01 March 21
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David Sirota | What the Neera Tanden Affair Reveals About the Washington DC Swamp
David Sirota, Guardian UK
Sirota writes:
In defense of an awful nominee and a corrupt DC culture, Republicans engage in hypocrisy while Democrats trample the causes they purport to care about
hen sifting through the wreckage to try to make sense of this epoch, future anthropologists should dust off whatever records will be preserved about Neera Tanden’s star-crossed nomination to an obscure-but-powerful White House office.
The whole episode is a museum-ready diorama in miniature illustrating so many things that died in the transition from democracy to oligarchy. And in this affair, all the politicians, pundits, news outlets and Democratic party apparatchiks involved are very blatantly telling on themselves.
Tanden is being nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the federal budget. As a political operative and head of a corporate-funded thinktank, she does not have especially relevant experience for the appointment – in fact, whether in gubernatorial administrations, mayoral offices or Capitol Hill budget committees, there are far more qualified experts for this gig.
Moreover, her particular record would raise significant red flags as a job applicant for even a mid-level management position in any organization, much less the White House: during her tenure running the Center for American Progress, she reportedly outed a sexual harassment victim and physically assaulted an employee. While she was running the organization, CAP raked in corporate and foreign government cash and a report was revised in a way that helped a billionaire donor avoid scrutiny of his bigoted policing policy. Critics allege that Tanden busted a union of journalists. And she floated social security cuts when Democrats in Congress were trying to stop them.
Even if you discount Tanden’s infamous statement about Libya and oil, as well as her vicious crusade against Senator Bernie Sanders and the progressive base of the Democratic party, all of these other items would seem to disqualify Tanden for a job atop a Democratic administration that claims to respect expertise and want to protect women, workers’ rights, social programs and government ethics.
From the beginning, every single Democratic senator could have simply cited Biden’s promise to be the “most pro-union president” and stated that they would not vote to confirm anyone accused of undermining a union. Or they could have said that they are not going to allow someone who runs a corporate-funded thinktank – and whose nomination is being boosted by one of the most diabolical corporate lobbying groups in Washington – to be in charge of the White House office that can grant government ethics waivers. At the absolute barest minimum, these issues should have been major topics of discussion in her confirmation hearings and in the news media.
But the opposite has happened. This record is almost nowhere to be found in the discourse. Instead, the central topic of discussion is Tanden’s late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting.
On the right, the Republican party of troll-in-chief Donald Trump is pretending that Tanden’s online rhetoric – rather than her record – is disqualifying.
On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican party’s hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual record.
Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting, journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden’s tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and distracting attention from Tanden’s alleged attack on a union of journalists.
As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace, which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. The debate is being deliberately ramrodded into a conversation about her online etiquette, which has absolutely no relevance to the actual appointment (and I say that as an occasional target of Tanden’s Twitter vitriol).
All of this is a grotesque form of erasure. Democratic politicians, Beltway Liberals, and media voices are not merely swatting away, rationalizing or justifying Tanden’s record on the merits, they are doing something worse: they are trying to memory-hole Tanden’s record and pretend it doesn’t exist, even though she laid waste to the same liberal causes these defenders purport to care about.
Moreover, the Tanden brigade – and their online army now bullying reporters with racist vitriol – are cynically relying on a political and media environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any social cause.
Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise. They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are supposed to inform democratic decision-making.
The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the Washington media wants to center Tanden’s nomination on her actual record, because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.
Indeed, if corruption, mismanagement, bullying, union busting and let-them-eat-cake-style austerity ideology are suddenly perceived negatively, then all the real-life Veep characters in Washington – the politicians, operatives and media elites who’ve spent their whole lives angling for fancy White House titles – could be out of luck.
Appreciating the power of this tribal motivation is crucial, because it accounts for why Democrats seem to be spending as much or more political capital on trying to rescue Tanden’s nomination than on enacting policies to rescue Americans from an economic disaster. That’s no overstatement: the White House has signaled it is working the phones and pulling out all the stops for the OMB nominee at the very same time the administration is signaling a potential pre-emptive retreat on the minimum wage and a willingness to limit promised survival checks.
Such skewed priorities and misguided decisions might seem inexplicable to those future anthropologists looking back at this moment. However, it will all make perfect sense to them if they understand that the Tanden affair exemplifies how in this era of end-stage democracy, the first and foremost priority of the effete political elite wasn’t helping millions of people, it wasn’t defending the progressive agenda, and it wasn’t even ensuring electoral success.
It was something deeper, more tribal, and more corrupt: swamp self-preservation.
Murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty)
Three Names Mysteriously Removed From Khashoggi Intelligence Report After Initial Publication
Alex Marquardt, CNN
Marquardt writes:
hortly after the US intelligence community published its long-awaited report on Friday afternoon on the Saudis who were responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi, it was taken down without explanation and replaced with another version that removed the names of three men it had initially said were complicit.
The quiet switch by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went largely unnoticed as the outcry grew that the Biden administration was failing to punish the prince in any way, despite having just declared in no uncertain terms that MBS was responsible.
