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19 March 21
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Pro-Sanders Forces Finally Get Their Revenge
Holly Otterbein, POLITICO
Excerpt: "Steamrolled by Nevada's Democratic establishment in 2016, Sanders' supporters have now taken over one of the nation's top state parties - and that could have far-reaching consequences."
ive years ago, Bernie Sanders’ supporters were steamrolled by the Democratic establishment in Nevada’s presidential caucus.
This weekend, pro-Sanders forces finally got their revenge.
A slate of uber-progressive Sanders allies, endorsed by the tightly organized Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, won control of the Nevada Democratic Party in leadership elections on Saturday. On the losing side was one of the most powerful forces in Democratic politics: the well-oiled operation run by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The takeover of the state party, aka the Reid machine, represents a dramatic turnaround from the 2016 presidential race, when Sanders fans were accused of throwing chairs and making violent threats at a wild convention in Nevada — charges they vehemently deny to this day.
It’s a development that could have effects that stretch well beyond state borders — and a sign that Sanders himself is playing a long game in the battle for control of the Democratic Party.
“It means that the progressive movement is getting stronger, that more and more people are getting actively engaged,” said Judith Whitmer, the new chair of the Nevada Democratic Party. “Instead of just walking away or saying nothing is ever going to happen, we’re just determined to make it happen. More and more people are feeling the same way around the country.”
In the near term, the upheaval in the party could have ramifications on the 2022 midterms — establishment-oriented Democrats are worried that what they consider to be a new and inexperienced team will be ill-prepared to take on Republicans next year in the swing state. The left insists it is ready. But there are also implications beyond the current election cycle for the progressive movement nationwide, and perhaps even the 2024 presidential election.
On Wednesday, Whitmer will meet virtually with Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ chief political adviser, according to people familiar with the gathering. Keenan Korth, campaign manager for the winning slate of party officers, will also attend. One immediate topic of discussion will likely be fundraising: Apparently seeing the writing on the wall, the state party moved $450,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee shortly before power changed hands in Saturday’s election.
“It’s basically a call to get an understanding of what they’re facing and what they need help with — support in the immediate term — and making sure they’re in a position to succeed,” said a Sanders aide who declined to speak on the record. “It’s a critical state for Democrats.”
The toppling of the state party has been years in the making. Whitmer, who was chair of the Clark County Democratic Party until stepping down this month, said she contacted the DSA two years ago about filling seats in the central committee, which is the body that elects the party’s officers. Sanders’ political operation also sent texts late last year to the senator’s supporters to encourage them to run for those seats in Las Vegas’ Clark County, the most populous county in the state, said several sources familiar with the effort.
Progressives who were active in pushing for new party leadership said the 2016 caucus was the catalyst that drove many of them to participate in Democratic state politics. Sanders lost narrowly to Hillary Clinton in the February caucuses, leaving some on the left ruminating that they could have won if they’d done more. At the bitterly contested state convention months later, where presidential delegates to the national convention were finalized, Sanders fans also left feeling that the Nevada Democratic Party had rigged the process.
“The leadership there in Nevada hijacked the process on the floor, created a tremendous amount of angst among people who were there attending the convention, who were supporters of Sen. Sanders, by ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ then-campaign manager, at the time.
For its part, the Nevada state party lodged a complaint with the Democratic National Committee regarding the conduct of Sanders supporters and the “Campaign’s penchant for extra-parliamentary behavior—indeed, actual violence—in place of democratic conduct in a convention setting, and furthermore what we can only describe as their encouragement of, and complicity in, a very dangerous atmosphere that ended in chaos and physical threats to fellow Democrats.”
In a sign of how far the Democratic Party has shifted leftward in the state since 2016, even Whitmer’s opponent — who was recruited by Reid allies — is a well-known Sanders supporter. Tick Segerblom, a Clark County commissioner who said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto contacted him about running, backed Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Sanders won the Nevada caucus last year in a rout.
“Truthfully, the other side out-organized us,” said Segerblom, referring to the party leadership elections. “I don’t say that just recently, but starting with the caucus last February where individual delegates to the county convention get elected. They were focused on that at that time. They then proceeded to take control of the county party.”
Explaining why he lost despite himself being a Sanders supporter, Segerblom said it was a story of outsiders versus insiders: “The Bernie grassroots people felt like they had been excluded going back to 2016, and so they wanted to change that. And so whether I was Bernie or not really wasn’t important. It’s that I am close to the governor and the senators and people like that.”
Shaun Navarro, co-chair of the Las Vegas DSA, said there were also larger forces at play in the weekend’s election results that are changing the state’s politics: “It’s a growing state. The state itself is changing. The electorate is changing: It’s moving more left because it is so diverse and there are so many people moving in from out of state.”
The 2022 midterms in Nevada will be one of the first major tests of the new party officers — and they will also measure the strength of the progressive movement writ large. The new guard believes that left-wing leaders and donors around the country see the fast-growing state as a huge opportunity and will invest financially in the party.
“We know that when it comes to 2024, if the party under our leadership has suffered losses in 2022, that that will undercut our ability to be successful moving forward,” said Korth. “The progressive movement nationwide is excited about Nevada and energized about the future of our party here and our organizing, and can absolutely be a critical component of our fundraising strategy to raise the $10 [million] to $20 million that the party is going to need to raise between now and November of 2022.”
