31 March 21
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Chuck Schumer Eyes a Second Shot at Raising the Minimum Wage Through Reconciliation
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "Schumer has suggested to progressive groups that there is a glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time."
Democrats capitulated to a ruling by a Senate staffer, the body’s parliamentarian, the first time around.
enate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering putting a $15 minimum wage into the next reconciliation package, which will be focused on infrastructure, multiple sources familiar with the New York senator’s thinking told The Intercept.
Senate Democrats attempted to include the wage hike in President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief package, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled it was out of order, and Senate Democrats allowed that ruling to stand. An effort to overturn the ruling, which required 60 votes, garnered just 42.
Schumer has suggested to progressive groups that there is a glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time: The new legislation is focused on infrastructure, and setting wages is directly related to the budget impact of any infrastructure spending. If there’s even a small chance of it working, he reasoned, it’s worth the fight.
Schumer, though, is encountering resistance from some backers of increasing the minimum wage, who argue that attempting to include it is doomed to fail just as it did last time, and in the process it will trigger another wave of indignation from the public at the failure. Debate over the $1.9 trillion relief package was consumed in its final days by anger over the lack of inclusion of the wage hike, with pressure on progressives to vote it down.
Internal congressional critics of the Schumer idea argue that the link between the policy and whether it clears reconciliation is irrelevant — after all, Republicans included drilling in the Arctic in Trump’s tax cut legislation, two policies that had nothing to do with each other — and that the parliamentarian is likely to rule the same way again. Taking another run at it, for some in the Senate, recalls a favorite maxim of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who would often say, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”
Sources familiar with Schumer’s thinking say that he is buoyed by the fact that the parliamentarian’s ruling was just one line long, meaning it didn’t offer any analysis that could be read as precedent. That the parliamentarian’s analysis of the question was just one line long rankled some Senate Democrats, given that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is a staffer and her role is supposed to be advisory. It would be as if a president asked for an analysis on whether waterboarding was within the executive’s authority and the legal counsel responded with a one line memo either up or down. Putting the minimum wage question back to MacDonough might force a more serious grappling with it — or it could result in a copy-and-pasting of the original rejection.
The idea is also to continue pushing on all fronts — filibuster reform and a series of new reconciliation bills — until the party finds a soft spot in the line to push a higher minimum wage through.
Along those lines, a Schumer aide said the majority leader is also arguing that there are opportunities within Senate rules for additional reconciliation bills beyond those that had been expected, relying on language contained in Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. “At any time after the concurrent resolution on the budget for a fiscal year has been agreed to pursuant to section 301, and before the end of such fiscal year, the two Houses may adopt a concurrent resolution on the budget which revises or reaffirms the concurrent resolution on the budget for such fiscal year most recently agreed to,” the section of the law reads.
By pushing for multiple rounds of reconciliation, Schumer would also perhaps be strengthening the case for reform of the filibuster by once again establishing the 50-vote threshold as the standard way of passing major pieces of legislation. Once it becomes standard for the Senate to make decisions with a majority vote rather than 60 votes, it becomes harder to justify maintaining the current rules for some legislation but not for other pieces. And the cumbersome reconciliation process would feel pressure under the weight of its own absurdity. At the same time, the creative exploration of new procedural maneuvers worries backers of the fight against the filibuster that the party leadership lacks confidence in the ability to get it done.
The Senate still needs to lock down 50 votes in support of hiking the wage, however. Of the eight Democrats who voted no last time around on overruling the parliamentarian to enact a minimum wage, most are assumed to be gettable in a clean vote, though doing so could mean giving ground on the tipped minimum wage, a key priority of the National Restaurant Association. That would still leave Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., but there is hope that a package of small business tax credits, which would subsidize the wage increase, could get them there. There is also talk of including the measure in other must-pass pieces of legislation, creating a process where there wouldn’t be a standalone vote on the minimum wage but rather on the entire package, Senate sources said.
Migrant children at the border. (photo: Loren Elliott/Reuters)
Aviva Chomsky | The New Border Politics of the Biden Era Are Actually Ancient History
Aviva Chomsky, TomDispatch
Chomsky writes: "Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America."
Get used to it. We now officially live on a migration planet and you can thank many things for that. The U.S. war on (but also of) terror has unsettled tens of millions of people across the Greater Middle East and Africa. In doing so, by helping raise the specter of hordes of migrants heading one’s way, it lent a hand in sustaining the growth of right-wing populism in Europe; similarly, as TomDispatch regular Aviva Chomsky explains today (and describes in greater detail in her new book, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration), U.S. policies in Central America and Mexico have lent a remarkable hand to the endless “crisis” of migrants (and migrant children) arriving at the U.S. border, a crisis that — despite recent headlines and Washington claims — is no more overwhelming than it was as the Trump years ended. That phenomenon has, however, also helped promote the rise of right-wing populism in this country and the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist political network.
But above all in the future, you’ll be able to thank climate change for many of the migration crises. Thanks to human greenhouse gas emissions, we’re now on that migration planet and it’s only going to get worse as ever more parts of it become less inhabitable. The present “crisis” at the border, for instance, is at least in part due to two hurricanes, Eta and Iota, that devastated Central America last November as the hurricane season only intensifies in the region. Worse heat, storms, droughts, floods, rising sea levels — our grim new world — may displace 250 million people or more on this planet by 2050.
