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25 February 21
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Bess Levin | On Top of Everything Else, Ted Cruz Might Have Broken the Law
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes:
It sure sounds like the senator funneled political donations into his own pocket.
ed Cruz is currently in hot water for his decision to abandon Texas for Cancún in the middle of a state of emergency, for claiming the trip was his daughters’ idea, for getting caught in a web of lies over the origins of said trip, and for blaming the whole thing on both the media and the “assholes” who leaked his wife’s text messages which ultimately blew up Cruz’s spot. That’s kept him pretty busy for the time being, but it appears he may soon have to juggle multiple scandals, according to a new investigation concerning a shadow entity that the FEC may have cause to look into.
Salon’s Roger Sollenberger reports that in 2020, a leadership PAC attached to Cruz called Jobs, Freedom, and Security paid $1.2 million, or almost 80% of its entire operating budget, to a company called Reagan Investments LLC for “sponsorship advertising.” Per Sollenberger, “the only other committee to register any disbursements to that company was Trump Make America Great Again, for a fundraising promotion for Cruz’s books in December…However, the Trump group clearly marked the payment for ‘collateral: books.’” In other words, it’s possible Cruz may have bought his own books through this mystery company and then paid himself royalties, which would be illegal. Per Salon:
On Jan. 4, 2021…Cruz traveled to Georgia before the runoff elections, his leadership PAC reported a $240,000 expense for “sponsorship advertising” to Reagan Investments, which appears to correlate with another series of small-dollar donations that poured into the PAC over the next few days. It isn’t clear how much of the funds raised, if any, went to Republican runoff campaigns: Cruz’s PAC only spent a few thousand dollars in support of former Sen. Kelly Loeffler. In fact, most of the contributions rolled in after the runoffs were over and as the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection were playing out, while Cruz joined a handful of Republican Senators to object to the counting of Electoral College votes.
Legal experts tell Salon that if the money was for promotional book sales, as the filings may suggest, then the leadership PAC could be using Reagan Investments as a pass-through to allow Cruz to keep the royalties, which are generally between 10% and 15% for hardcover books, and about half that for paperbacks. Political candidates are not allowed to do that through their campaign committees. But the identity of Reagan Investments itself poses a mystery.
According to Cruz’s PAC’s filings, Reagan Investments LLC is located in an Austin office building and matches the address listed for a consulting firm founded by Jeff Roe, who managed Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid and 2018 reelection campaign against Beto O’Rourke. There’s also this:
[Regan Investments LLC] does not appear in Texas business registries. OpenCorporates records, however, show that a company by that name was organized in Missouri on Jan. 23, 2020—two days after the PAC reported its first-ever payment to the company, of about $57,000. The agent on that registration, James Thomas III, was involved with a scheme that unlawfully funneled dark money from a conservative nonprofit to a political committee, resulting in a $350,000 FEC fine in 2018. In a phone interview, Thomas claimed he was simply the organizing agent and could not immediately recall who operated the company, or its purpose.
Roe was also connected to the dark money scheme, and although the FEC did not cite Roe for a violation, Thomas told investigators that he “primarily took direction” from Roe.
Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, told Salon: “I don’t know that we can conclude that Reagan Investments LLC is a pass-through for book purchases. Trump MAGA described its payments to Reagan Investments as ‘collateral: books,’ whereas Cruz’s leadership PAC described every payment to Reagan Investments LLC as ‘sponsorship advertising.’ Just because Trump’s payments were for a specific purpose doesn’t mean we can conclude that Cruz’s payments were for that same purpose when the payments were reported differently. That said, I really don’t know what ‘sponsorship advertising’ means, and it looks like Cruz’s leadership PAC was the only political committee that reported payments for that purpose in the entire 2020 election cycle. Cruz’s failure to meaningfully disclose how his leadership PAC is spending its money means we can only guess about where the million-plus ultimately went.” If Reagan Investments does serve as a pass-through for book purchases, though, and allows Cruz to collect royalties, the Texas lawmaker, per Salon, “would appear to be converting donations to personal use and possibly filing false FEC reports.”
Unfortunately, Cruz’s campaign did not respond to Salon’s request for comment, leaving…a whole bunch of questions in need of answers!
Former president Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump Tax Returns Are Now in the Hands of the Manhattan District Attorney
Tucker Higgins, CNBC
Higgins writes:
ormer President Donald Trump’s tax records have been turned over to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the ex-president’s last-ditch effort to keep the documents shielded.
A spokesperson for Vance, Danny Frost, confirmed that a subpoena was enforced on Monday against Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, hours after the nation’s highest court rejected Trump’s appeal.
The subpoena demanded Trump’s personal and corporate records dating to 2011, including his tax returns. Trump bucked modern precedent by refusing to release his tax returns to the public even as he mounted two campaigns for the presidency.
A spokesperson for the former president did not immediately provide comment Thursday. After the court allowed the transfer, Trump pledged to “fight on” and said Vance was pursuing a “fishing expedition.”
The long-running investigation has been closely guarded. Early reports suggested that the DA was looking into hush money payments made on Trump’s behalf to women who alleged affairs with the real estate magnate. Trump denied the affairs.
More recent court filings have indicated that Vance may be investigating Trump and his namesake company, The Trump Organization, for possible bank and insurance fraud. Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations of financial impropriety and has accused investigators of having partisan motives.
The fight over Trump’s tax documents twice made it to the Supreme Court. Both times, the panel refused to stop lower court rulings siding with Vance. In July, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion for a 7-2 court rejecting Trump’s sweeping argument that he was immune to state-level criminal investigations while in office.
“In our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence.’ Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States,” said Roberts, who was appointed to the court by then-President George W. Bush.
After that ruling, Trump’s attorneys continued to fight the subpoena on the grounds that it was overly broad and issued in bad faith, but lower courts rejected those claims. In October, Trump’s attorneys once again asked the Supreme Court to step in, but the court wrote in a one-line order on Monday that it would not do so.
