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Robert Reich | Win the Amazon Union Fight and We Can Usher in a New Progressive Era
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "The second Gilded Age has wrought havoc on American society. The battle in Alabama offers hope to us all."
he most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.
All this is coming to a head in several ways.
Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.
Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.
To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.
Why is Amazon abusing its workers?
The company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.
Amazon is abusing workers because it can.
Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.
The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.
By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.
Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.
Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.
They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.
Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.
This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.
Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.
The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.
I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.
Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same.
Chinese president Xi Jinping. (photo: EFE)
Alfred McCoy | Washington's Delusion of Endless World Dominion: China and the US Struggle over Eurasia, the Epicenter of World Power
Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch
McCoy writes: "Empires live and die by their illusions."
Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that would be genuinely funny, if it weren’t so grim. You’ve certainly heard about that deal President Trump made with the Taliban ensuring that the last 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by May 21st. It’s been in the news for weeks now as a potential crisis for the Biden administration. Whatever may still be up for grabs there, however, one thing was a given: that 2,500 figure. After all, the president signed on to that agreement and who would have had better information about this country’s troop deployments than the commander-in-chief? (Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the 700 or more U.S. troops left in Syria after American officials assured President Trump that almost all of them had been withdrawn.)
As it happens, only the other day the New York Times revealed that there was indeed a tiny counting error (whoops!) when it came to that number. If you included all the “off the books” special operations forces and various “transitioning” units in Afghanistan, the total was actually… hmmm… 3,500 (if that’s even accurate). Not only that, but stationed in numerous other countries “from Syria to Yemen to Mali,” as the Times reporters put it, are similarly off-the-books and unacknowledged U.S. military personnel meant to fight America’s disastrous global war on terror.
In other words, almost two decades after that “war” across much of the Greater Middle East and ever-expanding parts of Africa was launched by President George W. Bush with the invasion of Afghanistan (a “war” theoretically aimed, according to the secretary of defense of that moment, at 60 countries), presidents may come and go, but the U.S. military just fights on. Engaged as it is in imperial conflicts of disaster, its high command is clearly convinced that it’s in charge and the commander-in-chief be damned.
And yet here may be the strangest thing of all: forget those global conflicts (one more disastrous than the next), all those garrisons around the planet, all the invasions and interventions of this century. In this country, the United States is essentially never treated as the great imperial power (or even, at this moment, the faltering one) that it is — not in the mainstream media, anyway. And yet if you don’t imagine this country as an imperial power of the first order, the history of this planet, of us, makes little sense. Fortunately, Alfred McCoy is a great historian of empire as well as a TomDispatch regular. His previous Dispatch book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, followed that most imperial of powers through the last half-century-plus. In his piece today, McCoy gives us a sneak introduction to his new book, an imperial history extending from the 1600s into a future in which the very word “imperial” may lose much of its meaning on a heating planet. That book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, will be published by Dispatch Books in October. In the meantime, you can get your first taste of it below. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Washington’s Delusion of Endless World Dominion
China and the U.S. Struggle over Eurasia, the Epicenter of World Power
mpires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.
By 1956, Britain had exploited its global empire shamelessly for a decade in an effort to lift its domestic economy out of the rubble of World War II. It was looking forward to doing so for many decades to come. Then an obscure Egyptian army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal and Britain’s establishment erupted in a paroxysm of racist outrage. The prime minister of the day, Sir Antony Eden, forged an alliance with France and Israel to send six aircraft carriers to the Suez area, smash Egypt’s tank force in the Sinai desert, and sweep its air force from the skies.
But Nasser grasped the deeper geopolitics of empire in a way that British leaders had long forgotten. The Suez Canal was the strategic hinge that tied Britain to its Asian empire — to British Petroleum’s oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the sea lanes to Singapore and beyond. So, in a geopolitical masterstroke, he simply filled a few rusting freighters with rocks and sank them at the entrance to the canal, snapping that hinge in a single gesture. After Eden was forced to withdraw British forces in a humiliating defeat, the once-mighty British pound trembled at the precipice of collapse and, overnight, the sense of imperial power in England seemed to vanish like a desert mirage.
Two Decades of Delusions
In a similar manner, Washington’s hubris is finding its nemesis in China’s President Xi Jinping and his grand strategy for uniting Eurasia into the world’s largest economic bloc. For two decades, as China climbed, step by step, toward global eminence, Washington’s inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. In the process, from Bill Clinton’s administration to Joe Biden’s, Washington’s China policy has morphed from illusion directly into a state of bipartisan delusion.
