01 April 21
People Donated to Me, But No One Donated to RSN
When the tree fell on my house we saw a nice outpouring of concern and good donations, thank you!
But when I asked you to donate to give RSN a budget to do its work the donations fell off to nearly nothing. In fact the final week of March was the worst finish to a fundraising drive we have ever seen.
It’s nice to know people care about me and my house, but the donations get used for RSN. It’s RSN that serves the community. Please donate to RSN the way you donated to me when I was in distress.
Very sincere thank you to all.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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01 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Robert Reich | The Bigot Party
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes:
epublicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”
Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks — they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”
“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.
In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28 percent more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25 percent from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.
To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place.
But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.
Republicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people, and Hispanic-Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.
To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.
On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.
The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up crises.
The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law, and human rights.
Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.
This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.
“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.
In his maiden speech at the State Department on March 4, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States.”
The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican Party, but there was no mistaking his subject.
“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.
People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”
That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.
Not since the years leading up to the Civil War has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.
Protesters gather during a rally held by the group Common Cause in front of the U.S. Supreme Court January 10, 2018. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Democrats' Only Chance to Stop the GOP Assault on Voting Rights
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
Brownstein writes: "It's no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy."
If the party doesn’t pass new protections, it could lose the House, Senate, and White House within the next four years.
he most explosive battle in decades over access to the voting booth will reach a new crescendo this week, as Republican-controlled states advance an array of measures to restrict the ballot, and the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the federal legislation that represents Democrats’ best chance to stop them.
It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary. To many civil-rights advocates and democracy scholars I’ve spoken with, this new wave of state-level bills constitutes the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot.
“This is a huge moment,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, told me. “This harkens to pre-segregation times in the South, and it goes to the core question of how we define citizenship and whether or not all citizens actually will have access to fully engage and participate.”
In Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and Montana, Republican governors and legislators are moving forward bills that would reduce access to voting by mail, limit early voting, ban ballot drop boxes, inhibit voter-registration drives, and toughen identification requirements—measures inspired by the same discredited claims of election fraud that Donald Trump pushed after his 2020 loss. Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in Georgia, for instance, passed a sweeping bill that would do almost all of those things.
The Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority is unlikely to block many, or perhaps any, of these state laws. As a result, Democrats may have a single realistic opportunity to resist not only these proposals, but also GOP plans to institute severe partisan congressional gerrymanders in many of the same states. That opportunity: using Democrats’ unified control of Washington to establish national election standards—by passing the omnibus election-reform bill known as H.R. 1, which is scheduled for a House vote today, and the new Voting Rights Act, which is expected to come to the floor later this year.
Democrats may have only a brief window in which to block these state-level GOP maneuvers. Typically, the president’s party loses House and Senate seats in the first midterm election after his victory. Democrats will face even worse odds if Republicans succeed in imposing restrictive voting laws or gerrymandering districts in the GOP’s favor across a host of red states.
If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.
“There’s an increasing appreciation,” Democratic Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, H.R. 1’s chief sponsor, told me, that “if we can’t get these changes in place in time for the 2022 midterm election, the efforts that Republicans are taking at the state level to lock in this voter-suppression regime” and maximize their advantage via partisan gerrymanders “will reshape the environment in a way that makes it impossible to get this, or frankly many other things, done.”
The outcome in the House for both H.R. 1 and a new VRA isn’t in much doubt. No Democrat voted against either bill when the chamber first passed them in 2019. This year, every House Democrat has already endorsed H.R. 1, ensuring its passage today. Although some Senate observers have questioned whether the moderate Democrat Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, will support H.R. 1’s Senate equivalent, most election-reform advocates I’ve spoken with expect that, in the end, Manchin and every other Senate Democrat will back both voting-rights bills, as they did in the previous Congress.