The first link to the report that was sent out by ODNI went dead. It was then replaced with a second version that removed three of the men it had just announced "participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in or responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to clarify why the names were originally on the list and what roles, if any, they may have had in Khashoggi's killing.
"We put a revised document on the website because the original one erroneously contained three names which should not have been included," an ODNI spokesperson told CNN.
A senior administration official had argued on Friday afternoon before the change was noticed that the report contained no new information.
"This [is] information that has been known to the U.S. government and briefed to select committees and members of Congress over one year ago," the official said.
Yet three of the names that ODNI had first listed had not previously been mentioned in reports about Khashoggi's death.
The White House referred requests for comment to the ODNI.
Biden had said during the presidential campaign he would make Saudi Arabia "the pariah that they are."
"Historically, and even in recent history-- democratic and republican administrations-- there have not been sanctions put in place for the leaders of foreign governments s where we have diplomatic relations and even where we don't have diplomatic relations," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN on Sunday. "We believe there is more effective ways to make sure this doesn't happen again."
The first of the three names removed is Abdulla Mohammed Alhoeriny, who has not been previously connected with Khashoggi's death.
According to a person familiar with the inner workings of Saudi intelligence, he's the brother of General Abdulaziz bin Mohammed al-Howraini, a minister who is in charge of the powerful Presidency of State Security which oversees multiple intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. Abdulla (as it's spelled by ODNI) appears in Saudi reports as the assistant chief of state security for counterterrorism.
The two other names that appeared in the unclassified intelligence report and then disappeared are Yasir Khalid Alsalem and Ibrahim al-Salim. It was not immediately clear who they are.
The three men are not among the 18 who have been sanctioned by the US for Khashoggi's murder. Those 18 were listed in the revised intelligence report, whose file name on the ODNI website includes "v2," clearly indicating it's the second version.
The initial intelligence report appears to have been online for several hours before ODNI took it down, according to the Wayback Machine internet archive. The discrepancy between the two lists of names was noticed on Capitol Hill and clarification has been asked of ODNI, a House Intelligence Committee official said. A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment.
The report, which was declassified by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, assessed that the Crown Prince, known as MBS, approved the operation in Istanbul to "capture or kill" Khashoggi.
The report concludes with a list of names -- first 21, then 18 when it was revised -- who US intelligence has "high confidence" were involved in the grisly murder but does not assess whether they knew that the operation would lead to his death.
Seventeen Saudis had already been sanctioned for the murder by the US Treasury Department. An eighteenth, a former senior intelligence official, was added Friday. The force that serves as the protective detail for MBS, known as the "Tiger Squad," was also sanctioned.
The State Department also announced 76 unnamed Saudis would be barred from the United States under a "Khashoggi Ban."
The Saudi government immediately responded to Friday's report and criticized its conclusions.
"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia completely rejects the negative, false and unacceptable assessment in the report pertaining to the Kingdom's leadership, and notes that the report contained inaccurate information and conclusions," a statement read.
Biden said over the weekend that more announcements regarding Saudi Arabi would be coming Monday. The White House clarified his comments, saying the State Department would provide more details about the announcements already made.
"The recalibration of relations with Saudi Arabia began on January 20th and it's ongoing. The Administration took a wide range of new actions on Friday," a White House official said. "The President is referring to the fact that on Monday, the State Department will provide more details and elaborate on those announcements, not new announcements."
Immigrant children at a detention facility next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, on June 18, 2018. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Lawyers Have Found the Parents of 105 Separated Migrant Children in Past Month
Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
The parents of 506 separated migrant children still haven't been found, however. Lawyers say the parents of 322 of them were likely to have been deported.
he lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported Wednesday that they have found the parents of 105 children in the past month.
The steering committee of pro-bono lawyers and advocates working on reunification said it had yet to find the parents of 506 children, down from 611 on Jan. 14, the last time it reported data to a federal judge overseeing the process.
The lawyers said the parents of about 322 of the 506 children are believed to have been deported, making it more difficult to find them. The lawyers are not required by the judge to say how many of the parents and children have been reunited.
The Biden administration recently formed a task force that will place the responsibility of finding and reuniting the families separated by the Trump administration, primarily under the "zero tolerance policy" of 2018, in the hands of the federal government. In their court filing Wednesday, lawyers representing the separated families and working to reunite them said they would work with the task force.
Lawyers for the Justice Department said they expect the task force to "resolve many — if not all — outstanding issues" related to the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of California, that resulted in the reunification process.
One reason it has been so hard to find parents is that many agreed to be deported without their children to allow their children to remain in the U.S. to claim asylum, their lawyers say.
A lawyer representing the separated families in the lawsuit, Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, has said the task force should commit to bring the deported parents back to the U.S. under special protections to reunite with their children.