Vance’s possession of Trump’s tax records does not guarantee that the public will ever learn what they contain. The records were obtained in connection with a grand jury investigation, and New York state law requires that grand jury proceedings are confidential. It is likely that the only way the public will see the records is if Vance ultimately brings charges and includes portions of the records in charging documents.
Senior Chief Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Handling) Jackie Velasco directs an E/A-18G Growler. (photo: Erik Melgar/U.S. Navy)
Michael T. Klare | Biden, Climate Change, and China: A New Cold War = A Scalding Planet
Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch
Klare writes: "Slowing the pace of climate change and getting 'tough' on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration."
It began with fire. It ended with ice. In between, there were the storms and floods. And the extremity of it all should have caught anyone’s attention.
First, of course, there was that burning season that set staggering records across California — four million acres incinerated, double the previous high — Oregon, and Washington. Those devastating burns spread as far east as Colorado at a moment when the Southwest may well have entered a climate-change-induced “megadrought.”
Then, of course, there was that Atlantic hurricane season: a record fifth-straight above-normal season with 30 named storms stretching across two alphabets, 12 of which “landed” with often devastating effect in this country. Let’s not forget those floods either, one of which set a record in Michigan.
And finally, of course, as 2021 began, the stunning winter storms with record cold and ice that essentially turned Texas into a failed state. Millions of Texans were left without power or running water in freezing temperatures evidently caused at least in part because the Arctic is rapidly overheating, pushing frigid air southward in winter. Of course, the governor of Texas promptly went on Fox News to assure those iced-in millions that it was all the fault of alternative energy systems. (It wasn’t, not faintly.)
And keep in mind that such climate extremity is becoming the norm. After all, the last seven years have been the hottest in recorded history and 2020 tied for the warmest of them all.
Such records (a word that, when it comes to climate change, has to be used again and again) should be daunting enough to make one thing obvious, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out today: the two greatest greenhouse gas emitters on planet Earth, the United States and China, desperately need to collaborate to bring climate change under control. It’s so self-evident it should hardly need to be said and yet, eerily enough, as Klare has been reporting, the U.S. and China seem ever more locked into a new, increasingly militarized, cold-war-style relationship, one that the Biden administration seems by no means prepared to avert. Under the circumstances, that’s the definition of a catastrophe.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
lowing the pace of climate change and getting “tough” on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration. Evidently, he believes that he can tame a rising China with harsh pressure tactics, while still gaining its cooperation in areas of concern to Washington. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs during the presidential election campaign, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change.” If, however, our new president truly believes that he can build an international coalition to gang up on China and secure Beijing’s cooperation on climate change, he’s seriously deluded. Indeed, though he could succeed in provoking a new cold war, he won’t prevent the planet from heating up unbearably in the process.
Biden is certainly aware of the dangers of global warming. In that same Foreign Affairs article, he labeled it nothing short of an “existential threat,” one that imperils the survival of human civilization. Acknowledging the importance of relying on scientific expertise (unlike our previous president who repeatedly invented his own version of scientific reality), Biden affirmed the conclusion of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or there will be hell to pay. He then pledged to “rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration,” which he indeed did, and to “make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero [greenhouse gas] emissions by 2050” — the target set by the IPCC.
Even such dramatic actions, he indicated, will not be sufficient. Other countries will have to join America in moving toward a global “net-zero” state in which any carbon emissions would be compensated for by equivalent carbon removals. “Because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions,” he wrote, “I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster.”
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases right now (although the U.S. remains number one historically), would obviously be Washington’s natural partner in this effort. Here, though, Biden’s antagonistic stance toward that country is likely to prove a significant impediment. Rather than prioritize collaboration with China on climate action, he chose to castigate Beijing for its continued reliance on coal. The Biden climate plan, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “includes insisting that China… stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil-fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative.” Then he went further by portraying the future effort to achieve a green economy as a potentially competitive, not collaborative, struggle with China, saying,
“I will make investment in research and development a cornerstone of my presidency, so that the United States is leading the charge in innovation. There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else when it comes to clean energy.”
Unfortunately, though he’s not wrong on China’s climate change challenges (similar, in many respects, to our own country’s), you can’t have it both ways. If climate change is an existential threat and international collaboration between the worst greenhouse gas emitters key to overcoming that peril, picking fights with China over its energy behavior is a self-defeating way to start. Whatever obstacles China does pose, its cooperation in achieving that 1.5-degree limit is critical. “If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter,” Biden said of global efforts to deal with climate change. Sadly, his insistence on pummeling China on so many fronts (and appointing China hawks to his foreign policy team to do so) will ensure that he gets it wrong. The only way to avert catastrophic climate change is for the United States to avoid a new cold war with China by devising a cooperative set of plans with Beijing to speed the global transition to a green economy.
Why Cooperation Is Essential
With such cooperation in mind, let’s review the basics on how those two countries affect world energy consumption and global carbon emissions: the United States and China are the world’s two leading consumers of energy and its two main emitters of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas. As a result, they exert an outsized influence on the global climate equation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China accounted for approximately 22% of world energy consumption in 2018; the U.S., 16%. And because both countries rely so heavily on fossil fuels for energy generation — China largely on coal, the U.S. more on oil and natural gas — their carbon-dioxide emissions account for an even larger share of the global total: China alone, nearly 29% in 2018; the U.S., 18%; and combined, an astonishing 46%.
It’s what will happen in the future, though, that really matters. If the world is to keep global temperatures from rising above that 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, every major economy should soon be on a downward-trending trajectory in terms of both fossil-fuel consumption and CO2 emissions (along with a compensating increase in renewable energy output). Horrifyingly enough, however, on their current trajectories, over the next two decades the combined fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions of China and the United States are still expected to rise, not fall, before stabilizing in the 2040s at a level far above net zero. According to the IEA, if the two countries stick to anything like their current courses, their combined fossil-fuel consumption would be approximately 17% higher in 2040 than in 2018, even if their CO2 emissions would rise by “only” 3%. Any increase of that kind over the next two decades would spell one simple word for humanity: D-O-O-M.