Back in 2000, the Clinton administration believed that, if admitted to the World Trade Organization, Beijing would play the global game strictly by Washington’s rules. When China started playing imperial hardball instead — stealing patents, forcing companies to turn over trade secrets, and manipulating its currency to increase its exports — the elite journal Foreign Affairs tut-tutted that such charges had “little merit,” urging Washington to avoid “an all-out trade war” by learning to “respect difference and look for common ground.”
Within just three years, a flood of exports produced by China’s low-wage workforce, drawn from 20% of the world’s population, began shutting down factories across America. The AFL-CIO labor confederation then started accusing Beijing of illegally “dumping” its goods in the U.S. at below-market prices. The administration of George W. Bush, however, dismissed the charges for lack of “conclusive evidence,” allowing Beijing’s export juggernaut to grind on unimpeded.
For the most part, the Bush-Cheney White House simply ignored China, instead invading Iraq in 2003, launching a strategy that was supposed to give the U.S. lasting dominion over the Middle East’s vast oil reserves. By the time Washington withdrew from Baghdad in 2011, having wasted up to $5.4 trillion on the misbegotten invasion and occupation of that country, fracking had left America on the edge of energy independence, while oil was joining cordwood and coal as a fuel whose days were numbered, potentially rendering the future Middle East geopolitically irrelevant.
While Washington had been pouring blood and treasure into desert sands, Beijing was making itself into the world’s workshop. It had amassed $4 trillion in foreign exchange, which it began investing in an ambitious scheme it called the Belt and Road Initiative to unify Eurasia via history’s largest set of infrastructure projects. Hoping to counter that move with a bold geopolitical gambit, President Barack Obama tried to check China with a new strategy that he called a “pivot to Asia.” It was to entail a global military shift of U.S. forces to the Pacific and a drawing of Eurasia’s commerce toward America through a new set of trade pacts. The scheme, brilliant in the abstract, soon crashed head-first into some harsh realities. As a start, extricating the U.S. military from the mess it had made in the Greater Middle East proved far harder than imagined. Meanwhile, getting big global trade treaties approved as anti-globalization populism surged across America — fueled by factory closures and stagnant wages — turned out, in the end, to be impossible.
Even President Obama underestimated the seriousness of China’s sustained challenge to this country’s global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” two senior Obama officials would later write, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”
Breaking with the Beltway consensus about China, Donald Trump would spend two years of his presidency fighting a trade war, thinking he could use America’s economic power — in the end, just a few tariffs — to bring Beijing to its knees. Despite his administration’s incredibly erratic foreign policy, its recognition of China’s challenge would prove surprisingly consistent. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster would, for instance, observe that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.” Similarly, Trump’s State Department warned that Beijing harbored “hegemonic ambitions” aimed at “displacing the United States as the world’s foremost power.”
In the end, however, Trump would capitulate. By January 2020, his trade war would have devastated this country’s agricultural exports, while inflicting heavy losses on its commercial supply chain, forcing the White House to rescind some of those punitive tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promises to purchase more American goods. Despite a celebratory White House signing ceremony, that deal represented little more than a surrender.
Joe Biden’s Imperial Illusions
Even now, after these 20 years of bipartisan failure, Washington’s imperial illusions persist. The Biden administration and its inside-the-Beltway foreign-policy experts seem to think that China is a problem like Covid-19 that can be managed simply by being the un-Trump. Last December, a pair of professors writing in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs typically opined that “America may one day look back on China the way they now view the Soviet Union,” that is, “as a dangerous rival whose evident strengths concealed stagnation and vulnerability.”
Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama’s National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. China’s population, he pointed out, is aging, its debt ballooning, and its politics “increasingly sclerotic.” In the event of conflict, China is geopolitically “vulnerable when it comes to food and energy security,” since its navy is unable to prevent it “from being cut off from vital supplies.”
In the months before the 2020 presidential election, a former official in Obama’s State Department, Jake Sullivan, began auditioning for appointment as Biden’s national security adviser by staking out a similar position. In Foreign Affairs, he argued that China might be “more formidable economically… than the Soviet Union ever was,” but Washington could still achieve “a steady state of… coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” Although China was clearly trying “to establish itself as the world’s leading power,” he added, America “still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition,” just as long as it avoids Trump’s “trajectory of self-sabotage.”
As expected from such a skilled courtier, Sullivan’s views coincided carefully with those of his future boss, Joe Biden. In his main foreign policy manifesto for the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden argued that “to win the competition for the future against China,” the U.S. had to “sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world.”