It's difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent historical account of what it actually looks like. (photo: SOPA/Alamy)
Hua Hsu | The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence
Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
Hsu writes: "These histories may help us see patterns that, eventually, others might see, too."
n the evening of April 28, 1997, Kuan Chung Kao, a thirty-three-year-old Taiwan-born engineer, went to the Cotati Yacht Club near Rohnert Park, a quiet suburb in Sonoma County, California, where he lived with his wife and three children. Kao went to the bar a couple of times a week for an after-work glass of red wine; on this evening, he was celebrating a new job. According to a bartender working that night, Kao got in an argument with a customer, who mistook him for Japanese. “You all look alike to me,” the man said. Tensions simmered, and, later in the evening, the man returned to needle Kao some more. “I’m sick and tired of being put down because I’m Chinese,” Kao shouted back. “If you want to challenge me, now’s the time to do it.”
An altercation followed, and someone called the police. When they arrived, the bartender, who later described Kao as a “caring and friendly” patron, helped defuse the situation and assured them that causing a ruckus was out of Kao’s character. He was sent home in a cab. Still livid, Kao shouted outside his house late into the night, alarming his neighbors, who placed about a dozen calls to 911. When two officers arrived, Kao was standing in his driveway, holding a stick. One of the officers ordered him to put it down. When he responded with profanities, the officer shot him. His wife, a nurse, tried to save him, but was restrained. A police spokesman later said that he had been waving the stick “in a threatening martial-arts fashion.” The other described the pudgy, five-foot-seven-inch Kao as a “ninja fighter.” Kao was not a ninja, and he had no martial-arts training. A warrant to search Kao’s house for evidence of martial-arts expertise turned up nothing.
At the time, I was a college student at Berkeley. A few days after the incident, a friend and I procured a megaphone and stood on the steps of the campus plaza, shouting to passersby about Kao’s death. We were trying to get our classmates to think about the indignities of this man’s final night, and to see the racial animus involved in assuming that he was some kind of martial-arts master. But we were neither succinct nor persuasive, and people continued on their way. It felt like we were passing a rumor between ourselves, something small and insignificant that only mattered to Asian Americans like us, rather than bearing witness to an instance of racial violence. The Sonoma County District Attorney’s office declined to charge the officers. When a vigil was organized outside Kao’s home on the one-year anniversary of his death, some of the neighbors, who had supported the police’s account of the night’s events, flew American flags, which was perceived at the time as a show of hostility.
The California attorney general looked into it and concluded that the officers had acted in self-defense. An F.B.I. examination did not lead to charges either. Years later, a civil suit was settled for a million dollars, which was split between the family and the four legal firms that had represented them. Over time, and in the face of an official narrative of events that drained that night of its complexity, it became difficult to fit Kao’s killing into any discernible pattern that might demand a reckoning; instead, it came to seem like a random occurrence. I soon forgot that it had happened at all.
I was reminded of Kao in the past few weeks, as frustrations have escalated around a recent string of attacks against Asian Americans. In the past year, there has been a steady increase in such attacks. Last spring, there seemed to be a constant stream of stories: verbal confrontations and fights, knifings, even an acid attack, much of it seemingly attributable to Donald Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric, particularly to his sneers about the “China flu.” Advocacy groups nationwide recorded between two and three thousand racist incidents in 2020.
Recently, fears of another wave of anti-Asian violence have arisen following a string of viral videos depicting attacks against Asian Americans. In late January, a clip circulated of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an eighty-four-year-old man originally from Thailand, being assaulted as he walked down a street in San Francisco. He died days later. Around this time, another clip, showing a ninety-one-year-old Asian man in Oakland’s Chinatown being shoved to the ground while walking down the street, made the rounds. The actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered rewards for information on the assailants. A few days later, Kim, Wu, and the activist Amanda Nguyen appeared on MSNBC, in part to chastise the mainstream media for being slow to cover these attacks. Even as outlets began reporting on these videos, attacks continued: a Filipino-American man’s face was slashed in New York; a Korean-American man was beaten in Los Angeles’s Koreatown while assailants shouted slurs at him. About a week ago, another viral clip circulated, this one of a fifty-two-year-old Asian-American woman being shoved to the ground in Flushing, Queens.
For some Asian Americans, the videos provided proof of what they have been feeling for some time, namely, that they are increasingly targeted on the basis of their appearance. But within this was a sense that their concerns would never be taken seriously. In the cases of the San Francisco and Oakland attacks, some officials, and even local community members, questioned whether these attacks were random rather than racially motivated. The attacker captured in the Queens video was released, and no hate-crime charges were brought against him. Beyond pressing for media coverage, however, the demands around what to do next were sometimes contradictory. Calls for more protection in Asian neighborhoods struck critics of police brutality as the wrong answer; in particular, Kim and Lee’s so-called bounties were perceived to undermine the efforts of Asian-American organizers already working toward community-oriented solutions to public safety. Villainizing the suspects, at least two of whom were Black, seemed to play into racist narratives of inner-city crime. Some felt dismayed that Black and brown community leaders had not rushed to the defense of Asian Americans; others claimed that such standards construed the fight for justice as quid pro quo. Calls to center and protect Asian “elders” drew criticism for playing into a respectability politics that casts a kindly grandma or grandpa as a sympathetic, innocent victim. I saw someone on Instagram acerbically wonder whether these were the same elders whom we had recently been urged to lecture about their racism?