True, both countries are expected to substantially increase their investment in renewable energy during the next 20 years, even as places like India are expected to account for an ever-increasing share of global energy use and CO2 emissions. Still, as long as Beijing and Washington continue to lead the world in both categories, any effort to achieve net-zero and avert an almost unimaginable climate cataclysm will have to fall largely on their shoulders. This would, however, require a colossal reduction in fossil-fuel consumption and the ramping up of renewables on a scale unlike any engineering project this planet has ever seen.
The Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, an influential Chinese think tank, has calculated what might be involved in reshaping China’s coal-dependent electrical power system to reach the goal of a 1.5-degree limit on global warming. Its researchers believe that, over the next three decades, this would require adding the equivalent of three times current global wind power capacity and four times that of solar power at the cost of approximately $20 trillion.
A similar transformation will be required in the United States, although with some differences: while this country relies far less on coal than China to generate electricity, it relies more on natural gas (a less potent emitter of CO2, but a fossil fuel nonetheless) and its electrical grid — as recent events in Texas have demonstrated — is woefully unprepared for climate change and will have to be substantially rebuilt at enormous cost.
And that represents only part of what needs to be done to avert planetary catastrophe. To eliminate carbon emissions from oil-powered vehicles, both countries will have to replace their entire fleets of cars, vans, trucks, and buses with electric-powered ones and develop alternative fuels for their trains, planes, and ships — an undertaking of equal magnitude and expense.
There are two ways all of this can be done: separately or together. Each country could devise its own blueprint for such a transition, developing its own green technologies and seeking financing wherever it could be found. As in the fight over fifth generation (5G) telecommunications, each could deny scientific knowledge and technical know-how to its rival and insist that allies buy only its equipment, whether or not it best suits their purposes — a stance taken by the Trump administration with respect to the Chinese company Huawei’s 5G wireless technology. Alternatively, the U.S. and China could cooperate in developing green technologies, share information and know-how, and work together in disseminating them around the world.
On the question of which approach is more likely to achieve success, the answer is too obvious to belabor. Only those prepared to risk civilization’s survival would choose the former — and yet that’s the choice that both sides may indeed make.
Why a New Cold War Precludes Climate Salvation
Those in Washington who favor a tougher approach toward China and the bolstering of U.S. military forces in the Pacific claim that, under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist regime has become more authoritarian at home and more aggressive abroad, endangering key U.S. allies in the Pacific and threatening our vital interests. Certainly, when it comes to the increasing repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province or pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, there can be little doubt of Beijing’s perfidy, though on other issues, there’s room for debate. On another subject, though, there really should be no room for debate at all: the impact of a new cold war between the planet’s two great powers on the chances for a successful global response to a rapidly warming planet.
There are several obvious reasons for this. First, increased hostility will ensure a competitive rather than collaborative search for vital solutions, resulting in wasted resources, inadequate financing, duplicative research, and the stalled international dissemination of advanced green technologies. A hint of such a future lies in the competitive rather than collaborative development of vaccines for Covid-19 and their distressingly chaotic distribution to Africa and the rest of the developing world, ensuring that the pandemic will have a life into 2022 or 2023 with an ever-rising death toll.
Second, a new cold war will make international diplomacy more difficult when it comes to ensuring worldwide compliance with the Paris climate agreement. Consider it a key lesson for the future that cooperation between President Barack Obama and Xi Jinping made the agreement possible in the first place, creating pressure on reluctant but vital powers like India and Russia to join as well. Once President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement, that space evaporated and global adherence withered. Only by recreating such a U.S.-China climate alliance will it be possible to corral other key players into full compliance. As suggested recently by Todd Stern, the lead American negotiator at the 2015 Paris climate summit, “There is simply no way to contain climate change worldwide without full-throttle engagement by both countries.”
A cold war environment would make such cooperation a fantasy.
Third, such an atmosphere would ensure a massive increase in military expenditures on both sides, sopping up funds needed for the transition to a green-energy economy. In addition, as the pace of militarization accelerated, fossil-fuel use would undoubtedly increase, as the governments of both countries favored the mass production of gas-guzzling tanks, bombers, and warships.
Finally, there is no reason to assume a cold war will always remain cold. The current standoff between the U.S. and China in the Pacific is different from the one that existed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in Europe during the historic Cold War. There is no longer anything like an “Iron Curtain” to define the boundaries between the two sides or keep their military forces from colliding with each another. While the risk of war in Europe was ever-present back then, each side knew that such a boundary-crossing assault might trigger a nuclear exchange and so prove suicidal. Today, however, the air and naval forces of China and the U.S. are constantly intermingling in the East and South China Seas, making a clash or collision possible at any time. So far, cooler heads have prevailed, preventing such encounters from sparking armed violence, but as tensions mount, a hot war between the U.S. and China cannot be ruled out.
Because American forces are poised to strike at vital targets on the Chinese mainland, it’s impossible to preclude China’s use of nuclear weapons or, if preparations for such use are detected, a preemptive U.S. nuclear strike. Any full-scale thermonuclear conflagration resulting from that would probably cause a nuclear winter and the death of billions of people, making the climate-change peril moot. But even if nuclear weapons are not employed, a war between the two powers could result in immense destruction in China’s industrial heartland and to such key U.S. allies as Japan and South Korea. Fires ignited in the course of battle would, of course, add additional carbon to the atmosphere, while the subsequent breakdown in global economic activity would postpone by years any transition to a green economy.