How far the party will go to make them law remains in doubt, however. Senate Republicans are likely to try to kill these bills with a filibuster. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the principal sponsor of H.R. 1’s Senate analogue, has been urging his colleagues to consider ending the filibuster for these bills alone, even if they are unwilling to end it for all legislation. But so far, at least two Democrats remain resistant to curtailing the filibuster in any way: Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
One White House official, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal strategy, told me that “the president is committed to defending the voting rights of all Americans, and keenly aware of the ongoing threats to those rights.” But several activists and scholars who support the election-reform bills told me they fear that neither the Biden administration nor Senate Democrats are sufficiently worried about the threat to small-d democracy coalescing in the red states. They are especially dumbfounded that Manchin and Sinema—and maybe others—would protect the filibuster on the grounds of encouraging bipartisan cooperation when Senate Republicans would be using it to shield red-state actions meant to entrench GOP control. “What’s the point of being a Democrat if you are just going to let Republicans systematically tilt the playing field so that Democrats can’t win?” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me. “At that point, you should just be a Republican.”
Although Democrats first introduced H.R. 1 and the new VRA long before the 2020 campaign, everything that has happened since Election Day has underscored the stakes in this struggle. The GOP’s state-level offensive amounts to an extension of the assault Trump mounted in the courts, in state legislatures, and ultimately through the attack that he inspired against the Capitol. If nothing else, the GOP’s boldness can leave Democrats with little doubt about what they can expect in the years ahead if they do not establish nationwide election standards. “This is a very brazen effort by lawmakers across the country to enact provisions that make it harder for Americans to vote,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice who is tracking the GOP’s state-level measures, told me. “There is no subtlety and no attempt to obfuscate what is going on here.”
In its latest tally, the Brennan Center counts 253 separate voter-suppression proposals pending in 43 states. That’s significantly more than the number of bills it tracked after the 2010 election—180 bills, in 41 states—when significant GOP gains in the states triggered a similar wave of laws.
Some advocates remain optimistic that the most extreme proposals (such as repealing some states’ on-demand absentee balloting) will be thwarted by public resistance; many Americans are now accustomed to the expanded voting options that many states have offered amid the pandemic. Such measures can also backfire by angering voters, who then become more determined to cast their ballot. But there’s no question that election law can heavily influence how easy or difficult participation is for voters—particularly low-income, young, and minority voters less attached to the political system. Among the laws under consideration in the states are these:
- On a pure party-line vote, Iowa’s legislature has approved a bill that cuts the number of early-voting days, reduces by one hour how long polls are open on Election Day, and requires all absentee ballots to be received by the time the polls close on Election Day. (The current rule allows all mail-in ballots to be counted so long as they are postmarked within one day of the election.)
- In Georgia, the state Senate approved legislation last month imposing new voter-ID requirements for requesting an absentee ballot, a step that critics say will disproportionately burden low-income voters. A state Senate committee voted Friday to end the policy that automatically registers voters when they obtain a driver’s license or access other government services, and to eliminate the on-demand absentee-ballot system the state has employed since 2005. Earlier this week, the state House approved a bill that would mandate the absentee-ballot voter-ID requirement, curtail the window during which voters can request an absentee ballot and the availability of ballot drop boxes, and retrench early voting on weekends, when Black churches traditionally hold “souls to the polls” mobilizations. Taken together, the state Democratic Party recently calculated, these provisions and others under consideration would outlaw the manner in which more than 2.2 million Georgians cast their ballots in 2020.
- In Arizona, the Republican-controlled legislature is advancing bills that would purge as many as 200,000 people from the roll of voters who automatically receive absentee ballots; reduce the number of early-voting days; impose tougher ID requirements for absentee ballots; require that absentee ballots be mailed by the Thursday before the election and received by the time the polls close on Election Day; and create new reporting requirements for groups conducting voter-registration drives. The purge alone could disenfranchise as many as 50,000 of the state’s Latino voters, Randy Perez, the democracy director at LUCHA, a community-organizing group, told me. “That could be 7 percent of our state’s Latino voters gone in a flash.”
