02 March 21
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Juan Cole | The 7 Deadly Sins of Today's Conservatives
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes:
hat someone at the conservative political convention, CPAC, thought it a good idea to put up a gilded statue of the odious Trump says it all. Today’s conservatives are literally worshiping a gold calf, for all the world like straying children of Israel who lapsed from their devotion to God.
Contemporary conservatism has fallen into the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. This listing of faults originated with Evagrius the Solitary, a fourth-century monk from what is now Turkey. His original list had eight sins, but both pride and vainglory were on it, and subsequent authors collapsed them into seven.
I have never found conservatism an interesting ideology, and it seems to me patently false. Its exponents seem to believe that the rich are rich because they are more capable than others and the poor are poor because they are lazy. They decry the role of government in the economy but no one manipulates the government for the benefit of their social class (typically the owners of businesses) than they do. They believe that there are social hierarchies and that these are a good thing. I once heard William Buckley on the radio insisting that the lives of the blind are obviously less full than the lives of the sighted. The crass and embarrassingly glib argument seems to me to sum up the conservative obsession with some people being innately better than others.
Even Buckley, however, would be embarrassed by today’s conservatives, who have devolved into glassy-eyed cultists. They dance around denying reality, imputing the Capitol insurrection to “antifa” in contrast to FBI findings and the evidence of our own eyes. They insisted Joe Biden isn’t really the president. Making sure that the rich are not regulated or taxed in the interests of the public good, the old conservative objective personified by Mitch McConnell, is tame stuff by comparison.
Conservatism has become so prideful as to be narcissistic. Refusing to acknowledge that you lost an election fair and square is pride. This sin of pride led dozens of sitting congressmen to vote against certifying Joe Biden’s triumph. They were too full of pride to accept that they had been whupped. In fact, conservatism today cannot accept any criticism, any defeat on any issue at all. If they appear to lose, it is because of a conspiracy. Their increasing loss of touch with reality is driven by pride. They are constructing a fantasyland in which they always prove victorious. Their pride in being white Christians is also to the point of sin. They seem to have lost sight of that charity and humility business, and seem not to realize that the founders of Christianity were not “white” but brown Palestinian Jews.
The notion that people are rich because they are better than others also displays the sin of pride. Obviously, the rich are often capable people. Economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich points out, however, that most billionaires get to be that way through 5 techniques.
1. Exploit a monopoly
2. Insider trading
3. Buy off politicians
4. Extort investors into giving you a golden parachute
5. Inherit a sh*t-load of money
All five of these ways to get super-rich exhibit the sin of greed. Monopoly practices harm the public weal, and entrepreneurs who wield them are taking advantage of people while benefiting enormously themselves. Likewise, insider trading (which even some in Congress engage in) is a form of theft. Corrupting the political system the way Koch does, buying off politicians to lower his taxes, is also nothing but greedy. Greed is the desire to have and hoard a lot of something (in this case, money). The greedy don’t want to consume their gains, necessarily. Nor could they. Having a billion dollars is after all notional. You don’t actually have it. Most of it is directed by other people. The rich can only own so many appliances or eat so many meals. Most of their money is socked away in investments and does them no particular good as persons.
The Trumpist form of contemporary conservatism is all about wrath. Trump wants to punish those Republicans who voted to impeach him. He didn’t get animated at CPAC until he got to his enemies list. Conservatives are angry. Life isn’t fair to them (even though they are the richest and most privileged people on earth). They are angry at minorities for asking for equality under the law and eroding their white privilege. They are angry about polite requests that they help pay for the government services and infrastructure that allow their businesses to turn a profit.
Today’s conservatives are envious of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. These movements made it indelicate to express racist ideas publicly. They robbed conservatism of the racial epithets whereby they had kept some populations voiceless. That is why they keep crying reverse racism against whites. They have minority envy. They wish they could have the validation that comes with being oppressed. Hence, they imply, Jewish Americans are making a war on Christmas to the point where you have to say “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas. Christianity, the religion of 85% of the population, is being discriminated against. They don’t understand that activism on the part of the Establishment is not lie activism on the part of the truly oppressed.
Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on lust. But the Trumpian brand that has taken over is ostentatious in its claims on white male privilege to sexually harass women. Trump himself is a notorious grabber of pudenda and a philanderer against whom many claims of sexual abuse have been filed. His brand of conservatism entails push-back against women’s desires to be treated like human beings instead of pleasurable objects. It seems clear from Rowan Farrow’s brave reporting that lust of this sort is common in corporate boardrooms, and its practitioners no doubt applaud Trump for parading it and trying to normalize it.
Gluttony is another sin of conservatism. It is the desire to consume as opposed to hoarding. Ted Cruz’s abandonment of Texas for Cancun was gluttony. He wanted to consume some nice weather and some leisure while the Texans he supposedly represents were shivering without heat or electricity in an ice storm. Trump is a notorious glutton, which can easily be seen in his girth. Many of the industries championed by conservatives involve gluttony. Flat top coal mining consumes the natural landscape, leaving only the husk behind. Likewise fracking. Promoting fossil fuels is a way of eating the earth right up. Belch.
The conservative approach to the pandemic last year was slothful. Trump and Republican governors just decided to let half a million people die rather than to take the needed actions. Indeed, Neoliberalism in general is slothful, consisting often in no more than a hope and a prayer that the market will swing into action and solve all problems. The market is, however, merely an artifact of social engineering and not a magic hand. Trump came into office promising to fix all those falling-down bridges and dilapidated airports. He never did. He was too lazy, as was his majority in Congress. They passed a tax cut on billionaires instead. The country is falling down around our ears because deregulating corporations and cutting their taxes are the primary goals of conservatives, not burnishing America’s assets.
Senator Elizabeth Warren. (photo: AP)
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders Propose 3% Wealth Tax on Billionaires
Greg Iacurci, CNBC
Iacurci writes:
slew of Democrats on Capitol Hill — including progressives Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — on Monday proposed a 3% total annual tax on wealth exceeding $1 billion.
They also called for a lesser, 2% annual wealth tax on the net worth of households and trusts ranging from $50 million to $1 billion.
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act aims at reining in a widening U.S. wealth gap, which has been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.
“The ultra-rich and powerful have rigged the rules in their favor so much that the top 0.1% pay a lower effective tax rate than the bottom 99%, and billionaire wealth is 40% higher than before the Covid crisis began,” Warren said Monday in a statement.
About 100,000 Americans — or, fewer than 1 in 1,000 families — would be subject to a wealth tax in 2023, according to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The policy would raise at least $3 trillion over a decade, they found.
Warren called for the tax revenues to be invested in child care and early education, K-12 education and infrastructure.
Aside from Warren and Sanders, other co-sponsors of the legislation include: Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii; Edward Markey, D-Mass.; and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; and Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., are also co-sponsors.
The bill likely faces significant obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats hold the slimmest of majorities.
Some groups also forecast a wealth tax would have some negative effects.
A 2020 Tax Foundation analysis of separate Warren and Sanders wealth tax proposals during their presidential runs found they would reduce U.S. economic output by 0.37% and 0.43%, respectively, over the long term.
A wealth tax would also face administrative and compliance challenges, such as difficulty valuing assets and likely tax evasion schemes, according to the Tax Foundation.
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act would attempt to address some of these issues.
The legislation would invest $100 billion into IRS systems and personnel, ensure a 30% audit rate for the super wealthy, and impose a 40% exit tax on wealthy Americans who seek to renounce their citizenship to avoid a wealth tax.
FBI Director Christopher Wray. (image: Daily Beast)
FBI Chief Chris Wray Calls Capitol Attack 'Domestic Terrorism,' Defends Intel
Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press
BI Director Chris Wray condemned the January riot at the U.S. Capitol as “domestic terrorism” Tuesday as he defended the bureau’s handling of intelligence indicating the prospect for violence. He told lawmakers the information was properly shared with other law enforcement agencies even though it was raw and unverified.
Wray’s comments before Congress, in a rare public appearance since the deadly Capitol attack two months ago, was the FBI’s most vigorous defense against the suggestion that it had not adequately communicated the distinct possibility of violence as lawmakers certified the results of the presidential election. He also described in stark terms the threat from domestic violent extremists and said that, contrary to some Republicans, there is no evidence that anti-Trump groups were involved in the riot.