An Alliance for Global Survival
If Joe Biden genuinely believes that climate change is an “existential threat” and that the United States “must lead the world,” it’s crucial that he stop the slide toward a new cold war with China and start working with Beijing to speed the transition to a green-energy economy focused on ensuring global compliance with the Paris climate agreement. This would not necessarily mean abandoning all efforts to pressure China on human rights and other contentious issues. It’s possible to pursue human rights, trade equity, and planetary survival at the same time. Indeed, as both countries come to share the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, progress on other issues could become easier.
Assuming Biden truly means what he says about overcoming the climate threat and “getting it right,” here are some of the steps he could take to achieve meaningful progress:
* Schedule a “climate summit” with Xi Jinping as soon as possible to discuss joint efforts to overcome global warming, including the initiation of bilateral programs to speed advances in areas like the spread of electric vehicles, the improvement of battery-storage capabilities, the creation of enhanced methods of carbon sequestration, and the development of alternative aviation fuels.
* At the conclusion of the summit, joint working groups on these and other matters should be established, made up of senior figures from both sides. Research centers and universities in each country should be designated as lead actors in key areas, with arrangements made for cooperative partnerships and the sharing of climate-related technical data.
* At the same time, presidents Biden and Xi should announce the establishment of an “Alliance for Global Survival,” intended to mobilize international support for the Paris climate agreement and strict adherence to its tenets. As part of this effort, the two leaders should plan joint meetings with other world leaders to persuade them to replicate the measures that Biden and Xi have agreed to work on cooperatively. As needed, they could offer to provide financial aid and technical assistance to poorer states to launch the necessary energy transition.
* Presidents Biden and Xi should agree to reconvene annually to review progress in all these areas and designate surrogates to meet on a more regular basis. Both countries should publish an online “dashboard” exhibiting progress in every key area of climate mitigation.
So, Joe, if you really meant what you said about overcoming climate change, these are some of the things you should focus on to get it right. Choose this path and guarantee us all a fighting chance to avert civilizational collapse. Opt for the path of confrontation instead — the one your administration already appears headed down — and that hope is likely to disappear into an unbearable world of burning, flooding, famine, and extreme storms until the end of time. After all, without remarkable effort, a simple formula will rule all our lives: a new cold war = a scalding planet.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), 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.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.
Signs sit near the White House following a 2018 March for Our Lives rally. (photo: Zach Gibson/Getty)
Youth Activists Are Heard in Biden's White House, but They Want to See More Action
Juana Summers, NPR
Summers writes:
he day before President Biden's allies on Capitol Hill were set to roll out his sweeping immigration overhaul, a group of activists rallied outside of the headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, projecting a message onto the building's façade."ICE is deporting and torturing people," the all-caps message read. "Abolish ICE and CBP," a reference to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The protesters were organized by United We Dream, the immigrant youth organization. United We Dream is one of a number of youth-led groups in regular contact with the Biden administration on key policy issues. While these activists are encouraged by what some described as open lines of communication to the White House, they say they're waiting to see whether that translates into policy victories.
"What we know and what I learned as an organizer is that access does not equal power, " said Greisa Martinez, the executive director of United We Dream. "So we continue to organize."
After a Democratic primary that was rife with generational tensions, Biden has so far managed to hold together the Democratic coalition that elected him, including the young people who turned out for Biden in droves. Now, younger Americans are confronting the intersecting crises of the coronavirus pandemic, an economic crisis, a national reckoning on race and justice and the urgent climate crisis.
"Democrats control the levers of power in Washington with Joe Biden as the party leader," said Jesse Barba, a spokesman for Young Invincibles. "And with it, they are having to own the outcome of how young people will weather the economic and health storms of the last four years."
During the campaign, candidate Biden pulled out all the stops to make sure that young people knew the issues that mattered to them were deeply felt, in an effort to ensure that they would show up at the ballot box. Now, the Biden White House is acutely focused on making sure that those same young people feel heard.
Leaders of youth-led movements have been invited to participate in regular meetings with administration officials, including Cedric Richmond, a Biden senior adviser and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
"I think there's a listening ear that's coming from the administration and Democrats on the Hill, for that matter," said Ben Wessel, the executive director of NextGen America, a progressive group dedicated to mobilizing young people. "I think time will tell whether that listening ear becomes an action oriented or a legislative strategy."
Richmond and Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, held a virtual meeting last week with more than a dozen youth activists focused on community violence prevention. The White House released an official readout of the meeting, saying that Rice and Richmond "underscored President Biden's commitment to taking action to make our communities safer and to ensure that equity drives our policymaking across the federal government."
One of the activists involved in that discussion was Max Markham, the policy director for March For Our Lives, the group was founded by survivors of the deadly 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. He says he and his colleagues have been "heartened" by some of the conversations with the administration.
"We have been vocal in our expectations that the Biden Administration has to have a plan and has to address gun violence as a public health emergency and that starts with staffing, that starts with who they're hiring and who they're empowering and the voices that they're amplifying," Markham said in an interview.
While some activists say they appreciate having open lines of communication with the administration, including at its highest levels, they do not plan to stop asserting public pressure on the administration from the outside.
March For Our Lives this week called on Biden to release a plan to curb gun violence in the first 100 days of his administration, that includes appointing a senior staffer as director of gun violence prevention to focus on the issue. March For Our Lives is also calling on Biden to leverage the Stafford Act, the federal disaster relief statute, to unlock $1 billion in funding "to be used for community intervention programming and data collection with a public health lens."
"We got the president into office and we expect results," Markham said. "And we will make our voices known if that is not the case."
The early days of the Biden administration have been focused on meeting the immediate needs of the nation as it grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, including a $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan currently before Congress.
Many young activists pointed to that package as a meaningful example of why it's so important that they be involved in policy conversations. The package now includes adult dependents among those eligible for stimulus payments.
In the two previous rounds of stimulus payments, adults who could be claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax return were not eligible for money, a move that excluded more than 13.5 million adult dependents, according to the People's Policy Project.
