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16 March 21
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Nomi Prins | Building or Unbuilding America?: Infrastructure Should Be the Great Economic Equalizer
Nomi Prins, TomDispatch
Prins writes: "During the Trump years, the phrase 'Infrastructure Week' rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline."
My mother died in 1977; my father in 1983; and so many decades later, I think about them ever more often. Partially that’s because, like most kids (I suspect), I wasn’t particularly interested in their lives when they were alive. Only now do I have a thousand-and-one questions for them that can never be answered, including how they first met. I do remember my mother once telling me that my father “wooed her on roller skates,” but typically I never asked her to elaborate… sigh.
These days, however, there’s another reason I think about my parents regularly. I often find myself trying to imagine what it would be like to bring them, like two tourists from the past, into this twenty-first-century American world of ours and just how shocked they would be — and I’m not just thinking about the still-foaming former President Donald Trump or what, for mysterious reasons, are still called “Republicans.” The exception to such shock, by the way, would undoubtedly be the pandemic that’s gripped this country for a year now. After all, as children they lived through the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, a pandemic experience that must have been as telling for them as it is for children today but that they never mentioned to me. In just about every other way imaginable, though, I think they would believe that they had been transported to another planet.
Let me give you but one example of what I imagine they would find beyond belief about their former homeland in the context of today’s all-too-timely piece by TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins. Imagine, for instance, that I were to explain high-speed railways to them and then ask them to guess, in 2021, just how many miles of such advanced rail technology they thought the United States and China now had. The answer, as it happens, is a maximum of 34 miles for the U.S. and nearly 24,000 miles and still rapidly expanding for China. Believe me, they would be boggled. (Even we, I think, should be boggled.) They lived in an era in which, as Prins explains today, the bipartisan funding and building of infrastructure was the norm in this country. If I were to inform them that Americans, still priding themselves on being the greatest power on planet Earth (despite their monstrous mishandling of the pandemic), no longer build or even maintain infrastructure at all and that the “Republicans” of this moment are more or less guaranteed to be in lockstep opposition to any Biden administration attempt to reverse course on the subject, I suspect they would think me mad. Which is why Prins’s piece today couldn’t be more important.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
uring the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running joke in Washington.
Despite the focus in recent years on President Trump’s failure to do anything for the country’s crumbling infrastructure, here’s a sad reality: considered over a longer period of time, Washington’s political failure to fund the repairing, modernizing, or in some cases simply the building of that national infrastructure has proven a remarkably bipartisan “effort.” After all, the same grand unfulfilled ambitions for infrastructure were part and parcel of the Obama White House from 2009 on and could well typify the Biden years, if Congress doesn’t get its act together (or the filibuster doesn’t go down in flames). The disastrous electric grid power outages that occurred during the recent deep freeze in Texas are but the latest example of the pressing need for infrastructure upgrades and investments of every sort. If nothing is done, more people will suffer, more jobs will be lost, and the economy will face drastic consequences.
Since the mid-twentieth century, when most of this country’s modern infrastructure systems were first established, the population has doubled. Not only are American roads, airports, electric grids, waterways, railways and more distinctly outdated, but today’s crucial telecommunications sector hasn’t ever been subjected to a comprehensive broadband strategy.
Worse yet, what’s known as America’s “infrastructure gap” only continues to widen. The cost of what we need but haven’t done to modernize our infrastructure has expanded to $5.6 trillion over the last 20 years ($3 trillion in the last decade alone), according to a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Some estimates now even run as high as $7 trillion.
In other words, as old infrastructure deteriorates and new infrastructure and technology are needed, the cost of addressing this ongoing problem only escalates. Currently, there is a $1-trillion backlog of (yet unapproved) deferred-maintenance funding floating around Capitol Hill. Without action in the reasonable future, certain kinds of American infrastructure could, like that Texas energy grid, soon be deemed unsafe.
Now, it’s true that the U.S. continues to battle Covid-19 with more than half a million lives already lost and significant parts of the economy struggling to make ends meet. Even before the pandemic, however, America’s failing infrastructure system was already costing the average household nearly $3,300 a year.
According to ASCE, “The nation’s economy could see the loss of $10 trillion in GDP [gross domestic product] and a decline of more than $23 trillion in business productivity cumulatively over the next two decades if current investment trends continue.” Whatever a post-pandemic economy looks like, our country is already starved for policies that offer safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable future infrastructure systems. Such a down payment on our future is crucial not just for us, but for generations to come.
As early as 2016, ASCE researchers found that the overall number of dams with potential high-hazard status had already climbed to nearly 15,500. At the time, the organization also discovered that nearly four out of every 10 bridges in America were 50 years old or more and identified 56,007 of them as already structurally deficient. Those numbers would obviously be even higher today.
And yet, in 2021, what Americans face is hardly just a transportation crisis. The country’s energy system largely predates the twenty-first century. The majority of American electric transmission and distribution systems were established in the 1950s and 1960s with only a 50-year life cycle. ASCE reports that, “More than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.” That means our systems weren’t and aren’t equipped to handle excess needs — especially in emergencies.
The country is critically overdue for infrastructure development in which the government and the private sector would collaborate with intention and urgency. Infrastructure could be the great equalizer in our economy, if only the Biden administration and a now-dogmatically partisan Congress had the fortitude and foresight to make it happen.
American History Offers a Roadmap for Infrastructure Success
It wasn’t always like this. Over the course of American history, building infrastructure has not only had a powerful economic impact, but regularly garnered bipartisan political support for the public good.
In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. That landmark bill provided federal support to an already ongoing private effort to build the first transcontinental railroad. Though at the time all its ramifications weren’t positive — notably escalating conflicts between Native Americans and settlers pushing westward — the effort did connect the country’s coastal markets, provided jobs for thousands, and helped jumpstart commerce in the West. Believe it or not, most of that transcontinental railroad line is still in use today.
In December 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing the construction of a dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River in the American Southwest, a region that had faced unpredictable flooding and lacked reliable electricity. Despite the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, by early 1931, the private sector, with government support, had begun constructing a structure of unprecedented magnitude, known today as the Hoover Dam. As an infrastructure project, it would eventually pay for itself through the sale of the electricity that it generated. Today, that dam still provides electricity and water to tens of millions of people.
Having grasped the power of the German system of autobahns while a general in World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, under the guise of “national security,” launch the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, with bipartisan support, creating the interstate highway system. In its time, that system would be considered one of the “greatest public works projects in history.”
In the end, that act would lead to the creation of more than 47,000 miles of roads across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It would have a powerful effect on commercial business activity, national defense planning, and personal travel, helping to launch whole new sectors of the economy, ranging from roadside fast-food restaurants to theme parks. According to estimates, it would return more than six dollars in economic productivity for every dollar it cost to build and support, a result any investor would be happy with.
Equivalent efforts today would undoubtedly prove to be similar economic drivers. Domestically, such investments in infrastructure have always proven beneficial. New efforts to create sustainable green energy businesses, reconfigure energy grids, and rebuild crippled transit systems for a new age would help guarantee U.S global economic competitiveness deep into the twenty-first century.
Infrastructure as an International Race for Influence
In an interview with CNBC in February 2021, after being confirmed as the first female treasury secretary, Janet Yellen stressed the crucial need not just for a Covid-19 stimulus relief but for a sustainable infrastructure one as well.
As part of what the Biden administration has labeled its “Build Back Better” agenda, she underscored the “long-term structural problems in the U.S. economy that have resulted in inequality [and] slow productivity growth.” She also highlighted how a major new focus on clean-energy investments could make the economy more competitive globally.
When it comes to infrastructure and sustainable development efforts, the U.S. is being left in the dust by its primary economic rivals. Following his first phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Biden noted to a group of senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee that, “if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.” He went on to say, “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment, and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”
As this country, deep in partisan gridlock, stalls on infrastructure measures of any sort, its global competitors are proceeding full speed ahead. Having helped to jumpstart its economy with projects like high-speed railways and massive new bridges, China is now accelerating its efforts to further develop its technological infrastructure. As Bloomberg reported, the Chinese are focused on supporting the build-up of “everything from wireless networks to artificial intelligence. In the master plan backed by President Jinping himself, China will invest an estimated $1.4 trillion over six years” in such projects.
And it’s not just that Asian giant leaving the U.S. behind. Major trading partners like Australia, India, and Japan are projected to significantly out-invest the United States. The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Competitiveness Report typically listed this country in 13th place among the world’s nations when it came to its infrastructure quality. (It had been ranked 5th in 2002.) In 2020, that organization ranked the U.S. 32nd out of 115 countries on its Energy Transition Index.
Despite the multiple stimulus packages that Congress has passed in the Covid-19 era, no funding — not a cent — has been designated for capital-building projects. In contrast, China, Japan, and the European Union have all crafted stimulus programs in which infrastructure spending was a core component.
Infrastructure Development as a Political Equalizer
Infrastructure could be the engine for the most advantageous kinds of growth in this country. An optimal combination of federal and private funds, strategic partnerships, targeted infrastructure bonds, and even the creation of an infrastructure bank could help jumpstart a range of sustainable and ultimately revenue-generating businesses.
