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Biden’s nominee had publicly encouraged measures to mitigate climate change, including a transition to cleaner energy, which triggered a backlash from America’s powerful oil, gas, and coal industries.
In commentary last September, Bloom Raskin suggested that regulators should “ask themselves how their existing instruments can be used to incentivize a rapid, orderly, and just transition away from high-emission and biodiversity-destroying investments.” She was merely echoing the position taken by top central bankers and economists all over the world. But her expressed hope of encouraging a potential transition to cleaner energy triggered a backlash from America’s powerful oil, gas, and coal industries. Her withdrawal will likely enable the Senate’s confirmation of the rest of Biden’s slate of nominees to the Fed, at a time of roaring inflation and mounting perils abroad. But it dooms the most powerful central bank in the world to a state of willful blindness regarding the looming chaos that scientists predict climate change will unleash.
Bloom Raskin’s fate was sealed on Monday, when Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, signalled that he would oppose her confirmation because she “failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs.” Manchin’s family fortune is largely derived from coal, and he has taken more money from fossil-fuel interests than any other senator during the current cycle. Every Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee has also taken money from fossil-fuel interests, cumulatively accepting more than eight million dollars during their political careers from the producers of the carbon emissions that are helping to cause climate change. Given Democrats’ single-vote advantage in the Senate, Manchin’s opposition has all but killed the Bloom Raskin nomination, relegating her to having to find a Republican vote, which seemed especially unlikely after Susan Collins, of Maine, also signalled her opposition on Monday.
Bloom Raskin, who is a law professor at Duke University, is not a new or untested figure on the national economic stage. She was unanimously confirmed by the Senate to top economic positions twice before, serving a term as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, from 2010 to 2014, and as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury during the Obama Administration. Her previous nomination to the Fed’s Board of Governors had wide support from the banking industry. But, in her letter to Biden, she noted that the difference this time was that “my frank public discussion of climate change and the economic costs associated with it” had become a point of contention with the Republicans on the Banking Committee: “It was—and is—my considered view that the perils of climate change must be added to the list of serious risks that the Federal Reserve considers as it works to ensure the stability and resiliency of our economy and financial system.” (The full text of Bloom Raskin’s letter is below.)
“This is not a novel or radical position,” Bloom Raskin says in her letter. “The Department of Defense has been systematically analyzing the energy security risks of climate change for years, developing mitigation strategies to confront them. Banks and insurance companies incorporate financial aspects of extreme weather events into their plans. Farmers, ranchers and businesses across the country already are struggling to adapt to extreme floods, hurricanes, rising sea levels and wildfires. Central banks around the world have already begun acting on these issues. Chairman Powell has recognized climate change as a significant risk that needs to be incorporated into the supervisory process. Any vice chair for supervision who ignored these realities—which are manifesting every day across this country—would be guilty of gross dereliction of duty.”
Bloom Raskin notes that her opponents, rather than forthrightly debating how the Fed should prepare for climate risks, engaged in baseless “diversionary attacks on my ethics and character.” The Senate Banking Committee’s ranking Republican, Pat Toomey, of Pennsylvania, led an effort to badger Bloom Raskin over what he claimed was her failure to sufficiently answer more than a hundred questions, many of which concerned her time serving as a director of a Colorado trust company. Toomey implied, with no persuasive evidence, that she improperly used her influence as a former governor of the Fed to help the trust get undue preferential treatment. (The allegations against Bloom Raskin, who has denied any improper behavior, dissolved under closer examination.) A conservative dark-money group that calls itself the American Accountability Foundation—which is co-founded by the former opposition-research director for the 2016 Presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas—has since taken credit for the opposition campaign. The American Accountability Foundation is an offshoot of another dark-money group, the Conservative Partnership Institute, which Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, joined shortly after leaving the White House. Both are registered as charities under the tax code, and therefore cannot legally participate in political campaigns. Yet, in 2021, Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, donated a million dollars to the latter group.