The Reid machine is skeptical that the new leadership can win general elections, and it intends to stay as involved as it has always been — through independent expenditures and other outside groups. The old guard prided itself on being one of the most successful state Democratic parties in the nation, if not the best overall, with a record that includes electing both U.S. senators in recent years, cinching the last four presidential elections and taking control of the state legislature.
“What we have done is focused on winning and delivering Democratic victories up and down the ballot for the better part of 20 years and to see that demonized is hurtful on a personal level,” said Megan Jones, a former Reid aide. “But on a professional level, it's short-sighted because I don't think they know what they're doing. And honestly I don't know if they want to know what they're doing, because these folks have been plotting against the state party and what they perceive as this power structure for the better part of four years.”
Whitmer said she is dedicated to reaching out to everyone in the state party — since her victory, she said she has been in contact with Cortez Masto’s team — and argued that internal divisions have been exaggerated. She also said she has “a 27-year career in project management, operations, logistics, managing multibillion-dollar projects.”
Reid declined to provide comment through an aide.
The change in leadership also comes as Nevada is looking to become the first-in-the-nation nominating state in the presidential race, something Reid has been pushing for aggressively. While left-wing and traditional Democrats said they were both committed to moving ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire, some are concerned that divisions in the state party could hurt their cause.
The state party staff quit after the progressive slate won, and Whitmer said the new officers were not immediately given access to social media or ActBlue accounts. (That has since changed, she said.) Both sides have also accused each other of attempting to put their thumb on the scales while filling vacant central committee seats.
The effort to go first in the presidential primary is not the only potential impact in 2024 and beyond, especially if Biden declines to campaign for a second term. Though the party officers’ terms are two years long, Whitmer said she is planning to run for reelection — and progressives say their efforts could make the state a more fruitful place for upcoming left-wing presidential candidates.
“I suspect that if we secure first-in-the-nation here in Nevada that any would-be progressive presidential contenders — it would make them all the more likely to get into the race because of the foundation we built here,” he said.
A Reid ally dismissed that notion, pointing out that the party does not run presidential primaries — unlike caucuses, which state Democrats are looking to axe in the future. “Part of the calculation to move away from the caucus is because we could see this coming,” the person said.
Students bearing signs critical of filibuster stalling civil rights legislation in Congress and protesting segregation begin noon hour parade in front of Dillard University in New Orleans on March 8, 1960. (photo: AP)
The Filibuster's Ugly History and Why It Must Be Scrapped
Sean Wilentz, Rolling Stone
Excerpt: "The filibuster is no cornerstone of senatorial greatness. It is an accident that has spun out of control."
he case for ending the Senate filibuster rule is based not on simple partisanship but out of concern for American democracy. Partisanship becomes a problem when normal political parties place narrow self-interest so far above all other considerations that the nation obviously suffers as a result. And, in truth, both parties have long deployed the filibuster — the provision in the Senate’s rules that effectively requires a supermajority of senators to guarantee passage of most legislation — when they find themselves in the minority. In normal times, the parties have normalized the filibuster, to the point where it appears to be a natural feature of the Senate’s operations.
In fact, however, there is nothing natural about the filibuster, and, even more important, the United States long ago ceased to have two normal political parties. For at least 25 years, the Republican Party has been in the grip of a radicalization that had led it from Reaganism — already a departure from the party’s mainline traditions — to Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth right-wing politics and then to the authoritarian putsch-prone personality cult of Donald Trump. Instead of believing in its own appeal to a majority of voters with anything resembling ideas, the GOP relies on themes of culture-war demagogy, conspiracy mongering, and racial division. Yet even that is insufficient: Lacking confidence in that repertoire of dog whistles, Republicans have now become utterly dependent on gerrymandering and brazen voter suppression.
The Republican Party is a “normal” party only in the sense that the segregationist wing of the Southern Democratic Party before the modern civil rights era was “normal.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Trump worshipper, has stated that his idol has some sort of “magic.” The “magic” Graham couldn’t define was the same old dark “magic” that was practiced by his predecessor, Strom Thurmond. Indeed, Republican strategy and tactics, although national rather than sectional in scope, are strikingly similar to those of the old Dixiecrats, reviving and updating the old Jim Crow politics, with restrictive ID laws and election-roll purges taking the place of the poll tax and the grandfather clause — Jim Crow 2.0.
So, these are the stakes at the heart of the current debate over the filibuster. With the tiniest possible majority in the Senate — achieved only by overcoming voter suppression in Georgia — and just a razor-thin majority in the House, the Democrats have a very small window for achieving reforms that might reverse the greatest attempted subversion of American democracy since the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. To say that killing the filibuster will come back to haunt the Democrats, as Republicans are wont to do, is to miss the severity and immediacy of the crisis. As the party of a sitting president usually suffers losses in midterm congressional elections, there’s certainly a strong possibility that the Republicans will regain the House or the Senate, or both, in 2022. But unless checked right away, Republican-controlled state legislatures will be hell-bent on curtailing voting rights and turning probability into certainty — and then imposing Jim Crow 2.0 as the law of much of the land. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln at another moment of maximum danger for democracy, the tug has to come, and better that it should come now instead of later.