Such investment is a matter of economics, of cost versus benefit. These days, however, such calculations are both obstructed and obfuscated by politics. In the end, however, political economics comes down to getting creative about sources of funding and how to allocate them. To launch a meaningful infrastructure program would mean deciding who will produce it, who will consume it, and what kinds of transfer of wealth would be involved in the short and long run. Though the private sector certainly would help drive such a new set of programs, government funding would, as in the past, be crucial, whether under the rubric of national security, competitive innovation, sustainable clean energy, or creating a carbon-neutral future America. Any effort, no matter the label, would undoubtedly generate sustainable public and private jobs for the future.
On both the domestic and international fronts, infrastructure is big business. Wall Street, as well as the energy and construction sectors, are all eager to learn more about Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan, which he is expected to take up in his already delayed first joint address to Congress. Actions, not just words, are needed.
Expectations are running high about what might prove to be a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure initiative. Such anticipation has already elevated the stock prices of construction companies, as well as shares in the sustainable energy sector.
There are concerns, to be sure. A big infrastructure package might never make it through an evenly split Senate, where partisanship is the name of the game. Some economists also fear that it could bring on inflation. There is, of course, debate over the role of the private sector in any such plan, as well as horse-trading about what kinds of projects should get priority. But the reality is that this country desperately needs infrastructure that, in turn, can secure a sustainable and green future. Someday this will have to be done, and the longer the delay, the more those costs are likely to rise. The future revenues and economic benefits from a solid infrastructure package should be key drivers in any post-pandemic economy.
The biggest asset managers in the country are already seeing more money flowing into their infrastructure and sustainable-energy funds. Financing for such deals in the private sector is also increasing. Any significant funding on the public side will only spur and augment that financing. Such projects could drive the economy for years to come. They would run the gamut from establishing smart grids and expanding broadband reach to building electric transmission systems that run off more sustainable energy sources, while manufacturing cleaner vehicles and ways to use them. Going big with futuristic transit projects like Virgin’s Hyperloop, a high-speed variant of a vacuum train, or Elon Musk’s initiative for the development of carbon-capture technology, could even be included in a joint drive to create the necessary clean-energy infrastructure and economy of the future.
Polling also shows that such infrastructure spending has broad public support, even if, in Congress, much-needed bipartisan backing for such a program remains distinctly in question. Still, in February, the ranking Republican senator on the environment and public works committee, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, said that “transportation infrastructure is the platform that can drive economic growth — all-American jobs, right there, right on the ground — now and in the future, and improve the quality of life for everyone on the safety aspects.” Meanwhile, the committee’s chairman, Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, stressed that “the burdens of poor road conditions are disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities.” He pointed out that “low-income families and peoples of color are frequently left behind or left out by our investments in infrastructure, blocking their access to jobs and education opportunities.”
Sadly, given the way leadership in Washington wasted endless months dithering over the merits of supporting American workers during a pandemic, it may be too much to hope that a transformative bipartisan infrastructure deal will materialize.
Infrastructure as the Great Economic Equalizer
Here’s a simple reality: a strong American economy is dependent on infrastructure. That means more than just a “big umbrella” effort focused on transportation and electricity. Yes, airports, railroads, electrical grids, and roadways are all-important economic drivers, but in the twenty-first-century world, high-capacity communications systems are also essential to economic prosperity, as are distribution channels of various sorts. At the moment, there’s a water main break every two minutes in the U.S. Nearly six billion gallons of treated water are lost daily thanks to such breaks. Situations like the one in Flint, Michigan, in which economic pressure and bankruptcy eventually led a city to expose thousands of its children to poisonous drinking water, will become increasingly unavoidable in a country with an ever-deteriorating infrastructure.
The great economic equalizer is this: the more efficient our infrastructure systems become, the less they cost, and the more they can be readily used by those across the income spectrum. What American history shows since the time of Abraham Lincoln is that, in periods of economic turmoil, major infrastructure building or rebuilding will not only pay for itself but support the economy for generations to come.
For the next generation, it’s already clear that clean and sustainable energy will be crucial to achieving a more equal, economically prosperous, and less climate-challenged future. A renewables-based rebuilding of the economy and the creation of the jobs to go with it would be anything but some niche set of activities in the usual infrastructure spectrum. It would be the future. High-paying jobs within the sustainable energy sector are already booming. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that among the occupations projected to have the fastest employment growth from 2016 to 2026 will be those in “green” work.
Wall Street and big tech companies are also paying attention. Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become the world’s biggest corporate purchasers of clean energy and are now planning for some of the world’s most transformational climate targets. That will mean smaller companies will also be able to enter that workspace as innovation and infrastructure drive economic incentives.
The Next Generation
It may be ambitious to expect that we’ve left the Groundhog Day vortex of “infrastructure week” behind us, but the critical demand for a new Infrastructure Age confronts us now. From Main Street to Wall Street, the need and the growing market for a sustainable, efficient, and clean future couldn’t be more real. An abundance of avenues to finance such a future are available and it makes logical business sense to pursue them.
It’s obvious enough what should be done. The only question, given American politics in 2021, is: Can it be done?
The economy of tomorrow will be built upon the infrastructure measures of today. You can’t see the value of stocks from space, nor can you see the physical value of what you’ve left to the next generation from stat sheets. But from the International Space Station you can see the Hoover Dam and even San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. What will future generations see that we’ve left behind? If the answer is nothing, that will be a tragedy of our age.
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.
Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive, is a TomDispatch regular. Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. She is currently working on her new book, Permanent Distortion. She is also the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power and five other books. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb assistance.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Deb Haaland Confirmed as First Indigenous US Cabinet Secretary
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "The 60-year-old from New Mexico will be responsible for the country's land, seas and natural resources, as well as overseeing tribal affairs."
Interior secretary from New Mexico will be responsible for US’s land, seas and national resources
eb Haaland has been confirmed as the secretary of the interior, making her the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in US history.
The US Senate confirmed the Democrat on Monday by a vote of 51-40, after she secured the support of Republican senators including Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan and Susan Collins.
In a statement after the vote, Haaland said she was “ready to serve”.
Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of 574 sovereign tribal nations located across 35 states. She is the most senior Indigenous American in the US government since the Republican Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw nation situated in what is now Kansas, who served as vice-president to Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1933.
She will lead about 70,000 staff who oversee one-fifth of all the land in the US and 1.7bn acres of coastlines, as well as managing national parks, wildlife refuges and natural resources such as gas, oil and water.
Haaland will also be responsible for upholding the government’s legally binding obligations to the tribes – treaty obligations that have been systematically violated with devastating consequences for life expectancy, exposure to environmental hazards, political participation and economic opportunities in Indian Country.
According to the 2010 census, 5.2 million people or about 2% of the US population identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native – descendants of those who survived US government policies to kill, remove or assimilate indigenous peoples.
“Native youth look to Representative Haaland as a role model, as a fierce defender of their rights and their communities, and as the living representation of the future of Indigenous communities in this country,” said Nikki Pitre, the executive director of the Center for Native American Youth.
New Mexico’s Democratic senator, Ben Ray Luján, who presided over the Senate during Monday’s vote, said Haaland’s appointment sends a signal to young Native Americans.
“She’s the embodiment of the old adage that if you see it you can be it,” he said.
Haaland’s confirmation comes after several days of grilling by senators over her past criticism of Republicans, even though she had one of the best records of bipartisanship in the previous Congress. She also faced hostile questions from senators from oil and gas states, who claimed her opposition to fossil fuels projects would destroy jobs.
Last year, Haaland sponsored a bill that would set a national goal of protecting 30% of US lands and oceans by 2030 – the 30 by 30 commitment since made by Biden in an executive order.
In a recent interview, Haaland told the Guardian that as secretary of the interior she would “move climate change priorities, tribal consultation and a green economic recovery forward”.
She added: “I’m going to continue to reach across the aisle, to protect our environment and make sure that vulnerable communities have a say in what our country is doing moving forward.”
Nick Tilsen, the president and chief executive of the NDN Collective, a grassroots indigenous power organization, said: “Deb Haaland is going to be a breath of fresh air who will fight for lands, jobs and people.”
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: Belga)
ALSO SEE: Sweden, Venezuela Are Latest Countries to Question AstraZeneca Vaccine
Our Political Leaders Could Have Prevented Mass COVID-19 Deaths. They Chose Not To.
Walker Bragman, Jacobin
Bragman writes: "The US has never seriously considered far-reaching responses to the coronavirus pandemic like a national lockdown or a universal basic income that would allow people to stay at home without immiseration."
The result: unnecessary mass deaths, with more on the way.
ast night, on the fiftieth day of his presidency and the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic, President Biden addressed the nation and announced, “America is coming back.”
Among the first steps of that return will be ensuring that nearly all schools return to normal in the next two months. Thanks to $125 billion in the new $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill dedicated to the effort and an aggressive vaccination push for teachers and staff, Biden declared “the number-one priority of my new secretary of education” will be “opening the majority of K-8 schools in my first hundred days in office.”
