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25 March 21
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If the Democrats Don't Kill the Filibuster, They're Screwed
Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, Jacobin
The Democratic Party’s leadership must immediately kill the filibuster and move key legislation — because the GOP is one heartbeat away from reclaiming control of the Senate.
here are many reasons to end the filibuster. It is undemocratic, it has been abused, it has no constitutional foundation, and it empowers a tiny minority to stop anything. But maybe the best reason to get rid of the filibuster is this: Mitch McConnell is one heartbeat away from becoming Senate majority leader again, and the filibuster makes it impossible for Democrats to pass much of anything quickly, even though they could lose power at any moment.
Many pundits are already suggesting the Democrats’ control of Congress will only last until the 2022 midterm elections. But a single, unforeseen Senate vacancy could instantly kill a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass their agenda, from new gun regulations to a badly needed minimum wage hike, from voting rights legislation and new worker protections to a promised public option.
The Senate is split 50-50, and ten Democratic senators are from states whose Republican governors could replace them with GOP appointees in the event they are rendered incapacitated by a health event. Among that group, six are over seventy years old. The pandemic has provided ample evidence that such health events can occur at any moment — and that’s especially true for septuagenarians and octogenarians. And, while deaths of younger senators have been rare, three such casualties have occurred in the last thirty years.
Two months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Democrats have passed one major piece of legislation: a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. Democrats used the budget reconciliation process to pass the bill by a simple majority vote, but they cannot use the process for most legislation. Plus, the move comes with clear downsides, as it provided the basis for killing a $15 minimum wage. It’s not a real substitute for ending the filibuster.
By preserving the filibuster, Democrats are choosing to allow Republicans to indefinitely block virtually all legislation, outside of occasional spending bills, unless they can win over ten GOP votes. Garnering such Republican support seems like a fantasy, given the minority party’s highly conservative and disciplined opposition: no Republicans voted for the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, even though it is wildly popular with the public.
While Biden and conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia have started publicly mulling some limited filibuster reform — a return to the “talking filibuster” — when you read about the idea, it quickly starts to sound unnecessarily complicated. There is also no indication yet that it would actually stop Republicans from blocking legislation for long periods of time.
In truth, spending any time at all considering such half measures could prove disastrous — and at least one report suggests some Biden aides are starting to appreciate this.
“People close to Biden tell us he’s feeling bullish on what he can accomplish, and is fully prepared to support the dashing of the Senate’s filibuster rule to allow Democrats to pass voting rights and other trophy legislation for his party,” Axios reported yesterday. “His team sees little chance he’s going to be able to rewire the government in his image if he plays by the rules of bringing in at least 10 Republicans.”
If that anonymously sourced story proves true — a big if — it would be good news, because right now, Democrats are wasting time they don’t have. Their hemming and hawing over the filibuster is needlessly stalling the implementation of huge swaths of their agenda during what could be the only, brief opportunity they have during Biden’s presidency to put their platform into law. Their majority is so razor-thin, after all, that it could end at literally any moment.
A Majority That Could End Any Day
Democrats controlled the presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate from 2009 to 2010, during Barack Obama’s first two years as president, and they only regained full control in Washington this year, after senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their runoff races in Georgia.
But the party’s grip on the Senate is exceedingly narrow. The chamber is split 50-50, with Democrats relying on Vice President Kamala Harris to break tie votes. In effect, any unexpected personal health crisis among key Democratic lawmakers is a political emergency imperiling the party’s hold on the Senate.
In January, days after Democrats took power in Washington, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy was briefly hospitalized. Leahy, eighty, said he “had some muscle spasms” and was given “a clean bill of health.”
Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s other senator, is seventy-nine and had a heart attack during his presidential campaign last year.
Vermont governor Phil Scott is a Republican, and he would have the power to appoint a replacement — one who would likely be from his party — if either of the state’s senators were unable to finish their terms.
Four other Democratic senators who are older than seventy represent states with GOP governors that have the power to make appointments to fill Senate vacancies — Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Manchin in West Virginia. In all, thirty-four Senate Democrats are at least sixty years old.
Democrats should know full well how perilous their majority is. In 2009, seventy-seven-year-old Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy’s death from brain cancer ended the party’s sixty-seat, filibuster-proof majority and nearly tanked Democrats’ health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act.
After Republican Scott Brown unexpectedly won the election to replace Kennedy, Democrats were forced to pass a version of the Affordable Care Act that had already been approved by the Senate and only made light changes a few months later, using the budget reconciliation process.
“I Don’t Need to Wait Another Minute”
After a gunman killed ten people this week at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, reportedly using an “AR-15-style pistol modified with an arm brace,” Biden demanded that Congress pass new gun regulations immediately.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take commonsense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act,” Biden said Tuesday, calling for Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as expand background checks.