The GOP is on the offensive elsewhere too. Republicans in Montana and New Hampshire are pushing proposals that would make voting more difficult for college students. In Florida, state House Republicans are moving a bill that would require voters to reapply for mail-in ballots more frequently, and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis wants to reduce the availability of drop boxes and create more stringent standards for signature verification on absentee ballots, among other measures. Republican legislators in Texas recently introduced a bill to ban voting at night, after Harris County (which includes Houston) generated huge turnout last year by, in part, holding one session of all-night voting meant to provide access for workers who could not get to the polls at any other time.
In red states, civil-rights and government-reform groups are struggling to combat these restrictions. Courts have uniformly rejected Trump’s illusory claims of fraud, but polls show that the majority of Republican voters believe them—and that’s translated into substantial pressure on GOP legislators to impose new obstacles to voting. “We are getting drowned out,” Perez said. “Every legislator I talk to tells me the same thing: ‘I get thousands of emails a day telling me the election was stolen and I need to fix it.’” Voters, he added, “might be in for a big shock if we can’t stop this.”
Federal courts are unlikely to step in: Although the Supreme Court refused to intervene in the far-fetched efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, under Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative Court majority has consistently refused to block state limits on voting access or to prevent partisan gerrymanders. Critics argue that in the Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, Roberts fired the starting gun for the current barrage of voter-suppression measures—by eviscerating the provision of the original VRA that required states with a history of discrimination to receive “preclearance” from the Justice Department for changes in their voting laws.
Assessing this turbulent landscape, Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who specializes in voter turnout, recently concluded: “We are witnessing the greatest roll back of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.”
H.R. 1 would reverse many of the restrictive policies advancing in red states. As I wrote recently, the bill would require all states to provide online, automatic, and same-day registration; ensure at least 15 days of in-person early voting; provide all voters with access to no-excuse, postage-free absentee ballots; and offer drop boxes where they can return those ballots. It would also end gerrymandering by requiring every state to create independent commissions for congressional redistricting and by defining national criteria to govern the process.
Against the backdrop of the red-state voting offensive, the fate of H.R. 1 looks like a genuine inflection point. If Democrats can’t persuade Manchin, Sinema, and any other filibuster proponents to kill the parliamentary tool, Senate Republicans will be able to shield their state-level allies from federal interference. And that could produce a widening divergence between elections in red and blue states—as well as a lasting disadvantage for Democrats in the battle for control of Congress. Such a chasm will fuel “competing narratives that are inherently corrosive and destructive,” Sarbanes told me. “The more you have this bifurcated system of how elections are conducted in this country, the more oxygen you are going to give to some of the conspiracy theories that come from the other side.”
Yet even that equilibrium—with blue states expanding the franchise and red states restricting it—might not be stable. First, voter-suppression laws and gerrymanders in red states could help Republicans regain one or both congressional chambers in 2022. Then, efforts to restrict the vote could help Republicans recapture the presidency in 2024. Today, Democratic governors in key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—can block any restrictive laws, but if the party loses any of those governorships in 2022, it’ll be virtually powerless to stop new voter-suppression efforts from the Republican-controlled state legislatures.
In that nightmare scenario for Democrats, new laws across the Rust Belt, combined with what’s already happening in Arizona and Georgia, would put enough states at risk to seriously endanger Democratic hopes of holding the White House in 2024. If Republicans win unified control of the White House and Congress that year, they could try to set national voting standards that impose the red-state voting rules on blue states. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, for instance, has already proposed legislation that would bar all states from offering automatic voter registration and using drop boxes, and would require them to adopt stiff voter-ID rules. In his speech to CPAC on Sunday, Trump also called for establishing a national voter-ID requirement, as well as rules banning early voting and most mail balloting.
More and more Democrats, Sarbanes said, are coming to recognize that “this isn’t just about trying to do something now that we can do later. This is about doing something now that we may not get the chance to do again for another 50 years.” Democrats face an unforgiving equation: a fleeting window in which to act, and potentially lasting consequences if they don’t. “If you look at all the stakes that are involved,” Sarbanes continued, “the notion that you would miss this opportunity becomes incomprehensible.”