All these men are veteran foreign policy professionals with a wealth of international experience. Yet they seem oblivious to the geopolitical foundations for global power that Xi Jinping, like Nasser before him, seemed to grasp so intuitively. Like the British establishment of the 1950s, these American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they’ve forgotten how they got there.
In the aftermath of World War II, America’s Cold War leaders had a clear understanding that their global power, like Britain’s before it, would depend on control over Eurasia. For the previous 400 years, every would-be global hegemon had struggled to dominate that vast land mass. In the sixteenth century, Portugal had dotted continental coastlines with 50 fortified ports (feitorias) stretching from Lisbon to the Straits of Malacca (which connect the Indian Ocean to the Pacific), just as, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain would rule the waves through naval bastions that stretched from Scapa Flow, Scotland, to Singapore.
While Portugal’s strategy, as recorded in royal decrees, was focused on controlling maritime choke points, Britain benefitted from the systematic study of geopolitics by the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, who argued that the key to global power was control over Eurasia and, more broadly, a tri-continental “world island” comprised of Asia, Europe, and Africa. As strong as those empires were in their day, no imperial power fully perfected its global reach by capturing both axial ends of Eurasia — until America came on the scene.
The Cold War Struggle for Control over Eurasia
During its first decade as the globe’s great hegemon at the close of World War II, Washington quite self-consciously set out to build an apparatus of awesome military power that would allow it to dominate the sprawling Eurasian land mass. With each passing decade, layer upon layer of weaponry and an ever-growing network of military bastions were combined to “contain” communism behind a 5,000-mile Iron Curtain that arched across Eurasia, from the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone near Seoul, South Korea.
Through its post-World War II occupation of the defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, Washington seized military bases, large and small, at both ends of Eurasia. In Japan, for example, its military would occupy approximately 100 installations from Misawa air base in the far north to Sasebo naval base in the south.
Soon after, as Washington reeled from the twin shocks of a communist victory in China and the start of the Korean war in June 1950, the National Security Council adopted NSC-68, a memorandum making it clear that control of Eurasia would be the key to its global power struggle against communism. “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass,” read that foundational document. The U.S., it insisted, must expand its military yet again “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.”
As the Pentagon’s budget quadrupled from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion in the early 1950s in pursuit of that strategic mission, Washington quickly built a chain of 500 military installations ringing that landmass, from the massive Ramstein air base in West Germany to vast, sprawling naval bases at Subic Bay in the Philippines and Yokosuka, Japan.
Such bases were the visible manifestation of a chain of mutual defense pacts organized across the breadth of Eurasia, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe to a security treaty, ANZUS, involving Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. in the South Pacific. Along the strategic island chain facing Asia known as the Pacific littoral, Washington quickly cemented its position through bilateral defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.
Along the Iron Curtain running through the heart of Europe, 25 active-duty NATO divisions faced 150 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact divisions, both backed by armadas of artillery, tanks, strategic bombers, and nuclear-armed missiles. To patrol the Eurasian continent’s sprawling coastline, Washington mobilized massive naval armadas stiffened by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carriers — the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and the massive 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.
By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.
Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.
China’s Eurasian Strategy
After all that, it seems remarkable that Washington’s current generation of foreign policy leaders, like Britain’s in the 1950s, is so blindingly oblivious to the geopolitics of empire — in this case, to Beijing’s largely economic bid for global power on that same “world island” (Eurasia plus an adjoining Africa).
It’s not as if China has been hiding some secret strategy. In a 2013 speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, President Xi typically urged the peoples of Central Asia to join with his country to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.” Through trade and infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” this vast landmass inhabited by close to three billion people could, he said, become “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
This development scheme, soon to be dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, would become a massive effort to economically integrate that “world island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe by investing well more than a trillion dollars — a sum 10 times larger than the famed U.S. Marshall plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II. Beijing also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with an impressive $100 billion in capital and 103 member nations. More recently, China has formed the world’s largest trade bloc with 14 Asia-Pacific partners and, over Washington’s strenuous objections, signed an ambitious financial services agreement with the European Union.
Such investments, almost none of a military nature, quickly fostered the formation of a transcontinental grid of railroads and gas pipelines extending from East Asia to Europe, the Pacific to the Atlantic, all linked to Beijing. In a striking parallel with that sixteenth century chain of 50 fortified Portuguese ports, Beijing has also acquired special access through loans and leases to more than 40 seaports encompassing its own latter-day “world island” — from the Straits of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline from Piraeus, Greece, to Zeebrugge, Belgium.