None of those ideas are likely to garner substantial Republican support, even if Democrats were to water them down. Until Democrats eliminate the filibuster, any talk of new gun rules is meaningless and should be treated as such.
The same can be said of most of Democrats’ policy agenda, including the items they’re emphasizing in Congress right now. The party’s democracy reform and voting rights legislation, H.R. 1, isn’t going anywhere with the GOP able to block it, and statehood for Washington, DC, certainly isn’t either.
According to the Intercept, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is telling union leaders that Democrats will bring their landmark labor legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, to the floor once it has at least fifty cosponsors, but the chance that ten or more Republicans will support the bill is close to nonexistent.
Democrats aren’t talking much these days about a public health insurance option, which Biden pitched as an alternative to Medicare for All. Instead, they opted to use their COVID bill to deliver tens of billions of dollars to health insurance companies in order to put people on mediocre private insurance plans. But if Democrats are ever going to get serious about passing a public option, they would surely have to do it without any Republican votes.
Democrats would also likely have to significantly scale back their proposed $15 minimum wage hike in order to win any GOP support on the issue. That would mean shortchanging workers who have been paid too little for years.
Increasing the minimum wage isn’t some ideological wish-list item. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been in place since 2009, and it’s worth less today than it’s ever been, according to Federal Reserve research.
The people most impacted by this long-delayed wage increase are also the ones who have borne the brunt of the nation’s yearlong medical emergency. A recent Brookings Institution study found that essential workers during the COVID pandemic “comprised approximately half (47%) of all workers in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 an hour.”
Democrats, in other words, have a moral obligation to fulfill their promise to raise the minimum wage immediately, because it will not happen in a McConnell-led Senate.
They similarly have a moral obligation to protect people’s voting rights, since Republicans around the country are working diligently to make it much harder to vote. According to a Brennan Center report last month, lawmakers in forty-three states “have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access.”
Democrats can’t move quickly on any of these pressing items with the filibuster in place. In fact, one of the few things they can do with their fifty-one-vote majority is to change the Senate rules and eliminate the filibuster. And that might be the only way to put all — and maybe any — of these other ideas into law.
Reconciliation Is Not the Answer
Conservative Democrats’ interest in preserving the filibuster, combined with GOP intransigence, led Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to pass their COVID relief bill by majority vote.
Reconciliation is a process historically only used once or twice per year, and it allows the Senate parliamentarian to weigh in and recommend tossing measures that aren’t budget items. In February, parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised Senate Democrats that their $15 minimum wage provision wasn’t budget-related and shouldn’t be part of their pandemic aid bill.
While Democrats have the power to ignore MacDonough’s opinion (a process requiring only forty-one votes) or replace her — like Republicans did in 2001 when the parliamentarian wasn’t ruling their way — they chose to do neither.
Sanders has been arguing that Democrats can use the reconciliation process more often, and he’s now pushing to use reconciliation to pass a series of measures designed to lower drug prices. But Sanders’s strategy could ultimately rely on Democrats ignoring the parliamentarian — something his colleagues do not seem interested in doing.
In short, this seems like a futile and frustrating way to try to write policy, when Democrats should really just end the filibuster.
If Democrats genuinely want to enact new gun regulations or pass any of their broader policy priorities, they can’t waste any more time debating such pointless matters. They control the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and their caucus is just large enough to vote to kill the filibuster tomorrow if their members wanted to — and they should want to, as soon as possible.
Democrats have all the structural power they need to pass their promised agenda today. They might not have that power tomorrow.
U.S. soldiers on the U.S.-Mexico border. (photo: Getty)
Todd Miller | The Border-Industrial Complex in the Post-Trump Era
Todd Miller, TomDispatch
Miller writes: "The Homeland Security vehicle soon pulled up next to us. An agent rolled down his window and asked me, 'What are you doing? Joyriding?'"
As Todd Miller has been reporting for years at TomDispatch, there’s one truth seldom mentioned in the endless coverage of this country’s border crisis, already reaching a fever pitch in the early days of the Biden administration: whatever happens on that border, whatever the latest policies may be from (not really) building a “big, fat, beautiful wall” to detaining migrant children in prison-like conditions, an ever-growing border-industrial complex (as Miller has long called it) will continue to haul in profits. In the news these days: a growing surge of undocumented immigrants heading for that border, fierce partisan criticism of Biden’s early border moves, and unaccompanied children traveling through dangerous desert regions only to end up confined en masse in prison-like detention facilities without showers or a glimpse of “el cielo” (the sky) for days on end. It may be politically poisonous news for a Biden administration attempting to reverse Donald Trump’s version of border mania, including halting the building of his “piecemeal border wall,” which a New York Times report recently called “one of the costliest megaprojects in United States history,” but never for the border-industrial complex.