“This is a campaign that’s been manufactured against Sarah Bloom Raskin by the fossil-fuel industry for the sin she’s committed of telling the truth about the dangers of carbon emissions,” Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, told me. “And, as usual, the fossil-fuel industry is hiding behind a bunch of phony front groups to hide their hand.”
Residents leave the badly damaged residential building that was hit by a Russian shell. (photo: Mykhaylo PalinChak/Getty)
Ukraine owes billions of dollars in foreign debt, most of it to international finance institutions, banks, and hedge funds. If Western governments were serious about helping Ukrainians amid a devastating war, they would push for those debts to be canceled.
The people of Ukraine are fighting for their survival while dealing with huge humanitarian needs, mass displacement, and the horrific siege conditions in Mariupol. And yet they are seeing urgently needed resources flow out of the country to foreign creditors.
Ukraine’s total external government debt amounts to $54 billion. The country is set to pay $7.3 billion in debt repayments this year alone. More than half is due to private lenders like banks and hedge funds, while most of the rest is owed to multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the European Investment Bank. The current fall in the value of Ukrainian hryvnia against the US dollar will only exacerbate the debt burden, as foreign debts are owed in dollars, heaping extra pressure on the government to find the funds to repay its loans at a time of foreign invasion and extreme economic disruption.
Since the invasion, Ukrainian dollar-denominated bonds, which were issued as part of its 2015 debt restructuring, have been trading at around 25 cents on the dollar. This reflects the high risk of default, but also means that if Ukraine continues to make its debt payments, Western banks and hedge funds could make profits of 300 percent.
The response of multilateral institutions has been to give even more loans to Ukraine. Since the war started, the IMF has given a £1.4 billion emergency loan, while the World Bank has provided a $723 million financial package that includes $589 million in loans. These new loans are being piled on top of Ukraine’s already unsustainable debts.
Ukraine should never have been required to take on these debts in the first place. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea and military conflict in Donbas in 2014, Ukraine faced economic and financial crisis and was forced to take on more foreign loans from international institutions. IMF loans came with strings attached, which pushed Ukraine to accept punishing conditions involving public spending cuts, privatization, and market liberalization. This prescription of failed policies is familiar to many lower-income countries across the Global South, where the IMF has imposed similar conditions on loans for decades, unleashing long-lasting damage on their economies.
Civil society groups are demanding a response to Ukraine’s debt crisis commensurate with the scale of devastation being unleashed, which includes debt cancellation to release finances for humanitarian aid and medical supplies as well as for future reconstruction. They warn about the role that IMF loans have played in restructuring their economy and slashing essential public services. This agenda is damaging at the best of times, let alone during military conflict and instability.
Calling for debt cancellation in response to invasion, disaster, or crisis should not be controversial — it should be an automatic global response. The global debt justice movement is calling for an automatic debt relief process to ensure that unrelenting debt repayments do not prevent governments from responding to humanitarian catastrophes and severe external shocks.
Multilateral institutions and governments should sign up to a global scheme to automatically suspend debt payments at times of invasion, pandemics, and natural and climate disasters. Following debt suspension, an independent assessment should be conducted to identify the level of debt restructuring and cancellation required by all creditors. Instead of fighting for debt suspension and cancellation on a disaster-by-disaster basis, an automatic debt relief mechanism would be the quickest way to provide immediate support.
Financial support to Ukraine should include both debt relief and grants, so that Ukraine is not left servicing its current debt while taking on even more loans with more damaging conditions. The UK government should use its influence to push the IMF and World Bank to cancel Ukraine’s debt to free up funds for immediate relief and for future reconstruction.
As the people of Ukraine fight for their survival as a country, cancelling debt is a crucial act of solidarity — and one that can and should be done immediately.