In light of that, let Aviva Chomsky explore what the Biden administration is really likely to do not just on our border with Mexico but, like the administrations that preceded it (and not only Donald Trump’s either), in trying to outsource that border to Central America. It’s a grim tale of our time. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Will Biden’s Central American Plan Slow Migration (or Speed It Up)?
The New Border Politics of the Biden Era Are Actually Ancient History
oe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his “Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,” restoring “U.S. leadership in the region” that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such “leadership” has an ominous ring.
Although the second half of his plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that region that’s more Cold War-like than CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression.
Linking Immigration and Foreign Policy
The clearest statement of the president’s Central America goals appears in his “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021,” sent to Congress on January 20th. That proposal offers a sweeping set of changes aimed at eliminating President Trump’s racist exclusions, restoring rights to asylum, and opening a path to legal status and citizenship for the immigrant population. After the anti-immigrant barrage of the last four years, that proposal seems worth celebrating. It follows in the footsteps of previous bipartisan “comprehensive” compromises like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and a failed 2013 immigration bill, both of which included a path to citizenship for many undocumented people, while dedicating significant resources to border “security.”
Read closely, a significant portion of Biden’s immigration proposal focuses on the premise that addressing the root causes of Central America’s problems will reduce the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. In its own words, the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security, and economic development in Central America” in order to “address the key factors” contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy language, however, are long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that should sound familiar to those who have been paying attention in these years.
Their essence: that millions of dollars in “aid” money should be poured into upgrading local military and police forces in order to protect an economic model based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it happens, this is the very model that Washington has imposed on the countries of Central America over the past century, one that’s left its lands corrupt, violent, and impoverished, and so continued to uproot Central Americans and send them fleeing toward the United States.
Crucial to Biden’s plan, as to those of his predecessors, is another key element: to coerce Mexico and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall only partially built along the southern border of the U.S. and proudly promoted by presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.
While the economic model lurking behind Biden’s plan may be old indeed, the attempt to outsource U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly twenty-first-century twist on border policy.
Outsourcing the Border (from Bush to Biden)
The idea that immigration policy could be outsourced began long before Donald Trump notoriously threatened, in mid-2019, to impose tariffs on Mexican goods to pressure that country’s new president into agreeing to his demand to collaborate with Washington’s anti-immigrant agenda. That included, of course, Trump’s controversial “remain in Mexico” policy that has continued to strand tens of thousands of asylum-seekers there.
Meanwhile, for almost two decades the United States has been bullying (and funding) military and police forces to its south to enforce its immigration priorities, effectively turning other countries’ borders into extensions of the U.S. one. In the process, Mexico’s forces have regularly been deployed on that country’s southern border, and Guatemala’s on its border with Honduras, all to violently enforce Washington’s immigration policies.
Such outsourcing was, in part, a response to the successes of the immigrant rights movement in this country. U.S. leaders hoped to evade legal scrutiny and protest at home by making Mexico and Central America implement the uglier aspects of their policies.
It all began with the Mérida Initiative in 2007, a George W. Bush-initiated plan that would direct billions of dollars to military equipment, aid, and infrastructure in Mexico (with smaller amounts going to Central America). One of its four pillars was the creation of “a 21st century border” by pushing Mexico to militarize its southern border. By 2013, Washington had funded 12 new military bases along that border with Guatemala and a 100-mile “security cordon” north of it.
In response to what was seen as a child-migrant crisis in the summer of 2014 (sound familiar?), President Barack Obama further pressured Mexico to initiate a new Southern Border Program. Since then, tens of millions of dollars a year have gone toward the militarization of that border and Mexico was soon detaining tens of thousands of migrants monthly. Not surprisingly, deportations and human-rights violations against Central American migrants shot up dramatically there. “Our border today in effect is Mexico’s border with Honduras and Guatemala,” exulted Obama’s former border czar Alan Bersin in 2019. A local activist was less sanguine, protesting that the program “turned the border region into a war zone.”
President Trump blustered and bullied Mexico and various Central American countries far more openly than the previous two presidents while taking such policies to new levels. Under his orders, Mexico formed a new, militarized National Guard and deployed 12,000 of its members to the Guatemalan border, even as funding from Washington helped create high-technology infrastructure along Mexico’s southern border, rivaling that on the U.S. border.
Trump called for reducing aid to Central America. Yet under his watch, most of the $3.6 billion appropriated by Congress continued to flow there, about half of it aimed at strengthening local military and police units. Trump did, however, temporarily withhold civilian aid funds to coerce Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador into signing “safe third country” agreements that would allow the United States to deport people with valid asylum claims to those very countries.
Trump also demanded that Guatemala increase security along its southern border “to stem the flow of irregular migration” and “deploy officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to advise and mentor host nation police, border security, immigration, and customs counterparts.” Once the Central American countries conceded to Trump’s demands, aid was restored.
This February, President Biden suspended those safe third country agreements, but is clearly otherwise ready to continue to outsource border enforcement to Mexico and Central America.
The Other Side of Militarization: “Economic Development”
As Democratic and Republican administrations alike outsourced a militarized response to immigration, they also sought to sell their agendas with promises of economic-development aid to Central America. However, they consistently promoted the very kind of assistance that historically brought violence and poverty to the region — and so led directly to today’s migrant crisis.
The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the “free market” will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over and over again in Central America’s tormented history, however, exactly the opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to take advantage of the region’s fertile lands, natural resources, and cheap labor. This form of development — whether in support of banana and coffee plantations in the nineteenth century or sugar, cotton, and cattle operations after World War II — brought Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its north-bound mass migration of today.