US National Park Service shows a mountain lion, dubbed P-78, taken with a remote field camera in the taken in the eastern Santa Susana Mountains at Towsley Canyon, in Los Angeles County in Nov. 2020. (photo: AP
Judge: US Agency Illegally Paid for Colorado Predator Hunt
James Anderson, Associated Press
Anderson writes:
he U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service illegally helped pay for a Colorado program to kill dozens of mountain lions and black bears in an experiment to determine if the predators were partly responsible for declining mule deer populations, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Marcia Krieger in Denver found that Fish and Wildlife failed to do a required analysis of the program’s environmental effects, possibly so it could fast-track federal funding for most of the $4 million program.
Tuesday’s decision stops that funding for state-authorized kills of mountain lions and black bears in southern Colorado’s Upper Arkansas River Valley. A second Colorado Parks and Wildlife program in northwestern Colorado’s Piceance Basin has been completed.
Concerned about declining populations of mule deer, which help sustain Colorado’s nearly $1 billion hunting industry, Colorado Parks and Wildlife decided in 2016 to conduct an experiment to see if limited killing of mountain lions and black bears would have an impact on deer numbers.
The plan would test whether removing some lions and bears, which also prey on deer, would produce higher deer survival rates. As many as 15 lions and 25 black bears would be killed each year for three years in one area near Rifle, in northwestern Colorado. About 60 lions could be killed over three years in southern Colorado in a study lasting nine years.
To help fund the experiment, Fish and Wildlife largely relied on an environmental analysis by the U.S. Agriculture Department that didn’t specifically address the Colorado plan, according to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and the Humane Society of the United States. That analysis was required for any federal funding.
The lawsuit also argued that declining deer populations stemmed from human development, including oil and gas leasing, and that killing those predators would damage local ecosystems. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says its research is ongoing and that other factors could include maternal and fetal conditions and changes in the availability of forage.
“Fish and Wildlife really didn’t go into the environmental impact that removing mountain lions and black bears would have on those areas,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The mule deer are suffering mostly from a reduction in habitat.”
Actual numbers of predators killed under the program weren’t immediately available. Colorado’s Division of Natural Resources, which oversees Colorado Parks and Wildlife, referred a query for comment to Fish and Wildlife. That agency didn’t immediately respond to a telephone message and email seeking comment on Tuesday’s ruling.
Krieger ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a more complete and focused environmental analysis of the program.
Sen. Chuck Schumer. (photo: Getty)
Democrats Have a Good Chance of Holding the Senate in 2022
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
Kilgore writes:
he announcement of Joe Biden’s first group of federal judicial nominees helps dramatize the value to Democrats of holding the White House and the Senate at the same time, aside from the value of a governing trifecta in terms of enacting the party’s legislative priorities. So even if Democrats lose control of the House in the 2022 midterms, as history (buttressed by redistricting) suggests they might, it’s important to Biden’s legacy to hang onto the Senate at least through his current term in the White House. And if you take a look at the midterm Senate landscape, it’s not that much of a reach.
But first let’s look at history. The very high number of midterms in which the president’s party loses House seats (17 out of the 19 since World War II) isn’t quite matched in Senate races (11 out of 19 over the same period). The most obvious reason is that only one-third of the Senate is up in any one cycle, which means the playing field can sometimes be skewed in the direction of the president’s party even if it’s having a bad year overall.
For example, in 1970, the first midterm after Richard Nixon’s election as president, 24 of the 34 Senate seats up were held by Democrats. Even though Democrats flipped Republican seats in high-profile contests in California and Illinois, and Republicans lost an additional seat in New York as third-party Conservative James Buckley beat both major parties, the GOP had a net gain of one seat in a very target-rich environment even as Democrats gained 12 net seats in the House. More recently, and even more strikingly, Republicans gained two net Senate seats in 2018 even as Democrats netted 41 House seats. It wasn’t that hard since 24 of the 33 Senate seats on the ballot were held by Democrats, including incumbents in the very red states of Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota.