Without losing his cool, President Joe Biden has learned from the wishful thinking of Barack Obama, who believed Republicans would listen to reason only to discover they were determined to wreck him. Republicans, in their lockstep opposition to the historic $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and stimulus bill, have proved true once again to their obstructionist nihilism. This time, of course, their obstruction failed, but only because the bill, a revenue measure, was open to a process known as reconciliation, whereby simple majorities in both houses of Congress are sufficient to win passage. With the filibuster intact, most of the rest of Biden’s program will require a 60-vote supermajority to pass the Senate. And although some important measures might conceivably win the backing of the required 10 Republican senators (assuming Democratic unanimity), others plainly will not, above all the crucial measures H.R.1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill.
H.R. 1 is a large piece of legislation, known as an omnibus bill, which provides numerous fundamental reforms in our voting system: easing, not restricting, voter registration; protecting the system from hacking and outside interference; and shining a light on the dark-money contributions concealed by current laws. The Lewis Voting Rights Bill authorizes targeted review of voting changes in jurisdictions across the country, focused on eliminating methods deliberately aimed at discriminating against racial minorities. It would be a formidable obstacle to the wave of pending Republican-sponsored voter-suppression legislation, amounting to, at the latest count, some 253 separate proposals in 43 states.
Together, H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Bill would bring the most sweeping reform of our electoral laws since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet far from radical, the proposals seek mainly to correct for the regression on voting rights and open elections in recent years, as inscribed in the retrograde Supreme Court Shelby County and Citizens United decisions that have gutted both the original Voting Rights Act and public accountability for private megadonors. The reform bills should be properly viewed as truly conservative measures, taking voting rights back to where the civil rights movement of the 1960s had taken them. Not surprisingly, though, Republican pseudo-conservatives have blasted the reforms as “a threat to American democracy” (the Heritage Foundation) and “a power grab” designed to create “a permanent partisan majority” (Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn). The word “conservative” has lost its meaning when Republicans use it.
In short, so long as the filibuster remains in place, the bills are almost surely D.O.A. in the Senate. Remove the filibuster, however, and the chances for passage are strong.
The repeal of the filibuster should thus be a no-brainer for Democrats. Why hand Republicans the cudgel to protect red-state legislators’ efforts to secure and entrench GOP control built on minority rule? As repeal involves changing the rules of the Senate and not a piece of public legislation, it requires only a simple majority to pass. Yet at least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have so far resisted, claiming they want to encourage bipartisan cooperation in a hyper-polarized time. Repealing the filibuster, Sen. Sinema says, “runs contrary to the deliberative nature of the Senate, and would afford too much power to the majority party.” Senator Manchin, meanwhile, has stated he wants to make the filibuster “painful” to use. So, the door to change slowly opens.
The claim that without the filibuster the majority party would have too much power is bizarre on its face: Getting rid of the filibuster would not be giving the majority any more power beyond the power it enjoys by virtue of being the majority. The other complaint, that the filibuster is somehow fundamental to the Senate’s institutional core, is historically groundless. The filibuster is no cornerstone of senatorial greatness. It is an accident that has spun out of control.
The framers of the Constitution made absolutely clear that they favored strict majority rule in legislative matters. In “Federalist 22,” Alexander Hamilton described making a supermajority “requisite to a decision” as a kind of “poison” that subjected “the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.” Still, the Constitution left it to the members of the House and Senate to devise their own rules for their respective chambers. At first, both houses heeded Hamilton’s wisdom, adopting what was known as the “previous motion” rule that permitted a simple majority of voting members to end debate. For nearly 20 years, the Senate got along well enough under the rule. Senators sometimes turned tactically verbose to delay action on a bill, but not so much that the previous motion was invoked very often. Then Hamilton’s archrival Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, got into the act.
In March 1805, Burr, under indictment for killing Hamilton in a duel a year earlier, stepped down from the vice presidency and delivered an emotional and highly praised farewell speech to the Senate. Along the way, reflecting on his years overseeing the Senate, he described the body’s rule book as a mess, filled with redundant and otherwise needless regulations, and he singled out the little-used previous-motion rule. The following year, the Senate abandoned the rule, not because the members wanted to find a way to become more deliberative, nor because they wanted to enable the minority to obstruct the majority, but because Aaron Burr, in a digression on housekeeping, told them they should, with no motive beyond the procedural.
The Senate now lacked any means to cut off debate, but the rise of the filibuster — the word derived from the Spanish filibustero, or “pirate” — came only in the years preceding the Civil War, when individual members would attempt to hold the Senate hostage by refusing to yield the floor for hours on end. At one critical moment, in July 1841, the powerful Henry Clay of Kentucky attempted to halt a debate over a bill he favored to charter a new national bank with a simple majority vote, provoking William King of Alabama to threaten a grandstanding filibuster: Clay, he remarked, should “make his arrangements with his boarding house for the winter.” The threat worked, and Clay backed down.
After the Civil War, Senate leaders from both parties tried to get rid of the practice but failed, as those opposed would simply filibuster the proposal to death. In 1917, when filibusterers threatened a bill supported by President Woodrow Wilson that would arm merchant vessels in the run-up to America’s entry into World War I, the Senate instituted the first so-called cloture rule, requiring two-thirds of all members present to close debate. Thereafter, though, the cloture rule could not stop southern Democrats from mounting the most notorious filibusters of all, blocking anti-lynching bills and every-other-variety civil rights measure from the 1930s until 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson finally engineered the breaking of the filibuster that threatened passage of his landmark Civil Rights Act, resorting to every legislative trick in the book to force unwilling senators into line. (Not that the filibustering of civil rights measures has ended: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, for example, sidelined the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill in 2020.)