Many of the senators’ questions Tuesday centered on the FBI’s handling of a Jan. 5 report from the Norfolk, Virginia, field office that warned of online posts foreshadowing a “war” in Washington the following day. Capitol Police leaders have said they were unaware of that report and had received no intelligence from the FBI that would have led them to expect the sort of violence that besieged them on the 6th. Five people died as a result of the riot, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot as she tried to enter the House chamber with lawmakers still inside.
Asked about the handling of the report, Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that it was disseminated though the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, discussed at a command post and posted on an internet portal available to other law enforcement agencies.
“We did communicate that information in a timely fashion to the Capitol Police and (Metropolitan Police Department) in not one, not two, but three different ways,” Wray said, though he added that the outcome was “unacceptable” and the FBI was looking into what if anything it could have done differently ahead of the insurrection.
Though the information was raw, unverified and appeared aspirational in nature, Wray said, it was specific and concerning enough that “the smartest thing to do, the most prudent thing to do, was just push it to the people who needed to get it.”
In characterizing the events of Jan. 6 as an act of domestic terrorism, Wray highlighted the FBI’s growing concern about an increase in extremist violence in the U.S., including from militia groups, white supremacists and anarchists. The threat they pose is being treated with the same urgency as that from international terror groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaida.
“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon,” Wray said.
The violence at the Capitol made clear that a law enforcement agency that remade itself after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to deal with international terrorism is now scrambling to address homegrown violence from white Americans. President Joe Biden’s administration has tasked his national intelligence director to work with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to assess the threat.
Wray said the number of domestic terrorism investigations has increased from around 1,000 since he became FBI director in 2017 to about 2,000 now. The number of white supremacist arrests has almost tripled, he said.
Wray has kept a notably low profile since the Capitol attack. Though he has briefed lawmakers privately and shared information with local law enforcement, Tuesday’s oversight hearing marked his first public appearance before Congress since before November’s presidential election.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)
Mandy Smithberger | The Pentagon, First, Last, and Always: Focusing on the Wrong Threats, Including a New Cold War With China, Is the Last Thing We Can Afford Now
Mandy Smithberger, TomDispatch
Smithberger writes: "This country is in a crisis of the first order. More than half a million of us have died thanks to Covid-19. Food insecurity is on the rise, with nearly 24 million Americans going hungry, including 12 million children."
Strange, isn’t it, what doesn’t sink in. Take this number: $6.4 trillion. There’s a figure you might think should cause a genuine stir (especially since each of those was a taxpayer dollar). In fact, that was what, in November 2019, Neta Crawford of Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project calculated that this country had spent on or committed to its post-9/11 wars across significant parts of the planet (and future care for U.S. military personnel damaged by them). By all rights, that number should have stunned this country. It should have caused an uproar. It should have resulted in major policy changes in Washington.
Just imagine that, in the years before Covid-19 hit, when American infrastructure was already going down — “infrastructure week” would become a (bad) joke of the Trump era — the American taxpayer was “investing” $6.4 trillion (a figure you can’t repeat too often) in a series of disastrous wars. They would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of American military personnel and hundreds of thousands of civilians in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. They would uproot millions more and help unsettle the planet. Yet, explain it as you will, they simply couldn’t be (and still can’t be) ended. If that isn’t the record from hell, what is?
Today, Crawford’s figure would, of course, have to be updated as we await Joe Biden’s decisions on future American war-making from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond. And yet, strangely enough, as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert Mandy Smithberger reports, Washington, in a remarkably bipartisan fashion, continues to fund the Pentagon at levels that should astound us all. This at a moment when questions remain about whether the Biden administration can pass a $1.9 trillion bill to offer relief to Americans overwhelmed by the disaster of Covid-19. Imagine what those $6.4 trillion dollars could have done, if invested in this country, in us, instead of in those disastrous wars. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Pentagon, First, Last, and Always
Focusing on the Wrong Threats, including a New Cold War with China, Is the Last Thing We Can Afford Now
his country is in a crisis of the first order. More than half a million of us have died thanks to Covid-19. Food insecurity is on the rise, with nearly 24 million Americans going hungry, including 12 million children. Unemployment claims filed since the pandemic began have now reached 93 million. Given the level of damage to the less wealthy parts of this society, it’s little wonder that most Americans chose pandemic recovery (including the quick distribution of vaccines) as their top priority issue.