Climate change is likely to prove a dream, not a nightmare, for the corporations in that complex. It will ensure that migrants, and the fear of them, will only grow in this country in the face of disaster elsewhere, as in November when two powerful hurricanes devastated parts of Central America. As then, so in the future it will continue to send desperate souls northward from destroyed communities toward that increasingly over-built U.S. border.
For the border-industrial complex, however, it all adds up to yet more lucrative work and profits. So let Miller drive you to that very border to catch a glimpse of Trump’s ridiculous, fragmentary wall and, while you’re at it, have a genuine border-industrial-complex experience. Then check out his new book, Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, to be published in April. It’s likely to be the perfect way to update your border experience.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
n late February, I drove to see the Trump wall in Sasabe, Arizona. As soon as I parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle stationed a quarter of a mile away began to creep down the dirt road toward us. Just ahead, a dystopian “No Trespassing” sign was flapping in the wind. It was cold as I stepped out of the car with my five-year-old son, William. The wall ahead of us, 30-feet high with steel bollards, was indeed imposing as it quavered slightly in the wind. Through its bars we could see Mexico, a broken panorama of hills filled with mesquites backed by a blue sky.
The Homeland Security vehicle soon pulled up next to us. An agent rolled down his window and asked me, “What are you doing? Joyriding?”
After I laughed in response to a word I hadn’t heard in years, the agent informed us that we were in a dangerous construction zone, even if this part of the wall had been built four months earlier. I glanced around. There were no bulldozers, excavators, or construction equipment of any sort. I wondered whether the lack of machinery reflected the campaign promise of the recently inaugurated Joe Biden that “not another foot” of Trump’s wall would be built.
Indeed, that was why I was here — to see what the border looked like as the post-Trump era began. President Biden had started his term with strong promises to reverse the border policies of his predecessor: families torn apart would be reunited and asylum seekers previously forced to stay in Mexico allowed to enter the United States. Given the Trump years, the proposals of the new administration sounded almost revolutionary.
And yet something else bothered me as we drove away: everything looked the same as it had for years. I’ve been coming to this stretch of border since 2001. I’ve witnessed its incremental disfigurement during the most dramatic border fortification period in this country’s history. In the early 2000s came an influx of Border Patrol agents, followed in 2007 by the construction of a 15-foot wall (that Senator Joe Biden voted for), followed by high-tech surveillance towers, courtesy of a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Boeing Corporation.
Believe me, the forces that shaped our southern border over the decades have been far more powerful than Donald Trump or any individual politician. During the 2020 election, it was commonly asserted that, by getting rid of Trump, the United States would create a more humane border and immigration system. And there was a certain truth to that, but a distinctly limited one. Underneath the theater of partisan politics, there remains a churning border-industrial complex, a conjunction of entrenched interests and relationships between the U.S. government — particularly the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — and private corporations that has received very little attention.
The small border town of Sasabe and its surrounding region is a microcosm of this.
The cumulative force of that complex will now carry on in Trump’s wake. Indeed, during the 2020 election the border industry, created through decades of bipartisan fortification, actually donated more money to the Biden campaign and the Democrats than to Trump and the Republicans.
The Complex
In the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) dolled out 105,000 contracts, or a breathtaking average of 24 contracts a day, worth $55 billion to private contractors. That sum exceeded their $52 billion collective budgets for border and immigration enforcement for the 28 years from 1975 to 2003. While those contracts included ones for companies like Fisher Sand and Gravel that built the 30-foot wall my son and I saw in Sasabe, many of them — including the most expensive — went to companies creating high-tech border fortification, ranging from sophisticated camera systems to advanced biometric and data-processing technologies.
This might explain the border industry’s interest in candidate Biden, who promised: “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it.”
Behind that bold, declarative sentence lay an all-too-familiar version of technological border protection sold as something so much more innocuous, harmless, and humane than what Trump was offering. As it happens, despite our former president’s urge to create a literal wall across hundreds of miles of borderlands, high-technology has long been and even in the Trump years remained a large part of the border-industrial complex.
One pivotal moment for that complex came in 2005 when the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Jackson (previously Lockheed Martin’s chief operating officer), addressed a conference room of border-industry representatives about creating a virtual or technological wall. “This is an unusual invitation,” he said then. “I want to make sure you have it clearly, that we’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business. We’re asking you. We’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organization.”