Newly declassified documents reveal Ammar al-Baluchi was repeatedly slammed against a wall while naked until all trainees received 'certification.' (photo: Getty)
Newly declassified documents reveal Ammar al-Baluchi was repeatedly slammed against a wall while naked until all trainees received ‘certification’
The details of the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi are in a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified as part of a court filing by his lawyers aimed at getting him an independent medical examination.
Baluchi, a 44-year-old Kuwaiti, is one of five defendants before a military tribunal on Guantánamo Bay charged with participation in the 9/11 plot, but the case has been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years, mired in a dispute over legal admissibility of testimony obtained after torture.
According to the inspector general’s report, the CIA was aware that the 2003 rendition of the detainee, Ammar al-Baluchi, from Pakistani custody to the “black site” north of Kabul was conducted “extra-legally,” because at the time he was in Pakistani jurisdiction and no longer represented a terrorist threat.
The report said that interrogators at the site, known both as Cobalt and the Salt Pit, went beyond the CIA’s guidelines in torturing Baluchi, using two techniques without approval: using a stick behind his knees in stress position that involved leaning back while kneeling, and dousing with ice-cold water.
The technique of “walling” was approved by the “enhanced interrogation technique” guidelines sent by CIA headquarters. It involved placing the detainee’s heels against a specially designed plywood wall “which had flexibility to it” and putting a rolled up towel around the detainee’s neck.
“The interrogators would then grab the ends of the towel in front of and below the detainees face and shove [Baluchi] backwards into the wall, never letting go of the towel,” the report said. One of the interrogators (identified only by a code) said the goal was to “bounce” the detainee off the wall. The report noted that Baluchi was “naked for the proceedings.”
There was no time limit for the “walling” sessions but “typically a session did not last for more than two hours at a time.” They went on for so long because Baluchi was being used as a teaching prop.
One former trainee told investigators “all the interrogation students lined up to ‘wall’ Ammar so that [the instructor] could certify them on their ability to use the technique.”
The report said that: “In the case of ‘walling’ in particular the [Office of the Inspector General] had difficulty determining whether the session was designed to elicit information from Ammar or to ensure that all interrogator trainees received their certification.”
The fact that interrogators lined up to “wall” Ammar suggested that “certification was key,” the report concluded.
A neuropsychologist carried out an MRI of Baluchi’s head in late 2018 and found “abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage” in parts of his brain, affecting memory formation and retrieval as well as behavioral regulation. The specialist found that the “abnormalities observed were consistent with traumatic brain injury.”
The inspector general’s report also concluded that Baluchi’s treatment did not yield any useful intelligence. It noted that the interrogators at Cobalt “focused more on whether Ammar was ‘compliant’ than on the quality of the information he was providing.” It called the CIA’s logic in justifying the detention “fuzzy and circular.”
“Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.”
The interrogators were convinced that Baluchi knew more than he was saying because he was a nephew of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Baluchi spent more than three years in CIA custody, moved between a total of six “black sites” before being transferred in 2006 to Guantánamo Bay, where he is still awaiting trial.
Alka Pradhan, one of his lawyers said: “If the CIA had not hidden their own conclusions about the illegality of Ammar’s torture for this long, the US government would not have been able to bring charges against Ammar because we now know that the torture inflicted on Ammar led to lasting brain damage in the form of a traumatic brain injury and other debilitating illnesses that cannot be treated at Guantánamo Bay.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky virtually addresses Congress on March 16. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Getty)
Zelensky invoked many touchstones in the positive story the United States tells itself about its triumphs over adversity and progression toward realizing its founding ideals — Pearl Harbor, Martin Luther King Jr., Sept. 11 — to persuade Americans that the Ukrainian freedom struggle is our freedom struggle.
In perhaps the most powerful moment, Zelensky aired video of the horrors Russia is inflicting on the Ukrainian people, followed by the stark words: “Close the sky over Ukraine.” Addressing President Biden directly in halting English, Zelensky said: “Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”
In so doing, Zelensky reiterated his call for the United States and its allies to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and again demanded new shipments of fighter jets, which the administration has been reluctant to deliver.