Keep in mind that our democracy is suffering as well. After all, former president Donald Trump incited an insurrection when he wasn’t able to win at the polls, an assault on the Capitol in which military veterans were overrepresented among those committed to reversing the election results (and endangering legislators as well). If you want a mood-of-the-moment fact, consider this: even after Joe Biden’s election, QAnon followers continued to insist that Trump could still be inaugurated to his second term in office. Addressing economic and political instability at home will take significant resources and focus, including calling to account those who so grossly mishandled the country’s pandemic response and stoked the big lie of questioning the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory.
If, however, you weren’t out here in the real world, but in there where the national security elite exists, you’d find that the chatter would involve few of the problems just mentioned. And only in our world would such a stance seem remarkably disconnected from reality. In their world, the “crisis” part of the present financial crisis is a fear, based on widespread rumors and reports about the Biden budget to come, that the Pentagon’s funding might actually get, if not a genuine haircut, then at least a trim — something largely unheard of in the twenty-first century.
The Pentagon’s boosters and their allies in the defense industry respond to such fears by insisting that no such trim could possibly be in order, that competition with China must be the prime focus of this moment and of the budget to come. Assuming that China’s rise is, in fact, a genuine problem, it’s not one that’s likely to be solved either in the near future or in a military fashion (not, at least, without disaster for the world), and it’s certainly not one that should be prioritized during a catastrophic pandemic.
While there are genuine concerns about what China’s rise might mean for the United States, it’s important to recognize just how much harm those trying to distract us from the very real problems at hand are likely to inflict on our health and actual security. Since the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, those unwilling to accept our failures or respond adequately to the disease at hand have blamed outside forces, most notably China, for otherwise preventable havoc to American lives and the economy.
Trump and his allies tried to shirk accountability for their failure to respond to the pandemic by pushing xenophobic and false characterizations of Covid-19 as the “China virus” or the “kung flu.” In a similar fashion, the national security elites hope that focusing on building up our military and building new nuclear weapons with China in mind will distract time and energy from making needed changes at home. But those urging us to increase Pentagon spending to compete with China in the middle of a pandemic are, in reality, only compounding the damage to our country’s recovery.
Militarizing the Future
Given the last two decades, you won’t be surprised to know that this misplaced assessment of the real threat to the public has a firm grip on Washington right now. As my colleague Dan Grazier at the Project On Government Oversight pointed out recently, confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks included more than 70 (sometimes ominous) mentions of China.
So again, no surprise that only a few weeks after those hearings, Biden announced the creation of a new China task force at the Pentagon. As the press announcement made clear, that group is going to be a dream for the military-industrial complex since it will, above all, focus on developing advanced “defense” technologies to stare down the China “threat” and so further militarize the future. In other words, the Pentagon’s projected threat assessments and their wonder-weapon solutions will be at the forefront of Washington thinking — and, therefore, funding, even during this pandemic.
That’s why it’s easy enough to predict where such a task force will lead. A similar panel in 2018, including lobbyists, board members, and contractors from the arms industry, warned that competition with China would require a long-term increase in funding for the Pentagon of 3% to 5%. That could mean an almost unimaginable future Department of Defense budget of $971.9 billion in fiscal year 2024. To pay for it, they suggested, Congress should consider cutting social security and other kinds of safety-net spending.
Even before Covid-19 hit, the economic fragility of so many Americans should have made that kind of recommendation irresponsible. In the midst of a pandemic, it’s beyond dangerous. Still, it betrays a crucial truth about the military-industrial complex: its key figures see the U.S. economy as something that should serve their needs, not the other way around.