Visibility matters. Yet obsessing over it sometimes obscures the long-standing challenges of organizing Asian Americans around a single, shared story. It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent, historical account of what that racism actually looks like. The parameters of activism often get defined by hashtags—#StopAAPIHate, #ProtectOurElders, #NotYourModelMinority—rather than a sense of history. In the age of Black Lives Matter, the desire to carve out a crisp, pithy position is greater than ever. But the past weeks’ conversations have illustrated how the Asian-American experience doesn’t always fit neatly into conventional understandings of victimhood.
For decades, Asian people in America tended to identify more with their own nationality and ethnicity than with a broad Asian-American community. But, in the sixties and seventies, a more inclusive sense of Asian-American identity grew out of a desire for political solidarity. This new identity assumed a kind of cross-generational ethos, as younger people forged connections with older immigrants, helping them to navigate social services and to understand their rights. And it found clarity through collective struggle, as when, in 1977, in San Francisco, Asian-American community organizers, aided by a multiracial coalition of allies, came to the defense of a group of elderly Asians, mostly Filipino men, who were being evicted from their longtime homes in the I-Hotel. But the real turning point came in 1982, when two white men, one of whom had been laid off from his job as an autoworker, followed Vincent Chin, a young Chinese-American draftsman, from a Detroit bar to a nearby McDonald’s and beat him to death. Witnesses said that the three had initially fought at the bar, and that during the altercation the men had allegedly mistaken Chin for Japanese and blamed him for the American auto industry’s decline. The men later claimed that it was a fight that had gotten out of hand, and that they were not motivated by Chin’s race. They were given probation and fined. The lenient sentencing sparked a national campaign against anti-Asian racism and inspired an Oscar-nominated documentary, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?”
In contrast to racism against other groups, anti-Asian racism has rarely been as gruesome and blatant as it was in the Chin killing. There have of course been other violent incidents, like the “Chinese massacre” that occurred in Los Angeles, in 1871, or the Sikh-temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012. But the history of Asian victimhood in America is varied and muddled. A presumption of foreignness might link exclusionary immigration policies of the nineteenth century to the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War; the paranoia around Asian-American scientists, which resulted in the mistreatment of a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist named Wen Ho Lee, in the nineteen-nineties; and post-9/11 Islamophobia. Yet even the effects of these broad patterns of discrimination aren’t uniformly felt. And the needs and disadvantages of refugee communities and poor Asian Americans have been obscured as much by the myth of Asians as the “model minority” as by the movements, particularly among the professional class, to resist this myth.
The current moment underscores the in-between space that Asian Americans inhabit. It’s hard to prove bias in a hate crime, and it’s typically done by showing how a particular crime draws on recognizable histories of violence or neglect. This becomes difficult when people are mystified by the idea of anti-Asian racism. In Chin’s case, the culprits were white men who espoused racist ideas, which made it easier to recognize the assault as a hate crime and to organize the community around it. Some recent attacks also make legible the ways in which systemic injustices afflict Asian Americans. In late December, police officers killed a Chinese-American named Christian Hall in Monroe County, Pennsylvania; soon after, a Filipino-American man named Angelo Quinto died, after a police officer choked him by kneeling on his neck in Antioch, California. Both Hall and Quinto were suffering from mental-health episodes at the time. Officers claimed that Hall, who was standing on an overpass, pointed a gun in their direction. Quinto died as his family, who had called the police out of concern, looked on. Campaigns fighting for the officers to be held accountable fluidly align with the movement for Black lives, and the criticism of the criminal-justice system’s overreach and potential for brutality.
The videos circulating now are more difficult to parse. In the case of the ninety-one-year-old who was injured in Oakland, the culprit was a man with what a judge called “significant mental-health issues” who seemed to target people indiscriminately. Local community leaders in the Bay Area warned against drawing overly simplistic conclusions from these incidents. “These crimes and violent situations that happen in Chinatown have been happening for a while,” Alvina Wong, a director at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, explained to the Oaklandside. The attack captured on video was one of more than twenty tallied by the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce in a two-week span. We might instead read these videos as part of a larger set of stories. The gutting of local reporting and newspapers has made it harder for communities to stay informed about city politics and the conditions driving local crime. Economic policies that once extracted resources from cities have now caused them to gentrify and crowd out the poor, making enemies of neighboring communities. Mayors and politicians who don’t at all fear losing the support of their Asian constituency rarely feel the need to proactively work on their behalf. Meanwhile, a tattered social safety net does little to help those struggling with mental health.