"People think that adult dependents aren't having to pay their rent, aren't contributing to their own household income and well-being," said Sarah Audelo, the executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action. "So there are some pieces that are very distinct to, 'Wow, this is an experience that someone who's 20 years old will only have.' So we need people who have that experience to be able to bring that perspective forward."
Policy tensions lie ahead
Many organizers also say they're keenly aware that the administration is currently having its honeymoon period.
"At some point, we're gonna run out of easy things to do," said Wessel. "The to do list is going to get more challenging — things that are going to take a little more political courage and bravery, or a little more muscle in persuading the rest of America, not just young progressives."
One early point of tension came when Biden, speaking at a CNN town hall, outwardly rejected calls to eliminate up to $50,000 of student loan debt, a priority of many young organizers and liberal Democrats.
"I think there's just a lot of education clearly that needs to be done about who holds student debt, about the impact of student debt," said Audelo. "I was hoping we were in a more positive place but then the town hall response was like, 'OK cool, we're like 15 years behind.'"
Another potential point of conflict is the issue of immigration, with Democrats in need of at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate to pass Biden's sweeping immigration bill.
The proposal offers a path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. There have been steep political challenges to moving immigration legislation through Congress, and Republicans have already signaled resistance to Biden's legislation.
Greisa Martinez of United We Dream said that part of the work that her organization and others are doing is engaging on policy with administration officials, but also "being clear about what's at stake for folks outside of the administration."
Still, Martinez is undeterred.
"It's not just undocumented people that are clamoring for a different direction on immigration. It's millions of people that went out to vote and people are super clear that deportations and enforcement and detention is not the pathway that the majority of American voters want to go, and that's why they chose Joe Biden," Martinez said. "What we know for sure is that we can't leave 2021 without any protection for people."
Seeking more seats at the table
The demands of young organizers are sweeping in terms of policy, but they are also calling on the administration to bring more young people into the administration in meaningful ways.
Many groups are calling on Biden to establish an Office of Young Americans within the White House and to appoint a director of youth engagement who will sit on the Domestic Policy Council.
"Biden does owe a lot to young people. But it's not just repaying us for helping him to get elected, it's making sure that he actually is working with us," said Charlotte Kerpen, the chair of the High School Democrats of America. "For Biden to have a group of young people that he can really consult to, would make sure that the policies are not only reflecting the beliefs of young people, but are helping to make sure that in the future, the policies are representing what we have always believed. "
Earlier this month, the White House announced that Vincent Toranzo, a high school senior from Pembroke Pines, Fla., would serve on the administration's COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, aimed at addressing COVID-19 related health and social inequities.
Activists pointed to other staffers with backgrounds in youth-led movements like Maggie Thomas, now the chief of staff in the Office of Domestic Climate Policy. She previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Democrats Jay Inslee and Elizabeth Warren, before helping to launch the climate group Evergreen.
"In the past we've seen too often where there will be a public engagement arm and it's just separate from the actual policy work that's happening in an administration," said Audelo. "And that's just unacceptable and that is not what young people are trying to do. They want to make sure that their concerns, that the unique perspective that young people have into the fight on climate, into the fights on the economy... that those perspectives, their ideas are reflected in actual policy discussions."
Rachel Levine appears during her confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C., on 25 February. (photo: Reuters)
Trans Doctor Rachel Levine Faces Historic Senate Confirmation Hearing
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes:
Levine would make history as the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the US Senate
r Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and health official from Pennsylvania, faces a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday as Joe Biden’s nominee for assistant health secretary. The process could see her become the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the US Senate.
If confirmed, Levine, 63, would make history and break several glass ceilings. In a country which still only has a handful of openly trans public officials, she would be the most high-profile, occupying a senior position in the Biden administration with major responsibilities in the pandemic response.
Announcing her nomination last month, Biden said Levine would bring “steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get through this pandemic … She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”
Levine is practiced in the art of negotiating confirmation hearings. She had to be confirmed by the Pennsylvania senate in 2015 for her first public role as physician general of the state.
The following year she told the Washington Post that she succeeded in securing a unanimous confirmation vote after she sat down one-on-one with the state senators. “With very few exceptions my being transgender is not an issue,” she told the newspaper.
Since the start of the pandemic she has led Pennsylvania’s effort to combat the health crisis as the state’s health secretary. In such a highly visible role she has been confronted by a rash of hostile and anti-trans mockery and abuse on social media and even at a public fair.
Last July the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, who brought Levine into public office, felt it necessary to put out a statement defending her against what he called “vile acts” and “relentless comments and slurs”. He said she was a “highly skilled, valued and capable member of my administration and transgender”.
Biden’s nomination of Levine is one of several moves taken by the new administration to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Last month the president lifted Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the US military.
Earlier this month Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay person to be confirmed to a cabinet post as transportation secretary.
A Yemeni child is seen at a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of the northern city of Marib in Yemen on Feb. 18, 2021. (photo: Nabil Alawzari/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Yemen Faces the Worst Famine the World Has Seen
in Decades, the UN Warns
Democrats Pressure Biden on US Backing for Saudi War in Yemen
Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Emmons writes:
Progressive lawmakers sent Biden a letter seeking details on his plan to halt U.S. aid for offensive military operations in Yemen.
eeks after President Joe Biden announced he would end U.S. support for “offensive” military operations in Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of progressive lawmakers are asking his administration to clarify what forms of U.S. support will continue.
In his first foreign policy address earlier this month, Biden said his administration was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” But he also promised that the U.S. would continue to help Saudi Arabia defend itself against missile attacks, including from Iranian-backed militias like the Houthis in Yemen. In the following weeks, his administration has yet to explain how it distinguishes between offensive and defensive forms of support.