As a model, it relies on militarized governments to dispossess peasant farmers, freeing the land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror are brought to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class, allowing investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such operations, in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while their cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate change — bringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea levels, more intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined the livelihoods of the Central American poor.
Starting in the 1970s, many of those poor workers and peasants pushed for land reform and investment in basic rights like food, health, and education instead of simply further enriching foreign and local elites. When peaceful protest was met with violence, revolution followed, although only in Nicaragua did it triumph.
Washington spent the 1980s attempting to crush Nicaragua’s successful revolution and the revolutionary movements against the right-wing military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. The peace treaties of the 1990s ended the armed conflicts, but never addressed the fundamental social and economic divides that underlay them. In fact, the end of those conflicts only opened the regional floodgates for massive new foreign investment and export booms. These involved, among other things, the spread of maquiladora export-processing plants and the growing of new export-oriented “non-traditional” fruits and vegetables, as well as a boom in extractive industries like gold, nickel, and petroleum, not to speak of the creation of new infrastructure for mass tourism.
In the 1980s, refugees first began fleeing north, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, then riven by war, repression, and the violence of local paramilitary and death squads. The veneer of peace in the 1990s in no way brought an end to poverty, repression, and violence. Both public and private armed forces provided “security” — but only to elites and the new urban and rural megaprojects they sponsored.
If a government did threaten investors’ profits in any way, as when El Salvador declared a moratorium on mining licenses, the U.S.-sponsored Central America Free Trade Agreement enabled foreign corporations to sue and force it to submit to binding arbitration by a World Bank body. In the Obama years, when the elected, reformist president of Honduras tried to enact labor and environmental improvements, Washington gave the nod to a coup there and celebrated when the new president proudly declared the country “open for business” with a package of laws favoring foreign investors.
Journalist David Bacon termed that country’s new direction a “poverty-wage economic model” that only fostered the rise of gangs, drug trafficking, and violence. Protest was met with fierce repression, even as U.S. military aid flowed in. Prior to the coup, Hondurans had barely figured among Central American migrants to the United States. Since 2009, its citizens have often come to predominate among those forced to flee their homes and head north.
President Obama’s 2014 Alliance for Prosperity offered a new round of aid for investor-driven economic development. Journalist Dawn Paley characterized that Alliance as in “large part a plan to build new infrastructure that will benefit transnational corporations,” including “tax breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power lines to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of import, assembly, and export at low-wage maquilas.” One major project was a new gas pipeline to facilitate exports of U.S. natural gas to Central America.
It was Obama who oversaw Washington’s recognition of the coup in Honduras. It was Trump who looked the other way when Guatemala in 2019 and Honduras in 2020 expelled international anti-corruption commissions. And it was Trump who agreed to downplay the mounting corruption and drug trafficking charges against his friend, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, as long as he promoted an investor-friendly economy and agreed to collaborate with the U.S. president’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The January 2021 Caravan Marks the Arrival of the Biden Years
All signs point to the Biden years continuing what’s become the Washington norm in Central America: outsourcing immigration policy, militarizing security there, and promoting a model of development that claims to deter migration while actually fueling it. In fact, President Biden’s proposal designates $4 billion over four years for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to distribute. Such disbursement, however, would be conditioned on progress toward Washington-approved goals like “improv[ing] border security,” “inform[ing]… citizens of the dangers of the journey to the southwest border of the United States,” and “resolv[ing] disputes involving the confiscation of real property of United States entities.” Significant resources would also be directed to further developing “smart” border technology in that region and to Border Patrol operations in Central America.
A preview of how this is likely to work came just as Biden took office in January 2021.
One predictable result of Washington’s outsourcing of immigration control is that the migrant journey from Central America has become ever more costly and perilous. As a result, some migrants have begun gathering in large public “caravans” for protection. Their aim: to reach the U.S. border safely, turn themselves in to the border patrol, and request asylum. In late January 2021, a caravan of some 7,500 Hondurans arrived at the Guatemalan border in hopes that the new president in Washington would, as promised, reverse Trump’s controversial remain-in-Mexico policy of apparently endless internment in crowded, inadequate camps just short of the U.S.
They hadn’t known that Biden would, in fact, continue his predecessors’ outsourcing of immigration policy to Mexico and Central America. As it happened, 2,000 tear-gas and baton-wielding Guatemalan police and soldiers (armed, trained, and supported by the United States) massed at the Guatemala-Honduras border to drive them back.
One former Trump official (retained by President Biden) tweeted that Guatemala had “carr[ied] out its responsibilities appropriately and lawfully.” The Mexican government, too, praised Guatemala as it massed thousands of its troops on its own southern border. And Juan González, Biden’s National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere lauded Guatemala’s “management of the migrant flow.”
In mid-March, President Biden appeared to link a positive response to Mexico’s request for some of Washington’s surplus Covid-19 vaccine to further commitments to cracking down on migrants. One demand: that Mexico suspend its own laws guaranteeing humane detention conditions for families with young children. Neither country had the capacity to provide such conditions for the large number of families detained at the border in early 2021, but the Biden administration preferred to press Mexico to ignore its own laws, so that it could deport more of those families and keep the problem out of sight of the U.S. public.