Several modifications of the filibuster have followed since the 1960s, most importantly, in 1975, a reduction of the number to three-fifths (or 60 members in the current Senate if all senators are present). Most recently, exceptions have been carved out regarding spending bills and the approval of executive-branch positions and federal judges. Yet even as the Senate has relaxed the means to get around a filibuster, the practice itself has become easier to undertake, requiring a simple request from any member, bypassing the need to grandstand on the floor of the Senate for hours on end. Not surprisingly, the number of filibusters, as measured by the number of cloture motions, which began rising fairly steadily in the mid-1960s, has skyrocketed in the deeply polarized 21st century. By grinding action to a virtual halt, the easily-invoked filibuster has virtually robbed the Senate of its legislative function. Thanks to the gridlock, the august job of U.S. senator has never before been so useless.
In all, there is nothing especially deliberative about the filibuster, which has always been a tool of obstruction. Calls for its elimination are nothing new. As politics have become toxic with the radicalization of the Republicans and asymmetrical polarization, its destructive anti-democratic power has intensified, even after the Trump catastrophe that culminated in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. In the current crisis of democracy, with so many of our basic constitutional and majoritarian norms under attack — including the right to vote, the most fundamental democratic right of all — it is absurd to protect the filibuster as some sort of venerable guardian of sound government. In reality, the filibuster is nothing more than Aaron Burr’s haphazard folly, a well-intentioned mistake that for far too long has impeded the majority will in the name of deliberative democracy. It is time to get rid of the filibuster and allow Alexander Hamilton to finally triumph over his nemesis Burr, freeing the Senate once and for all from the “poison” of minority rule. There may not be a next time.
A doctor returns a dose of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine to a refrigerator unit in Central Falls, R.I., on March 1, 2021. (photo: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe)
Covid Vaccine Makers Promise Investors They'll Soon Hike Prices
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson pledged affordable vaccines - but only as long as there's a 'pandemic.'"
he U.S. pharmaceutical firms behind the approved coronavirus vaccines — Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer — have quietly touted plans to raise prices on coronavirus vaccines in the near future and to capitalize on the virus’s lasting presence.
While the companies have enjoyed a boost in goodwill from the rush to develop vaccines, drug industry executives have noted, the public is still sensitive to drug pricing and the reputational risk has, so far, curtailed their ability to reap large financial rewards.
But that environment, they hope, will change once the pandemic ends: a date that drugmakers themselves reserve the right to declare. Pharmaceutical officials, speaking at recent conferences and on calls with investors, say they expect the virus will linger, morphing from a pandemic into a perennial endemic. And as Covid-19 mutations continue to spread and booster shots may be required on a regular basis, leaders from the three companies are enthusiastic about cashing in.
“As this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us,” said Frank D’Amelio, the chief financial officer for Pfizer, at a conference. Additional factors, such as the need for booster shots, present “a significant opportunity for our vaccine from a demand perspective, from a pricing perspective, given the clinical profile of our vaccine.”
Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have also pledged affordability for their vaccines for the duration of the pandemic but have indicated to investors that they plan to return to more “commercial” pricing as early as later this year.
The vaccines are already poised to be some of the most lucrative drugs of all time. The companies are expecting to bring in billions in profit this year alone, and all the major drugmakers with approved coronavirus vaccines received investments and backorders from government agencies.
The U.S. government has fully financed the research and development of several coronavirus vaccines, including those produced by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, to the tune of over $2 billion. The U.S. has also provided nearly $2 billion in payments to secure doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, which was developed in partnership with BioNTech, a company that received nearly $500 million in development assistance from the German government.
Pfizer, one of the early global leaders in the vaccine race, is very clear about the enormous moneymaking opportunity they see in the vaccines. D’Amelio, the company’s CFO, spoke on a Zoom call last Thursday at the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference, to discuss the issue.
Carter Lewis Gould, an analyst with Barclays Bank, noted that Pfizer faced the particular challenges with “optics” but asked when the company could “pursue higher pricing down the road.”
The current pricing, said D’Amelio, is “clearly not being driven by what I’ll call normal market conditions, normal market forces,” but rather the “pandemic state that we’ve been in and the needs of governments to really secure doses from the various vaccine suppliers.” Once the pandemic ends, he continued, there will be “significant opportunity” for Pfizer.
The comments build on a lengthy explanation of the financials of the vaccine laid out during Pfizer’s last quarterly earnings call. During the event, Pfizer executives announced that the company’s coronavirus vaccine was projected to bring in $15 billion this year alone from sales, of which $4 billion would be purely profit. The estimate would make the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, according to observers, one of the highest-grossing pharmaceutical products of all time.
Those revenue projections are based on prices largely negotiated with governments under pandemic conditions, which could soon change. Pfizer, in its latest investor disclosures, revealed that it received advance payments for its vaccine totaling $957 million as of December 31. In the U.S., the company has agreed to a price of $19.50 per vaccine dose or $39 per patient based on a two-dose series. In the European Union, the company charges a higher rate, nearly $64 per dose. These figures, however, could increase. Pfizer’s pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar 13, for instance, costs $200 per dose on the private market.