On Thursday, 41 members of Congress sent a letter to Biden expressing support for his decision to limit U.S. backing for the war but asked him to clarify what forms of “military, intelligence, [and] logistical” support it defines as “offensive” activities and what forms of support will continue.
“You have said that the United States will ‘continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people’ from ‘threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries,’” the letter says. “What activities does this policy entail, and under what legal authority is the administration authorized to engage in such activities?”
The letter was written by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and signed by 38 others. In a phone interview Wednesday, DeFazio told The Intercept that he wasn’t aware of any formal communication between the Biden administration and Congress about their policy, and said the letter was trying to get answers.
“That raises questions that we would like to have answered,” DeFazio said. “How do you define weapons? What’s the difference between an offensive weapon or a defensive weapon? Congress has acted a number of times to block arms sales to the Saudis. So we just have a number of questions. We think it’s obviously a tremendous improvement over the position of the Trump administration. We would just like more clarification, more detail about what the shift means and also what [legal] authority they’re depending upon to continue to be involved in this conflict in any way.”
Khanna told The Intercept that he had informal conversations with Biden administration officials about how they interpret “offensive” operations, but he wanted the administration to clarify the details with Congress as a “formal statement of administration policy.”
“My understanding is that the ban on any U.S. participation in Saudi military strikes applies very broadly to any Saudi bombing or missile strikes into Yemen,” Khanna said. “There is no wiggle room for the Saudis to claim they’re attacking a place in Yemen out of self-defense. That is my understanding of how the administration intends the directive.”
Asked about the letter, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council referred The Intercept to the Department of Defense and the State Department for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond, and spokespersons for the State Department and director of national intelligence declined to comment.
The letter comes as the Biden administration is expected to release a long-awaited intelligence report on the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. The report is likely to serve as a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and could reopen old wounds about the direct involvement of the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After the assassination in 2018, Congress passed measures to block arms sales and direct President Donald Trump to cut off U.S. support for the war in Yemen, but he vetoed them.
Biden is expected to call King Salman of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, to discuss the U.S.-Saudi relationship before the release of the Khashoggi report. As a candidate, Biden took a much harsher line on arms sales, saying in a November 2019 primary debate that “there is very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Saudi Arabia and the UAE began their intervention in March 2015, after an Iranian-backed rebel group overran the country’s capital, Sanaa. Under the Obama and Trump administrations, the U.S. supported the intervention with arms sales and intelligence, even as the Saudi air force bombed civilian targets, like markets, schools, and medical clinics. The Trump administration cut off midair refueling for Saudi warplanes in 2018, but other forms of U.S. support continued.
Last month the Biden administration paused all arms sales to Saudi and the UAE, with Secretary of State Tony Blinken citing a desire “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives, and advances our foreign policy.” Those sales included a massive $23 billion transfer of advanced weapons technology — including the F35 fighter jet and Reaper drones — to the UAE as part of the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords.”
The letter from members of Congress questions what weapons the administration deems “relevant” to offensive operations and whether the $23 billion sale will go forward.
In the past, Saudi officials have claimed their airstrikes were acts of self-defense against the Houthis, who themselves have carried out missile attacks against targets in southern Saudi Arabia.
Max Abrahms, a professor of political science at Northeastern University and a critic of the U.S. intervention, told The Intercept the Democrats who signed the letter are right to question the Biden administration. “The distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is often unclear,” Abrahms said in a phone interview. “Which weapons are offensive or defensive depends on one’s own perspective in this conflict.”
The letter also contains a detailed list of questions about Biden’s other policies toward Yemen, including whether the U.S. will pressure the UAE and Saudi Arabia to stop arming and financing different militias there, and whether it would support an independent investigation into allegations of disappearances and torture by UAE-backed forces — which the Trump administration denied knowledge of in 2019.
An employee restocks shelves in the meat section at a Kroger supermarket. (photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg)
How Biden Can Rein In the Big Meat Monopoly
Claire Kelloway, Vox
Kelloway writes:
The meat industry is bad for farmers, workers, consumers, animals, and the environment. It should be the next target in Democrats’ antitrust push.
hortly after President Joe Biden took office in January, a coalition of some 30 groups made a push for a cause that flew under the radar: curbing the power of Big Ag.
The signatories, which included familiar groups like farmer advocates, labor unions, animal welfare groups, and environmental organizations, called on Biden to issue an executive order banning food industry mergers, at least until stronger antitrust rules are in place. (Disclosure: The Open Markets Institute, where I work, was one of the signatories.)
The effort to shine a light on Big Ag is indicative of a broadening movement to stop the rapid consolidation of food production. It’s also part of an emergent anti-consolidation mood on the left. Antitrust policy has reemerged as a progressive priority over the past few years, though much of that focus has generally been on breaking up and regulating big banks or Big Tech.
There’s a case to be made that Big Ag — and more specifically, Big Meat — should join that list. As author and business reporter Chris Leonard said at a recent Yale Law conference, “concentration in agriculture is only important to people who eat, otherwise it’s a trivial matter.”
How we produce meat has profound implications for people, the environment, and animals. Big Meat corporations operate on an industrial model of animal agriculture that drives farmers off the land, injures workers, traps billions of animals in horrid conditions, pollutes rural drinking water, and in some states disproportionately sickens rural communities of color. Big Meat justifies this destruction under the banner of cheap meat, all while allegedly working together to actually raise prices for consumers.
To be sure, some of these problems existed in the livestock industry 50 years ago, back when we ate less meat and the industry wasn’t dominated by just a few companies. But the rapid expansion and consolidation of the meat industry since the 1970s has translated into immense political power, earned in part by giving out millions to politicians each year and maintaining a revolving door between the federal government and industry (two-thirds of meat industry lobbyists are former government employees). In fact, Tom Vilsack — who headed the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for both of President Obama’s terms, and was just confirmed to return to the post as Biden’s agriculture secretary — was a dairy industry lobbyist during much of the Trump presidency.