In late January 2021, CISPES joined a large coalition of peace, solidarity, and labor organizations that called upon the Biden administration to rethink its Central American plans. “The intersecting crises that millions in Central America face are the result of decades of brutal state repression of democratic movements by right-wing regimes and the implementation of economic models designed to benefit local oligarchs and transnational corporations,” CISPES wrote. “Far too often, the United States has been a major force behind these policies, which have impoverished the majority of the population and devastated the environment.”
The coalition called on Biden to reject Washington’s longstanding commitment to militarized security linked to the creation and reinforcement of investor-friendly extractive economies in Central America. “Confronting displacement demands a total rethinking of U.S. foreign policy,” CISPES urged. As of mid-March, the president had not responded in any fashion to the plea. My advice: don’t hold your breath waiting for such a response.
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.
CBP lifts a little girl into a van. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Over 4,000 Migrants, Many Kids, Crowded Into Texas Facility
Elliot Spagat and Nomaan Merchant, Associated Press
he Biden administration for the first time Tuesday allowed journalists inside its main border detention facility for migrant children, revealing a severely overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250 and the youngest were kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping.
With thousands of children and families arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks and packing facilities, President Joe Biden has been under pressure to bring more transparency to the process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection allowed two journalists from The Associated Press and a crew from CBS to tour the facility in Donna, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal crossings.
More than 4,100 people were being housed on the property Tuesday. Most were unaccompanied children processed in tents before being taken to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services and then placed with a family member, relative or sponsor.
The children were being housed by the hundreds in eight “pods” formed by plastic dividers, each about 3,200 square feet (297 square meters) in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them.
Oscar Escamilla, acting executive officer of the U.S. Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley, said 250 to 300 kids enter daily and far fewer leave.
The youngest children — among them, 3-year-old girl being cared for by her 11-year-old brother and a newborn with a 17-year-old mother — are kept out of the pods and sleep in a playpen area.
On Tuesday, journalists watched children being processed. They went into a small room for lice inspection and a health check. Their hair was hosed down and towels were tossed in a black bin marked “Lice.” The kids — many of whom have made long journeys to get to the border, including stretches on foot — were also checked for scabies, fever and other ailments. No COVID-19 test was administered unless a child showed symptoms.
Nurse practitioners also gave psychological tests, asking children if they had suicidal thoughts. All shoelaces were removed to avoid harm to anyone.
The children were then led down a green turf hall to a large intake room. Those 14 and older are fingerprinted and have their photo taken; younger children did not.
They went to a second intake room where they got notices to appear for immigration court. Border Patrol agents asked them if they had a contact in the U.S. and allowed the child to call that person.
Children were given bracelets with a barcode that shows a history of when they showered and medical conditions.
Outside the facility, the roar of construction equipment could be heard along with air conditioning units.
The Biden administration has continued expelling adults who try to cross the border under a coronavirus-related public health declaration enacted by former President Donald Trump. Biden also has tried to expel most families traveling together, but changes in Mexican law have forced agents to release many parents and children into the U.S.
Biden has declined to resume the Trump-era practice of expelling unaccompanied immigrant children. Several hundred kids and teenagers are crossing the border daily, most fleeing violence, poverty or the effects of natural disasters in Central America. In some cases, parents refused entry into the U.S. have sent their children across the border alone, hoping they will be placed with relatives eventually.
The Border Patrol is apprehending far more children daily than Health and Human Services is placing with U.S. sponsors, leading to a severe backlog in the system. The Border Patrol generally is not supposed to detain children for more than three days, but Health and Human Services lacks space.
More than 2,000 kids have been at the Donna facility for more than 72 hours, including 39 for more than 15 days.
HHS is housing children at convention centers in Dallas and San Diego and is opening large-scale sites in San Antonio, El Paso and elsewhere.
Biden has been sharply criticized by Republicans seeking to defend Trump’s immigration record, which includes the separation of thousands of immigrant families under a “zero tolerance” policy.
Nina Turner. (photo: Nina Turner/Facebook)
Nina Turner Hopes to Move Ohio Left
Nuala Bishari, In These Times
Excerpt: "The 'daughter of Cleveland' and former Bernie Sanders surrogate is running for Congress on a platform that includes a $15 minimum wage, recurring stimulus checks and free public college."
ormer Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner calls into a virtual fundraiser February 24, hosted by Our Revolution, the grassroots political advocacy group that used to call Turner its president. The event is one of dozens as her run for Congress ramps up in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District, around Cleveland and Akron.
Per usual, Turner includes a call for radical change. “This nation is going to be better because there are some 21st-century freedom fighters who are willing to put it on the line,” Turner tells attendees.
Turner, who frequently cites famous Black politicians and activists, this time references former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D‑Texas), who famously said in 1977: “What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”
“Whether it’s dealing with the damage that we’re doing to Mother Earth, to ensuring that everybody in this nation has Medicare for All, to canceling student debt, to dealing with the injustices in the criminal justice system — you name it, baby, that is about creating an America that is as good as its promise, for everybody,” Turner says.
Turner announced her run to replace Rep. Marcia Fudge in December 2020, shortly after President Joe Biden announced Fudge as his pick for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Turner is one of seven Democratic candidates, but what sets Turner apart early is her national following.
Turner quickly won an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.), whom she campaigned for in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Reps. Cori Bush (D‑Mo.) and Ro Khanna (D‑Calif.) endorsed Turner the day she announced. The progressive political action committee Justice Democrats endorsed Turner in January, and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) followed suit in February. And in March, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) backed Turner as well.
“I’m looking to have her seated next to me, fighting this fight,” Bush says at the February fundraiser. “We need somebody like Sen. Nina Turner who is unapologetic, who is unbossed, who is not ashamed and not afraid of her progressive values.”