The company has faced calls for new price controls and to release the vaccine as a generic. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has demanded that Pfizer and other drugmakers share patents and intellectual property associated with the vaccine with the developing world in order to end the pandemic as fast as possible. The industry, through its vast network of lobbyists, has fiercely opposed the proposal, as well as similar calls for price regulations.
Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla, during the investor call, said the company had little to worry about in terms of political opposition.
“We believe the industry has generated a great deal of goodwill with Congress and public opinion through our Covid-19 treatment and vaccine efforts,” said Bourla. He added that he looked forward to working with the Biden administration and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.
Last year, many pharmaceutical companies pledged to temporarily suspend many ordinary pricing strategies in order to help end the coronavirus crisis. Moderna made waves last October when the company announced that it would not enforce certain patent rights for its vaccine. AstraZeneca, whose vaccine has been approved abroad but not yet in the U.S., promised last year to only sell its vaccine on a nonprofit basis to the developing world “during the pandemic.”
But these promises have fallen short. Pfizer has reportedly pressed Latin American governments, including Argentina, to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as collateral to cover the costs of lawsuits related to adverse effects of the vaccine.
AstraZeneca’s promises have been undercut by leaked agreements. In its deals with local manufacturers, AstraZeneca has stated that the company reserved the right to declare the end of the pandemic for pricing purposes. The Financial Times obtained a memorandum of understanding revealing that its promise not to profit from the vaccine during the pandemic would end as soon as July 1, 2021.
Moderna has not taken any steps to share vaccine intellectual property rights, manufacturing technology, or design and has declined to participate in the World Health Organization-backed fund to distribute low-priced vaccines to the developing world.
Moderna President Stephen Hoge, speaking at the Barclays Bank conference last week, similarly made clear that his company would remain sensitive to pricing concerns around affordability during the pandemic.
“Post-pandemic, as we get into those what I will call seasonal epidemics that you would expect to happen with a SARS-CoV-2 virus, we would expect more normal pricing based on value,” said Hoge.
Joseph Wolk, the executive vice president of Johnson & Johnson, speaking at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference this month, noted that investors could expect the company to reevaluate the vaccine for “pricing that’s much more in line with a commercial opportunity” when the pandemic is over.
Wolk noted that the end of the pandemic is a “fluid” question. The announcement, Wolk said, would come down to a percentage of people vaccinated, though he did not give any specific figures. The “pandemic period will be in place for the majority of this year, if not the entire piece of this year,” he continued, before making it clear that the declaration would be left to Johnson & Johnson.
“I think when we look at it, it’s not going to be something that’s dictated to us,” said Wolk.
The end of the pandemic may be declared by the World Health Organization or other international bodies. Drug firms, however, are not under a legal requirement to make prices based on the WHO’s determination.
Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment regarding its pricing strategies and under what circumstances the firms would use to determine an end to the pandemic.
Asked for comment on when Pfizer would declare an end to the pandemic for pricing purposes, the firm instead released a statement from D’Amelio. “We are committed to the principle of equitable and affordable access for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people around the world,” said D’Amelio. “We have clearly stated in our public disclosures that we anticipate a pandemic phase that could last into 2022, where governments will be the primary purchasers of our vaccine.”
The vaccine makers’ vague promises around affordability, while retaining a monopoly control of vaccine technology financed by public entities, have unsettled public health watchdogs.
Achal Prabhala — coordinator for the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines — notes that the U.S. government alone, through Operation Warp Speed, has pumped $18 billion into vaccine makers, in addition to advance payments for vaccines, ensuring that the pharmaceutical industry would face no financial risk.
“You know, Americans are amazed that they’re getting vaccines for free,” said Prabhala. “And of course they’re not because they’ve already paid for them once and now they’re amazed that they’re not paying for them twice.”
The pharmaceutical industry has faced declining public approval over the last decade. But the pandemic has presented a golden opportunity, noted Prabhala.
“Even though companies like Pfizer, which has not made the vaccine available to 85 percent of the world’s population, are enjoying immense popularity in the U.S. and Europe because of the fact that they got the vaccines done fast, and they seem to work well. That’s an unusually good position for pharma, they’re not used to being thought of as saviors,” he added.
But the companies have held out on drastic or even slight price increases on the vaccines, Prabhala continued, because they are managing the potential for reputational risk. “It’s pretty interesting that they are now waiting for the opportune time to raise prices once enough people have been vaccinated,” he added.
Rep. Chip Roy. (photo: AP)
A GOP House Member Fondly Remembers Lynching During Anti-Asian Violence Hearing
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes:
Rep. Chip Roy recalled a Texas saying about “rope” and “a tall tree.”
t the behest of absolutely no one, a GOP congressman from Texas chose an anti-Asian discrimination and violence hearing two days after murders in Georgia that left six Asian women and two others dead to extol the virtue of lynchings.
During a House Judiciary Committee meeting Thursday, Rep. Chip Roy said Texans “believe in justice” while simultaneously invoking the imagery of one of America’s most unjust legacies.
“There’s old sayings in Texas about ‘Find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,’” Roy said Wednesday during the House Judiciary Committee meeting. “We take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.”
On Tuesday eight people were killed and another was injured after a suspect is alleged to have bought a gun and targeted three spas in the Atlanta area. Most of the victims were Asian women.