With its growing wealth, China also built a blue-water navy that, by 2020, already had 360 warships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and the planet’s second global system of military satellites. That growing force was meant to be the tip of China’s spear aimed at puncturing Washington’s encirclement of Asia. To cut the chain of American installations along the Pacific littoral, Beijing has built eight military bases on tiny (often dredged) islands in the South China Sea and imposed an air defense zone over a portion of the East China Sea. It has also challenged the U.S. Navy’s long-standing dominion over the Indian Ocean by opening its first foreign base at Djibouti in East Africa and building modern ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, and Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with potential military applications.
By now, the inherent strength of Beijing’s geopolitical strategy should be obvious to Washington foreign policy experts, were their insights not clouded by imperial hubris. Ignoring the unbending geopolitics of global power, centered as always on Eurasia, those Washington insiders now coming to power in the Biden administration somehow imagine that there is still a fight to be fought, a competition to be waged, a race to be run. Yet, as with the British in the 1950s, that ship may well have sailed.
By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.
As Sir Halford Mackinder might have put it, had he lived to celebrate his 160th birthday last month, the U.S. dominated Eurasia and thereby the world for 70 years. Now, China is taking control of that strategic continent and global power will surely follow.
However, it will do so on anything but the recognizable planet of the last 400 years. Sooner or later, Washington will undoubtedly have to accept the unbending geopolitical reality that undergirds the latest shift in global power and adapt its foreign policy and fiscal priorities accordingly.
This current version of the Suez syndrome is, nonetheless, anything but the usual. Thanks to longterm imperial development based on fossil fuels, planet Earth itself is now changing in ways dangerous to any power, no matter how imperial or ascendant. So, sooner or later, both Washington and Beijing will have to recognize that we are now in a distinctly dangerous new world where, in the decades to come, without some kind of coordination and global cooperation to curtail climate change, old imperial truths of any sort are likely to be left in the attic of history in a house coming down around all our ears.
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.
President Biden departs after attending Mass on Saturday at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
White House Tries to Snuff Out Report on Staffers Who Were Let Go for Pot Use
Dana Farrington, NPR
Farrington writes:
he White House says five employees were let go from their jobs related to past marijuana use, even though personnel policies were updated so that past pot use would not automatically bar people from working there.
Responding to a Daily Beast report about the issue, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday on Twitter: "The bottom line is this: of the hundreds of people hired, only five people who had started working at the White House are no longer employed as a result of this policy."
Psaki pointed to a recent NBC report on the new guidelines, which were negotiated because marijuana use is legal in some places in the United States but remains illegal under federal law.
The NBC report said the White House would grant waivers on a case-by-case basis to people who smoked marijuana on a "limited" basis and don't need a security clearance. The waiver requires employees to stop all pot use and agree to drug testing.
"As a result, more people will serve who would not have in the past with the same level of recent drug use," Psaki said on Twitter.
The Daily Beast reported that "dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use," citing anonymous sources "familiar with the matter."
"In some cases, staffers were informally told by transition higher-ups ahead of formally joining the administration that they would likely overlook some past marijuana use, only to be asked later to resign," according to the Daily Beast report. NPR has not independently confirmed if that is the case.
In an additional statement to The Daily Beast, Psaki said, "While we will not get into individual cases, there were additional factors at play in many instances for the small number of individuals who were terminated."
Lloyd Austin. (photo: Getty Images)
Pentagon Chief in Afghanistan on Unannounced Visit as Deadline to Withdraw US Troops Looms
Dan Lamothe, The Washington Post
Lamothe writes:
efense Secretary Lloyd Austin touched down in Afghanistan on Sunday, making an unannounced visit as the Biden administration wrestles with how to end its role in a war that is nearly 20 years old without allowing security to disintegrate.
Austin, the retired Army general selected by President Biden to run the Pentagon, flew into Kabul’s international airport before boarding a Black Hawk helicopter to meet with officials that included Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, U.S. diplomat Ross Wilson and Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
Austin told reporters traveling with him in Kabul that senior U.S. officials want to see “a responsible end to this conflict” and “a transition to something else.”
“There’s always going to be concerns about things one way or the other, but I think there is a lot of energy focused on doing what is necessary to bring about a responsible end and a negotiated settlement to the war,” Austin said.
Separately, the defense secretary told a group of service members in Kabul that being deployed is “clearly not easy,” but that the mission is important.
“Continue to take care of each other and focus on the task at hand,” Austin told them.