To imagine what it might be like in those schools, the country could turn to teachers like Mary.
Mary, who asked to not use her real name to protect her job, teaches at a parochial school in Louisiana for K-12 students. Aside from a brief shutdown at the school last March, she has been teaching in person ever since the pandemic began. She has spent her days thinking about building ventilation and distances between desks, imagining the microscopic viruses floating through her classroom and settling into the lungs of her students and colleagues.
All told, Mary knows six of her colleagues and eight of her students who have contracted the virus. Two of those students, including one middle-schooler, had serious complications and ended up in the hospital, she says.
After the second student was hospitalized, she says the school did not mandate quarantines for their contacts. Nor has the school’s administration been forthright in divulging new cases among faculty and the student body. According to Mary, one school official advised students not to get tested, while another dismissed the virus as “not that contagious.”
“We are just plain lucky nothing worse has happened to one of our kids,” Mary laments. “But of course, there’s no official, transparent contact tracking — so there is no knowing the residual effects on the community. How many people got sick and died from community transmission from our own sick kids?”
Mary’s choice between safety and continued employment is one faced by millions of Americans as every level of the government continues the push to reopen, despite the ongoing pandemic.
The country’s approach to the pandemic has been one of suppression over elimination, of acceptable losses and acceptable spread. While other countries have been able to better control the spread of the virus through ambitious zero-COVID strategies, the United States has never once seriously considered far-reaching responses like a national lockdown or a universal basic income that would allow people to shelter in place. For both Donald Trump and now Biden, the political risks of such moves were too great, despite the arguments of scientific experts, the pleas of many of those on the front lines.
The result is a year of devastation that could have been smaller, thousands of deaths that could have likely been avoided.
While COVID infections have leveled off after weeks of decline, about 528,000 Americans have died from the virus since it reached the United States last March and there is no complete end in sight. Some experts are now suggesting that COVID may become endemic, meaning it would become a permanent part of life, like the flu. The combination of uncontrolled spread and sluggish vaccine rollout is enabling mutations and creating new variants of the virus — some of which have shown some signs of vaccine resistance, including one strain identified in California. There is concern among some in the medical community that eventually our current vaccines could be rendered ineffective.
Complicating matters, the long-term effects of the virus in adults and children remain uncertain, but very real. Even asymptomatic cases can leave lasting lung damage. A recent study by the UK’s Office of National Statistics found that 13 percent of children ten and younger reported at least one symptom five weeks after confirmed infection.
None of that has stopped the relentless push to reopen the country — even though the earliest projected date for the United States to have enough vaccines for every American is still two months away.
That means there will soon be many more struggling, terrified teachers just like Mary.
Setting the Course
Perhaps the most successful virus-suppression model is that of New Zealand, which locked down early while providing generous government relief until the virus had been nearly eradicated within its borders. Other examples include Taiwan, which closed its borders early, and Vietnam, which implemented clustered lockdowns respectively.
By contrast, the US government allowed individual states to chart their own course without providing much guidance or relief. To date, only five states have some kind of stay-at-home advisory in place. Texas and Mississippi announced last week that they were reopening fully and lifting mask mandates.
The Trump administration set the course. Sensing a threat to his reelection chances in a prolonged public health crisis — and seemingly unwilling to provide sustained relief through a lockdown — President Donald Trump withheld information from the public that the virus was airborne, downplayed the risks it posed, politicized mask-wearing, and began a push to fully reopen the country in March after most states locked down.
“Don’t forget, this has never been done,” Trump told Fox News on March 24. “We’ve had flus before; we’ve had viruses before … I gave it two weeks…. And we’ll give it some more time if we need a little more time. But we have to open this country up.”
To that end, Republicans in the Senate pushed a corporate liability shield as a provision in COVID relief bills, though it never passed. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states were the first to attempt a return to normalcy despite surging cases, but it wasn’t long before Democratic states, driven by the lack of federal assistance as well as pressure from business groups, followed suit. Lockdowns became politically toxic, inspiring public resistance and even violence. Anti-maskers became a thing. In October, a group of domestic terrorists in Michigan even plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her partial lockdown order.
While it was pushing to reopen the country, Trump’s White House was routinely interfering with reports coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to emails obtained by the House and published earlier this month, political pressure even helped shape the CDC’s public health guidance on testing.
The Push to Reopen Schools
Biden promised to be a different kind of president, one who would let the facts dictate policy rather than the other way around. In August, Biden told ABC: “I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives. Because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus.”
“I would shut it down,” Biden said. “I would listen to the scientists.”
Members of Biden’s inner circle seemed to embrace the elimination strategy. Andy Slavitt, an administrator of the health care nonprofit United States of Care who Biden chose as a senior advisor on COVID, tweeted in July: “Herd immunity is just herd thinning.”
“And that assumes we understand how immunity works,” he wrote. “Which we don’t. I’m not willing to lose 500,000 mostly older & low income people.”
But after the election, Biden and company changed their tune. On November 19, Biden told reporters that “there is no circumstance which I can see that would require a total national shutdown.”
“I think that would be counterproductive,” he said.
In December, Biden announced that his key COVID priorities for his first hundred days in office included school reopenings. Today, he is still actively moving forward on that plan.
“I think it’s time for schools to reopen safely,” Biden told CBS’s Nora O’Donnell last month, sitting at a notable distance across the room from the interviewer. During a February 6 CNN town hall, he told a scared second-grade girl not to worry about COVID because she was unlikely to get the virus or spread it to her parents.
Predictably, the push to reopen schools has been met with backlash, particularly from educators. Teachers in Philadelphia have been demonstrating against a planned reopening, demanding additional safety measures. Chicago’s teachers union just reached an agreement to reopen schools and avert a strike that included more teacher vaccinations and other safety protocols.
In the face of that backlash, the CDC has largely sided with the Biden administration. Five days before Biden’s CBS interview, CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow that “there is accumulating data that suggests that there is not a lot of transmission that is happening in schools when the proper mitigation measures are taken.”
Nine days later, the CDC released guidelines to reopen schools which provided that “at any level of community transmission, all schools have options to provide in-person instruction (either full or hybrid), through strict adherence to mitigation strategies.” The plan did not include vaccinating teachers as a precondition for in-person learning.
While Walensky had highlighted proper ventilation as an important mitigation measure in her Maddow interview, the guidelines did not establish standards for ventilation systems — a problem shared by the administration’s new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines for reopened workplaces.
Media outlets have also gotten onboard with a return to normal schooling. The Atlantic ran an article purporting to explain the “truth” about in-school spread, citing three studies. Vox published an op-ed by Dr Benjamin P. Linas, an infectious disease physician and associate professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine, that argued the benefits of school reopenings outweigh the risks involved.
“I appreciate that returning to in-person learning carries some risk for educators,” Linas wrote. “There is no immediately foreseeable scenario in which there will be truly no risk of COVID-19 infection in school settings. However, insisting on a zero-risk scenario for school reopening is a commitment to long-term remote learning, which most people agree is not acceptable.”
Mounting Evidence
For Dr Deepti Gurdasani, the push to reopen schools is alarming. A clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in machine learning in genomic and clinical prediction, she has found herself waging a Twitter war on misinformation surrounding school reopenings.
“I’ve been a hearing a lot about how children are more infectious *now* & contribute to transmission because of the B117 variant, but didn’t before. This is a myth,” Gurdasani tweeted in a thread that was shared thousands of times. “Children & schools have always played an important role in transmission. Time to lay this to rest.”
Gurdasani is a signatory to the John Snow Memorandum — an open letter to the world, named for one of the founders of modern epidemiology, urging a rejection of pandemic management strategies that rely on herd immunity. Speaking to the Daily Poster, she acknowledges the difficulty in getting her message out.
“Very early on in the pandemic — at least in the western world, or in Europe and the US — this sort of narrative was built that children were somehow exceptional or unique in that they were less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and less likely to transmit,” Gurdasani tells the Daily Poster. “And this narrative very quickly got entrenched in political decision-making, as well as in the scientific community, despite having very little evidence behind it.”
Gurdasani explains that many of the studies cited as evidence that children are not major spreaders of the virus relied on symptom-based testing. Children, Gurdasani explains, are not likely to be symptomatic.
“When you do symptom-based testing in a household, you could very often pick up adults who were infected actually from children but classify them as the index case who brought infection to the household because the actual index case, who was a child, was silent,” she says. “Similarly, transmission to children is being missed if you base testing on symptoms.”
Indeed, a study from last month funded by Austria’s Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research noted the failure of several previous studies to take into account asymptomatic spread by children and other flaws. Gurdasani told the Daily Poster that new evidence actually suggests that children are more likely to spread the virus to households than adults.
“We don’t know very much still about susceptibility in children, but it’s very clear that they’re exposed to a greater extent because — particularly in schools — they just have a much higher number of contacts than adults and when they’re infected, they may actually transmit more than adults as well,” she says.
Such was the finding of a study from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in England published in late December. Researchers found that young people ages twelve to sixteen were seven times as likely as those older than seveteen to be the first case in their household. They also found that children ages two to sixteen were twice as likely as those over the age of seveteen to spread the virus to family members.