Of course, by then, the border and immigration enforcement system had already been on a growth spurt. During President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993-2001), for example, its annual budgets had nearly tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.3 billion. Clinton, in fact, initiated the immigration deterrence system still in place today in which Washington deployed armed agents, barriers, and walls, as well as high-tech systems to block the traditional urban places where immigrants had once crossed. They were funneled instead into dangerous and deadly spots like the remote and brutal Arizona desert around Sasabe. As Clinton put it in his 1995 State of the Union address:
“[O]ur administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Sound familiar?
The Clinton years, however, already seemed like ancient times when Jackson made that 2005 plea. He was speaking in the midst of a burgeoning Homeland Security era. After all, DHS was only created in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, during George W. Bush’s years in office, border and immigration enforcement budgets grew from $4.2 billion in 2000 to $15.2 billion in 2008 — more, that is, than during any other presidency including Donald Trump’s. Under Bush, that border became another front in the war on terror (even if no terrorists crossed it), opening the money faucets. And that was what Jackson was underscoring — the advent of a new reality that would produce tens of thousands of contracts for private companies.
In addition, as U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq began to wane, many security and defense companies pivoted toward the new border market. As one vendor pointed out to me at a Border Security Expo in Phoenix in 2012, “We are bringing the battlefield to the border.” That vendor, who had been a soldier in Afghanistan a few years earlier, smiled confidently, the banners of large weapons-makers like Raytheon hanging above him. At the time (as now), an “unprecedented boom period” was forecast for the border market. As the company VisionGain explained then, a “virtuous circle… would continue to drive spending in the long term based on three interlocking developments: ‘illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration,’ more money for border policing in ‘developing countries,’ and the ‘maturation’ of new technologies.”
Since 9/11, border-security corporate giants became big campaign contributors not only to presidential candidates, but also to key members of the Appropriations Committees and the Homeland Security Committees (both House and Senate) — all crucial when it came to border policies, contracts, and budgets. Between 2006 and 2018, top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon contributed a total of $27.6 million to members of the House Appropriations Committee and $6.5 million to members of the House Homeland Security Committee. And from 2002 to 2019, there were nearly 20,000 reported lobbying “visits” to congressional offices related to homeland security. The 2,841 visits reported for 2018 alone included ones from top CBP and ICE contractors Accenture, CoreCivic, GeoGroup, L3Harris, and Leidos.
By the time Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017, the border-industrial complex was truly humming. That year, he would oversee a $20-billion border and immigration budget and have at his disposal nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents (up from 4,000 in 1994), 650 miles of already built walls and barriers, billions of dollars in border technology then in place, and more than 200 immigration-detention centers across the United States.
He claimed he was going to build his very own “big, fat, beautiful wall,” most of which, as it turned out, already existed. He claimed that he was going to clamp down on a border that was already remarkably clamped down upon. And in his own fashion, he took it to new levels.
That’s what we saw in Sasabe, where a 15-foot wall had recently been replaced with a 30-foot wall. As it happened, much of the 450 miles of wall the Trump administration did, in the end, build really involved interchanging already existing smaller barriers with monstrous ones that left remarkable environmental and cultural destruction in their wake.
Trump administration policies forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, infants to appear in immigration court, and separated family members into a sprawling incarceration apparatus whose companies had been making up to $126 per person per day for years. He could have done little of this without the constantly growing border-industrial complex that preceded him and, in important ways, made him.
Nonetheless, in the 2020 election campaign, the border industry pivoted toward Biden and the Democrats. That pivot ensured one thing: that its influence would be strong, if not preeminent, on such issues when the new administration took over.
The Biden Years Begin at the Border
In early January 2021, Biden’s nominee to run DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed that, over the previous three years, he had earned $3.3 million from corporate clients with the WilmerHale law firm. Two of those clients were Northrop Grumman and Leidos, companies that Nick Buxton and I identified as top border contractors in Biden’s Border: The Industry, the Democrats and the 2020 Election, a report we co-authored for the Transnational Institute.
When we started to look at the 2020 campaign contributions of 13 top border contractors for CBP and ICE, we had no idea what to expect. It was, after all, a corporate group that included producers of surveillance infrastructure for the high-tech “virtual wall” along the border like L3Harris, General Dynamics, and the Israeli company Elbit Systems; others like Palantir and IBM produced border data-processing software; and there were also detention companies like CoreCivic and GeoGroup.
To our surprise, these companies had given significantly more to the Biden campaign ($5,364,994) than to Trump ($1,730,435). In general, they had shifted to the Democrats who garnered 55% of their $40 million in campaign contributions, including donations to key members of the House and Senate Appropriations and Homeland Security committees.