The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, told investigators that he his attacks weren’t racially motivated. But Asian-American, migrant, and sex worker advocates have all called that account into question.
After praising mob justice that has historically resulted in the killings of people of color, Roy pivoted to dismissing the hearing focused on anti-Asian discrimination as being somehow against the First Amendment, and tried to tie that idea to being against criminal justice.
"My concern about this hearing is it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society, free speech, and away from the rule of law, taking out bad guys,” Roy added.
According to Roy, these “bad guys'' include the Chinese government, which he referred to as “Chi-Coms.”
As if Roy’s point wasn’t convoluted enough, it was also patently ahistorical. Lynchings are not, in fact, complimentary to the “rule of law.” The 1871 “Chinese Massacre” in Los Angeles, in which at least 17 Asian immigrants were hanged, was one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history.
There have been at least 3,795 “hate incidents” of anti-Asian discrimination reported since the pandemic began in the U.S., the group Stop AAPI Hate said in a report released Tuesday. That same day,
Former President Donald Trump often referred to COVID-19—which he repeatedly downplayed even as hundreds of Americans died on his watch—as the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” Current White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week that there was “no question” that Trump’s statements “led to perceptions of the Asian American community that are inaccurate, unfair,” and that they “elevated threats against Asian Americans.”
House Democrats, including some of Asian-American descent, blasted Roy during Thursday’s hearing.
“Your president, your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want. But you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s eye on the back of Asian Americans across the country, on our grandparents, on our kids,” Rep. Grace Meng of New York told Roy. “This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community to find solutions, and we will not let you take our voice away from us.”
Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, poured cold water on Roy’s theory that the hearing was an attack on free speech.
“It’s not about policing speech. I served in active duty, so you can say whatever you want on the First Amendment,” Lieu said. “You can say racist, stupid stuff if you want. But I’m asking you to please stop using racist terms like ‘kung flu’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ or other ethnic identifiers and describe them as virus.”
Despite calls for Roy to apologize following his comments about lynching, and derision of the importance of a hearing about anti-Asian racism, he has refused to do so.
“We need more justice and less thought policing,” Roy said in a statement to the Daily Caller. “We should restore order by tamping out evil actors, not turn America into an authoritarian state like the Chinese communists who seek to destroy us.”
“No apologies,” Roy added.
Kyle McCradic coils up an old lead service line in Galesburg on March 4, 2021. (photo: Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)
Homes in Illinois Found to Have Lead Levels as Bad as Flint, Report Finds
Terrell Jermaine Starr, The Root
Starr writes:
lint, Michigan, is considered ground-zero for contaminated water, but a recent analysis conducted by the Chicago Tribune found that homes in the state of Illinois have lead levels that are just as bad. “More than 8 of every 10 Illinoisans live in a community where brain-damaging lead was found in the tap water of at least one home during the past six years,” according to the report.
The data comes from samples collected by the state’s 1,768 water utilities under federal regulations. Just a small number of homes are monitored by each utility but the tests show a widespread threat to public health when combined. The main source of the lead exposure was traced to pipes known as service lines that connect houses to water supplies. The report notes that Illinois has more of these lines made of lead than any other state, and Chicago, where much of the state’s Black and people of color population lives, has the most of any other city.
Here is more from the Tribune:
Between 2015 and 2020, tap water in dozens of Illinois homes had hundreds and even thousands of parts per billion of lead — just as extreme as what researchers found during the same period in Flint, where mismanagement of the public water system exposed children to the toxic metal and drew a world spotlight to the scourge.East Moline found one home with 3,000 ppb of lead in tap water, records show. The Rockford suburb of Loves Park detected 2,700 ppb of lead in a home. Southwest of Joliet, the water system in Coal City found 1,260 ppb of lead in one of its samples.Utilities in the three cities were among 224 statewide where at least one home had lead levels at or above 40 ppb, a threshold the U.S. EPA once declared an “imminent and substantial threat to pregnant women and young children.” Others in the Chicago area included Bartlett, Cicero, Lake Barrington, South Elgin and Wauconda.Nearly 60% of the state’s water systems found at least one home with levels greater than 5 ppb — the Food and Drug Administration’s limit for bottled water.
University Park, a predominantly Black community, had the worst levels of lead-in-water issues. According to the Tribune’s analysis of data from the Illinois EPA, samples of tap water collected since 2019 had as much as 5,300 ppb of lead and averaged 54 ppb.
“There is no training for a water crisis,” said Mayor Joseph Roudez. “The experience has been horrible, and it’s still horrible.”
The full report can be found here.
A dorm at the Homestead compound in an image provided by the federal government in 2016. (photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Immigration: Reopening Mass Influx Facilities Goes Against Biden Administration Promises
Jennie Rose Nelson, NACLA
Excerpt: "The Biden administration has proposed legal frameworks to protect unaccompanied immigrant children, while also reopening facilities that have caused widespread harm."
n February 18, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was introduced to Congress. The bill proposes extensive reforms to improve pathways to citizenship for 11 million people, alleviate court backlogs, and address the root causes of migration. According to sponsoring congresswoman Linda Sanchéz, the Act will “restore the United States’ commitment to human rights.”
After the unhinged brutality of the previous administration’s approach to immigration, this Act gives grounds for hope by substantiating Biden’s campaign promises to shift away from implicit criminalization and hostile enforcement.