Another ONS study released last month found that teachers were at high risk, ranking fourth among the twenty-five professions surveyed. The ONS studies are part of a growing body of research suggesting that open schools spread the virus. A Princeton study from September, which surveyed more than half a million people in India, found that children and young adults made up one-third of COVID cases and were especially key to transmitting the virus. Similarly, a study released the month before in the Journal of Pediatrics found that children could be “super-spreaders” even without displaying symptoms of COVID, due to the amount of the virus in their systems.
Meanwhile, the evidence on school closures cutting the spread of COVID is mounting too. A study from October based on data gathered from 131 countries found that school closures could reduce viral transmission by 15 percent. The next month, another study, which looked at a number of mitigation strategies, found that closing educational facilities ranked as the second most effective measure.
Research studies aren’t the only evidence that students are fueling the virus. Where schools are open, COVID is spreading. In the UK where Gurdasani is based, cases are surging among children ages five to fifteen, while dropping among other demographics.
On February 21, Democratic Iowa State Senator Rob Hogg tweeted that roughly three thousand children had contracted COVID since Republican Governor Kim Reynolds reopened schools with no restrictions in late January.
A week earlier, public health officials in Onondaga County, New York, where schools are open, warned that they were seeing a rash of new cases among children — around fifty to sixty per week — likely due to the prevalence of the new UK COVID variant.
“When you look at global evidence, school closures emerge as one of the most important and most effective interventions in reducing [the spread of the pandemic],” Gurdasani says.
A Lack of Political Will
Robert Morris has spent the pandemic deeply troubled, watching public officials make poor decision after poor decision. A physician and epidemiologist, Morris boasts an impressive resume, having taught at the Tufts University School of Medicine, Harvard University School of Public Health, and the Medical College of Wisconsin as well as having served as an advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CDC, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the President’s Cancer Panel. Speaking to the Daily Poster, he says that the biggest hurdle the country faces in terms of responsible pandemic management is a lack of political will.
“We can eliminate this,” he says. “We just have to have the political will to do it.”
On February 22, Morris published a post in his newsletter “Ahead of the Curve” arguing that the United States ought to adopt strategies that have worked elsewhere to get the virus under control.
“If we had simply matched the performance of Canada, we would have reduced deaths in the United States by 62%,” Morris wrote. “But Canada didn’t get it right. Japan had a death rate 96% lower than the United States. And matching top-performing countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, or Taiwan would have saved over 485,000 American lives. What did these countries do differently?… From the very start, they had a single goal. Zero COVID.”
The post includes a stark warning about the likelihood of containing the pandemic at the current rate of vaccine rollout. Morris compares it to taking a dose of antibiotics too low to kill all the bacteria, facilitating the rise of resistance.
“Every time a person develops COVID-19, those virus strains most capable of replicating and transmitting infection to others will be selected,” it reads. “As time goes on, these new variants will look less and less like the virus used as the model for existing vaccines.”
Morris tells the Daily Poster that there is still time for the United States to cut its losses and embrace elimination, accepting that “it’s harder now because we’ve wasted so much time and lives.”
Morris’s recommendation is a strict five-week lockdown similar to what New Zealand did early on. This, he explained, would be preferable to what he called our “on again off again, half-assed lockdown strategy.” Five weeks, he explains, would allow us to get through two cycles of the virus and beat it.
While Morris blames the Trump administration for the pandemic reaching this point, he told the Daily Poster that he has concerns about the CDC backing school reopening, particularly due to the uncertain long-term effects of the virus.
“I don’t know what the calculations are going on, but obviously there’s tremendous political pressure to get schools open and businesses running,” he said.
Biden’s Strategy
The push to reopen schools is part of a larger strategy by the Biden administration to present a positive narrative about the pandemic that things are rapidly changing for the better, even as the president’s allies urge caution. In his address following the signing of the COVID relief bill, on the fiftieth day of his presidency, Biden announced, “America is coming back” because of the vaccines.
“There is hope and light and better days ahead,” he said. “If we all do our part, our country will be vaccinated soon.”
Last month, Biden said that every American would be able to get a vaccine by the end of July. Earlier this month, he moved the date up, suggesting the United States would have enough vaccines for everyone by the end of May.
But the optimistic projections have not come without warnings. Last month, CNN reported that an expert close to the administration was warning that Biden was “painting way too rosy of a picture” specifically in regards to the threat of COVID variants.
Dr Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota who served on the president’s transition team, has been issuing dire warnings in light of the new COVID variants cropping up.
“The Biden administration is going to have to address this issue and we’ve got to stop basically telling people we’ve turned the corner,” he told CNN. “At the rate we’re at right now, this is going to be a huge challenge.”
On Monday, the CDC released new COVID guidelines that fully-vaccinated people can congregate with other fully-vaccinated people or low-risk unvaccinated people “from another household” without masks. However, the news came with a warning:
“We’re still learning how vaccines will affect the spread of COVID-19,” it read. “After you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, you should keep taking precautions in public places like wearing a mask, staying 6 feet apart from others, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces until we know more.”
The new guidelines still advise mask-wearing for fully-vaccinated people in public and recommends isolation if they experience symptoms. The CDC also noted that the efficacy of the vaccines against the new variants is still unknown.
Responding to the CDC’s new guidelines, Morris tells the Daily Poster, he’s “not sure what the rush is.”
“We’re still learning how well COVID-19 vaccines keep people from spreading the disease,” he says. “Early data show that the vaccines may help keep people from spreading COVID-19, but we are learning more as more people get vaccinated.”
Stay-at-Home Order
Locking the country down to one extent or another would require the president seeking authorization from Congress. Legally, such a move is possible, experts tell the Daily Poster.
William D. Araiza, constitutional and administrative law professor and vice dean at Brooklyn Law School, says that Biden could issue a mandatory stay-at-home order if Congress authorized it under the authority granted by the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
“There might be due process issues, but I suspect if the situation was dire enough a court would reject that kind of claim,” he says.
Araiza says Congress could also take measures short of confining everyone to their homes, like mandating remote work for remote-capable employees under the authority granted by the Interstate Commerce Clause. It could also delegate that authority to the president or an administrative agency.
Stephen Gardbaum, a constitutional scholar and MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UCLA School of Law, tells the Daily Poster Congress could protect workers who decide to work from home against the wishes of their employers.
“I think that would be well within Congress’ authority, especially if they excluded very small employers who don’t really engage in interstate business,” he says.
Gardbaum was less bullish on a national stay-at-home mandate, explaining that congressional authorization would ultimately depend on the courts, which in general have become more skeptical of such far-reaching moves as they have become increasingly populated by right-wing judges.
“I’m not saying a plausible and persuasive constitutional argument can’t be made, based on the pandemic’s huge impact on the national economy,” says Gardbaum. ”But a national lockdown would likely be challenged in the courts and my prediction is that this Supreme Court would say no.”
At this point, all such scenarios are hypothetical. No one in power is seriously considering any sort of national policy aimed at keeping people home.
We Know How to Prevent Deaths
To Mary, the political calculations surrounding the pandemic are irrelevant. She recently received her first vaccination, due to new eligibility guidelines in her state. Sitting in her car after the shot, she broke down out of a sense of sheer relief.
But she recognizes that she is one of the lucky ones. And even now, she remains frustrated at the decision to not lock down the country, calling the move “shortsighted.”
“We know exactly what needs to happen to prevent deaths, we just didn’t feel like doing it,” she says. “We should have locked down hard last March. Biden should’ve instituted a lockdown this January and paid people to stay home.”
'National Report' on Newsmax. (photo: Emma Rechenberg/Twitter)
Newsmax Ratings Are Collapsing - but Insiders Claim Victory
Justin Baragona, Lloyd Grove and Diana Falzone, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "For Newsmax, it looks like midnight is approaching, and the upstart TV channel is in danger of turning back into a pumpkin."
Without Trump’s scraps to fight over anymore, Newsmax ratings have sunk and the network further resembles a cheap Fox knockoff. But insiders see a big win for the fledgling outlet.
The pro-Trump cable news network—which barely registered in Nielsen ratings for the first six years after its chief executive and majority owner, Chris Ruddy, launched it in May 2014—prompted massive media attention for seemingly taking Fox News head-on in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election. Perhaps more than a Cinderella story, it was a wingnut media version of David versus Goliath.
But now, a mere four months after the supposed slingshot to Fox News’ forehead, reality has intruded, and Newsmax finds itself smack-dab in the middle of a ratings collapse.
Many of the disaffected Trump supporters who initially flocked to Newsmax to gobble up unhinged election conspiracies challenging the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency have faded away now that Biden is firmly ensconced and Fox News has pivoted to aggressive coverage of the Democratic establishment’s supposed war on Christianity, support for open borders and unlimited immigration, and “cancel culture” that is allegedly depriving innocent children of their beloved Dr. Seuss books and Looney Tunes characters.