It’s still too early to assess just what will happen to this country’s vast border-and-immigration apparatus under the Biden administration, which has made promises about reversing Trumpian border policies. Still, it will be no less caught in the web of the border-industrial complex than the preceding administration.
Perhaps a glimpse of the future border under Biden was offered when, on January 19th, Homeland Security secretary nominee Mayorkas appeared for his Senate confirmation hearings and was asked about the 8,000 people from Honduras heading for the U.S. in a “caravan” at that very moment. The day before, U.S.-trained troops and police in Guatemala had thwarted and then deported vast numbers of them as they tried to cross into that country. Many in the caravan reported that they were heading north thanks to back-to-back catastrophic category 4 hurricanes that had devastated the Honduran and Nicaraguan coasts in November 2020.
Mayorkas responded rather generically that if people were found to qualify “under the law to remain in the United States, then we will apply the law accordingly, if they do not qualify to remain in the United States, then they won’t.” Given that there is no climate-refugee status available to anyone crossing the border that meant most of those who finally made it (if they ever did) wouldn’t qualify to stay.
It’s possible that, by the time I went to see that wall with my son in late February, some people from that caravan had already made it to the border, despite endless obstacles in their path. As we drove down Highway 286, also known as the Sasabe Road, there were reports of undocumented people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico all traveling through the rugged Baboquivari mountain range to the west of us and the grim canyons to the east of us in attempts to avoid the Border Patrol and its surveillance equipment.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans against what he dubbed “the military-industrial complex” in 1961, he spoke of its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual… felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Sixty years later, something similar could be said of the ever-expanding border-industrial complex. It needs just such climate disasters and just such caravans (or, as we’re seeing right now, just such “crises” of unaccompanied minors) to continue its never-ending growth, whether the president is touting a big, fat, beautiful wall or opting for high-tech border technology.
For my son and me, the enforcement apparatus first became noticeable at a checkpoint 25 miles north of the international boundary. Not only were green-uniformed agents interrogating passengers in any vehicle heading northwards, but a host of cameras focused on the vehicles passing by.
Whether they were license-plate readers or facial-recognition cameras I had no way of knowing. What I did know was that Northrop Grumman (which contributed $649,748 to Joe Biden and $323,014 to Donald Trump in the 2020 election campaign) had received a valuable contract to ensure that CBP’s biometric system included “modalities” of all sorts — face and voice data, iris recognition, scars and tattoos, possibly even DNA sample collection, and information about “relationship patterns” and “encounters” with the public. And who could tell if the Predator B drones that General Atomics produces — oh, by the way, that company gave $82,974 to Biden and $51,665 to Trump in 2020 — were above us (as they regularly are in the border regions) using Northrup Grumman’s VADER “man-hunting” radar system first deployed in Afghanistan?
As we traveled through that gauntlet, Border Patrol vehicles were everywhere, reinforcing the surveillance apparatus that extends 100 miles into the U.S. interior. We soon passed a surveillance tower at the side of the road first erected by the Boeing Corporation and renovated by Elbit Systems ($5,553 to Biden, $5,649 to Trump), one of dozens in the area. On the other side of that highway was a gravel clearing where a G4S ($49,233 to Biden, $33,019 to Trump) van usually idles. It’s a mobile prison the Border Patrol uses to transport its prisoners to short-term detention centers in Tucson. And keep in mind that there was so much we couldn’t see like the thousands of implanted motion sensors manufactured by a host of other companies.
Traveling through this border area, it’s hard not to feel like you’re in a profitable version of a classic panopticon, a prison system in which, wherever you might be, you’re being watched. Even five-year-old William was startled by such a world and, genuinely puzzled, asked me, “Why do the green men,” as he calls the Border Patrol, “want to stop the workers?”
By the time we got to that shard of Trump’s “big, fat, beautiful” wall, it seemed like just a modest part of a much larger system that left partisan politics in the dust. At its heart was never The Donald but a powerful cluster of companies with an active interest in working on that border until the end of time.
Just after the agent told us that we were in a construction zone and needed to leave, I noticed a pile of bollards near the dirt road that ran parallel to the wall. They were from the previous wall, the one Biden had voted for in 2006. As William and I drove back to Tucson through that gauntlet of inspection, I wondered what the border-industrial world would look like when he was my age and living in what could be an even more extreme world filled with ever more terrified people fleeing disaster.
And I kept thinking of that discarded pile of bollards, a reminder of just how easy it would be to tear that wall and the world that goes with it down.
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.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, has written on border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, and the NACLA Report on the Americas. His latest book is Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders. You can follow him on Twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at toddmillerwriter.com.