Inside the district, no polling data has been released and campaign finance reports have been slow. But in the first few weeks of the campaign, Turner — who has pledged on Twitter not to accept any lobbyist or corporate PAC money — had raised $646,744. The next highest fundraiser, Cuyahoga County Councilor (and local Democratic Party Chair) Shontel Brown, had around $40,000.
Liz Shirey, Turner’s campaign manager, says they raised more than $1 million by early February in “tens of thousands of small-dollar donations from across the country.”
The former state senator’s local name recognition goes back more than a decade. Turner served on the Cleveland City Council from 2006 to 2008 before being appointed to the Ohio Senate. She won her seat in 2010 but chose not to run in 2014 to make a bid (unsuccessfully) for Ohio secretary of state.
Turner is joined in the race by Brown, former Cleveland Councilor and current state Sen. Jeff Johnson, former state Rep. John Barnes Jr., former state Sen. Shirley Smith, and lesser-known candidates Tariq Shabazz and Bryan Flannery. Based on fundraising and endorsements, Turner and Brown are considered the frontrunners.
In a state that went for former President Donald Trump in 2020, District 11 is a Democratic stronghold. Demographically, it is 53% Black with a strong working-class voting base and a median household income of $42,000.
Turner’s platform includes a $15 minimum wage, recurring stimulus checks and free public college, which she believes her working-class constituents need.
“I’m running for big mama who needs some relief,” Turner says. “I’m running for the babies in our community, some of whom don’t have the hardware, the software, the internet connection they need to even be able to study and learn. I’m running for frontline workers.”
Local endorsements in the race are slowly rolling in. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), which represents around 1,800 workers in the Cleveland area, endorsed Turner in late February, as did the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union Local 19, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
ATU was one of the first unions to endorse Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries, so its vote of confidence in Turner hints at her ability to win over mainstream organizations, despite the more traditional Democratic candidates.
Still, Turner faces stiff competition to win the labor vote. Brown has the support of the local Bricklayers Union, the Pipefitters Union, the Cleveland Building & Construction Trades Council and the Black Contractors Group, among others. The steelworkers have yet to endorse.
Fudge’s seat became officially vacant when her federal appointment was confirmed by the Senate on March 10 and she resigned from the House of Representatives, paving the way for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to call a special election. The primary will likely be in early May.
Turner has faith in her district and believes voters want real, systemic change.
“They want to know that their vote does really matter,” Turner says. “That when they do vote for Democrats, that something materially is going to change in their lives.”
Daniel Goldman of Arlington, Va., holds the transgender flag at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court on Oct. 8. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/WP)
On This Transgender Day of Visibility, We Won't Be Defeated
Dawn Ennis, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Today's Transgender Day of Visibility is a colorful celebration of trans presence in the world. It should also be a rallying call to protect our rights to live freely and equally."
ake a look at me, and you’ll see more than I probably want you to see, even with a mask covering my nose and mouth.
I’m overweight, but then, who hasn’t put on a few pounds in this pandemic? I’m white. I have blue eyes, freckles and, I am not afraid to boast, great legs. Yes, I am a woman. But some will notice that I’m a different kind of woman: a transgender woman. You might even notice something different about my hair—and I call it my hair, because, hell, I paid for it, so it’s mine. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t grow on my head but came home with me in a box.
All these facts come from just looking at me, in person, or in a little box on Zoom or social media.
And yet none of these details define who I really am or why today, the Transgender Day of Visibility, is relevant to my being. What happens today around the world is that trans people like me will flood your timeline with photos, videos, memes and the hashtag #TDoV as well as variations on those themes. We’ll wear the pink, blue, and white colors Monica Helms combined to form the Trans Pride flag. We’ll speak, sing, shout, and there’s not much you can do to stop us.
Well, unless you’re a Republican governor hell-bent on erasing us from sports and affirming health care, that is.
Look at what they’ve done just this week:
In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem signed executive orders that will ban trans girls and women from school sports, from grade school all the way up to college.
Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee banned trans athletes without a single word in the new bill calling them “trans” or “transgender.” Instead these girls are misgendered as boys.
Arkansas is on a tear. In addition to signing a law banning trans girls and women, Gov. Asa Hutchinson also gave health-care workers the right to discriminate, by refusing to treat anyone if they have a moral or religious objection. And now headed to his desk is another bill that would make gender-affirming treatment a crime. ACLU attorney Chase Strangio correctly labeled it “the single most extreme anti-trans law to ever pass through a state legislature.”
Earlier this month, Mississippi got the ball rolling with its trans ban and we’re still waiting for a federal judge to decide the case of Idaho‘s law banning trans girls and women from competing in sports according to their gender identity.
These laws and the bills in the works in more than two dozen states threaten not only our visibility but our very existence. That’s not me being overly dramatic, which, as a former child actor, is certainly a valid criticism for some things.
No, laws that stop any trans child, student athlete or adult from living authentically in every way a cisgender person can, that is the very definition of discrimination and erasure. Not being able to do the things every other woman can, would mean I, Dawn Stacey Ennis, am not able to exist. Who else in the United States is at risk of being denied their very existence by a right-wing, religion-fueled political machine that finds itself creeping toward extinction and oblivion?
We don’t have it anywhere as bad as the migrants fleeing oppression huddled at our southern border, but sometimes it feels as if we are just as unwanted. As if our transgender identity somehow cancels out our citizenship, our rights and even our humanity.