Some have wondered if these horrific, viral videos constitute a wave, or if they were just random incidents. When your concerns have gone unrecognized for decades, it’s understandable why some within the Asian-American community remain so invested in using these highly visible moments as an opportunity to call attention to hate, even if the incidents seem more varied than that. The wave in question isn’t just two or three incidents. It’s a broader history that stretches past Trump and the pandemic. It’s easy for these incidents to fade from memory. While digging through old articles about Kao, I realized that one of the first reported pieces I’d written, in 2000, was about anti-Asian violence on college campuses. The same month as Kao’s killing, in 1997, a group of mostly Asian students were beaten up in the parking lot of a Denny’s in Syracuse, after complaining that the staff seemed to be seating white customers first. The staff allegedly didn’t intervene as a group of white patrons went outside and assaulted them, shouting racial slurs. A police officer who arrived on the scene reportedly said that it appeared to be nothing more than a parking-lot fight. The local D.A. declined to press charges. There were similar incidents at other colleges, and Asian-American advocacy groups questioned whether they were hate crimes. A few years prior, in the early nineties, Yoshi Hattori, a Japanese exchange student in Baton Rouge, had showed up at the wrong door for a Halloween party. The owner deemed him threatening—Hattori was dressed in a white suit, inspired by John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever”—and shot him dead. Hattori’s shooter, Rodney Peairs, expressed remorse but was eventually acquitted, thanks to Louisiana’s laws around self-defense in cases of trespass. Peairs’s lawyers claimed that he and his wife felt threatened by Hattori’s “kinetic,” “antsy,” and “scary” way of moving. Hattori’s father surmised that his son was having trouble seeing anything, on account of a lost contact lens. His English wasn’t strong, so Hattori may not have understood what Peairs was saying to him. He probably had no idea what was going on, or why this was happening, as he died.
These moments didn’t coalesce into a movement. The assailants often got the benefit of the doubt and were let off scot-free. They have since been forgotten. Understanding this history won’t bring back Ratanapakdee, Hall, or Quinto. A plea for context won’t defuse tempers between strangers in the street. But nothing is random, even if the logic of American life tries to persuade us otherwise. These histories may help us see patterns that, eventually, others might see, too.
President Biden boarding Air Force One on Saturday. (photo: Yuri Gripas/NYT)
In the Wake of US Bombing in Syria, Iran Rejects Nuclear Talks
Laurence Norman and Michael R. Gordon, The Wall Street Journal
ran rejected a European Union offer to hold direct nuclear talks with the U.S. in the coming days, risking renewed tension between Tehran and Western capitals.
Senior Western diplomats said Iran’s response doesn’t quash the Biden administration’s hopes of reviving diplomatic efforts to restore the 2015 nuclear deal, struck between Iran and six world powers and abandoned by the Trump administration in 2018. But they said it seemed to set a deadlock: Iran wants a guarantee it wouldn’t walk away from a meeting with the U.S. without some sanctions relief, which Washington has so far ruled out.
With Tehran escalating its nuclear activities in recent months in breach of the 2015 nuclear deal, the U.S. conducting airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria, and Iranian presidential elections in June, diplomats have warned that opportunities to ease tensions might now be imperiled.
Just 10 days ago, Western officials were hopeful that headway would soon be made toward relaunching the nuclear negotiations. The EU floated the idea of holding talks in Europe that would include all of the remaining participants in the 2015 deal—Iran plus China, the U.K., France, German, and Russia, as well as the U.S. The Biden administration immediately announced it would attend a meeting, with Washington’s envoy Rob Malley set to participate.
EU officials had been trying to get an agreement on dates for a meeting and had floated the possibility of talks in Vienna or Brussels in the coming days. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said last Monday that he was “reasonably optimistic” talks would happen. However, Iran this weekend sent a note saying it wouldn’t attend a meeting in the current circumstances.
“Given the recent moves and positions of the U.S. and the three European countries, the Islamic Republic doesn’t assess the timing of an informal meeting proposed by the EU coordinator as appropriate,” Saaed Khatibzadeh, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, said. “The path ahead is very clear: The U.S. should end its illegal and unilateral sanctions and return to its JCPOA commitments.” He was referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is the formal name of the 2015 Iran accord.
Iran proposed a different approach in its latest discussions with the EU. Echoing an idea floated publicly in early February by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, Tehran told the EU that it wants the EU to serve as a mediator, brokering a step-by-step process in which the U.S. and Iran would each agree to concessions before a possible meeting between Iranian officials and their U.S. counterparts, Western diplomats said.
A senior Biden administration official said the U.S. was disappointed that Tehran had rejected the EU proposal for a meeting at which Iran and the U.S. could have discussed initial steps to revive the 2015 deal. He said, however, that the U.S. would now consult with its European partners as well as Russia and China about how else Washington can pursue its diplomatic efforts. He declined to say whether the U.S. would accept the Iranian idea for an EU mediating role pending those consultations.
“It is unfortunate because that could have happened quickly. That was what was on the table,” the administration official said of the EU proposal. “We are not going to be dogmatic or sticklers for form. We want to make sure that whatever formal process is agreed is one that is going to be effective.”
At stake are efforts by the U.S. and its partners to constrain the nuclear program of a country that Washington has accused of being a sponsor of terrorism and which has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and militant groups ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.
Biden administration officials say that Iran’s assertive posture in the region makes it all the more important to rein in its nuclear activities. Administration officials have said that the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew and whose limits were subsequently breached by Iran, would be a first step toward a more far-reaching arrangement the U.S. and its allies hope to achieve. That, the administration says, would include more enduring limits on Tehran’s nuclear program and restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran, however, has said that it was in compliance with the 2015 deal before President Trump withdrew, and that it wants to return to the accord but won’t negotiate it. It is seeking to build up its negotiating leverage by expanding its nuclear activities, reducing but not eliminating the access of international inspectors, and demanding that the U.S. remove all sanctions since President Trump took office, including those imposed under antiterror authorities.