The 2022 landscape isn’t as favorable to Democrats as those two were for Republicans, but it is still reasonably sunny, with Republicans holding 20 of the 34 seats at risk. It certainly helps Democrats that five Republicans are retiring in 2022, with additional retirements still possible, while so far all the Democratic incumbents are running again.
According to the Cook Political Report’s initial analysis of 2022 Senate races, six look competitive (either tossups or leaning in one direction or the other). Of those, four (including the two tossups, which involve open seats in North Carolina and Pennsylvania) are currently held by Republicans. Conditions could obviously change (possible GOP retirements in Iowa and Wisconsin could make those two seats more competitive, and if popular New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu decides to run against Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, that race could heat up). But all things considered, Democrats don’t need a national advantage to keep the Senate.
In the meantime, of course, Democrats should pray for the health of their current senators. If a Democratic senator in the wrong state (i.e., one of the six where a Republican governor would have the power to appoint a Republican to a vacant seat) resigns or dies, Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote could become meaningless, and Mitch McConnell might regain the gavel. At that point Biden’s power in Congress might drop to somewhere near zero.
Demonstrators protest outside of the Capitol building in opposition of House Bill 531 in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 8, 2021. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty)
Corporate Giants Bow to Pressure in Georgia Voting Law Backlash
Stephen Collinson, CNN
Collinson writes:
belated but growing corporate backlash came too late to halt Georgia's new election law but voting rights activists are now calling on US CEOs to prove their long-term commitment to the fight against Republican voter suppression.
Huge employers in the Atlanta area, including Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, on Wednesday steered into a confrontation with Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the law critics described as a revival of Jim Crow racism.
Their shift came after initial and widely criticized silence or ambivalence from powerful corporate leaders following the passage of the law that discriminates against Black voters and is rooted in ex-President Donald Trump's election fraud lies.
The measure introduces new impediments to voting, reducing the number of drop boxes in heavily African American areas and allows the state to intervene to assert control over the conduct of elections in Democratic counties. It shortens the time available for absentee votes and introduces new registration requirements that campaigners say are designed to target Black voters.
After Delta initially blandly expressed support for voting rights and largely accepted the GOP line of the law earlier this week, the airline's CEO Ed Bastian issued a memo to employees Wednesday blasting it -- saying he had now had sufficient time to understand its true effect.
"It's evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong," Bastian said, adding that the law was based on a "lie" of election fraud in 2020 in Georgia.
James Quincey, the CEO of Coca-Cola, told CNBC on Wednesday that his firm had "always opposed this legislation" and called it "unacceptable" after fierce pressure from civil rights organizations for a stronger stance from the soft drinks giant. Both Delta and Coca-Cola were targeted by hashtag campaigns on social media calling for boycotts.
A cynic might argue that large corporations rushing to condemn the law are acting as big business usually does, to protect the reputation of their brands and to avoid alienating their customer base on a heated political issue.
The time it took for the backlash to emerge explains the rush by Republican state lawmakers to speed it to the governor's desk earlier this month. But it's hard to take seriously claims by some of the world's most sophisticated companies that it took a while to find out what was in the bill.
2020 election shockwaves
The shifting attitudes in the corporate world over the legislation reflect the still reverberating shockwaves of the 2020 election and Trump's destruction of the tradition of peaceful transfers of power in his effort to overturn his election loss. Like every individual citizen, and American entity, big firms are being called upon to make a choice they would probably prefer to avoid on which side of the divide they fall -- not least since the democratic system that made them mighty is still under assault. The most recent tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that 361 bills with provisions that restrict voting have been introduced in 47 states across the country as of March 24 -- marking a 43% rise in the number of bills introduced since Brennan last released a count a little over a month ago.