This revolving door has resulted in legislation and regulatory policy that leans heavily in the big meatpackers’ favor. In fact, early in the pandemic, President Trump signed an executive order to keep slaughterhouses open — and that executive order was drafted by a meat lobbyist.
Obama made major promises to tame meatpackers’ power, but as agriculture secretary, Vilsack failed to make headway in the face of industry pushback. The Biden administration now has a chance to move where Obama faltered — but with Vilsack returning, food-focused activists are skeptical.
Taking on Big Meat wouldn’t just help consumers, farmers, and meatpacking workers; one poll found 82 percent of independent rural voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports “a moratorium on factory farms and corporate monopolies in food and agriculture,” so it could also help halt Democrats’ losing streak in rural areas and heartland states.
As progressives take their campaign against consolidation into a higher gear with a friendlier administration in power, Big Meat needs to be on the priority list.
What exactly is “Big Meat”?
When you roam the meat aisle, you’ll see a wide variety of brand names, but chances are good that most of them are owned by one of the just six companies that control two-thirds of all US meat production: JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, Smithfield, Hormel, and National Beef.
The meat industry is even more consolidated today than the early 1900s, when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and President Woodrow Wilson broke up and regulated the powerful and manipulative Meat Trust, the handful of companies that dominated the market at the time. These progressive-era reforms worked for some 50 years to establish fairer and more competitive livestock markets. As recently as 1977, the top four companies in each industry controlled just 25 percent of cattle, 31 percent of pork, and 22 percent of chicken processing.
But that all changed in the late 1970s, when judges and legal scholars adopted a new, radically conservative antitrust doctrine that gave corporations more cover to buy up their competitors. The former president of Tyson Foods, Don Tyson, told Leonard, the business reporter, that their motto was to “expand or expire — buy your competitor or go out of business.”
In addition to direct competitors, meat corporations such as Tyson bought up or drove out companies all along the meat supply chain, from feed manufacturers to livestock breeders. Altogether, this decimated independent, local businesses that kept money circulating through rural communities and funneled wealth to a handful of corporate headquarters instead. Today, the top four corporations in each industry slaughter 73 percent of all beef, 67 percent of all pork, and 54 percent of all chicken.
Over this period, meat production became much more industrial, and meatpackers used their growing power to push the farms they bought from to consolidate as well — to go big or go home. This precipitated an explosion in factory farms, dramatically expanding the chicken industry and shifting pork and beef production to fewer, larger farms.
For example, from 1997 to 2012, the number of pigs on factory farms has gone up by more than a third and the average hog farm has grown by 70 percent — but nearly 70 percent of hog farms have gone out of business in recent decades. In one decade, the number of cattle-feeding operations in the largest 13 cattle states dropped by 40 percent as the average operation size increased 13 percent. Today, about 9 billion animals live in terrible conditions on American factory farms, producing some 100 billion pounds of meat a year, and all closely controlled by just six meat conglomerates.
Factory farms aren’t just bad for animal welfare and the environment; increased consolidation leaves livestock farmers with little choice but to raise animals on the big meat companies’ terms. This has driven small farmers off the land and trapped those who remain in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that are so exploitative some farmers say they are treated like indentured servants.
How Big Meat controls farmers
Say you’re a chicken farmer in the Southeast, where most chickens are raised. To get into the business, you’ll need to sign a contract to raise chickens for a poultry processor (or “integrator”) like Tyson. Right from the outset, you’re at a disadvantage — half of all chicken farmers report having just one or two integrators to choose from, which gives the integrators more power to set the terms of their contracts.
For the average-size farm (four chicken houses) you’ll need to invest around $1 million to get started. Every couple of months you’ll receive a new flock of baby chicks, which you don’t technically own. The integrator will drop off feed and everything else they need.
You’re not paid a standard price for each chicken you raise. Instead, you’re paid based on an opaque performance ranking system that compares you to other chicken farmers in your area — if you used less feed to raise heavier birds, you’ll get a bonus, but if you weren’t as efficient, you’ll get a pay cut.
Income isn’t so reliable, and some weeks you might receive a flock of sick birds and the loss sets you back on your $1 million loan payment for those chicken houses. You want to say something, but you risk retaliation. Meatpackers have been known to send farmers who complain even more sick birds or even withhold chicken feed, driving them out of business.
Such unpredictable income can trap farmers in a cycle of debt. While the median poultry farming household did make more than the median US household in 2011, the range of incomes across poultry households is much larger — the bottom 20 percent of poultry households made $18,780 or less.
This meatpacker manipulation isn’t unique to poultry. Most pork and about a third of beef is produced on contract to a shrinking number of powerful buyers. These arrangements give meatpackers more power to determine the price farmers receive, and they incentivize an industrial, factory-farm model that is disastrous for animal welfare and the environment.
Meatpacker abuse extends to the next step in the supply chain, meat processing, where the powerful meat lobby has deregulated worker safety.
Why meatpacking plants are some of the most dangerous workplaces
Perhaps the best illustration of the power Big Meat holds over its workforce came in the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 spread through the close quarters of meatpacking plants. Rather than pause or slow slaughter lines to prevent further outbreaks, dominant meat lobbyists literally wrote new rules for the Trump administration to keep plants running, business as usual.
Without mandatory or enforceable pandemic safety standards, most meatpackers still have not reconfigured their plants or slowed slaughter line speeds to allow for proper distancing. As a result, more than 57,000 meatpacking workers have fallen ill and 284 have died since the start of the pandemic. (Here’s a helpful visualization of how meatpackers can make their plants safer for workers.)
Meatpacking has always been a gruesome job, but working conditions dramatically deteriorated during the 1980s after decades of reform.
From 1980 to 1990, meatpacking worker injury rates increased 40 percent. Despite such high injury rates, inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fell to an all-time low in the late ’90s.