Of course, the giants of the weapons industry have long had a direct seat at the table in Washington. Despite being the first Black secretary of defense, for instance, Lloyd Austin III remains typical of the Pentagon establishment in the sense that he comes to the job directly from a seat on the board of directors of weapons giant Raytheon. And he’s in good company. After all, many of the administration’s recent appointees are drawn from key Washington think tanks supported by the weapons industry.
For instance, more than a dozen former staffers from, or people affiliated with, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have joined the Biden administration. A recent report by the Revolving Door Project found that CNAS had repeatedly accepted the sort of funding that went comfortably with recommendations it was making that “would directly benefit some of the think tank’s donors, including military contractors and foreign governments.” When it came to confronting China, for instance, CNAS figures urged the Department of Defense to “sustain and enhance” defense contractors so that they would become ever more “robust, flexible, and resilient” in a faceoff with that country.
Sadly, even as the Pentagon’s budget remains largely unchallenged, there’s been a sudden reawakening — especially in Republican ranks — to the version of fiscal conservatism that looks askance at providing relief to communities and businesses suffering around the country. Recent debates in Washington about the latest pandemic relief bill suggest once again that the much-ballyhooed principles of “responsibility” and “fiscal conservatism” apply to everyone — except, of course, the Pentagon.
Putting Covid-19 Relief Spending in Perspective
The price tag for the relief bill presently being debated in Congress, $1.9 trillion, is certainly significant, but it’s not far from the kind of taxpayer support national security agencies normally receive every year. In 2020, for instance, the real national security budget request surpassed $1.2 trillion. That request included not only the Pentagon, but other costs of war, including care for veterans and military retirement benefits.
Over the years, such costs have proven monumental. The Department of Defense alone, for example, has received more than $10.6 trillion over the past 20 years. That included $2 trillion for its overseas contingency operations account, a war-fighting fund used by both the Pentagon and lawmakers to circumvent congressionally imposed spending caps. Reliance on that account, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assured Congress, only made it likelier that taxpayers would fund more expensive and less optimal solutions to America’s forever wars.
In the past, the justification for such excessive national-security spending rested on the idea that the Defense Department was the key to keeping Americans safe. As a result, the Pentagon’s ever-escalating requests for money were approved by Congress year after year without real opposition. Disproportionate funding for that institution has, however, come at a significant cost.
Caps on non-defense spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011 meant that civilian agencies were already underfunded when the pandemic hit. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, “Overall funding for programs outside veterans’ medical care remains below its level a decade ago.” The consequences of that underspending can also be seen in our crumbling roads and infrastructure, to which, in its last report in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a D+ — and the situation has only grown worse since then.
Job protection is the other common refrain for those defending high funding levels for the Pentagon and, during a pandemic with such devastating employment consequences, such a concern can hardly be dismissed. But studies have consistently shown that military spending is a remarkably poor job creator compared to almost any other kind of spending. Some of us may still remember World War II’s Rosie the Riveter and mid-twentieth-century union support for defense budgets as engines for job creation. Those assumptions are, however, sorely out of date. Investing in healthcare, combating climate change, or rebuilding infrastructure are all significantly more effective job creators than yet more military spending.
Of course, non-military stimulus spending has been far from perfect. Even measuring the effects of the first relief package passed by Congress has proven difficult, especially since the Trump administration ignored the law when it came to reporting on just how many jobs that spending either preserved or created. Still, there’s no question that non-military stimulus efforts are more effective, by orders of magnitude, than defense spending when it comes to job creation.
Needed: A New Funding Strategy to Weather Future Storms
The uncomfortable truth (even for those who would like to see a trillion dollars in annual Pentagon spending) is that such funding won’t make us safer, possibly far less so. Recent studies of preventable military aviation crashes indicate that, disturbingly enough, given the way the Pentagon spends taxpayer funds, more money can actually make us less safe.
Somewhere along the line in this pandemic moment, Washington needs to redefine the meaning of both “national security” and “national interest.” In a world in which California burns and Texas freezes, in which more than half-a-million Americans have already been felled by Covid-19, it’s time to recognize how damaging the over-funding of the Pentagon and a myopic focus on an ever more militarized cold war with China are likely to be to this country. As the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Stephen Wertheim has argued, it’s increasingly clear that an American strategy focused on chasing global military supremacy into the distant future no longer serves any real definition of national interest.
Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman recently pointed out at Foreign Affairs that “the coming era will be one of health crises, climate shocks, cyberattacks, and geoeconomic competition among great powers. What unites those seemingly disparate threats is that each is not so much a battle to be won as a challenge to be weathered.” While traditional defense threats still loom large in what passes for national debate in Washington, the most likely (and potentially most devastating) threats to public health and safety aren’t actually in the Pentagon’s wheelhouse.
Weathering those future crises will continue to require innovation and creativity, which means ensuring that we are investing adequately not in the hypersonic weaponry of some future imagined war but in education and public health now. Particularly in the near term, as we try to rebuild jobs and businesses lost to this pandemic, even the Pentagon must be forced to make better use of the staggering resources it already receives from increasingly embattled American taxpayers. Rushing to produce yet more useless (and sometimes poorly produced) weapons systems and technology will only increase the fragility of both the military and the civilian society it’s supposed to protect.
Make no mistake: the addiction to Pentagon spending is a bipartisan problem in Washington. Still, change is in order. The problems we face at home are too overwhelming to be ignored. We can’t continue to let the appetites of the military-industrial complex crowd out the needs of the rest of us.
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.
A Trump supporter outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on Jan. 6. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Georgia House Passes Very Real Voting Access Rollback Based on Republican Election Fiction
Elliot Hannon, Slate
Hannon writes:
eorgia moved a step closer to making it harder to vote Monday when Republican lawmakers in the House approved a bill that would significantly curtail early and absentee voting options in the state. Why is the state of Georgia—and Republicans in particular—suddenly interested in making it harder to vote? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s characterization of the bill says it all: “The House voted along party lines, 97–72, on the sweeping elections bill supported by Republicans who want to impose new voting requirements after losing presidential and U.S. Senate races in Georgia.” Republicans lost the state of Georgia, and they don’t want to lose it again. Instead of devising a way to attract more voters, they’ve decided on the opposite track: making it harder for the opposition to vote.
“The far-reaching bill would require a photo ID for absentee voting, limit the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot, restrict where ballot drop boxes could be located and when they could be accessed, and limit early voting hours on weekends, among many other changes,” the Associated Press reports. “Later Monday, the state Senate Ethics Committee approved a Republican-backed bill that would limit who can vote absentee in Georgia to those 65 and older, people with a disability and people who will be away from their precinct on Election Day.”
This is where Trump’s outlandish election claims have come in handy for Republicans, many of whom have adopted his concocted grievances as their own belief system about the election. The push in Georgia to limit voting access, as the AP notes, is “one of a flood of election bills being pushed by GOP lawmakers across the country this year that would add new barriers to voting.” The national Republican fiction that they were robbed in 2020 has been repeated ad nauseam, thereby eroding their own trust in the election—that they set the rules for!
This, despite the fact that Georgia election officials, including Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have said there’s literally no evidence of widespread fraud, much less one that affected the results that were already subject to heightened scrutiny—from recounts and audits. The fraud may not have been real, but the erosion of (Republican) trust is. And, of course, the only way to restore that (Republican) trust is by enacting real-world policies based on the very fiction that spawned this whole mess. It’s cynical and cyclical, it’s corrosive—and it’s happening nationwide.
In Georgia, the bill now heads to the overwhelmingly Republican state Senate, where it will be debated before it is ultimately advanced to the desk of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
The press freedom group hopes a full investigation will be opened into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his officials. (photo: Andy Rain/EPA)
Crimes Against Humanity Complaint Filed Against Mohammed Bin Salman in German Court
Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Michael Safi, Guardian UK
Reporters without Borders accuses Saudi heir of crimes against humanity over persecution of journalists
audi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and other high-ranking Saudi officials have been accused of committing crimes against humanity in a criminal complaint filed in Germany by Reporters without Borders (RSF), the press freedom group.
The 500-page complaint, filed with the German public prosecutor in general in the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe, centres on the “widespread and systematic” persecution of journalists in Saudi Arabia, including the arbitrary detention of 34 journalists there and the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist.