Nearly every news report singles us out as something “other:” The headlines scream about “trans athletes and women” and “girls vs. biological boys.” Those lopsided mainstream accounts treat our identities as ratings fodder, as if debating our rights and our existence is somehow fair, while at the same time giving credence to those who claim it is unfair for us to compete as we really are.
The time has come today to be what they accuse us of being: unbeatable.
The truth is, trans women and girls don’t always win. In fact, like every other athlete, they lose more times than not. Just because the media doesn’t cover those results doesn’t mean they aren’t searchable. But if the reputation that trans athletes are unbeatable is already ingrained in the public conscience, then I say let’s show them we cannot be beaten in court, in the statehouses, and in the streets.
We face some mighty fierce political forces who are opposed to transgender rights, aided and abetted by the likes of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and The Federalist. They are loud but they are outnumbered, and so they are fighting harder than ever, mainly because we are succeeding in being seen.
The proof that days like today are effective is in their bigoted and hateful efforts to outlaw us and strip us of our right to life-saving medical treatment and prevent us from being protected equally according to the law by failing to support the Equality Act.
It’s like that old proverb that says hate exists so that we can know what love is.
But I don’t need to hear old clips of Bobby Riggs to know what a sexist is. I don’t need David Duke to tell me what a racist is. And I especially don’t need Louis Farrakhan to explain what an anti-Semite is—don’t even try: I’m Jewish, and I’ve seen him preach hate in person.
By that same token, some cisgender gay and straight men need to stop presuming to tell me, a transgender woman, who is and who is not a transphobe, and what is and what is not transphobic. They do not know. I do, all too well. Seven of them come to mind: Ben Shapiro, Jesse Singal, Dan Savage, Jonathan Kay, Piers Morgan, Bill Maher, and worst of all, Tucker Carlson. I don’t care why they have a fixation on us. I just want them to stop.
Instead of paying attention to these clowns and creeps, here are eight awesome writers, journalists and prolific advocates who trans folks and allies alike should be following:
· Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl and so much more
· Gwendolyn Ann Smith, creator of the Trans Day of Remembrance, journalist, and the subject of an excellent biography.
· Chris Mosier, trailblazing athlete and advocate, manager of transathlete.com
· Tre’vell Anderson, journalist, social curator and “world changer!”
· Raquel Willis, writer and activist
· Chase Strangio, writer and attorney, deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project.
· Jennifer Finney Boylan, author, scholar, college professor, columnist for The New York Times
· Karleigh Chardonnay Webb, journalist, athlete, actress and advocate
What all the forces allied against the transgender community really want is to set us apart, which I concede TDoV aids somewhat in their evil effort. My own brother-in-law once asked me, “Isn’t the goal of being trans to blend in and be accepted as just another woman, or man? So what’s the point of this display?”
The point is to raise awareness that we are not now accepted as women and men. Whether we should be or not is currently a hot topic of debate, and until that is no longer the case, Trans Day of Visibility exists to counter those who would erase us, outlaw us, discriminate against us, or tell us so-and-so can’t be a transphobe because they say so.
And because I choose to be visible, unfortunately, I make myself a target. The onslaught on social media, in email, and even in the mailbox that hangs outside my home has been something awful. I changed our home phone number to stop the harassing calls and for safety my youngest has been instructed to no longer answer the door, which we now keep locked at all times, day and night. My visibility has threatened my family and that scares the shit out of me.
So I take precautions to safeguard them and myself, but I will not cower. I am fortunate to be white, and conversations I’ve had with Asian American trans people these last few weeks remind me how much worse it is for them, and has always been. One of my closest friends is a Black trans woman and I worry for her every single day, too, even here in the bluer-than-blue state of Connecticut, because hate knows no borders.
It’s not only a record year for hateful legislation, according to the Human Rights Campaign, but already at least 12 trans or gender non-conforming Americans, most of them Black and female-identified, have been murdered because of who they were.
It is for them we must be visible today, and not just seen but also heard. Contact your U.S. senator today (allies should do this, too) and tell them you want them to vote for the Equality Act. Identify yourself as trans or an ally. Reach out to your governor and tell them you want them to veto anti-trans legislation. Share these links on your social media and encourage your friends to do the same.
We need to be visible, not just for us but for the closeted and the stealth who fear losing everything if they are seen as transgender. Well, I’m someone who already lost everything I held dear: my marriage as well as the woman I loved, my career (and the six-figure income that came with it), and my male privilege. I shed all those things, and except for the pretense of being male, not happily.
But losing the caterpillar shell and emerging from the chrysalis is the price of becoming a butterfly. And I have never been happier, or more visible, than I am today. Just try and stop me. You cannot, because I am trans, and therefore I am unbeatable.
A view of the Huahine crossing the Suez Canal on March 30, 2021 in Ismailia, Egypt. (photo: Mahmoud Khaled/Getty Images)
The Suez Canal Is a Lifeline for Global Capitalism
Daniel Finn, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The Suez Canal blockage inspired a thousand memes, but its consequences for the world economy were deadly serious."
The canal has always performed a vital function for capitalist trade, and there’s no reason to think its economic and geopolitical importance is going to decline.
he blockage of the Suez Canal by the giant container ship Ever Given created a traffic jam with hundreds of ships carrying goods worth billions of dollars. German insurance company Allianz estimated that a week’s closure of the canal would cost the world economy between $6 and $10 billion.