Today, the industry averages two amputations per week. Many of them can be attributed to fast slaughter line speeds, the leading cause of injury in meatpacking plants, which also lead to accidental cuts and repetitive motion disorders such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Poultry line speeds have more than doubled in the past half century, and the meat industry continues to lobby hard to make them even faster.
Despite these dangerous working conditions, wages remain low. In 1979, largely unionized meatpacking workers made roughly $28 per hour, 14 percent above the national manufacturing average, adjusted for inflation. In just more than a decade, meatpacking wages fell from 14 percent above the national average to 20 percent below it.
Wages fell after the broad deregulatory policies of the Reagan era ushered in both industry consolidation and union-busting. Just as meatpackers built power through buying up their competitors, they also preyed on weakened union power, closing union plants and reopening them with lower wages and a non-unionized workforce.
At the same time, meatpackers made a concerted effort to move plants from urban centers to rural areas hostile to unions, and recruited a more vulnerable and mobile immigrant workforce. Today, two-thirds of meatpacking workers are people of color, and roughly half are immigrants. Language barriers, institutional racism, and less unionization further decimated worker power and exacerbated exploitation.
A 2016 Oxfam report found that many poultry workers are denied bathroom breaks and resort to wearing diapers while working the slaughter line. In one informal survey of women in Iowa’s meatpacking industry, 85 percent reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence at work.
Today, continued consolidation makes it easier for meatpackers to come together and conspire against workers and fix wages. An ongoing class-action lawsuit accuses 14 top poultry processors (representing some 80 percent of the industry) of meeting “off the books” at industry conferences to share information about hourly plant workers’ wages and benefits in a conspiracy to hold them down across the industry.
Progressives have long championed the working class, but until the pandemic hit, the plight of meatpacking workers went largely unnoticed. This goes for many rural food workers, predominantly immigrants and people of color, who are ignored when progressives often write off rural areas as white and conservative. A robust antitrust agenda that takes aim at Big Meat would, advocates argue, help these overlooked workers by breaking Big Meat’s political power.
How Big Meat cheats its customers
For all the talk of Big Meat feeding the world by producing “efficient” cheap protein, some of the biggest meat producers have recently been caught red-handed conspiring to inflate chicken prices for consumers.
Last year, the DOJ indicted 10 poultry executives for regularly calling and texting one another to coordinate their bids for large annual purchasing contracts with restaurant chains and grocery stores. Pilgrim’s Pride, the second largest US poultry company, pleaded guilty and paid the government a $110 million fine for “restraining competition,” though indicted poultry executives could still face criminal charges.
But poultry price-fixing schemes could go even further. Other private class-action suits have accused chicken companies of manipulating a price index and cutting back chicken production in order to raise prices, which could have cost the average American family of four an extra $330 on chicken, annually.
Now that one crime is out in the open, poultry corporations are rushing to settle these other suits. Just weeks ago, Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson Foods agreed to pay $75 million and $221.5 million, respectively, to settle private price-fixing suits.
It’s not just chicken; most major meat corporations have been accused of price-fixing in recent years. In December, the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, paid $24.5 million to settle pork price-fixing allegations, and in June, the DOJ subpoenaed the top four beef packers to investigate cattle market manipulation.
Making Big Meat play fair
So what can the government actually do to rein in Big Meat?
Well, the good news is there are already laws on the books to address Big Meat’s manipulation and merger mania. The bad news is we just haven’t been enforcing them. A good first step would be to appoint bold, creative, and progressive enforcers to lead critical antitrust agencies at the DOJ, the FTC, and, of course, the Department of Agriculture.
But if the Biden administration wants to get serious about taking on Big Meat, it needs to go further.
It can start by issuing stronger rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act — a 1921 law that is supposed to protect farmers against unfair and deceptive business practices. Biden’s USDA could pass rules that actually give contract farmers the opportunity to seek justice when jerked around by meatpackers, and cut loopholes for corporations that justify farmer mistreatment as a “reasonable business decision.”
To deter gouging consumers, antitrust enforcers could bring more criminal charges against executives when they conspire to inflate prices, rather than slap-on-the-wrist fines. The DOJ and FTC can also direct federal antitrust enforcers to study and break up the most harmful agribusiness mergers, and block any future mergers that would give a corporation an anti-competitive share of the market. (At a minimum, scholars believe markets are excessively concentrated when four firms dominate 40 percent of all sales, but caps could be set even lower.)
But effective antitrust enforcement needs to go beyond breaking up Big Meat or cracking down on price fixing. Regulators also need to set new rules of fair play to ensure alternative meatpacking models have a chance to succeed. The FTC has extensive power to issue fair competition rules that would do far more to dismantle corporate dominance, in meatpacking and beyond, than breaking up Big Meat alone.
None of these actions need approval from Congress. They just require political will from Agriculture’s Vilsack and other Biden appointees to stand up to meatpackers’ political power. Vilsack fumbled antitrust reform efforts during the Obama administration, but pressure from the Democratic base could help put this issue on the Biden administration’s agenda.
But progressives can also push Congress to step up. Several farmer advocates recently endorsed a new proposal by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would simply outlaw the largest mergers, unless corporations can prove they do not harm competition (as it stands, most mergers are permissible unless the government can prove they likely harm consumers).
Workers need better enforcers in the federal government, too. A recent investigation found that OSHA failed to investigate over a third of the slaughter plants where workers died of Covid-19.
This isn’t a new problem — the agency has also claimed it did not have the resources to issue slaughter line speed standards that incorporate worker safety, another direly needed rule that the Biden administration should pick up. Strengthening unions, by passing laws like the PRO Act, would also help give workers a voice on the job.
The ravages of the pandemic and recent price-fixing scandals have put the dangers of Big Meat on full display. If progressives do not mobilize in this moment to demand a fairer, safer, and more democratic meat industry, the exploitation of workers, farmers, animals, and the environment will only get worse.
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