While some Newsmax insiders feel that the plummeting viewership is much ado about nothing, as other cable news networks also experience a post-inaugural erosion, others suggest that the fledgling network’s days of hoping to compete head-to-head with Fox are all but over, and that Newsmax will inevitably return to the fringes.
“I would look at it from the viewpoint of consumer marketing,” said University of Maryland business professor P.K. Kannan, who has studied the dynamics of the cable industry. “Let’s say you have Post and Kellogg cereals and each has a brand of raisin bran, and then a new, healthier version comes out with no sugar and some raisin bran eaters might like the healthier option even though it’s bland. So they’re going to focus on the consumers who want the healthier version and take them away from Post and Kellogg.”
Kannan acknowledged, however, that in this case the analogy might be better expressed this way: Instead of buying the traditional raisin bran—as marketed, say, by Fox News—some consumers are opting for the much-tastier Newsmax product, albeit a media breakfast loaded with sugar, corn syrup, addictive chemicals, and artificial flavors.
“After a while, you see that it starts dissipating. I don’t think it’s going to go back to the level of, say, August 2020”—when “Newsmax was not a player” and drawing a total viewership in the barely measurable 30,000 range. “But over time it will slowly erode. They will have to fight for their survival, like they were doing before.”
Newsmax, which spent the months before last November’s election staffing up its network with D-list Trump hangers-on and ex-Fox personalities, pounced after Fox News enraged then-President Donald Trump and his followers when the network’s decision desk made an early (and correct) Election Night projection for Biden to win Arizona.
With the president’s supporters taking to the streets yelling “Fox News sucks,” Newsmax made a transparently concerted effort to not only reject Biden’s victory but to peddle and amplify Trump’s baseless and dangerous “Big Lie” that the election was “stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud. The day all the networks and major media outlets declared Biden the president-elect, Newsmax—despite having no election decision desk—defiantly declared it would not name Biden the victor.
Pushing all-in on election lies paid immediate dividends for former right-wing newspaper reporter Chris Ruddy’s fledgling channel, and Ruddy—who also bills himself as a close Donald Trump confidant—wasn’t shy about tweaking Fox News in the media over the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel’s fall from atop the cable-news heap.
Despite his recent history of providing quotes touting Newsmax and slagging off Fox, the usually voluble Ruddy declined to comment for this story.
Post-election and through January, Fox News found itself in third place for the first time in 20 years. (The network, in the most recent full week, has since returned to the top of the heap in primetime and total day.) At one point, Newsmax’s biggest star Greg Kelly—a former Fox News host himself—defeated Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum head-to-head in the advertiser-friendly 25-54 age demographic, drawing headlines across the media world and prompting one Fox News staffer at the time to say the one-day ratings loss “scared them to their core.”
When Fox News announced in January, amid its then-slumping ratings, a complete revamping of its daytime lineup, notably demoting MacCallum from her 7 p.m. primetime slot to 3 p.m., Ruddy couldn’t help but gloat that his channel was responsible.
“The Fox is on the run,” he boasted. “The rise of Newsmax TV has caused a major shake-up at Fox News with news today that early evening host Martha MacCallum has been demoted to early afternoons.”
Ruddy, however, is gloating no more.
“We all knew their ratings surge wouldn’t last just because that’s how the news business is especially something as amateur hour as Newsmax,” a current Fox News staffer told The Daily Beast.
Earlier this month, Mediaite first reported that Newsmax had lost half of its audience since its November post-election high. Between the week ending Nov. 16 to the last week of February, the right-wing channel saw a 51-percent drop in total day viewership and a 63-percent decrease in its demo audience.
Kelly, who saw his viewership nearly top a million total viewers in November, was down to an average audience of 502,000 at the end of February. Even worse, considering his one-night demo victory over MacCallum, Kelly’s 25-54 ratings plunged by 63 percent.
“Mediaite published misleading information,” Newsmax spokesperson Brian Peterson told The Daily Beast. “They cherry-picked data using one major news week in November and compared it to one arbitrarily selected week in February, creating a data set that showed a fall-off for most of cable news, not just Newsmax.”
To be fair, as Peterson suggested, the three major cable networks have all experienced notable drops since the early post-election days, when the nation was enraptured by the all-encompassing drama surrounding Biden’s win and Trump’s refusal to concede. Their drops, however, are less significant than Newsmax’s.
Fox News, for instance, has only seen a 7-percent decrease in total day viewership and 13 percent in the demo since mid-November. MSNBC, as another example, is down 17 percent in total day audience and 28 percent in the demo.
“There’s normalization going on,” one Newsmax insider noted to The Daily Beast. “By mid-summer, Fox will be on top again. I’m watching Newsmax drift lower.”
The source added that “Trump gave them a moment” but what Newsmax now needs to do is “to hire talent with real names that audiences know.” Another insider, meanwhile, expressed pessimism over whether Ruddy can turn the ship around and truly be long-term competitive with the major cable-news stations.
“I’ve said this for a while that [Ruddy’s] over his head on financing,” said the source familiar with the situation, adding: “But when you put all these pieces together—this is a big operation, he’s hired a lot of people, there’s a lot of turnover. The advertising thing hasn’t changed dramatically in his favor. The ratings are down. He’s paying cable operators” for carriages on their systems—in contrast to Fox, which charges cable operators a subscriber fee.
The month of March has been even less kind to Newsmax.
Having already seen its 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. average total audience (the network’s peak day part) dwindle from 509,000 in January to 405,000 in February, Newsmax is only drawing 308,000 total viewers in March—an additional decrease of 24 percent. In total day, its overall viewership has tumbled all the way down to 178,000, a loss of 20 percent from the month before.
The March demo (ages 25-54) audience for 4-8 p.m. has also plunged 32 percent from February to just 47,000, while total day’s 25-54 demographic audience has fallen an additional 29 percent.
“I laughed when I saw the news about the drop,” a second Fox News staffer said. “Everyone panicked over a sugar high. Nothing about it was sustainable, yet people think it’s the new normal. Management panicked off of a small period of time and dismantled the entire lineup.”
A Fox News insider echoed those sentiments, noting that “all I’ve heard about Newsmax is that people at Fox now see them as a non-threat and essentially irrelevant.”
With Newsmax pulling only an eighth of Fox’s audience now when it drew one-fourth of the rival network’s viewership immediately following the election, CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter reported in his newsletter last Wednesday night that “Kelly is no longer nipping at Fox’s heels” and his demo win over MacCallum “was a fluke” in hindsight.
Newsmax, for its part, responded to Stelter’s remarks on its drop in ratings by pointing out that CNN itself has also seen its viewership plunge following the immediate post-election highs.
“As it turns out, Biden is also a very tame story for CNN as well, which has seen its own ratings collapse in recent weeks,” the network reacted, published on Newsmax’s website. Newsmax further noted that CNN has recently seen a 45 percent drop in total day viewership through March compared to the week after the election.
The network also pointed out that they are still showing double-digit growth compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 and said that Newsmax remains a top 25 cable network in total day audience. (For the week of March 7, however, Newsmax’s average total day audience of just 150,000 placed it 44th in cable.)
“Over the past few months, Newsmax has had a sudden rise, catapulting the independent network as a top cable news player,” the network added. “This fact has panicked not only CNN but Fox News, which has made dramatic changes in its lineup to counter Newsmax.”
(Last fall, for its part, Fox told the L.A. Times that it “regularly considers programming changes” and that these “changes are being made independent of any other ongoing matter” after host Melissa Francis was pulled off-air amid a gender pay dispute.)
This also reflects a widely shared suspicion within the network that since Newsmax rose to prominence in November, Fox News has allegedly tracked any fall-off in Newsmax’s ratings and pitched other media outlets to report on it.
The root cause of Newsmax’s decline seems all but obvious: They can no longer rely on the “Big Lie” to pull in Trumpers angry with Fox. And worse yet, in a right-wing media world where anti-Biden content doesn’t resonate as much, Newsmax now comes across as nothing more than a low-budget Fox News copycat, incessantly peddling the same exact “cancel culture” outrage bait about Dr. Seuss books and Pepé Le Pew cartoons.
In the waning days of Trump’s presidency, meanwhile, the dents in Newsmax’s armor began to show. After the Electoral College formally voted on Dec. 14, giving Trump 232 votes to Biden’s 306, Newsmax announced on-air that Biden was indeed the president-elect. A week later, amid legal threats from voting software company Smartmatic, the network forced several anchors to read a lengthy fact-check statement debunking its own baseless voter fraud lies.
At the same time, Kelly and other on-air Newsmax personalities still continued to push the falsehood that Biden “stole” the election—even after the violent Capitol insurrection incited by Trump in order to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election on January 6. And while Ruddy defended his network’s journalistic integrity and insisted it wasn’t peddling lies, hosts and guests claimed that the deadly riots were “very peaceful” and led by antifa activists pretending to be Trump supporters.
Perhaps the moment that it all came crashing to reality for Newsmax viewers, outside of Biden’s inauguration, was the early-February broadcast which featured anchor Bob Sellers literally fleeing the set when he couldn’t stop conspiracy-pushing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell from blathering on about voting machines stealing the election from Trump. (Newsmax, much like other right-wing outlets and figures, is currently trying to avoid the sort of multi-billion-dollar defamation lawsuits that Smartmatic and the voting software firm Dominion have threatened and, in the case of Lindell and canceled Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs, actually filed.)