Since its opening in 1869, the canal has been a vital channel for world commerce. Major developments in global capitalism, from the rise of the Middle East as an oil producer to the shift of manufacturing to the Far East, have only increased its importance. The canal has experienced periods of closure before as a result of political disputes in the region, and analysts have worried about its potential vulnerability to terrorist attacks. But this shutdown was the result of plain incompetence.
Laleh Khalili, who teaches international politics at Queen Mary University of London, is the author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. She spoke to Jacobin about the history of the canal and its enduring importance for the world economy.
DF: How did the Suez Canal come to be built? What was the economic and geopolitical context that made the project viable?
LK: The construction of the Suez Canal in the latter half of the nineteenth century speaks directly to both intra-European rivalries — especially between Britain and France — but even more importantly to the intensification of colonization and empire in Asia and Africa. It is significant that both the canal and the laying of submarine telegraph cables were intended to facilitate communication between the metropoles and the colonies. Pressed labor built the canal, and untold thousands died in the course of its construction (not unlike the US construction of the Panama Canal a few decades later).
Technologically, one major development was crucial to the development of the canal, and it also benefited from the canal’s construction: the placing of steam engines aboard ships. Since a sailing ship cannot sail down the canal when transversal winds are blowing, its opening consolidated the hegemony of coal-powered ships over sailing ships. It is no accident that the British colonized Aden, at the bottom of the Red Sea and straddling Bab al-Mandab, a few decades before the construction of the canal and turned it into an important coaling station, first for the vessels of the East India Company and later for those of the Admiralty and other British ships.
But the canal wasn’t only about the European connection to Asia and Africa. The US Civil War, the blockade of Confederate ports by the North, and the general strike — as W. E. B. Du Bois called it — by enslaved African Americans that precipitated the end of the war and continued after it all led to greater emphasis being placed on Egyptian cotton.
As Roger Owen has written in his book Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, by the end of the nineteenth century, cotton had become the primary export commodity of Egypt. Control over cotton and the inability of the Egyptian Khedive to pay back its canal construction debt were both factors in the British military takeover of Egypt in 1882 and its de facto control of the canal.
DF: What ownership structure was adopted for the canal?
LK: The canal construction company was a joint stock company with the French holding the most shares, but the British had effective control over Suez. The Universal Company of the Maritime Canal of Suez (or La Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez) operated the canal until 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized it in one of the most significant moments of post–Second World War decolonization.
In part, the nationalization of the canal by Nasser’s government was to enable Egypt to take over the canal fees in order to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam. But it was also an acknowledgment of how important control over transportation infrastructures is. Only a few years before, when Iran’s prime minister Muhammad Musaddiq dared to nationalize the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — now BP — in his country, one of the most effective measures used to bring him to heel was to prevent any tankers from carrying Iranian oil. Nasser foresaw that control over the canal would also give him a degree of control over the destiny of Egypt which no other measure would do.
DF: What was the outcome of the Suez Crisis and the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 for the canal in particular?
LK: The Suez Crisis happened in the same year as the Soviet invasion of Hungary with its quashing of the democratic movement there, and the two events are deeply connected. It was in part for fear of “losing” Egypt to Soviet control that President Eisenhower rebuked the tripartite belligerents — France, Britain, and Israel — into withdrawing from Egypt. In some ways, the 1953 restoration of the Shah in Iran and the 1956 war laid the groundwork for the imperial handover in the Middle East from Britain to the US, which was completed at last in the early 1970s.
DF: What impact did the rise of the Middle East as the world’s leading source of oil have on the canal?
LK: Obviously, the discovery of oil in the Persian/Arabian Gulf basin — Iran, Iraq, and on the Arabian Peninsula — meant that one of the primary products steaming through the canal was going to be oil. In fact, by 1970, some 60-70 percent of all seaborne cargo consisted of crude oil and petroleum products. And so much of that oil, of course, was carried to Europe, where reconstruction and industrial production were taking off in the postwar decades of recovery.
The question can be asked the other way around as well. The closure of the canal in 1958 led to a rerouting of these oil tankers around the Cape of Good Hope and thus encouraged the shift to the use of much larger crude carriers to take advantage of economies of scale.
DF: How did the 1967 war and its aftermath affect usage of the canal?
LK: Although the closure of the Suez Canal as a result of the 1967 war lasted much longer, until 1975, it did not have the same kind of effects as the much shorter 1958 closure. One of the more interesting side stories of the 1967 closure, however, was that of the “Yellow Fleet”: ships trapped in the Great Bitter Lake in the canal for years on end, so-called because they were covered by the yellow Saharan sand. I have written elsewhere about the other, global effects of this period of closure.
DF: How has the shift of economic power — and especially manufacturing — from West to East in recent decades affected the canal?
LK: In some ways, this has made the canal even more significant. The closures of 1958 and 1967–1975 led to prospecting for oil by European powers in West and North Africa, and Kazakh and Azeri oil have readily flowed to Europe since the end of the Cold War. As a result, Middle Eastern oil, though still important, was no longer the most significant cargo steaming through Suez. Container ships carrying goods manufactured in China and the rest of East and Southeast Asia are now — at least in terms of economic value — the most important and valuable cargoes going through the canal.
DF: Has China’s construction of a land route from its coastal regions to Europe via Central Asia brought the canal’s future into question?