“These journalists are the victims of unlawful killing, torture, sexual violence and coercion and forced disappearance,” said Christophe Deloire, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, at a press conference on Tuesday.
The complaint came just days after the US release of an unclassified intelligence report into Khashoggi’s 2018 murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, which US intelligence agencies said was approved by the 35-year-old Saudi heir.
RSF has chosen to file its complaint in Germany because German laws give its courts jurisdiction over international crimes committed abroad, even without a German connection. RSF indicated that it hoped its complaint, which centres on Prince Mohammed and four senior officials, will lead the German prosecutor to open what is known as a “situation analysis”, which could lead to a formal prosecutorial investigation into whether the Saudi officials have committed crimes against humanity by targeting reporters.
“The official opening of a criminal investigation in Germany into the crimes against humanity in Saudi Arabia would be a world first,” said RSF Germany director Christian Mihr. “We ask the public prosecutor general to open a situation analysis, with a view to formally launching a prosecutorial investigation and issuing arrest warrants.”
The prosecutor’s office said it had received the complaint and was assessing its legal and factual merits.
RSF said that the journalists who are in detention are victims of multiple counts of crimes against humanity, including wilful killing, torture, sexual violence and coercion, enforced disappearance, unlawful deprivation of liberty, and persecution. By focusing on dozens of cases of journalists who are being detained, RSF said it was revealing that all Saudi journalists, particularly those who speak out against the government, were under threat.
“The truth has been revealed but that is not enough,” said Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, who said she would give evidence as part of any investigation. “The murderer cannot be allowed to get away with it, otherwise it will happen again.”
The bid by RSF to try to get German prosecutors to open a case against the Saudi crown prince followed the recent conviction in Germany of a former Syrian secret police officer of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity for his role in the torture of protesters a decade ago. Eyad al-Gharib, a 44-year-old former low-ranking officer in the Syrian intelligence service, carried out orders in one of Bashar al-Assad’s prisons.
The “suspects” in RSF’s Saudi case are the crown prince, known as “MBS”, his close adviser Saud al-Qahtani, Ahmad Asiri, who has been sanctioned by the US and is alleged to have supervised Khashoggi’s murder, Mohammad al-Otaibi, the consul general in Istanbul at the time of the murder, and Maher Mutreb, an intelligence officer who is accused of leading the torture.
The group said in a statement that the named suspects were identified for their “organisational or executive responsibility in Khashoggi’s killing, as well as their involvement in developing a state policy to attack and silence journalists.”
The Biden administration has been criticised for its decision not to take further actions against Prince Mohammed, even as it publicly acknowledged he was behind the Khashoggi murder.
The US intelligence agencies based the assessment on the prince’s “control of decision-making in the kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of [the prince’s] protective detail in the operation, and [his] support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”
It also found that the prince’s “absolute control” of the kingdom’s security and intelligence organisations made it “highly unlikely” that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation like Khashoggi’s murder without his approval.
Khashoggi had gone to the Saudi consulate to pick up documents needed for his wedding. Once inside, he died at the hands of more than a dozen Saudi security and intelligence officials and others who had assembled ahead of his arrival. Surveillance cameras had tracked his route and those of his alleged killers in Istanbul in the hours before his killing.
The Saudi government has denied it planned to assassinate the Washington Post columnist and has said the killing was a rogue operation by Saudi agents.
Pump jacks. (photo: Martina Birnbaum/Getty Images)
Dying Oil Companies' Parting Gift: Millions in Cleanup Costs
Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
Sadasivam writes:
hen Weatherly Oil and Gas filed for bankruptcy in February 2019, the company was walking away from several hundred Texas wells. Many hadn’t produced a drop of oil in years. Companies are legally required to “plug” wells that they’re no longer using to extract oil and gas by pouring concrete into all their openings and cracks; this prevents them from leaking fossil fuels or harmful pollutants into the air and water sources nearby. But many companies that abandon wells say they no longer have the financial means to do so, leaving government regulators on the hook for the cost. The problem is massive: There are approximately 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells across the country.