Despite issuing an on-air groveling apology to Lindell—one of Newsmax’s biggest advertisers—the following day, the damage was done when it came to the MAGA base. Fellow fringe channel One America Network declared war on Newsmax for “censoring” Lindell while Trump supporters called for a boycott of the channel.
Since then, Newsmax has appeared lost and adrift, basically just following the trends of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets by raging about so-called liberal cancel culture, all while trying to find something about Biden to inflame their viewers.
In what might be the saddest attempt yet at rage-bait content, Kelly last month hosted a panel discussion on how “dirty and disheveled” Biden’s elderly pet dog Champ is.
“Did you see the dog? I wanted to show you something I noticed. Doesn’t he look a little rough? I love dogs, but this dog needs a bath and a comb and all kinds of love and care. I’ve never seen a dog in the White House like this,” Kelly declared of the 13-year-old German shepherd, adding: “This dog looks like, I’m sorry, like it’s from the junkyard.”
Not to be outdone, however, Newsmax primetime host Grant Stinchfield took the whole “cancel culture” obsession to its inevitable conclusion.
“This is how cancel culture ends. This is the finale, right? It's gotta be,” he said last Wednesday. “The banning of the Bible, canceling Jesus."
Yet, despite the sinking ratings and current lack of direction, some folks associated with the network are still highly optimistic about Newsmax’s future.
“They received a lot of positive press over the last couple years of the Trump administration. Positive in the sense of sometimes beating Fox in the ratings. Just growing very quickly,” a network insider told The Daily Beast. “The ratings for Fox are definitely higher. But I think they have an audience for sure. Especially with Trump bashing Fox the way he did. For now, Fox is still king of the conservative media. But Newsmax is a viable alternative.”
That outlook seems contagious within Newsmax circles. Another insider declared utmost “confidence” in the network’s ability to hold its own against Fox News.
“Absolutely. No one has expressed worries.”
Diana Falzone was an on-camera and digital reporter for FoxNews.com from 2012 to 2018. In May 2017, she filed a gender discrimination and disability lawsuit against the network and settled, and left the company in March 2018.
Eric Greitens resigned as Missouri governor in 2018, less than two years into his first term, over allegations of sexual assault. (photo: Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune)
Missouri Governor Who Resigned Over Alleged Sexual Assaults Mulls Senate Run
Daniel Strauss, Guardian UK
Strauss write: "The former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, a Republican who stepped down amid allegations of sexual assault, is reportedly considering a run for US Senate next year - prompting concern among Republicans that his candidacy could tip one of the state's two seats to the Democrats."
Republicans concerned that Eric Greitens’ candidacy could tip one of the state’s two seats to the Democrats
The race will be for the seat vacated by Roy Blunt, a long-serving Republican who announced his retirement this month. Democrats now control a 50-50 Senate via the casting vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Greitens, a former Navy Seal, resigned as governor in 2018, less than two years into his first term, over allegations of sexual assault.
A woman with whom he admitted having an extra-marital affair told a Missouri house investigative committee Greitens restrained, slapped, shoved and threatened her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid. He was alleged to have taken a compromising photo and threatened to blackmail the woman.
Greitens said the allegations amounted to a “political witch-hunt” but eventually bowed to Republicans and Democrats who called for his resignation. His departure elevated Republican Mike Parson, the lieutenant governor, to the governor’s office.
On Monday, Politico reported that Republicans who have fielded calls from Greitens about the Senate race are worried that if he does run the state could see a repeat of 2012, when their candidate, Todd Akin, lost an election in the midst of controversy over his extreme views on abortion.
Politico reported that Republican party leaders were considering “aggressive steps to stop Greitens from winning the nomination, including waging a slashing advertising campaign against them”.
The field is still forming for both the Republican and Democratic primaries. Some well known Missouri figures, like the Democratic former secretary of state Jason Kander, have decided not to jump into the Senate race.
Missouri’s other Senate seat is held by Josh Hawley, a hard-right conservative who backed Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden and was famously photographed raising a fist towards Trump supporters at the Capitol on 6 January, when a mob stormed Congress.
Hawley, a former state attorney general, beat Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, in 2018.
Soldiers advancing towards protesters during a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar. (photo: Santosh Krl/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Food and Fuel Prices Soar in Myanmar
as Coup Exacerbates Covid-19 Crisis
ALSO SEE: Op-Ed: How Women Are Defying Myanmar's
Junta With Sarongs and Cellphones
Death Toll in Myanmar Reaches 138 as Junta Orders Martial Law Across Large Area of Yangon
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Myanmar's ruling junta has declared martial law in a wide area of the country's largest city, as security forces killed dozens of protesters over the weekend in an increasingly lethal crackdown on resistance to last month's military coup."
The United Nations said at least 138 peaceful protesters have been killed in Myanmar since the Feb. 1 military coup, including at least 56 killed over the weekend.
The developments were the latest setback to hopes of resolving the crisis that started with the military’s seizure of power that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. A grassroots movement has sprung up across the country to challenge the takeover with almost daily protests that the army has tried to crush with increasingly deadly violence
State broadcaster MRTV said Monday that the Yangon townships of North Dagon, South Dagon, Dagon Seikkan and North Okkalapa have been put under martial law. That was in addition to two others — Hlaing Thar Yar and neighboring Shwepyitha — announced late Sunday.
More violence was reported around the country on Monday, with at least eight protesters in four cities or towns killed, according to the independent broadcaster and news service Democratic Voice of Burma.
Photos and videos posted on social media showed long convoys of trucks entering Yangon.
At least 38 people were killed Sunday, the majority in the Hlaing Thar Yar area of Yangon, and 18 were killed on Saturday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The total includes women and children, according to the figures from the U.N. human rights office.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “strongly condemns this ongoing violence against peaceful protesters and the continuing violation of the fundamental human rights of the people of Myanmar,” Dujarric said.
The U.N. chief renews his call on the international community, including regional countries, “to come together in solidarity with the people of Myanmar and their democratic aspirations,” the spokesman said.
Earlier Monday, U.N. Special Envoy on Myanmar Christine Schraner Burgener earlier condemned the “continuing bloodshed,” which has frustrated calls from the Security Council and other parties for restraint and dialogue.
“The ongoing brutality, including against medical personnel and destruction of public infrastructure, severely undermines any prospects for peace and stability,” she said.
Complicating efforts to organize new protests, as well as media coverage of the crisis, cellphone internet service has been cut, although access is still available through fixed broadband connections.
Mobile data service had been used to stream live video coverage of protests, often showing security forces attacking demonstrators. It previously had been turned off only from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. for several weeks, with no official explanation.
The blockage of internet service forced postponement of a court hearing in the capital, Natpyitaw, for Myanmar’s detained leader Suu Kyi, who was supposed to take part via a video conference, said her lawyer Khin Maung Zaw. Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were detained during the coup, and have been charged with several criminal offenses that their supporters believe are politically motivated to keep them locked up.
Since the takeover, Myanmar has been under a nationwide state of emergency, with military leaders in charge of all government. But Sunday’s announcement was the first use of martial law since the coup and suggested more direct handling of security by the military instead of police.
Sunday’s announcement said the junta, formally called the State Administrative Council, acted to enhance security and restore law and order, and that the Yangon regional commander has been entrusted with administrative, judicial and military powers in the area under his command. The orders cover six of Yangon’s 33 townships, all of which suffered major violence in recent days.
Thirty-four of Sunday’s deaths were in Yangon. At least 22 occurred in Hlaing Thar Yar township, an industrial area with many factories that supply the garment industry, a major export earner for Myanmar. Several of the factories, many of which are Chinese-owned, were set aflame Sunday by unknown perpetrators.
The torching earned protesters a rebuke from the Chinese Embassy, which in turn received an outpouring of scorn on social media for expressing concern about factories but not mentioning the dozens of people killed by Myanmar’s security forces.
Four other deaths were reported in the cities of Bago, Mandalay, and Hpakant, according to the AAPP and local media.
Protesters in the past week in response to increased police violence have begun taking a more aggressive approach to self-defense, burning tires at barricades and pushing back when they can against attacks.
A statement issued Sunday by the Committee Representing Pyihtaungsu Hluttaw, the elected members of Parliament who were not allowed to take their seats, announced that the general public has the legal right to self-defense against the junta’s security forces.
The group, which operates underground inside the country and with representatives abroad, has established itself as a shadow government that claims to be the sole legitimate representative body of Myanmar’s citizens. It has been declared treasonous by the junta.
A small respite from the latest violence came before dawn Monday, when several dozen anti-coup protesters in southern Myanmar held candlelight vigils with calls for the end of the military government and a return to democracy.
In Kyae Nupyin village, in Launglone township, villagers read Buddhist texts and prayed for the safety and security of all those risking their lives in the face of the increasingly lethal response of the security forces.