Whether Democrats and voting rights campaigners now have how powerful allies in the fight against a wave of voter suppression measures in multiple states will be borne out by events. The Georgia Democratic Party said the CEOs of Coca-Cola and Delta were right to criticize the law but said they should now strongly get behind two Democratic House bills in Washington sent to the Senate that would help overturn restrictions on voting in states like Georgia.
The legislation would reverse many of the provisions of GOP laws and bills in Georgia, Texas, Arizona and other states by establishing national voter standards. But it faces a daunting outlook with even some Senate Democrats wary of some details. And to pass them, Democrats may have to ignite a political conflagration by abolishing the tradition of the filibuster that effectively means a 60-vote supermajority is needed to pass major legislation.
"We look forward to engaging with Georgia companies like Coca-Cola and Delta as real partners on these critical issues, which affect the civil rights of Georgians and all Americans," Rep. Nikema Williams, who chairs the Peach State's Democratic Party, said in a statement that kept up the pressure.
Companies face change
A rush of statements by corporate leaders criticizing the Georgia law underscores how sensitive big corporations are to public opinion -- at least in the short term. They may also reflect the pressure from large Georgia-based workforces and also a judgment on the consumer of the future. Long-term demographic trends are unfavorable to White conservative political leaders facing a tide of diversity that could overwhelm their cultural populism in coming decades. Companies that get on the wrong side of the equation could dent their bottom lines in years to come.
Pressure in the corporate world for more companies to speak out came amid an effort by Black business leaders led by Kenneth Chenault, the ex-CEO of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of Merck, to get their corporate colleagues to take stronger positions against voter suppression.
"Corporations have to stand up. There is no middle ground," Chenault, said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" at the start of the day in which the corporate backlash and its reprisals played out on the business channel.
In a full page ad in The New York Times, Chenault and more than 70 other Black executives called on corporations to mobilize against any legislation compromising voting rights.
"The new law and others like it are both undemocratic and un-American, and they are wrong," the ad said. "Make no mistake, we have seen this playbook before by those who seek to deny their fellow Americans the opportunity to make their voices heard at the ballot box. "
Kemp, Georgia's Republican governor, also appeared on CNBC and strongly pushed back at the CEOs, arguing that they had cherry picked items of the law and didn't understand it.
"If they want to have a debate about the merits and the facts of the bill, then we should do that," said Kemp, who stood firm against Trump's attempts to reverse President Joe Biden's win in Georgia but fell in line with the GOP law.
The governor argued that critics ignore the fact that the new law now requires every county in Georgia to provide a drop box for early votes to be collected. But he did not mention new limits on the number of drop boxes allowed, and on the hours in which they can be accessed, which in effect makes it harder to vote in Democratic-leaning counties plagued by long Election Day lines.
In a statement, Kemp also hit out at the criticism of the law from Bastian, the Delta CEO, claiming that there was no difference between requiring people to show official IDs like drivers' licenses to allow people to vote or to board a plane.
Sports next to feel the pressure
The intervention of the corporate CEOs is a sign of success for the pressure campaign by Democrats and civil rights groups in Georgia, now a critical swing state. Biden became the first Democrat since 1992 to win the state, which was also responsible for handing his party control of a 50-50 Senate in two run-off elections in January.
The voting law will ensure an incendiary race for the gubernatorial mansion in 2022 -- which could pit Kemp in a rematch against voting rights campaigner and former Georgia House Democratic Leader Stacey Abrams who played a key role in turning the state blue in November.
Abrams has called the slow initial corporate response to the new voter law untenable but she said in an op-ed in USA Today on Wednesday that boycotts of big firms were not yet necessary.
She called on business leaders to recognize the reality of what is happening as Republicans seek to introduce new voting laws nationwide in response to Trump's loss. Big business should also put steel in their criticism by refusing to make campaign donations to legislators who are suppressing votes, she said.
"I ask like-minded Americans to hold corporations to their professed values -- by measuring their actions and demanding they stand with us," Abrams wrote.