Unfortunately, just days after the Act’s congressional debut, the administration announced that two Trump-era overflow facilities for unaccompanied immigrant children would soon reopen. The Carrizo Springs, Texas, Influx Care Facility has already admitted 890 children, and the notorious Homestead, Florida, Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children will likely reopen in the coming months under a new name, the Biscayne Influx Care Facility.
Biden has since called upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to oversee the care of 4,000 children in temporary shelters across Texas, further fueling incendiary media claims that we are facing an anarchic "border crisis.” Despite White House claims of operational improvements within these temporary influx facilities, community members insist that they are inherently dangerous and beyond reform.
The reopening of Carrizo Springs and Homestead not only undermine Biden’s campaign promises, they contradict various provisions within the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. The Act arguably serves as the foundational blueprint for this administration’s immigration reform efforts. Such an immediate and massive rift between proposal and practice begs the question whether broad claims will indeed be backed by meaningful change.
Unaccompanied Immigrant Children and the “Best Interests of the Child”
Unaccompanied immigrant children are minors under 18 years of age arriving at the U.S. border without the presence of a biological parent. High rates of severe psychological trauma, compounded by age and language barriers to self-advocacy, make unaccompanied immigrant children one of the most critically vulnerable populations of migrants and refugees.
The Flores Settlement Agreement outlines primary obligations regarding the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody, establishes basic minimum standards of care, and mandates time limits for children in federal holding facilities. These obligations have gone unfulfilled in the past, and children have suffered physical violence, sexual assault, and medical neglect that have led to the deaths of several children.
Ironically, emergency influx facilities such as Carrizo Springs and Homestead are used to help federal agencies meet the Flores obligation of transferring children from Customs and Border Protection into Health and Human Services facilities that are, in theory, more equipped for childcare. Unfortunately, legal loopholes associated with federal property regulations, national emergency declarations, and institutional privatization have frequently rendered these facilities no safer. It’s time to revamp legislative protections for unaccompanied immigrant children.
Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 acknowledges this need by building upon legal notions of “the best interests of the child,” a principle enshrined in relevant international human rights law. Specifically, the Act proposes enhanced partnerships between federal agencies and nongovernmental child welfare organizations. It calls for improved guidelines and protocols for basic minimum standards of care. It also reaffirms the responsibility of federal agencies housing unaccompanied immigrant children to provide adequate medical care, sanitation, nutrition, legal information, and the meaningful availability of qualified child welfare professionals.
The Act proposes reasonable access to detention and shelter facilities for both governmental and nongovernmental oversight mechanisms and increased funding to school districts to improve unaccompanied immigrant children’s access to education. The Act mentions support for and access to gender, trauma, and age-sensitive humanitarian assistance including “to fund national- and community-led humanitarian organizations in humanitarian response.”
Why would the Biden administration propose a bill that seeks to enhance legal frameworks to protect unaccompanied immigrant children while simultaneously reopening mass influx facilities that have caused immeasurable harm? According to Press Secretary Psaki, “This is not kids being kept in cages... ...This is a facility that was opened that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication.”
But how different can these facilities really be while maintaining original infrastructure, mass bed capacity, and legal loopholes that previously allowed abuse to occur behind closed doors? According to local community activists and immigrants’ rights attorneys–not enough. Press Secretary Psaki’s comments are reminiscent of Kirstjen Nielson’s reference to these facilities as “summer camps.” Attempts to assuage public concern by semantically differentiating a “shelter” from a “detention center,” despite prisonlike conditions and testimonies of abuse, is an egregious misrepresentation of reality. Local community activists are acutely aware of this rhetorical pattern, and the fight against the reopening of Homestead is already underway.
Homestead
Abuses at the Homestead detention center are well documented. Its prospective reopening is cause for grave alarm. Amnesty International’s 2019 report, No Home for Children: The Homestead “Temporary Emergency Facility,” documents a consistent failure on behalf of the facility’s managing company, Comprehensive Health Services (CHS), to fulfill obligations regarding the best interests of the child. According to this report, prisonlike conditions, widespread case mismanagement, harassment, and abuse were exacerbated by “the continued categorization of Homestead as a temporary emergency facility–as well as its location on federal land–[which] enables it to circumvent the more stringent requirements governing permanent shelters.”
Facilities like Homestead and Carrizo Springs are not required to meet state regulations regarding child welfare, and they are not subject to the associated mechanisms of oversight, accountability, or staff vetting processes. Homestead staff members who were hired without proper background checks have been implicated in multiple cases of sexual abuse against children.
Homestead’s for-profit business model, which incentivized cost cutting and bed-filling over the safety and dignity of unaccompanied children, made it more dangerous. But regardless of whether CHS will resume management of Homestead, the physical site itself has proven unfit to house children in any capacity. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) published a 2020 report detailing environmental conditions that pose “serious health and safety threats to the children who were housed there, including possible exposure to toxic chemicals from a neighboring Superfund site.” The report shows that there is “widespread contamination surrounding the shelter and the ability for many of these chemicals to travel in soil and groundwater raise considerable concern that detained children were exposed to unsafe levels of hazardous chemicals.” The hazardous chemicals found in toxic levels include pesticides, arsenic, and lead.