The trip marks the first visit by the new administration to Afghanistan and comes ahead of a May 1 deadline to remove all U.S. troops that was set in an agreement signed with the Taliban last year. About 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon, with several hundred more deployed on a short-term basis.
Austin’s visit comes after Turkey announced Friday that it will host a peace summit in April that was requested by the Biden administration in an effort to jump-start negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Ghani said he will attend if Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s top leader, also does.
At the height of the war in 2010, the United States had more than 100,000 troops spread across the country, many in combat daily. More than 2,300 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan, and many thousand more Afghans have.
The present situation has left the Biden administration picking from challenging options.
While the deal the Trump administration negotiated last year called for the complete removal of U.S. troops this spring, it did not require the Taliban to reach a peace accord with the Afghan government first.
The Taliban, driven from power by the United States in a war launched after al-Qaeda’s September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, has mostly held fire on Americans since then as a part of the deal. But it has waged a bloody campaign of violence on U.S.-trained Afghan troops, killing scores each month and encircling some Afghan cities. It also did not break with al-Qaeda, another term in the deal, according to U.S. analysts and intelligence assessments.
Biden has raised the prospect of staying in small numbers, at least for a while longer. In an interview with ABC News last week, the president said a full withdrawal by May “is tough,” and he was “in the process of making that decision now as to when they’ll leave.”
Biden administration officials, including Austin, have declined to elaborate on the options that Biden is considering. Austin, in a news conference with reporters in India on Saturday, said he was “aware of various speculation” prompted by an NBC News report last week that Biden has decided to keep troops in Afghanistan through November, but said no decision has been made.
The timing, along with the continued Taliban attacks on Afghan forces and challenges of moving military equipment from a landlocked country with no ports, has raised questions about whether the United States has reached a window of time in which it is no longer feasible for all U.S. troops to leave by May 1 in an orderly fashion.
The Taliban warned on Friday that if the United States does not meet the deadline, there will be a “reaction.”
Austin said the United States is “mindful of the timelines and the requirements that the Taliban has kind of laid out.” He then shifted to note his experience leading the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 at the direction of the Obama administration.
“I would just tell you that there’s probably nobody who understands the physics associated with moving troops and equipment out of a place better than me,” Austin said. “And I think that as we work through this process, we’ll keep all those things in mind, and we’ll keep as many options open as we can. Whatever the decision is that the president makes, you know, you can trust that it will be fully supportable.”
What that might yield is unclear. Taliban officials have expressed interest in taking over the country’s government again, raising concerns over whether advances in women’s rights and democracy will last.
Taliban officials have expressed interest in taking over the country’s government again, raising concerns over whether advances in women’s rights and democracy will last.
Politically, the question remains fraught. During the presidential campaign, Biden vowed to end “forever wars.” Still, some in his party appear torn over how rapidly U.S. forces should exit.
“It is time for it to come to an end,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” emphasizing his opposition to another long-term military commitment in Afghanistan. “At this point,” Durbin added, “I see no end in sight for our presence there. I want to make sure there is a safe exit of our troops; we try to keep the environment as stable as possible, but, as far as engaging in an Afghanistan war for another decade, I’m opposed.”
Speaking on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said her thoughts were with the military personnel who remain in harm’s way but that the prudent course is to allow Austin time to make a recommendation with input from U.S. commanders and allies in theater.
“I want American troops to come home,” Duckworth said, “but I also want to fight the bad guys over there instead of allowing them to come here.”
Top of mind among senior U.S. military officials is the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq a decade ago. That operation was completed on deadline, but it was carried out after the Obama administration weighed keeping thousands of service members there as a residual force. Less than three years after the departure, the Islamic State swept across Iraq from Syria, prompting the U.S. military to return.
A senior Afghan official, Shahmahmood Miakhel, said in an interview on Sunday that Afghan officials hope to “reach an understanding in the peace process, to have a cease fire and not need to use U.S. air support.”
“Afghan forces have the capability to support their own operations and U.S. forces mostly target international terrorist groups who operate under the umbrella of the Taliban in different parts of the country,” he said.
The official, who was just appointed Afghanistan’s ambassador to Qatar, said Afghan forces, especially commandos, are trained to be less dependent upon air support. U.S. forces, he said, “may have freedom to use their air support against counterterrorism operations in the country.”
Rahmatullah Andar, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s national security council, refused to address recent comments from the Biden administration on the withdrawal timeline of U.S. forces and continued air support. But he did express frustration that despite a deal being reached with the Taliban and the United States last year, violence across the country continues.
“After the Doha peace deal, foreigners are safe, but Afghans are being killed. The brunt of the violence is on the Afghan people and security forces,” he said.
