistance could well hinge on McConnell.
“We cannot do this alone,” Biden said in a statement after Congress passed the latest relief bill. “Immediately, starting in the new year, Congress will need to get to work on support for our COVID-19 plan, for support to struggling families, and investments in jobs and economic recovery. There will be no time to waste.”
Even if McConnell finds himself Senate minority leader for the next two years, the filibuster means he will have plenty of power to obstruct Democratic priorities. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) have unequivocally said they don’t want to blow up the Senate filibuster and allow bills to pass via a simple majority rather than the 60-vote threshold.
“That would break the Senate,” Manchin told the New York Times’s Luke Broadwater recently. “If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”
There are still things Democrats can do if they control the Senate with a bare majority. They could potentially use the Congressional Review Act to help Biden repeal some of Trump’s rulemaking. They could confirm Biden’s Cabinet appointments and judicial nominees. And they may be able to work around the filibuster in budget bills.
Biden, who served as a senator for decades before becoming Obama’s vice president, has a long working relationship with McConnell in the Senate. This could prove to be an asset going into his presidency.
“President-elect Biden, one of his strengths is reaching out and finding common ground,” Schiliro said, adding Biden and McConnell “have a shared experience and history in the Senate; they have a shared respect for the Senate, and I think that’s helpful.”
But unless McConnell and Republicans have a change of heart and decide to work with Democrats on even the most bipartisan issues like Covid-19 relief and infrastructure, the next two years could be defined by more partisan gridlock.
The results of the Georgia election could well determine how severe that gridlock is.
Protests in Mountain View, Calif., during the November 1, 2018 walkout. (photo: Stephen Lam/Reuters)
Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize
Paresh Dave and Ayanti Bera, Reuters
Excerpt: "More than 200 employees and contractors at Google parent Alphabet Inc in the United States and Canada have formed a labor union to promote workplace equity and ethical business practices, the group's elected leaders said on Monday."
READ MORE
Bashar al-Assad. (photo: Reuters)
Report: Syrian Detainees' Families Forced to Pay Huge Bribes to Corrupt Officials
Joshua Surtees, Guardian UK
Surtees writes: "Families of detainees in Syrian prisons are routinely forced to bribe officials to be allowed to visit them or to win their release, according to a report that reveals the vast scale of extortion in the detention system."
The sums involved – rising as high as £2m in one jail - are likely to be helping senior members of the Assad regime avoid sanctions, a survey of more than 1,200 former prisoners and family members suggests.
A report by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) says guards, judges, members of the military and in some cases middlemen receive cuts as part of a corrupt network that feeds large amounts of cash into the country’s security apparatus.
About a quarter of those surveyed said they had been asked for extortion money. Some paid a few thousand dollars or less, while others – particularly families living in exile – paid up to $30,000 (£22,000). Officials at one jail extorted about $2.7m in total, the report suggests.
Diab Serrih, the report’s author and ADMSP co-founder, said the money ended up in the pockets of corrupt officials, warlords and what he called the “deep government ruling Syria behind the scenes”.
“It’s an industry of detention,” he said. “The Syrian regime is built on security and intelligence branches. They pay poor salaries to encourage corruption and the bribes finance this infrastructure of detainment.”
Serrih claimed the system was endorsed by figures within the regime, many of whom are subject to sanctions and unable to hold bank accounts abroad. The total amount in bribes is likely to be much higher than that revealed in the report.
According to estimates by humanitarian watchdogs, between 100,000 and 250,000 people were arrested or forcibly disappeared, beginning before the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in 2011. That number had sharply escalated by the end of 2012.
Tens of thousands of people are believed to have been tortured or killed in Syrian jails since the Arab spring began. Sednaya prison, a military facility on the outskirts of Damascus, has long been considered one of the most formidable institutions in Syria.
Serrih was detained in 2006 after forming a youth opposition group and spent five years as a political prisoner before being released in 2011 as the regime cleared jails of opponents to make room for an influx of activists and protesters. He spent his childhood in the Sednaya area before moving to Damascus. After first fleeing to Turkey, he now lives in the Netherlands.