“This is far from a death knell for negotiations,” said Henry Rome, senior Iran analyst at Eurasia Group in New York, a consulting firm. “But Iran’s decision underscores that reviving the deal will be messy…Washington and Tehran will zig and zag in efforts to build up leverage and handle their own domestic political considerations.”
A White House spokeswoman suggested the administration was taking Iran’s rejection of the EU proposed meeting in stride.
“While we are disappointed at Iran’s response, we remain ready to reengage in meaningful diplomacy to achieve a mutual return to compliance with JCPOA commitments,” said Emily Horne of the National Security Council.
Iran’s decision to stay away from talks for now comes ahead of what could be fresh tensions between Iran and the West.
France, the U.K. and Germany are working on a resolution they plan to present to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency next week that would censure Iran for its recent steps to expand its nuclear activities and its failure to cooperate with the agency’s probe into its nuclear work.
Iran has warned that if the censure goes ahead, Iran could unwind an agreement it struck earlier this month with the IAEA aimed at softening its decision to scale back international inspections of its nuclear work. Under a deal with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi in Tehran, Iran agreed to steps that would allow the U.N. atomic agency to keep monitoring much of its nuclear work.
Without that agreement, Mr. Grossi had warned that the agency would be flying blind in its efforts to keep tabs on Iran’s expanding nuclear work and prevent fissile material and key nuclear equipment from being diverted to illicit uses.
European diplomats have spent days urging Iran to attend the talks, concerned that if discussions didn’t take place soon, diplomacy could hit a pause until much later in the year at the earliest. Still, a senior EU official said Sunday that he would be ready to resume efforts to arrange direct talks late next week, if asked.
Talks are unlikely to run during Iran’s new year celebration, which begins on March 20. The presidential race in Iran starts in earnest in late April or May and Iranian officials have privately warned their European counterparts negotiations could become very difficult during that period.
EU officials have also warned that Iran risked undercutting the goodwill it built by sticking to the nuclear accord for more than a year after President Trump withdrew the U.S.
“The window of opportunity to restore full implementation of JCPOA soon becomes very narrow,” Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador to the IAEA, said this weekend. Mr. Ulyanov, whose country is one of the remaining participants in the nuclear deal, is calling on the EU powers not to pressure Iran at the IAEA Board meeting, which starts Monday.
Myanmar coup: police fire on protesters in deadliest day of clashes. (photo: The Guardian)
'We Have to Win': Myanmar Protesters Persevere as Junta Ramps Up Violence
Rebecca Ratcliffe, Guardian UK
Ratcliffe writes:
Violent scenes play out across country as police crack down against peaceful protesters
e Swan Htet, 23, had joined a sit-down protest on a bridge in west Yangon when he saw police approaching. Officers were carrying guns, he remembered, but he didn’t expect them to actually shoot. The protest was peaceful; crowds were singing and clapping.
Then, gun fire rang out all around him. Bricks burst open and a branch snapped from a tree. “There was a guy who got hit in his thigh by a rubber bullet, so I carried him to an ambulance,” he said.
Ye Swan Htet saw five protesters run frantically towards him. They were carrying his cousin, Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing, who had been shot in his lower abdomen.
Doctors in a nearby neighbourhood desperately tried to help, said Ye Swan Htet, but they were unable to save him. A video posted by news outlet Myanmar Now showed his last moments, as he laid motionless outside a school before other protesters, still seemingly under fire, lifted him away.
Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing, 23, was one of at least 18 people killed in violence by security forces on Sunday, according to UN estimates. Police, reinforced by notorious military troops, launched their most violent crackdown yet in an attempt to quash protests against the junta.
Streets in downtown Yangon resembled a war zone; the sound of security forces opening fire echoed as live ammunition and stun grenades were deployed against protesters. Footage from various points in the city, shared on social media, showed panicked crowds fleeing to safety. Protesters struggled to breathe as clouds of teargas spread.
Demonstrators grabbed anything they could to shelter from the violence. Water tanks and panels of wood were fashioned into shields. Pavement slabs, bricks, bins and rubble were piled across roads to slow down the police. Many wore hard hats and goggles.
From behind makeshift barricades, crowds chanted: “Which party did we vote for? NLD” – Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. It won a landslide victory in last year’s election, but the military has refused to accept the result, alleging, without evidence, election fraud.
“This is for our future. We have to win,” said a student in downtown Yangon, who carried a thin plastic shield.
Violent scenes played out across the country. In Dawei, Mandalay, Myeik, Bago and Pakokku, protesters were killed with live ammunition, according to the UN, which condemned the use of escalating forces against peaceful protesters.
Ye Swan Htet and Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Nain had arrived at Hledan junction, a focal rallying point in Yangon, in the morning. On exiting the car, police approached them from two directions, “sandwiching” them in and throwing teargas, Ye Swan Htet said.