Austin, who visited Ghani at the presidential palace, said he did not convey a message to the president and wanted to hear what Ghani’s concerns are. Austin declined to say whether he thinks the Taliban has met the terms of its deal with the United States.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch arrives at the U.S. Capitol ahead of the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Jan. 20. (photo: Getty Images)
Neil Gorsuch Supports an Originalist Theory That Would Destroy Modern Governance
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes:
Just one problem: It’s bunk.
n Thursday, the Columbia Law Review published one of the most important and topical scholarly articles in recent memory, “Delegation at the Founding.” Its authors, Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, put forth a sweeping argument: They assert that an ascendant legal theory championed by conservative originalists has no actual basis in history. That theory, called the nondelegation doctrine, holds that the Constitution puts strict limits on Congress’ ability to let the executive branch set rules and regulations. Congress, for instance, could not direct the Environmental Protection Agency to set air quality standards that “protect public health,” and let the agency decide what limits on pollution are necessary to meet that goal. Nondelegation doctrine has enormous consequences for the federal government’s ability to function, since Congress typically sets broad goals and directs agencies to figure out how to achieve them. The theory is supported by a majority of the current Supreme Court; in 2019, Justice Neil Gorsuch signaled his eagerness to apply the doctrine, and at least four other conservative justices have joined his crusade.
Gorsuch and his allies in academia insist that the men who wrote the Constitution believed in the nondelegation doctrine, giving the theory an originalist pedigree. Yet Mortenson and Bagley, both law professors at the University of Michigan and former Supreme Court clerks, have painstakingly debunked originalists’ claims of historical support for the doctrine. The publication of their article presents a grave challenge to conservative originalists like Gorsuch who purport to follow the evidence even when it leads to an outcome that clashes with their political preferences. As Mortenson and Bagley put it: “You can be an originalist or you can be committed to the nondelegation doctrine. But you can’t be both.”
On Thursday, I spoke with the authors about their paper and the response it has already provoked among academics with near-dogmatic faith in the doctrine they debunk. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Mark Joseph Stern: What is the nondelegation doctrine?
Julian Davis Mortenson: Nondelegation is a judicially created doctrine that has had exactly one year of actual existence, 1935, over the 2½ centuries of the American republic. It says, in essence, that only Congress can make rules that govern private conduct, and all administrative agencies can do is apply the rules and maybe fill in some small details about the rules in the course of doing their work.
What happened in 1935?
Mortenson: The Supreme Court was very hostile to the New Deal, to economic interventionism. And it issued two opinions concluding that Congress had given the president too much discretion without giving him enough guidance. Those decisions happen, and then the doctrine is gone for many years.
Nicholas Bagley: It’s pretty much dormant until the 1980s and 1990s, when the conservative legal establishment starts to poke around for doctrines that might be able to restrain the federal government at a time when they felt it was too big, too powerful, and doing too much at the states’ expense. Conservative scholars glom onto nondelegation and start pushing for its reinvigoration in the courts. The Supreme Court slapped that down in 2001 in a unanimous decision written by none other than Justice [Antonin] Scalia. He said: Look, we’re not going to play this game. There’s no principled way for a court to draw these distinctions. We’re going to trust Congress to take care of protecting its own prerogatives.
At the same time, Justice [Clarence] Thomas writes separately to say: I’m open to reviving the doctrine. Start making an argument to me based in originalist materials that might allow me to get to that result. So originalist scholars start to build an argument. They write long law review articles and books that give the theory a patina of historical credentials. That was new, because until then, nondelegation was not primarily a claim about what the Framers believed in. It was a claim about how we ought to properly structure our government today—we want the legislature to make the important decisions, not beady-eyed bureaucrats.
You spent an enormous amount of time reviewing these originalist theories and assessing them in light of tens of thousands of pages of historical evidence. What did you find?
Bagley: When you talk about the founding era, there’s an awful lot to draw on because founders talked about their new Constitution all the time. If nondelegation was a thing, you should expect to find direct evidence of it. You’d expect it to arise in debates over laws that empower the president to act without much guidance from Congress. And when you look at those debates, it never crops up. It never shows up at all. And when you look at the practice before ratification, the founders delegated power all the time. It’s not a surprise that when they formed this new Constitution, they continued that pattern. If you take a hard look at the evidence people claim for the nondelegation doctrine, it falls apart in your hands. As a matter of historical inference, it can’t stand. History is not a game. It’s not infinitely flexible. You can’t read into it whatever you want.