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
Bernie Sanders Wants to Remind You the Pharmaceutical Industry Is Still Ripping Americans Off
Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
Olen writes:
he pharmaceutical industry is enjoying a moment. It has gone in mere months from being one of the most despised industries in the United States to a reputational high, a regular recipient of celebratory headlines for the rapid development of vaccines that will end the covid-19 pandemic.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would like you to know the American pharmaceutical industry is still ripping people off — and he plans to do something about that. This week, Sanders introduced a trio of bills designed to help the United States get a grip on the price we pay for prescription drugs. (Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is the lead sponsor in the House.) These bills would, if enacted, put an end to the gouging of the American public by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices, by pegging the price of pharmaceuticals to the median price in five comparable countries — Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan — and by allowing Americans to import drugs legally from Canada and other major countries.
These changes can’t come a moment too soon. It’s not simply that the high cost of drugs is roiling our politics, sending voters scurrying from party to party in a frantic attempt at a solution. It’s that our personal pharmaceutical bills are increasingly unaffordable.
Americans spend significantly more than citizens of other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on both over-the-counter and prescription medications. The examples are legion. Name-brand insulins — which many people with diabetes say work much better than older, less expensive generics — cost significantly less in Canada than in the United States, where prices have soared by more than 300 percent over the past two decades. People in both Canada and Britain pay a fraction of the cost for Epi-Pens as we do here.
There is a reason for this: No other first-world country besides the United States allows Big Pharma to charge whatever it likes for its products, because drugs are considered a social good and are expected to be affordable. Because we don’t, the Rand Corp. reports that drug prices in the United States are a walloping 256 percent more than other countries. As Sanders noted Tuesday, Big Pharma “has managed to create a situation where they can raise their prices to any level they want any day of the week.”
Without government action, people look to do-it-yourself solutions such as skipping doses or going without altogether to save money. As Elia Spates, who has Type 1 diabetes, testified to the Senate subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday, “When you pay over $800 per month for an individual in insurance premiums and pay an additional $2,000 per month till your deducible is met, your family starts to feel a financial pinch. The only way you see to cut back on the spending is to cut back on the insulin.”
This practice comes with a death count. Before the pandemic shutdowns, there were regular protests by parents whose adult children died after finding their insulin unaffordable. Cancer patients are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy protection than those in the general population and, if they do, they appear to be more likely to die of the disease.
There is a moment of opportunity here to change things. According to Politico, Big Pharma is — for once — running scared, thoroughly expecting something to turn up in major Democratic legislation this year that will finally crack down on its epic run of greed. If it happens, what will have brought it about? It’s not a sudden explosion of political empathy by those who for years stopped proposals like those made by Sanders in their tracks.
Instead, it’s that even the government’s pharmaceutical costs are so out of control that any attempt to bring them in line will help make the financial numbers of a future Biden spending package look better.
Many in Congress remain hesitant to embrace an all-encompassing solution, seeming to favor deals to help those on Medicare with co-pays. Perhaps they are gun-shy, unwilling to fully tackle the power of Big Pharma, which spends millions on lobbying every year. Perhaps they really believe, as is often claimed, that allowing the government to negotiate prices will stifle innovation. (If so, they are almost certainly wrong. The industry giants spend more on marketing and promoting their products than they do on researching new ones.) But, as Sanders points out, the time is long past for half-measures. The high costs of drugs are affecting everyone. The simplest, fairest and certainly most effective solution would be for the federal government to step in and take charge.
A critical care respiratory therapist works with a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) positive patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida, February 11, 2021. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Lack of Masks, Social Distancing, and Covid Testing Cost the US Hundreds of Thousands of Lives, According to New Report
Howard Schneider, Reuters
Schneider writes:
he United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.
That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.
U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
He likened the state-by-state, patchwork response to a car’s cruise control. As the virus worsened people hunkered down, but when the situation improved restrictions were dropped and people were less careful, with the result that “the equilibrium level of daily deaths ... remains in a relatively narrow band” until the vaccine arrived.
Atkeson projected a final fatality level of around 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsides. The outcome, had no vaccine been developed, would have been a far-worse 1.27 million, Atkeson estimated.
The economic response, while mammoth, also could have been better tailored, argued University of California, Berkeley economics professor Christine Romer. She joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others from the last two Democratic administrations in criticizing the spending authorized since last spring, including the Biden team’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
While she said the federal government’s more than $5 trillion in pandemic-related spending won’t likely trigger a fiscal crisis, she worries that higher-priority investments will be deferred because of allocations to initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program.
Those forgivable small business loans were “an interesting and noble experiment,” but were also “problematic on many levels,” including an apparent cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for each job saved, she said.