They sheltered in residents’ homes – a now common occurrence, as whole populations stand united in hate of the regime – and then ventured back out, only to repeat the process three more times, he said. The cousins had become separated shortly before the police opened fire at them.
Security forces had ratcheted up the violence against peaceful demonstrators in recent days – enough to give Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing reservations about joining the rallies in Yangon. Just the previous day he had posted on Facebook: “How many dead bodies are needed for the UN to take action?”
He planned to skip the general strike and go to work, said his cousin Ye Swan Htet, 23.
“We kept persuading him to come protest with us until he relented,” said Ye Swan Htet. “He took unpaid leave and came with us.”
In the spot where Ye Swan Htet’s cousin died, protesters made a shrine, sprinkling flowers next to a pair of nike trainers.
Ye Swan Htet said he had been told the body was undergoing an autopsy in Yangon general hospital.
“We are hoping to take his body home,” he added. “He fought until the end. I can’t handle it. If they were shooting us with rubber bullets, I could accept that. They might tear our flesh and cause emotional trauma but that could be treated. They shot us with live rounds. We cannot accept this,” says Ye Swan Htet. “He took unpaid leave and came with us.”
Outside the hospital a Catholic nun gave out free water and food. Though good and evil exists in everyone, she said, the military leadership were “born evil”.
“They do not have any consideration for the innocent children who they are killing,” she said.
Medics, who had been striking against the military coup, went back to work in the hospital’s emergency department to treat the injured.
People were still willing to sacrifice their lives to save the “taste of democracy” they have had, the nun said: “If no one helps us, the world will have another North Korea.”
The fight for democracy must continue, said Ye Swan Htet. The “finish line” is close, he added: “We are all risking our lives for the country, so that we can achieve true democracy.”
By early evening, most protesters in Yangon had gone home, vowing to return tomorrow. Communities plastered pictures of military ruler Min Aung Hlaing’s face to the road, to be stamped on by passersby. Beside his image, a message read: “We will never forgive you.”
Methane flare. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
How Much Does Climate Change Cost? Biden Raises Carbon's Dollar Value, but Not by Nearly Enough, Some Say
Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News
Lavelle writes:
The administration temporarily increased the “social cost” of carbon, climate-concerned economists say the number is not nearly high enough to meet Paris goals.
he Trump administration didn’t put much value on lowering carbon emissions.
In fact, it calculated that the benefits of action on climate change added up to as little as $1 per ton of carbon dioxide, and it set policy accordingly. Almost any steps to reduce greenhouse gases seemed too costly, given the paltry potential gain for society.
President Joe Biden’s White House took a crucial first step toward building back U.S. climate policy on Friday by directing federal agencies to use a figure closer to $52 per ton as their guidance for the so-called “social cost of carbon” number on a temporary basis.
That figure, applied during the Obama administration, will serve as a baseline while the Biden administration works on developing its own metric amid calls by climate-focused economists for a value that is at least twice as high.
Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who served as chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was a co-author of a working paper last month that put the social cost of carbon at $125 per ton or more. And Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern, author of a groundbreaking 2006 U.K. study on the economic cost of climate change, published a paper released Monday that warned a return to the Obama-era number would be a fundamentally flawed approach. “It is clear that climate change involves the management of risks of enormous magnitude and multiple dimensions, which could destroy lives and livelihoods across the world, displace billions, and lead to widespread, prolonged, and severe conflict,” they wrote.
The carbon prices arrived at using the Obama-era approach are too low to support the policy measures needed to limit warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and so avoid that future, wrote Stiglitz and Stern.
Putting a high value on climate action indicates that the costs of the steps taken to cut carbon emissions are worth something in lives saved, better health, preservation of coasts and forests, agricultural productivity and property.
Biden, who has set the ambitious goal of a 100 percent clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050, was expected to come out with an interim social cost of carbon number by Feb. 19—the day Biden formalized the U.S. re-entry to the Paris climate accord in a virtual meeting with G-7 leaders. After a week’s delay, the White House published its preliminary numbers, along with a strong statement that it was considering evidence that higher values were needed.
“This Administration will follow the science and listen to the experts,” the White House said in a statement.
Biden had called for a new social cost of carbon number in the climate crisis executive order he signed on Inauguration Day. In the order, Biden re-established an Interagency Working Group on the social cost of carbon which had been disbanded by Trump, and directed it to publish, within 30 days, an interim value for the metric that could be used by federal agencies until a more thorough analysis yielded a final number no later than January 2022.
Balancing Costs and Benefits
It might seem strange to place a dollar value on something like a healthier planet, but for decades, the federal government has routinely engaged in such analysis in making environmental and health policy. The process involves the same sort of economic modeling and risk-analysis techniques used, for example, when insurance companies set their rates. The government is legally required to weigh the costs and benefits of new regulations, in a process where the input from stakeholders almost invariably involves detailed accounting of the potential costs to regulated industries. And the cost-benefit calculus would be lopsided if the government did not also put a dollar value on seemingly priceless benefits, such as the lives saved through government action.