The Texas Railroad Commission, or RRC, which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry, tried to make sure Weatherly would pay up, objecting to the state’s bankruptcy plan because it didn’t include sufficient information about the amount of money that would be set aside for well cleanup and for the company’s various creditors. Ultimately, Weatherly struck a deal with the agency: The company would pay the Commission $3.5 million to cover the plugging costs of the abandoned wells that it couldn’t find buyers for. The agency agreed, and the bankruptcy court approved the deal. When Weatherly handed over 173 abandoned wells to the state, it officially became the company responsible for the most orphan wells in Texas.
Unfortunately, the $3.5 million that the RRC was able to squeeze out of Weatherly doesn’t even cover a third of the $13.3 million estimated cleanup cost. Effectively, the state is now responsible for coming up with almost all of the $10 million shortfall.
Though Weatherly insisted it couldn’t find the money to fulfill its plugging obligations, the company’s top executives were paid a combined $8.6 million in the year preceding bankruptcy. Weatherly’s former CEO later became a paid bankruptcy expert for FTI Consulting, a public-relations firm with a record of launching duplicitous front groups for oil companies. (The company’s former executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
It’s a stark example of the way that environmental liabilities are going unaddressed when companies go belly up, according to a report released Tuesday by the new nonprofit group Commission Shift, which advocates for reform of oil and gas regulation in Texas. The Lone Star State currently has more than 6,000 orphan wells on government rolls, and the RRC estimates they will cost more than $300 million to clean up. The report lays the blame on a number of the state’s regulatory policies, including waiving plugging requirements during the pandemic, infrequent and small-dollar penalties, and low financial assurance requirements from companies. The volatility of the oil market hasn’t helped: Price fluctuations and a long-term market slump caused a spike in bankruptcies in 2019, and sagging demand due to the pandemic accelerated the pace. Last year alone, 31 companies worth more than $50 billion filed for bankruptcy in Texas, bringing with them a wave of well abandonments.
“The Railroad Commission doesn’t have the proper systems in place to recover fees from the industry for plugging wells,” said Virginia Palacios, Commission Shift’s executive director. “Taxpayers are going to be on the hook for plugging those wells.”
To try to prevent this, the RRC collects financial assurances called bonds from oil companies before they begin to operate in the state. The bond value depends on how many wells the company has. Companies like Weatherly that operate 100 or more wells are required to submit a $250,000 bond — approximately $2,500 per well. But, since a typical abandoned well costs between $20,000 and $40,000 to plug and clean up, these bonds often cover only a fraction of a given company’s plugging costs if it ends up abandoning a large number of wells.
“It’s just nowhere near the amount of money you need to actually cover what operators could be leaving behind,” said Palacios. “The Railroad Commission needs to enforce better practices upfront so that we can avoid the bankruptcy process and the orphan law process altogether.”
The RRC did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Plugging costs are rising: Over the last decade, state data show that cleanup costs have increased anywhere between 30 and 300 percent in various parts of the state. In the RRC’s district 8, which oversees the Permian Basin — the largest and most productive shale play in Texas — per-foot plugging costs were less than $9 in 2010. By 2020, they had doubled.
Environmental advocates say that cleanup costs are poised to surge even more as newer fracking wells, which are drilled deeper and often involve long horizontal bores, are abandoned. The average well depth in the Permian is approximately 15,000 feet. An analysis of Texas data by Kelly Mitchell, a senior analyst with the corporate watchdog group Documented, found that the average well plugged by the RRC between 2015 and 2020 was only 2,231 feet deep. A separate report published last year by Carbon Tracker, a climate-focused financial think tank, estimated that it could cost as much as $300,000 to plug a 10,000-foot modern shale well.
Palacios said that, as more companies file for bankruptcy and signs point to the oil and gas industry shrinking in Texas, the need for effective oversight by the RRC is becoming more urgent. Her organization hopes to push the RRC toward policies that better protect taxpayers and the environment. Aside from the orphan wells issue, Commission Shift will target campaign finance and ethics reforms at the RRC, she said.
“RRC is going through an energy transition,” said Palacios. “We need our state agencies to not keep their heads in the sand on this and to start managing how that transition happens.”
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