LK: I really don’t think it has. High-speed rails traverse the land route across the Eurasian mass. These fast trains take approximately three weeks to go from the east coast of China to Budapest and onward to Hamburg and Rotterdam. They are expensive to run, which is why they often carry high-value and time-sensitive goods, like computers and other electronic items. In addition, China’s Belt and Road Initiative land routes go through several areas where the country’s rulers have violently suppressed local populations, most significantly among them the Uighur people of Xinjiang.
Sea routes are by contrast slower, but they can serve cargo that is bulkier and less time-sensitive. The fact that China so completely dominates the top ten list of container ports in the world says something about the importance of maritime transport in the country’s economic strategy.
DF: What does the current fiasco tell us about the canal’s significance for the world economy?
LK: We know that currently, about 12 percent of all globally traded goods go through the canal and that the canal is one of the most significant trade routes — along with the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific routes — in the world. But its closure also shows how brittle this trade can be: just-in-time auto manufacturers in Europe were among those most affected by the nearly weeklong closure of the canal. We know that efficiency — which is the holy grail of capital accumulation — is also the antithesis of robustness, and the closure has made this very obvious.
Joe Biden. (photo: VICE)
Biden's About to Unveil the Biggest Climate Spending Plan in US History
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "The $2 trillion proposal represents a new political strategy to lead the U.S. into a serious response to global warming, which scientists say will unleash planet-wide catastrophe if we don't act soon."
resident Joe Biden is about to roll out the biggest climate spending plan in U.S. history, kicking off a titanic political battle to make it happen, with literally the future of the planet at stake.
The $2 trillion proposal he’s announcing Wednesday represents a new political strategy to lead the U.S. into a serious response to global warming, which scientists say will unleash planet-wide catastrophe if we don’t act soon. Biden’s approach hitches a climate package to one of the most popular bipartisan issues in Washington, infrastructure spending, in hopes of getting Congress to pass both together.
The result is a historically massive investment program that tackles many Democratic priorities all at once—while trying to get corporations to pay for it with higher taxes.
“This is a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking,” said Paul Bledsoe, who advised former President Bill Clinton on climate and now serves as strategic adviser for the Progressive Policy Institute. “This is the first time, in my view, that U.S. policy has attempted to grapple with climate change in its full complexity.”
Though the bill is large, liberals are still criticizing it as insufficient to address the climate crisis, which has been linked to raging wildfires in California and punishing storms in the Gulf of Mexico. Moderate Democrats are grumbling about yet another massive spending proposal. And Republicans hate the tax hikes for businesses.
Yet fear of climate change has emerged as a major issue for voters, especially young people. A New York Times poll in October found that almost 60 percent of Americans were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about climate change harming their communities.
Biden will roll out the proposal Wednesday afternoon in a speech in Pittsburgh sure to kick off a knock-down, drag-out political fight.
That means the next few weeks will be a crucial moment in the fight against climate change. Scientists say time is running out to avert disastrous consequences over the coming decades, meaning policy choices now will be felt decades into the future.
The Green New Deal — Lite
Biden’s plan envisions a national vehicle charging network that would let Americans cross the country in electric cars—a key step in getting dirty, gas-guzzling engines off the road.
Biden will call for $174 billion to spur the American market for electric vehicles, and create a nationwide network of 500,000 charging stations by 2030, according to details distributed by the White House.
He wants $165 billion for public transit and Amtrak, which could shift Americans away from cars and into clean mass transportation. The plan calls for improving Amtrak’s Northeast corridor, replacing 50,000 diesel transit vehicles and electrifying at least 20 percent of America’s yellow school bus fleet.
The program targets $100 billion to build new power lines, which will carry clean electricity produced by solar or wind in the American midwest or offshore to the coasts where power demand is higher. It puts billions into research and development of new green technology, and includes $50 billion for infrastructure resilience to combat climate disasters, like last year’s Hurricane Laura in Louisiana.
Those climate proposals come alongside more traditional infrastructure ideas, like $621 billion for roads and bridges, and spending on expanding broadband internet to rural areas.
A decade ago, former Democratic President Barack Obama once hailed his administration’s $90 billion program, tacked onto a stimulus bill in 2009, as the “largest single investment in clean energy in history.”
Biden’s plan dwarfs that figure.
Democratic senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a co-author of the Green New Deal proposal, called Biden’s plan a “way of accomplishing many of the goals of the Green New Deal.”
The marriage of a climate rescue plan with infrastructure spending differs from some climate solutions proposed in the past, such as taxing the production carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet.
But a carbon tax is more politically controversial, noted Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University.
Infrastructure spending “is probably not the most effective approach for dealing with climate change, but politically, this is probably what makes the most sense,” Stavins said.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a co-author of the Green New Deal proposal, called Biden’s plan a “way of accomplishing many of the goals of the Green New Deal.”
Democrats now face the daunting question of how to actually get the measure implemented. Republicans have expressed support for passing an infrastructure package of some kind but also criticized the size of the bill and Biden’s plan to hike taxes on corporations.
Democrats face an especially difficult battle in the Senate, where they have only 51 votes and will need at least nine more to overcome the threat of a filibuster.
There may be a sneaky way around that, however, using the same tool Democrats just employed to get Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package through, which is known as “budget reconciliation.”
The term refers to a loophole that lets the Senate bypass any filibuster for some spending bills. The rules are complex, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly looking at attempts to use reconciliation to get parts of this climate and infrastructure package through.
Reconciliation could be used for some parts of the plan that affect the budget, Bledsoe said. But other elements, like regulatory measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, wouldn’t qualify.
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