Mass influx facilities are fundamentally unable to offer the kind of individualized care needed for such a vulnerable population of children. According to Neha Desai, the Director of Immigration with the National Center for Youth Law, "The size of the facility itself really precludes the children's basic well-being." Desai interviewed children detained at Homestead and described many of them to be “living in this condition of constant toxic stress." Furthermore, the size of other large-scale facilities has contributed to grievous case mismanagement. With hundreds of children still separated from their parents in the wake of Zero Tolerance, there are valid concerns that this has led to children being permanently lost. It’s both horrifying and impossible to imagine the true scope of pain and suffering that has occurred because of these facilities’ negligence and abuse.
Community organizers across the country are calling for influx facilities to be shut down, and for the administration to instead prioritize investment into community and family-based care, home studies, and post-release services. The instances of negligence and abuse within mass influx facilities have been too frequent and too severe to reasonably consider them exceptions to an otherwise acceptable model. Homestead and Carrizo Springs do not represent an unfortunate inevitability, but an informed policy choice aimed at maximizing profits by disappearing a problem instead of committing to long-term, durable solutions.
At the very least, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 demonstrates executive acknowledgment of reasonably humane standards for the treatment for unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee concrete action. Prison abolitionist movements have taught us that surface level reforms can further problematize efforts for meaningful change. The more normalized these influx facilities become, the more difficult it will be to dismantle them further down the road.
Mass influx facilities are fundamentally unsafe for children, and they must be permanently shuttered. AFSC, Freedom for Immigrants, and United We Dream were instrumental in the initial closing of Homestead, and local chapters are continuing to mobilize against the facility’s renewal. We are in an unprecedented political moment in which radical justice for immigrants is possible, but it will not happen without sustained community action. The lives and safety of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children depend on our continued advocacy and attention.
'In 2020 we saw deadly floods in Indonesia (above), bushfires in Australia, both drought and record rainfall in China and extreme storms from the Philippines to Nicaragua.' (photo: Juni Kriswanto/Getty)
The Planet Cannot Survive Our Remorseless Pursuit of Profit
Owen Jones, Guardian UK
Jones writes: "Oil companies knew 50 years ago the huge damage they were doing. Their motive to ignore it is the same now as it was then."
apitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet. Each year, air pollution takes more lives than smoking: the last estimate suggests 8.8m deaths across the world, compared with 7m from cigarettes.
As documents seen by the Guardian reveal, the oil industry has known for half a century that pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels poses severe threats to human health. By the late 1960s, Shell’s internal documents warned air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health”, while by 1980, Imperial College was warning of “birth defects among industry worker offspring”. And yet the same industry actively lobbied against clean air regulations proposed to protect health and save lives.
This may cause moral revulsion, but the behaviour is perfectly rational. An economic system based on accumulating profit will downgrade all other considerations, including the sanctity of human life. There is no economic incentive for a fossil fuel company to willingly support measures that minimise the detrimental impact of their relentless search for profit: indeed, quite the opposite.
Take another example of a product that has a detrimental impact on the environment and our health: meat. Eating too much processed and red meat is bad for health, while meat and dairy production accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions. But healthier diets and lower emissions as a result of lower meat consumption would not accord with big meat’s desire to maximise profits. In 2014, the industry splashed out around $10.8m (£7.7m) in campaign donations, and another $6.9m lobbying the federal government. That investment paid off: in 2015, the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services declared that sustainability would not be considered as a factor in their flagship dietary guidelines.
In western countries, capitalist economic systems go hand-in-hand with politically democratic ones, theoretically providing checks and balances to corporate interests. However, in reality there is often a direct correlation between political influence and economic power. One 2014 study by US academics concluded that the US was an oligarchy rather than a democracy, because “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interests groups have little or no independent influence”. In other words, organised wealthy interest groups – like fossil fuel companies – had a powerful impact in shaping government policy; ordinary citizens didn’t.
In the three years following the Paris agreement it was reported that the largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spent nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change. Fossil fuel companies understand the need to signal their green credentials in an age of growing public awareness about the climate crisis, but are accused of “greenwashing” by activists. Recently, in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, a group of environmental NGOs challenged the oil major Chevron, saying that its climate-friendly image is misrepresentative when fossil fuels are still at the heart of its operations.
Executives and shareholders will safeguard and increase their wealth – which they will pass on through the generations to their fortunate children, giving them the financial means to protect themselves from the consequences of the climate crisis engineered by their ancestors. The planet, and the rest of us, will not be so lucky. Unless we are able to bring global temperatures below a 1.5C increase on their pre-industrial levels by 2030, we will suffer even more severe consequences.
In 2020 we saw deadly floods in Indonesia and Bangladesh, bushfires in Australia and wildfires in California, both drought and record rainfall in China, Siberian wildfires and extreme storms from the Philippines to Nicaragua. A growing climate emergency means ever greater threats to water and food security, destabilised ecosystems, and millions driven from their homes, no doubt to be demonised as refugees and migrants by the wealthy nations most responsible for emissions.
According to one report, the top 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorest half of humanity are responsible for just 10% of global emissions. Yet it will be the global south that pays the heaviest price. This is not a bug of capitalism: it is a central feature. The remorseless search for profit – and an economic system that enables the capture of our political systems by multinational companies with bottomless pockets – represents a fatal threat to our health, to our lives, and to our planet. Without a determined effort to drive back the political power of these corporate titans – which means questioning the very fundamentals of our economic system – our planet will continue to perish. Time is not on our side.
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