Scholars often look to practice at the founding to determine the meaning of the Constitution. What did you learn about delegation in this period?
Mortenson: Delegation was deeply embedded in the operating system of governance throughout the founding period and throughout the 18th century. There is pervasive delegation in every direction throughout Anglo-American governance. The standard move for nondelegation theorists, faced with this avalanche of evidence that this is how the founders governed, is to say: Ah, the Constitution changed everything. The fact that it has “vesting clauses,” which vest power in the different branches of government, changed everything. If that were true, you’d think the founders might have said so at some point during the writing and ratification of the Constitution, which had highly learned debates about its meaning. But they didn’t! The story of radical discontinuity just doesn’t add up.
Proponents of the theory often claim to have James Madison on their side. Why?
Bagley: The best evidence originalists have mustered is a debate in the second Congress over the location of post roads. At first, Congress thought, let’s specify every single town that these roads will run through, because we want them in places that are important politically and financially. Then a proposal was put on the floor to say, let’s not do this ourselves—let’s give this to the president. Several members of Congress, including James Madison, object; Madison says the proposal would be unconstitutional. The other members laugh at them and say, you think this is somehow unconstitutional? You’re making up an argument because you want to retain control over the roads! In the end, Congress retains the authority over the post roads—but delegates additional authority to the president to create new post roads at his discretion. That’s exactly what Madison claimed was unconstitutional!
No originalist has proposed reviving a doctrine like the one they think they find in the second Congress. It doesn’t align with any of the extant theories about what a nondelegation doctrine would look like. If you assume that the nondelegation doctrine would preclude the president from doing something as banal as choosing the location of post roads, you basically are consigning the entire federal government to the rubbish heap. So the best originalist evidence for nondelegation is based on opportunistic arguments roundly rejected by the very coalition that, originalists claim, universally believed in the existence of this doctrine.
Mortenson: Originalists’ core piece of evidence is a set of losing claims invented more or less on the spot by a minority of one house of Congress that is completely at odds with the basis of the theory they’re advocating today. It’s all reverse-gerrymandered to pretend that overwhelming evidence to the contrary can be explained away if you just dance your feet fast enough.
Drafts of your article have been circulating for some time now. How have originalist proponents of the doctrine responded to it?
Mortenson: The retreat has been to claims about the necessary implications of structure and deep values that you can glean if you press your forehead against the text of the Constitution. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law. These are policy claims. And they’re shockingly similar to the arguments for unwritten rights in the Constitution that conservative originalists have derided for decades. When those arguments about structure and values and penumbras and emanations are made in service of abortion and LGBTQ equality, they are derided by originalists as contemptuous of democracy. For decades I’ve been told, “Keep your policy claims out of our Constitution.” I don’t see why the shoe doesn’t go on both feet.
Bagley: The nondelegation doctrine is at the heart of the conservative legal movement’s reform agenda. To the extent that it’s unavailable given their methodological commitments, that’s a real problem. The public responses have been to deny the force of the historical evidence that we supply, to insist that the historical record says something it doesn’t. I don’t find these historical responses persuasive. I’m struck by how thin they seem to me. And I’m struck by how otherwise smart people can endorse them. If you want to tell me it’s better to have this rule, fine. But you’re making a claim about the living Constitution as it evolves to deal with certain circumstances.
Do you have any hope that originalist judges like Gorsuch will read your paper and change their mind?
Mortenson: I have hope. I read Justice Gorsuch as very earnest and thoughtful. I think our research is so overwhelming that he might be willing to listen.
Bagley: [Pause.] When I clerked for Justice Stevens, he would circulate an opinion or a dissent and say, “You know, Nick, I think we’re going to persuade some people with this one.” Then he’d circulate it and he would get zero votes. I admired the optimism.
Syrian mourners pray during a funeral in the the village of Atareb in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo. (photo: Aaref Watad/AFP)
Several Killed in Government Attack on Hospital in Northwest Syria
Al Jazeera
At least six civilians, including a child, were killed after government forces fired on a hospital in western Aleppo.
rtillery shelling has killed six civilians, including a child when it hit a surgical hospital in rebel-held northwest Syria, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has said in a statement.
The attack on Sunday in the town of Atareb has also wounded 16 civilians including five health staff, the IRC said. The hospital is now out of service.
“Four of the injured are in a critical condition,” IRC said, adding that the hospital is run by its partner organisation SAMS.
The attack came despite a Russian-Turkish ceasefire in force since March 2020, covering the wider rebel-held stronghold in northwest Syria.