“Spending on programs such as unemployment compensation and public heath was exactly what was called for,” she wrote, but other aspects, particularly the generous one-time payments to families, were “largely ineffective and wasteful.”
“If something like the $1 trillion spent on stimulus payments that did little to help those most affected by the pandemic ends up precluding spending $1 trillion on infrastructure or climate change in the next few years, the United States will have made a very bad bargain indeed,” Romer wrote.
Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, argue the full package was needed to be sure all workers and families are kept economically intact until the job market recovers.
In a separate paper, Minneapolis Federal Reserve researchers Krista Ruffini and Abigail Wozniak concluded the federal programs largely did what they intended by supporting income and spending, with the impact seen in how consumption changed in response to the approval and lapse of different government payments.
But they also found room for improvement.
Evidence of the PPP’s effectiveness in job retention, for example, was “mixed,” they found, and increases in food assistance didn’t account for things like higher grocery prices.
“Food insecurity remained elevated throughout 2020,” they noted.
The aim now, they said, should be on determining what worked in order to make the response to any similar crisis more effective.
“The 2020 social insurance system response had many successes,” they said. “Given the scope and scale of the pandemic response, it is critical we continue to evaluate these efforts to understand the full extent of their reach, which populations were helped, who was left out.”
Frank Artiles leaves the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, Thursday, March 18, 2021. (photo: Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald)
'A Cloud of Corruption': Democrats Want DOJ Probe of Florida State Senate Races
Alex Daugherty and Samantha J. Gross, McClatchy DC
week after former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles was arrested on felony charges of offering no-party candidate Alexis “Alex” Rodriguez $50,000 to run as an independent in a South Florida state Senate race, Florida’s Democrats in Congress are asking Attorney General Merrick Garland for an expansive corruption investigation.
All 11 of Florida’s Democratic U.S. House members sent a letter to Garland on Thursday, arguing that the potential illicit transfer of campaign funds across state lines warrants scrutiny from the federal government.
The lawmakers said in their letter that “a cloud of corruption hangs over Florida’s 2020 election cycle, which thus far, has received only a limited formal investigation.”
“It is clear that the ultimate goal of the scheme outlined in legal records by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office could not have been accomplished without the coordinated support of two state-level political committees, The Truth and Our Florida, which were set up for the express purpose of raising the name identification of these ghost candidates, and to confuse voters with messaging that mirrored the Democratic campaigns,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter shared with the Miami Herald.
The Democrats wrote that mailers funded by the political committees were tied to an entity called Proclivity, which was registered in Delaware and used a UPS box in Atlanta as its mailing address.
The two political committees accepted $550,000 in untraceable contributions from Proclivity, which paid for what is believed to be hundreds of thousands of mailed political advertisements in support of no-party candidates. The mailers were sent in key Senate Districts 9, 37 and 39 in the month leading up to the Nov. 3 election.
Republicans won all three races, which were considered competitive.
The mailers talked up no-party candidates, who did no campaigning of their own, as champions for progressive causes in an apparent attempt to drive Democratic voters away from the Democratic candidates in those races.
The letter to Garland was led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties in Washington. South Florida Reps. Alcee Hastings, Lois Frankel, Ted Deutch and Frederica Wilson also signed the letter.
The letter comes days after Artiles and Rodriguez turned themselves in on charges related to a scheme to sway the outcome of a key Florida Senate race.
The Miami Herald found last December that Artiles got involved in Miami-Dade’s Senate District 37 race when he recruited and boasted about planting longtime acquaintance Rodriguez, an auto-parts dealer who then lived outside the district in Boca Raton, to run in the race. An arrest affidavit says Artiles offered Rodriguez $50,000 for his candidacy, and ended up paying him just under that amount.
Latinas for Trump co-founder Ileana Garcia won the Senate race by 32 votes out of more than 215,000 cast, over ousted incumbent Democrat José Javier Rodríguez, who shares a last name with the no-party candidate.
Artiles is now facing third-degree felony campaign-finance-related charges connected to illegal campaign contributions and false swearing in connection with voting or elections, which carry sentences of up to five years if convicted. Rodriguez is facing the same charges. Their arraignments are set for April 16.
The lawmakers say allegations in a 25-page affidavit made public last week could violate federal campaign finance laws, in addition to state law, and run afoul of Internal Revenue Service codes.
“Based on the suspicious practices outlined in this letter, including the likelihood of several potential illegal interstate transfers of funds, we strongly believe that much greater scrutiny of this matter at the federal level is warranted,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is also a pressing public concern as to whether any fraud occurred in furtherance of a federal criminal conspiracy designed to influence the outcome of one or more elections.”