The report says forced disappearance is a major strategy of the Syrian state, designed to control and intimidate people. “Arrest and monetary extortion of the population constitute a great source of funding of the state, and its repressive apparatus specifically,” it says.
The report calls for the international community to pressure supporters of the regime, particularly Russia, into revealing the fate of the disappeared and to allow families to visit those still alive. It also demands that officials reveal where the dead were buried and allow DNA testing of remains so that victims can be returned to their families.
Ahmad is one former prisoner who thought he would never see his family again. He was detained in nine different prisons in three years and his family paid $30,000 in bribes to get him out.
“Like many families, mine kept paying $1,000 here and $1,000 there, hoping they were giving it to a person who could get them information,” he said. “Eventually they paid a large sum to a lawyer who told them that some of it will go to a judge and some to the security forces.”
Abdullah was 19 and planning to desert the army, where he was serving his compulsory military service, when he was stopped at a checkpoint in October 2012. He was taken to prison, tortured and interrogated.
“Every day, four or five people would die and be taken out of the cell,” he said. “They mostly starved to death. Guards would enter the cell and carry out summary beatings, leaving the prisoners in a state of mental terror.”
In court he was convicted of stealing weapons and terrorism charges, and sentenced to 15 years in Sednaya. Food was given to prisoners sometimes, he said, but not if guards were in a bad mood. Talking and reading was forbidden, and torture was meted out to prisoners who were Sunnis but not those from Assad’s Alawite sect.
“My parents hired a lawyer to cut my sentence to six years,” Abdullah said. “The lawyer paid $10,000 dollars in bribes. Me and my three brothers are still working to pay off the debt.”
Many families have spent thousands of dollars trying to obtain news of their loved ones but received nothing in return.
Nadia, a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, said she last saw her husband when he travelled to Damascus in December 2012 to renew identity papers. “He was in a car with his father and seven others,” she said. “The last thing we heard was that they had reached Homs. All nine disappeared.”
In 2016 a neighbour told Nadia that a nephew in the military could help release her husband and father-in-law in exchange for cash. To raise the money, she sold land and a house in Syria, borrowed money from relatives and even sold her jewellery.
“We paid $5,000,” said Nadia. “Later, we were told that their release was imminent but that another $5,000 was needed. After the payment was made through a western Union transfer, they disappeared. It was a scam.
“It felt like it was so close and all in my hands, and when it didn’t happen, I broke down.”
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden receives a Covid-19 vaccination. (photo: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images)
The Bungled Vaccine Rollout Is a Bad Omen for the Climate Crisis
Kate Aronoff, The New Republic
Aronoff writes: "America's disastrous response to Covid-19 is an unsettling preview of how it might respond to the climate change crisis."
illions of usable Covid-19 vaccine doses in the United States could expire by the end of January before being administered. Roughly 10 percent of the available 40 million doses have been dispatched so far. Coronavirus testing and contact-tracing efforts have stumbled over similar bureaucratic dysfunction, with the country falling behind governments with comparatively paltry resources. Even judged against its former self, the U.S. is coming up short. As New York magazine’s David Wallace Wells pointed out last week, New York City vaccinated five million people against smallpox over just two weeks in 1947. Since vaccinations began in the U.S. on December 14, 4.3 million people here have received their first shots.
Covid-19 is one of the simpler problems humanity will have to deal with this century. America’s poor handling of it doesn’t inspire much confidence. Although distributing a vaccine is logistically complicated, it’s nothing compared to the system overhaul required for speedy decarbonization and to adapt to a warmer world. With Trump reluctantly on his way out of the White House, Democrats are now eager to reclaim this country’s mantle as the leader of the free world. Whether that title was ever one to be proud of is its own question. And ever-climbing Covid-19 deaths should now cast doubt on whether it’s even remotely accurate. It’s worth keeping that in mind as policymakers think about how to meet future challenges.