The next front in the pressure campaign against Georgia's law could come in sports. Ahead of Thursday's Opening Day, the Major League Baseball Players Association has said it is open to discussing this year's All-Star Game out of Georgia. The state's politics is likely to intrude in next week's Masters tournament at Augusta National, the first golf major of the year.
The National Black Justice Coalition, a leading civil rights group, has asked the PGA Tour to pull out of the tournament. The issue of race was already to the fore at this year's Masters due to the debut of Lee Elder as an honorary starter alongside Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.
Elder was the first Black player to tee off in the tournament in 1975 and his inclusion is widely seen as an attempt by the exclusive club to address past wrongs after failing to admit African American members for most of its history. Elder's honor was announced during the nationwide reckoning on race following the killing of George Floyd. The trial of the police officer accused in his death is currently taking place in Minneapolis.
(AT&T, which owns CNN, is a longtime sponsor of the Masters).
President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro. (photo: Getty)
Brazil: Calls Grow for Removal of 'Coup-Mongering' Bolsonaro as Crisis Builds
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "Prominent leaders of Brazil's opposition have called for president Jair Bolsonaro to be immediately removed from office to prevent his 'coup-mongering, authoritarian delusions' becoming a reality."
Opposition leaders demand impeachment for what they say is president’s illegal attempt to co-opt the country’s armed forces
“We cannot be bystanders to this barbarism,” congressman Marcelo Freixo said on Wednesday as parliamentarians demanded Bolsonaro’s impeachment for what they called his illegal attempt to co-opt the armed forces.
Bolsonaro’s decision to sack Brazil’s defence minister Gen Fernando Azevedo e Silva – and the subsequent departures of the heads of all three branches of the military – has sent political shockwaves through the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
“There is an attempt here by the president to arrange a coup – it is under way already – and that is why we are reacting,” claimed Alessandro Molon, the leader of the opposition in the lower house, as the impeachment request was presented to congress.
Gen Azevedo e Silva was relieved of his duties on Monday, with members of the military establishment pushing the idea that he was sacked for resisting Bolsonaro’s plans for a “coup-mongering adventure”. Hours later, on Tuesday morning, the heads of the army, air force and navy were reportedly dismissed during an ill-tempered meeting after Bolsonaro had discovered they were poised to resign in protest.
The sudden and dramatic fissure between Brazil’s far-right president and the military men who helped bring him to power in 2018 has yet to be fully explained. Some observers suspect senior members of the armed forces had decided to ditch Bolsonaro’s crisis-stricken administration – partly out of frustration at his calamitous handling of an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak that has killed nearly 320,000 Brazilians.
Others believe military chiefs may genuinely have been trying to protect Brazilian democracy after Bolsonaro, a former army captain known for his admiration of dictators, attempted some kind of authoritarian move such as a self-coup, by which a democratically elected leader takes on dictatorial powers.
João Roberto Martins Filho, a leading military expert, said at least eight different explanations for the rupture were circulating, and it was unclear which was true.
“We don’t even know yet what Bolsonaro proposed. He’s crazy enough to propose these kinds of things but we just don’t know and it will be hard to find out,” Martins Filho said, adding that he was unconvinced by the ousted military commanders’s efforts to position themselves as defenders of democracy.
“They elected Bolsonaro, they supported Bolsonaro, they filled Bolsonaro’s entire government – and now they want to come out of this as democrats,” he said. “If they were really in favour of the constitution they would go back to their barracks and take care of national security, as they do in European countries.”
Whatever happened, few doubt the week’s drama represents a pivotal and potentially dangerous moment in the modern history of a country that only emerged from two decades of dictatorship in 1985.
“This is a major moment for Brazilian democracy,” said Brian Winter, a Brazil specialist and the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly.
Winter said he suspected Bolsonaro had been trying to fill the military top brass with more amenable figures who might help shield him from impeachment or come to his rescue if he failed in his bid to win re-election next year.