Turkey’s defence ministry and a war monitor earlier reported that Syrian government artillery fire hit the hospital’s main entrance inside a cave.
“Although SAMS shared the hospital’s coordinates through the UN’s notification system, it came under attack and has now been damaged so severely that it can no longer be used,” Rehana Zawar, the IRC’s country director for northwest Syria said in a statement.
“This is the fifth attack on health care that has been recorded so far this year, and brings the total number of attacks on health care since January 2019 to 118.
“Health facilities are protected under international law and should be safe havens in times of crisis, but after 10 years of war this is not the case in Syria. Since the start of the conflict, Physicians for Human Rights have documented close to 600 attacks on health care,” Zawar said.
Al Jazeera’s Adham Abu Hussam, reporting from neighbouring rebel-held Idlib province, said that the hospital used to serve some 100,000 people in the area.
The area is also included in the de-escalation zone agreed upon by Russia, Iran and Turkey – an area which stretches from the northeastern mountains of Latakia to the northwestern suburbs of Aleppo city.
The hospital is located underground, a tactic used by the opposition to avoid being targeted in the conflict-prone area.
In a statement, the White Helmets – a volunteer search-and-rescue group that operates in rebel-held parts of Syria – said the attack is a “continuation of the regime and Russia’s systematic policy of targeting medical facilities and hospitals”.
Hospitals and clinics have been targeted and destroyed in cities across the country amid fighting between government forces – backed by Russia and Iran – and armed opposition groups.
In a report released earlier this month, the IRC highlighted the ways in which the war in Syria has turned hospitals from places of shelter to danger zones.
According to the report, an estimated 70 percent of the health workforce has left the country, leaving just one Syrian doctor for every 10,000 civilians. Only 58 percent of hospitals remain fully functional, the UN says.
Rebel-held Idlib province, which was dubbed a “dumping ground” for evacuees who fled government offensives in other parts of the country, is now facing a raging coronavirus pandemic while much of its healthcare facilities are in ruins. The region is home to nearly 3 million people, most of whom are internally displaced.
The ceasefire brokered by rebel-backer Turkey and regime ally Russia last March stemmed a months-long regime military offensive on the region – the last rebel-held bastion – that killed hundreds of civilians and displaced more than a million people from their homes.
It has since largely held despite repeated violations including Russian air strikes on the region, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Meanwhile, the United States-based Physicians for Human Rights has documented 598 attacks on at least 350 separate healthcare facilities in Syria since March 2011, the vast majority of them allegedly committed by the Syrian government and allied forces, including Russia. In the same 10-year period, at least 930 medical personnel were killed, the rights group said.
Between 2016 and 2019, the World Health Organization documented up to 337 attacks on healthcare sites in Syria’s northwest.
The health directorate in the rebel-controlled northwest said Sunday’s attack was the first on a medical facility in the region since February 2020.
The war, now widely seen as a proxy conflict, has killed more than 388,000 people and displaced millions at home and abroad since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
When facing a human attack, sperm whales abandoned the defensive circles used against orca and swam upwind instead. (image: Alamy)
Sperm Whales in 19th Century Shared Ship Attack Information
Philip Hoare, Guardian UK
Hoare writes:
Whalers’ logbooks show rapid drop in strike rate in north Pacific due to changes in cetacean behaviour
remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the 21st century.
The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t.
Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.
“Sperm whales have a traditional way of reacting to attacks from orca,” notes Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his house overlooking the ocean in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at Dalhousie University. Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.
It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched. As Herman Melville, himself a whaler in the Pacific in 1841, would write in Moby-Dick (1851): “The moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc.”
Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.
The hunters themselves realised the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’ says Whitehead.
And in turn, it evokes another irony. Now, just as whales are beginning to recover from the industrial destruction by 20th-century whaling fleets – whose steamships and grenade harpoons no whale could evade – they face new threats created by our technology. ‘They’re having to learn not to get hit by ships, cope with the depredations of longline fishing, the changing source of their food due to climate change,’ says Whitehead. Perhaps the greatest modern peril is noise pollution, one they can do nothing to evade.
Whitehead and Randall have written persuasively of whale culture, expressed in localised feeding techniques as whales adapt to shifting sources, or in subtle changes in humpback song whose meaning remains mysterious. The same sort of urgent social learning the animals experienced in the whale wars of two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate today’s uncertain world and what we’ve done to it.
As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us. After all, it was the whales that provoked Melville to his prophesies in Moby-Dick. “We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality,” he wrote, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded … then the eternal whale will still survive, and … spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”
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