There’s no vaccine for global warming. The energetic basis of society as we know it needs to be simultaneously dismantled and rebuilt. That means building prodigious numbers of wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines, and rewiring the grid to both accept and distribute electrons. All the while, fossil fuel profits that have historically furnished state budgets the world over will have to go unrealized. Internal combustion engines will need to become a thing of the past, as will the way most of us currently cool and heat homes and cook dinner. In all likelihood, at least millions of people will have to leave their homes and find new ones in other neighborhoods, regions, or countries—from the wealthy homeowners in California’s combustible hills to the middle- and working-class beachfront communities being swallowed by the sea, to farmers on infertile land. In some places, it’ll just be too hot for humans to live. All of these problems amount to a coordination nightmare orders of magnitude larger than the one posed by Covid-19.
It’s tempting to blame the U.S. failure in dealing with the pandemic on Donald Trump. And the outgoing president does have blood on his hands. But his administration didn’t single-handedly hollow out the parts of the state best suited to handle this crisis. The government that’s failing to contain and inoculate against the novel coronavirus has been decades in the making, as policymakers starved some parts of the state while grotesquely bloating others. Over roughly the same period, when a record amount of greenhouse gases have seeped into the atmosphere, both the military and the prison system have grown in the U.S. as its safety net has been winnowed. Gross domestic product has ballooned too, although wages here have stayed roughly flat since about 1973, amid a record takeoff in corporate profits. The mission to protect those profits is a global one: The U.S. has joined other wealthy nations in blocking a proposal by India and South Africa to suspend intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines. So as it hoards and wastes vaccines, the U.S. is helping cut off their supply to millions in the global south.
The right-wing intellectuals, think tanks, and politicians who spent much of the last century enshrining these core governmental capacities have simultaneously taken a sledgehammer to the idea of a government that can improve and protect working people’s lives—and enlisted both Democrats and Republicans in their cause. “While neoconservatives and neoliberals diverge in their political ideals,” geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written, “they share certain convictions about the narrow legitimacy of the public sector in the conduct of everyday life, despite the U.S. constitutional admonition that the government should ‘promote the general welfare.’ For them, wide-scale protections from calamity and opportunities for advancement should not be a public good centrally organized to benefit everyone who is eligible.” She calls this phenomenon the “antistate state,” driven by “people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power. Once they have achieved an elected or appointed position in government they have to make what they do seem transparently legitimate, and if budgets are any indication, they spend a lot of money even as they claim they’re ‘shrinking government.’”
The “antistate state” is now dealing with the pandemic and climate crisis. And while its hallmarks aren’t unique to the U.S., it exists here in a particularly advanced form, having been encouraged to fester for the last few decades. On New Year’s Eve, in one recent example, all but five Senate Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders voted to squash a debate about $2,000 survival checks for the sake of passing a $740 billion defense authorization bill.
Joe Biden ran on the promise of healing the nation and nursing it back to a greatness allegedly achieved sometime between December 2008 and November 2016. Restored to its Obama-era highs, the U.S., he promises, will once again be “at the head of the table,” leading the way for the world in dealing with—among other things—the climate crisis. Given its response to Covid-19, though, it’s not at all clear whether that’s a challenge the U.S. is up to.
That’s not to say the U.S. can’t meet the challenges ahead. We know from past example that quick, massive change is possible. Days after his inauguration in March 1932, Roosevelt pitched a program called the Civilian Conservation Corps to his closest advisers. It was signed into law by the end of the month, and the program accepted its first recruits by April 7. The New Deal proceeded to build a welfare state without so much as a computer. There aren’t many hard and fast barriers around what the U.S. government can and cannot do: With virtually unlimited wealth at its disposal, the ceiling is high. But taking the lead on Covid, climate, or anything else will require fundamentally rethinking what it is the U.S. government does and who it serves.
As the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. has a critical role to play in averting catastrophic levels of warming. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will or even can take the lead, however much time Biden climate envoy John Kerry might spend hobnobbing with world leaders and fossil fuel executives about it. As with Covid-19, American failure doesn’t need to be the world’s: Other countries and regions are already showing more effective and humane paths forward, both against pandemics and against fossil fuels. It may well be time for the U.S. to follow—with all the humility and adaptability that role implies.
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