Bolsonaro’s fears over his ability to secure a second term appear to have intensified in recent months, with polls showing his handling of Covid has dented support and the unexpected re-emergence of his political nemesis Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Lula, a charismatic former union leader who led Brazil from 2003 until 2011, was prevented from challenging Bolsonaro in the 2018 election because of a corruption conviction that was recently quashed. But the 75-year-old now looks likely to run against Bolsonaro in the 2022 and has spent recent weeks excoriating his rival’s “moronic” handling of coronavirus.
“Bolsonaro is worried about impeachment and he’s also worried about Lula,” Winter said. “I don’t think you will ever see Jair Bolsonaro hand the presidential sash to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva”
Arlindo Chinaglia, an opposition politician who is also backing the impeachment request – one of more than 60 submitted against Bolsonaro – admitted the president’s removal would only be possible if society mobilized against his “authoritarian misdemeanors”. In the wake of this week’s political crisis he urged citizens who cherished democracy – including those who voted Bolsonaro into power – to wake up to the threat.
“We have a president who is trying to pressure the armed forces into serving his coup-mongering, authoritarian delusions,” Chinaglia said, remembering the military coup that plunged Brazil into dictatorship exactly 57 years ago, on 1 April 1964.
“Showing excessive tolerance to those who attack democracy day after day has never been the correct way to behave,” he added.
Amazonian forests in Bolivia. (photo: Oriol Massana & Adrià López-Baucells)
Global Rainforest Destruction Surged in 2020, Study Finds
Deutsche Welle
new study published Wednesday found that the destruction of primary forest increased by 12% in 2020, impacting ecosystems that store vast amounts of carbon and shelter abundant biodiversity.
Brazil saw the worst losses, three times higher than the next highest country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the report from Global Forest Watch (GFW) citing satellite data.
The driving factor of deforestation has been a combination of a demand for commodities, increased agriculture, and climate change.
2020 was meant to be a "landmark year" in the fight against deforestation in which companies, countries and international organizations had pledged to halve or completely stop forest loss, said the report.
What Were the Main Takeaways?
The report, which included data from the University of Maryland, study cited in the report registered the destruction of 10.4 million acres (4.2 million hectares) of primary forest.
The loss of tree cover ー which refers to plantations as well as natural forest ー was a total of 30 million acres. Australia saw a ninefold increase in tree cover loss from late 2019 to early 2020 compared to 2018 primarily driven by extreme weather.
Heat and drought also stoked huge fires in Siberia and deep into the Amazon, researchers said.
The findings did, however, show signs of hope, particularly in southeast Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia saw downward trends for deforestation after implementing regulations such as a temporary palm oil license ban — although that is set to expire in 2021.
Researchers Voice Concern
These losses constitute a "climate emergency. They're a biodiversity crisis, a humanitarian disaster, and a loss of economic opportunity," said Frances Seymour of the World Resources Institute, which is behind the
The destruction of tropical forests released vast amounts of CO2 in 2020, a total of 2.6 million tons. That equals the annual amount of emissions from India's 570 million cars, researchers said.
COVID's Impact on Deforestation
The study suggested that COVID-19 restrictions may have had an effect when it came to illegal harvesting because forests were less protected or the return of large numbers of people to rural areas.
Researchers, however, said that little had changed when it comes to the trajectory of forest destruction. They warned the worst could still be to come if countries slash protections in an attempt to ramp up economic growth, hampered by the pandemic.
If deforestation goes unchecked it could lead to a negative feedback loop ー where trees lost leads to more carbon in the air, which in turn leads to increased climate change impacts leading to more trees being lost, researchers said.
The aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic could offer and opportunity to reimagine policies and economies in a way that protects forest before it is too late, the report suggests.
Seymour said the most "ominous signal" from the 2020 data is the instances of forests themselves falling victim to climate change.
"The longer we wait to stop forestation, and get other sectors on to net zero trajectories, the more likely it is that our natural carbon sinks will go up in smoke," she said.
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