After the 2020 election, the political committees amended their campaign finance filings and changed the name of the entity that paid for the mailers to Grow United Inc., a tax-exempt corporation that, like Proclivity, is also registered in Delaware, and whose address is a post office box in Denver.
There is no way to confirm Grow United Inc. donated the money because the entity has no information on file with the state of Delaware. It is “delinquent and not in good standing” for failure to file its annual report with the state, according to its registered agent, The Corporation Trust Company.
According to campaign filings, Grow United donated $1.4 million to Florida causes during the 2020 election cycle, including $530,000 combined to the Florida Democratic Party and the Florida Democratic Legislative Campaign, a committee that serves as the political arm for Senate Democrats.
The group donated to other political committees that backed Democrats but also made large donations to groups like Liberate Florida, which spent its money on contributions to GOP candidates, consultants and conservative political committees in October.
The congressional delegation is not the first group of Democrats to call for further action related to the no-party candidate scheme. Last Friday, Florida Democrats called for Garcia’s resignation from the state Senate and for a special election to be held in Miami-Dade Senate District 37.
State Democratic Chair Manny Diaz also said that the party was looking at “potential referrals to the Department of Justice.”
“We are exploring every avenue that we have,” he told reporters at a press conference Friday. “This election can’t stand, because this election is tainted.”
And the House Democrats argued that unlike former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, the evidence in the Florida state Senate races merits scrutiny.
“Unlike the dangerous, baseless claims of voter fraud impacting the 2020 Election, in this case, evidence actually exists that a multi-state fraud conspiracy was committed against Florida’s voters,” the lawmakers wrote.
Anti-coup protesters run as riot policemen and soldiers crack down on demonstrators. (photo: AP)
Myanmar Military Junta Threatens Private Banks on Strike
teleSUR
The absence of banking activities is preventing the payment of payrolls and the completion of international transactions.
yanmar’s Military Junta is increasing its pressure actions against private financial institutions due to the cash shortage problems that branch closures are causing.
Since the coup occurred on February 1, the absence of banking activities is preventing the payment of payrolls and the completion of international transactions.
Given that customers have been withdrawing their savings from banks, the Central Bank stated that citizens will only be able to withdraw USD354 per day through ATMs and USD1,417 per week at bank branches.
Private bank employees have reported that the dictatorship has detained some managers and directors in retaliation for the closures sponsored by the civil disobedience movement.
The Military Junta has also detained employees of several businesses that did not open on Wednesday due to a "silence strike" against the Junta, including workers from City Mart supermarkets and the Orange chain of stores.
In an attempt to contain the macroeconomic crisis that financial inactivity could generate, the regime has also threatened to nationalize the private banks if they do not resume operations.
Despite the threats and arrests, the Kanbawza Group of Companies (KBZ), which is the country's largest private bank, is keeping all its offices closed, including over thirty branches in Rangoon.
So far, the military dictatorship has killed 286 citizens and detained 2,900 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).
Officials say the 'strong return' of American bald eagles is a reminder of the powerful importance of federal conservation efforts and protections. (photo: Charlie Neibergal/AP)
American Bald Eagles Have Made 'Strong Return' From Brink of Extinction
Jewel Wicker, Guardian UK
Wicker writes:
he number of American bald eagles has more than quadrupled since 2009, according to a recent report by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The species, once on the brink of extinction, has grown to 316,700 birds and 71,400 nesting pairs in the 2019 breeding season. US officials say the “strong return” of American bald eagles is a reminder of the importance of federal conservation efforts and protections, such as banning the pesticide DDT.
Deb Haaland told the Associated Press that the growth of the species “is also a moment to reflect on the importance of the Endangered Species Act, a vital tool in the efforts to protect America’s wildlife”.
“The strong return of this treasured bird reminds us of our nation’s shared resilience and the importance of being responsible stewards of our lands and waters that bind us together,″ the interior secretary added. According to the AP, the bald eagle was removed from the list of endangered and threatened species in 2007.
Haaland also said her department plans to review actions taken by the Trump administration “to undermine key provisions” of the Endangered Species Act, which was created in 1973, 10 years after populations of American bald eagles had dwindled to just 417 known nesting pairs.
According to the news organization, the Trump administration removed endangered species protections for gray wolves last year, “ending longstanding federal safeguards and putting states and tribes in charge of overseeing the predators”.
The move, made days before the 2020 general election, was seen as a decision made to appeal to key demographics of rural voters. Earlier this year, the administration removed protections on habitats for the northern spotted owl in Oregon, Washington state and northern California. Environmentalists criticized the decision as one that prioritized the timber industry over wildlife protections.
Nesting cams, such as the one in Big Bear Lake, have allowed supporters of the bird to view them live.
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