The area around the small city of Dawei has become a hot spot for resistance to the military takeover. On nearby country roads, a long convoy of motorcyclists carried the protest message through villages.
In Dawei itself, demonstrators built barricades out of rocks to hinder police on the main roads. There were marches, both in the morning and the afternoon, to try to keep up the momentum of weeks of resistance to the takeover.
Steven Donziger in Ecuador. (photo: Steven Donziger/RT)
US Lawyer Steven Donziger Speaks From House Arrest After Suing Chevron for Amazon Oil Spills on Behalf of Indigenous Ecuadorians
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Decades of reckless oil drilling by Chevron have destroyed 1,700 square miles of land in the Ecuadorian Amazon."
ecades of reckless oil drilling by Chevron have destroyed 1,700 square miles of land in the Ecuadorian Amazon, but the company has refused to pay for the damage or clean up the land despite losing a lawsuit 10 years ago, when Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered the oil giant to pay $18 billion on behalf of 30,000 Amazonian Indigenous people. Instead of cleaning up the damage, Chevron has spent the past decade waging an unprecedented legal battle to avoid paying for the environmental destruction, while also trying to take down the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who helped bring the landmark case. Donziger, who has been on house arrest for nearly 600 days, says Chevron’s legal attacks on him are meant to silence critics and stop other lawsuits against the company for environmental damage. “Chevron and its allies have used the judiciary to try to attack the very idea of corporate accountability and environmental justice work that leads to significant judgments,” Donziger says. We also speak with Paul Paz y Miño, associate director at Amazon Watch, who says the new attorney general should conduct a review of the case and the dubious grounds for Donziger’s house arrest. “The real thing that’s going on here is Chevron is attempting to literally criminalize a human rights lawyer who beat them,” Paz y Miño says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to what’s been described as the Amazon’s Chernobyl — 1,700 square miles of land in the Ecuadorian Amazon devastated by decades of reckless oil drilling. Ten years ago, Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion for dumping over 70 billion liters of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 30,000 Amazonian Indigenous people who had been suffering since the mid-’60s, when Texaco began drilling on their ancestral land. Chevron bought Texaco in 2000.
The landmark ruling was seen as a major victory for the environment and corporate accountability. But Chevron refused to pay or clean up the land. Amazon Watch has spent years documenting the environmental destruction in Ecuador. This is part of a short video produced by the group and narrated by the actor Peter Coyote.
PETER COYOTE: Today, in an Amazon rainforest region of northeastern Ecuador called the Oriente, tens of thousands of men, women and children are surrounded on all sides by widespread oil contamination, the soil polluted, the water poisoned. Over nearly 25 years in Ecuador, American oil giant Chevron, in the form of its predecessor company Texaco, engaged in reckless pump-and-dump oil operations that ravaged thousands of square miles of once-pristine Amazon rainforest. To increase its profit margin by a few dollars per barrel of oil, the company cut corners and used a populated rainforest ecosystem as its toxic dumping grounds. The result? Tens of thousands of people who live in what was once a paradise on Earth now face a horrific epidemic of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages and other oil-related illness. And the Indigenous peoples, who have lived off the bounty of the rainforest for countless generations, now struggle for survival.
AMY GOODMAN: Instead of cleaning up the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron has spent the past decade waging an unprecedented legal battle to avoid paying for the environmental damage, while also trying to take down the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who helped bring the landmark case. With the help of dozens of law firms, Chevron has ended Donziger’s legal career. He’s been disbarred. His bank accounts have been frozen. He has been forced to surrender his passport. Steve Donziger has also been under house arrest for nearly 600 days, after a federal judge drafted criminal [contempt] charges against him for refusing to turn over his cellphone and computer. In an unusual legal twist, the judge appointed a private law firm with ties to Chevron to prosecute Donziger, after federal prosecutors declined to bring charges.
Many of his supporters see Donziger as a corporate political prisoner. His case is attracting growing attention with the legal world, as well as among environmentalists and human rights activists. Fifty-five Nobel laureates, including 10 recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, have called for an end to the judicial attacks on Donziger. A coalition of groups, including Amnesty International, Amazon Watch, the National Lawyers Guild and others, recently wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to investigate what they describe as, quote, “disturbing legal attacks” on Donziger. Last week, an appeals court threw out a key contempt finding against Donziger, who’s now waiting to hear if he’ll be freed from house arrest.
Steve Donziger joins us now from his New York home. We’re also joined by Paul Paz y Miño in Oakland, associate director at Amazon Watch. He has been working on the Clean Up Ecuador Campaign for the last 14 years.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Steve Donziger, thanks so much for joining us. Why are you under house arrest? Are you currently wearing an ankle bracelet, a shackle?
STEVEN DONZIGER: I am. I am wearing an ankle bracelet. It’s about the size of a garage door opener. It’s been on my ankle since August 6, 2019. I sleep with it. I eat with that. I bathe with it. It never leaves my ankle. And it allows the government to monitor my whereabouts on a 24/7 basis.
I mean, the fundamental issue here is Chevron destroyed the Ecuadorian Amazon, and I was part of a legal team that held the company accountable. The decision in Ecuador has been affirmed by multiple appellate courts in Ecuador and Canada.
What Chevron did is, rather than pay the judgment that it owes to the thousands of people in Ecuador that it poisoned, it’s gone after me and other lawyers. And in the United States, Chevron sued me for $60 billion, which is the largest potential personal liability in the history of our country. I’m a human rights lawyer. I live in a two-bedroom apartment with my wife and son on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Chevron then launched a campaign to really try to drive me out of the case. And as part of their strategy, they demanded to see my confidential communications with my clients, including everything on my cellphone and computer. And when I appealed that to the higher court here in New York, while the appeal was pending, Judge Kaplan charged me with criminal contempt of court for not complying with the order while the lawfulness of the order was under appeal. He then had me locked up in my home.
This is a misdemeanor charge with a maximum sentence of 180 days in prison. I assert my complete innocence. He appointed a judge, who denied me a jury. And I am the only person in the history of this country, as far as we can tell, who’s charged with a misdemeanor in the federal system, who has no criminal record, who has ever been held for even one day pretrial. And I’ve now been held 585 days on a charge that, if I were to be found guilty, would lead to a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail. And it’s very unlikely I would go to jail, because the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer convicted in this district of criminal contempt is 90 days of home confinement. And I’ve already served more than six times that.
So, what’s really happening here is, Chevron and its allies have used the judiciary to try to attack the very idea of corporate accountability and environmental justice work that leads to significant judgments. And I think they’re not only trying to retaliate against me; they’re trying to send a broader message to the activist community, to the legal community, that these types of cases, that truly challenge the fossil fuel industry, that are intimately connected to the survival of our planet, should not be allowed to happen in court, at least not at this level.
And I am hoping — and we had a huge victory last week in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where Judge Kaplan’s main contempt finding against me was thrown out. And I am hoping cooler heads prevail and the 2nd Circuit issues another decision, based on last week’s argument, that allows me to get my freedom back.
AMY GOODMAN: Everything about this is so unusual, is so astounding. Can you explain what Rule 42 is and the idea that the judge could not get federal prosecutors to indict you, so he was able to choose a private law firm, a lawyer from a private law firm connected to Chevron, and he went after you?
STEVEN DONZIGER: Well, I don’t think this is proper, and I don’t think it’s legal. It is legal for a judge to charge someone with criminal contempt with an adequate basis. I don’t think one exists here. The judge is then obligated, under Rule 42, to take the charges to the regular prosecutor, the professional prosecutor’s office. And in this case, the professional prosecutor refused to bring the case — and, I think, for good reason, again, because I don’t think — this is all about me doing my job as a lawyer and trying to defend my clients’ rights. It isn’t about me defying the court. I was seeking more court review. I wasn’t defying the court when I appealed Judge Kaplan’s order, that turned out to be unlawful.
So, when the prosecutor refused to bring the case, Judge Kaplan appointed a private law firm. Now, it is legal for a judge to appoint a private lawyer to prosecute in those circumstances, but it is not proper to appoint a law firm that has financial ties to Chevron and has an attorney-client relationship to Chevron. I mean, I am essentially being prosecuted by Chevron.
The law firm’s name, by the way, is Seward & Kissel. They’re a kind of a midsize law firm here in New York. What’s really unusual about this is, not only does Seward & Kissel have a financial relationship with Chevron, they have close ties to the oil and gas industry generally, and they’re billing taxpayers for my misdemeanor prosecution. So far they’ve been paid by taxpayers $464,000 to prosecute and detain me on a misdemeanor contempt charge. My guess is they’ve actually been paid a lot more. We haven’t seen all of their bills.