That’s exactly what a federal appeals court ruled that the Bush administration failed to do in 2008, when it established fuel economy standards that took into account the costs to car companies and consumers but not the benefits of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. When President Barack Obama took office the following year, it sought to address the concerns raised by the court by establishing an Interagency Working Group on the issue, which eventually arrived at a social cost of carbon value of around $52 per ton.
The metric was part of the cost-benefit analysis for all of the Obama administration’s climate actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, including its power plant rules and vehicle fuel economy standards. And when the Trump administration set out to dismantle those rules, it justified its actions with a new calculation for the social cost of carbon—$1 to $7 per ton.
To arrive at such a low range, the Trump administration’s economists applied a hefty “discount rate” to the value, a process used in economics to account for the concept that a dollar saved in the future will not buy as much as a dollar spent today.
Although most economists agree that some discounting of future benefits is a sound approach, they say the discount rate should be low at a time of low inflation and low interest rates. Tamma Carlton, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a co-author, with Greenstone, of last month’s working paper on the social cost of carbon, said that one key change they made in arriving at their $125 per ton figure was applying a lower discount rate than was used during the Obama years, when inflation and interest rates were higher.
There are also strong moral arguments against the Trump approach of greatly discounting future climate benefits, which Trump administration economists achieved by using stock market returns as their key metric.
“We’re talking about long-run intergenerational decisions here,” said Carlton. “And there are many reasons to think that the sort of short-run behavior of the stock market does not reflect the decisions we want to think about when we’re thinking about many generations into the future, and how we discount the future for our children and our children’s children.
“The Biden Interagency Working Group followed the practice of the Obama administration in including a range of three discount rates in its analysis—all of them below the Trump discount rate. But it added, “Based on the IWG’s initial review, new data and evidence strongly suggests that the discount rate regarded as appropriate for intergenerational analysis is lower.”
The Foundation of Everything
The Trump administration also low-balled its social cost of carbon figure by counting only the projected impacts of climate change in the United States, not around the globe. Biden made clear in his executive order that he intends to end that practice and calculate the benefits of cutting carbon emissions based on the worldwide impact of limiting global temperature rise—an approach he sees as an essential part of his re-engagement with the international community.
“It is essential that agencies capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible, including by taking global damages into account,” Biden said in his executive order. “Doing so facilitates sound decision-making, recognizes the breadth of climate impacts, and supports the international leadership of the United States on climate issues.”
Although the concept may be arcane, what the Biden administration chooses as its social cost of carbon will be the foundation for everything else it does on climate change. “It’s the single most important economic metric for guiding climate policy decisions,” said Richard Newell, president and CEO of the think tank Resources for the Future, who co-chaired a National Academies of Science panel that in 2017 urged the government to update its approach to the valuation process. The Biden administration is now taking up the academy’s recommendations that the Trump team ignored, including that the government should establish a regular process of reviewing and updating the social cost of carbon based on the latest science on climate change and economics.
Newell said he also expects that the Biden administration will apply the social cost of carbon across government decision-making more broadly than just the regulatory process. For example, Biden noted in his executive order that he wanted his Interagency Working Group to consider the application of the social cost of carbon to areas such as government procurement. Biden has already made clear that he wants to use the federal government’s purchasing power to boost demand for electric vehicles as part of his climate plan; applying a higher social cost of carbon to such decisions would help justify purchases, even if EVs cost more than conventional vehicles in the short-term. (In testimony before Congress on Feb. 24, U.S. Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, a Trump appointee, said he would commit to only converting 10 percent of the Postal Service’s vehicles to EVs, citing the cost.)
Business groups made clear that they recognize the importance of the Biden administration’s decision on the social cost of carbon. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and 10 other business groups sent a letter to the Biden White House calling for “ample channels and opportunities for public and stakeholder input.”
Of course, that input will include a push from forces within industry and on the right who supported the Trump administration’s approach. The Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit with funders that include right-wing foundations, posted a scathing essay last month by its senior economist, David Kreutzer, calling the social cost of carbon “unknown and virtually unknowable,” and based on arbitrary inputs. “Whether or not dead people vote in significant numbers may be an open question, but dead policies are flourishing in DC right now,” Kreutzer wrote.
Against that backdrop, the establishment business groups appear to be taking a moderate stance, and signaling a desire to cooperate with Biden.
“Along with reentering the Paris Agreement, assessing the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions is an important step for climate policymaking,” said Stephen Comstock, vice president of corporate policy for the American Petroleum Institute, in an email sent before the Biden decision was announced. “We look forward to engaging the interagency working group and providing input as they develop their recommendations to help shape a lower-carbon future.”
Of course, the Biden administration has committed to putting the United States not just on a path to a lower-carbon future, but one with zero net carbon emissions. And according to economists, that will require a social cost of carbon much higher than the Obama-era value the Biden White House has adopted for the time being. Using that old analysis, wrote Stiglitz and Stern, would amount to accepting a hike in global temperatures of 3.5 to 4 degrees Celsius (6.3 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in decision-making. “Almost surely,” they wrote, “the U.S. would be committing itself not to achieve the Paris goals.”
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