But this is — make no mistake about it, Amy. This is a for-profit, private, corporate prosecution of a human rights lawyer in the name of the government. And it’s never happened before in the history of this country. It’s terrifying, not just for me and my family, but, I think, for anyone who does this work. And I’m hoping that more and more people will notice it, and pressure will build so it has to stop. As a matter of fact, the letter to Merrick Garland by Amnesty International and other groups specifically asks him, in the Justice Department, to review what we believe is the mishandling of this case and these flagrant conflicts of interest that have allowed a private corporation’s law firm to act in the name of the state to deprive a human rights lawyer of his liberty. It’s just not right. It’s not what we know our judicial system to be. And I have to say, people around the world are appalled. I’m talking about serious lawyers from countries all over the world, who have supported the Ecuadorians and supported their lawyers, are appalled to watch this happening in the United States of America.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Steve, as you pointed out and as we began the lede, this — ultimately, this larger story is not about you. It’s about the devastation of Ecuador. And it’s what you point out repeatedly, how you got involved with this. Can you talk about the $9.5 billion — it was actually initially $18 billion — judgment that Chevron owes to the Ecuadorian people, the majority of it allocated not just to clean up the soil and water, but to create support healthcare systems and treatment of cancer patients? The significance what it was that first got you interested in this and that continues to this day?
STEVEN DONZIGER: Well, thank you, Amy. I mean, first of all, thanks for bringing that up, because, ultimately, this is not about Steven Donziger. Chevron wants that to be the story. This is about what Chevron did to poison the Amazon and Ecuador and really devastate the lives of tens of thousands of people, including resulting in death to thousands of people from cancers and other oil-related diseases.
I first went to Ecuador in 1993 as part of a team of lawyers and doctors, led by Cristóbal Bonifaz, to investigate this matter. I was kind of a marginal lawyer on a much larger team for several years. As the case evolved, I became more and more involved. I’ve worked on other cases, by the way. And I want to be clear: This is not my case. This is a case that is controlled and owned by the affected communities in Ecuador, who have a lot of other lawyers working on this. But like other people on that first trip, I couldn’t turn my back on this problem.
We have really tried, year after year, to seek a remedy, to help save lives, to help repair the Amazon, to hold Chevron accountable so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. And we were very successful in our work. I mean, the judgment in Ecuador has been affirmed by Ecuador’s Supreme Court, by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court. It’s been affirmed by Canada’s Supreme Court for enforcement purposes in a unanimous decision in 2015.
And the attacks on me really are efforts to utilize a New York federal judge to essentially disable my advocacy, because I’ve been so involved over so many years in so many aspects of this case, including fundraising. I’ve been to Ecuador over 200 times to meet with my clients. They don’t want me involved in this case ,and they calculated that if I’m locked up in my home, the case will somehow die.
I will say this, as a quick point: The case is very viable. There are lawyers in different countries around the world exploring opportunities to enforce the judgment against Chevron’s assets. And that is happening completely independent of me.
So, while I really pray for me and my family to get a good outcome, I want to return to my work as a human rights lawyer or as a human rights advocate. This case will go on with or without me. And it’s very important people understand it has the backing of courts all over the world, except this trial judge in the appellate court here in New York, which have, really, I think, gone out of their way, based on highly questionable evidence that Chevron has presented, to try to attack me and the Ecuadorians.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to bring Paul Paz y Miño into this conversation, associate director of Amazon Watch. You, Amnesty International, National Lawyers Guild and others are now appealing to Attorney General Merrick Garland. If you can talk about both what you’re asking him to do — and then, you, too, as being involved with Amazon Watch and other groups, have been deeply involved with Ecuador. Your family lineage is back to Ecuador. Can you talk about what needs to happen now?
PAUL PAZ Y MIÑO: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. And thanks for covering this issue, Amy. I can’t think of a more important topic when it comes to climate justice, corporate accountability and what we’re facing in terms of corporate power in the U.S.
The letter that Amazon Watch and Amnesty USA and other groups have sent is, as Steven pointed out, requesting that the new attorney general conduct a review of how this case has been handled, because of improper acts of targeting Steven Donziger and locking him up in his home for a year and a half on misdemeanor contempt of court charges.
The real thing that’s going on here is Chevron is attempting to literally criminalize a human rights lawyer who beat them. He’s never been accused, let alone convicted, of a crime anywhere. And now Chevron’s machinations by Lewis Kaplan, this federal judge, and Preska, the judge that he has appointed, are on the cusp of turning him into a criminal because he didn’t comply with Kaplan’s outrageous contempt of court orders.
And so, Steven Donziger, for Chevron, is a tactic. It’s a tactic for them to avoid talking about what they actually did, and have the world not look at what they actually did in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And what we want, as the human rights and environmental justice community, is for this new administration to check the corporate power that has manipulated the judicial system to turn Steven Donziger into an example of what will happen if you stand up to corporate power in the United States. And it’s a seriously chilling one.
There is a coalition of organizations called Protect the Protest, which includes Amnesty and us and Greenpeace and many other groups, who have banded together to protect each other from corporate SLAPP attacks. And that’s essentially what we’re seeing in this case, because the —
AMY GOODMAN: And explain the term ”SLAPP attack.”
PAUL PAZ Y MIÑO: ”SLAPP” stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” And this is how corporations prevent activists and organizations from standing up to their abuses. They immediately hit them with baseless lawsuits and force them to spend all the money, sometimes, that they have to defend themselves. And many states in the country do not have anti-SLAPP legislation. So, if they file it in the right place, you are forced to defend yourself against a massive legal team, in some cases. And in Chevron’s case, we’re talking about 60 law firms.
Make no mistake: They did not just go after Steven Donziger, although Steven has been the target of their abuse. They came after Amazon Watch. They came after Rainforest Action Network. They came after their own shareholders. They came after journalists. This has been a scorched-earth tactic by Chevron and their “kill step” law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, based in D.C. Gibson, Dunn prides itself on what they call the kill step, which is a way to avoid international judgments on U.S. corporations by going after them in the United States.
And what’s so important about this is that the environmental racism that has been steeped from day one by the operations of a U.S. oil company is now being aided and abetted by the U.S. judiciary, because what happened is, the Ecuadorians have never had access to justice in the United States. As you heard from Steven, when the suit was first brought against Texaco in New York, they spent eight years fighting. And then New York’s same district that is now holding Steven in his home sent the case back to Ecuador, saying that it was improper venue. This is based on Texaco arguing it should not be in New York. So, again, the Ecuadorians, who have been suffering with pollution every single day, took their case again to Ecuador and fought for almost another decade to hold Chevron to account. And after they got that judgment — actually, two weeks prior to that judgment, Chevron preemptively sued, back in New York, to prevent them from ever bringing that judgment to the United States.
And the reason that’s important is that they escaped the situation where they would be faced with the facts of their abuses in the Amazon, and a judge in the United States has yet to look at the facts of what they did and determine that they should pay to clean up. And what’s dangerous for Chevron is that it’s only the United States where they’ve been protected in, but they have assets around the world. So, when Steven Donziger was working with others to enforce that judgment internationally, that’s when they turned not only to their SLAPP suit, but to criminalizing him, silencing him and making sure that he can’t continue his work to enforce that Ecuadorian judgment.
AMY GOODMAN: Vice produced a short documentary titled The World’s Worst Oil Related Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of. I want to go to a clip.
PABLO FAJARDO: [translated] Texaco utilized the cheapest technology in order to maximize their profit and economic resources, but in exchange for a larger impact on the environment and on people’s health.
ROSA MORENO: [translated] Out of every 20 babies that are born, 15 or 16 have this same condition.
ECUADORIAN MOTHER: [translated] And now my daughter, who is so young to have a disease such as cancer.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Donziger, you tweeted, “Indigenous leader Emergildo Criollo of the Cofan is a man I greatly admire. He was a driving force behind the successful lawsuit against Chevron. Chevron engineers told him that oil was 'like milk' and full of vitamins. He lost two children to cancer.” Can you talk about him?
STEVEN DONZIGER: Oh my god. Emergildo is one of the great leaders in the Ecuadorian Amazon who has been one of the driving forces behind the lawsuit for years. I’ve known him since the early 1990s. He’s a leader of the Cofán Indigenous people. He tells these incredible stories from the 1980s, when he was a young man. He lost children to the oil contamination. And when the Indigenous peoples complained about it, the Chevron engineers would say, “Oh, no, this is not a problem. This stuff has vitamins in it. It’s like milk.” I mean, can you imagine the level of disrespect and the level of abuse?
And it really raises a larger issue, which is this case has been led by people like Emergildo and other Indigenous leaders and shamans and rural community leaders, like Luis Yanza and other Ecuadorian lawyers, who won a resounding victory in court. This case really isn’t about me. Chevron has tried to make a caricature out of this case by focusing on me. And it’s important to focus on the people who are really, really suffering and continue to suffer down in Ecuador.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds, but, so, there was a judgment, reduced to $9 billion. What happens now?
STEVEN DONZIGER: The Ecuadorians, with their lawyers, will continue to try to enforce the judgment against Chevron’s assets and force the company to comply with the law. We’ve held them accountable. We won the judgment. We will continue to hold them accountable, forcing them to actually pay the judgment. So, this case is viable and still going on.
AMY GOODMAN: And you remain under house arrest after 600 days.
STEVEN DONZIGER: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Donziger, I want to thank you for being with us, human rights lawyer who successfully sued Chevron in Ecuador, waiting to hear if he will be freed after nearly 600 days of house arrest. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe. Wear a mask.
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