This is already being portrayed as an effort to shame Biden into plunging deeper into the conflict. But in a way, both men are right.
Zelensky is unquestionably right that the United States and its allies could do more. Yet Biden is also right to be proceeding with extreme caution, and media coverage that obscures the complexities of that calculus is not exactly enhancing the long term prospects for humanity.
“It was heartbreaking,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me of Zelensky’s speech. “I don’t know how any member of Congress walks out of there without thinking about what more the United States can do.”
Zelensky’s dramatic elevation of the stakes is “not hyperbole,” Murphy said. “This is the most significant challenge to the post-World War II order in our lifetimes, and we should treat it that way."
Yet Murphy noted a complication. On one hand, Zelensky should demand as much military aid as possible, Murphy said, because “he has an obligation” to press the United States and its allies to “make the maximalist commitment to save his country.”
On the other, Murphy pointed out, “it’s not in the world’s best interests for this conflict to spill over into a European-wide war," or to see “direct conflict between the United States and Russia for the first time in history.”
The Biden administration has argued that Zelensky’s requests — for a no-fly zone and Polish jet fighters — risk being seen as overt acts of war against Russia. U.S. intelligence warns of “Russian escalation against NATO” and a “high risk scenario.”
Despite Zelensky’s speech, Murphy says, a no-fly zone will likely continue to be a nonstarter for both parties. “A no-fly zone is the United States declaring war against Russia,” Murphy told me.
Murphy also argued that the administration, having managed the crisis exceptionally so far, should be given the benefit of the doubt on which weapons to supply. But he suggested Zelensky’s speech would encourage lawmakers to “outflank the president” in calls for military aid.
“I don’t think that’s a helpful dynamic to Ukraine or the world,” Murphy said. The administration is announcing $1 billion in new assistance to Ukraine, but calls for more will grow louder.
Here’s the larger context. At a time when the United States and its allies are attempting a fiendishly difficult balance — between aiding Ukraine and inflicting sanctions on Russia without provoking World War III — the pressure on Biden to overreach is intense from the media, from Republicans and from certain foreign policy voices.
Media questioning of the White House is largely posed from a hawkish direction. As a darkly comic video posted by the Intercept shows, much reporter questioning demands to know why Biden hasn’t agreed to Ukrainian demands for a no-fly zone and other weaponry.
In some cases, questions echo GOP talking points: One reporter asked whether Biden is “showing enough strength against Putin.” Similarly, a New York Times piece intoned that if Biden doesn’t honor Zelensky’s demands, it could open him up to GOP charges that he’s “soft on Russia” and treated that argument respectfully.
This sort of thing lets Republicans get away with calling for more “toughness” without accounting for the obvious world-historical downside risks of too much “toughness.” This effectively launders bad-faith posturing and confuses the debate with simplistic framing rather than illuminating its complexities and trade-offs.
Max Bergmann, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, points out that this “irresponsible” bias toward hawkishness reflects how much memories of the Cold War have faded.
“The concept of a potential nuclear escalation is foreign to everybody,” Bergmann told me. This makes it easier, he said, for the media and analysts to “argue that the U.S. should militarily intervene."
Now, Bergmann said, “we have to be very nervous about how this could escalate.” Bergmann noted that twin assumptions animating much current discourse — Putin is “a madman,” yet we can somehow escalate without him using nuclear weapons — is “absurd.”
Biden may be uniquely equipped for this moment, as someone who “experienced the Cold War," Bergmann said. "That’s when he became a senator.”
A great deal is riding on that being right. To the degree that the administration and lawmakers avoid letting pressure color decision-making, it can only be all the better.
A sign is seen as voters line up for the U.S. Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, U.S., January 5, 2021. (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
Georgia's House of Representatives approved the legislation on a largely party-line vote of 98-73, sending it to the state Senate, less than a week after Florida's Republican-controlled legislature passed a measure to create a first-of-its-kind election police force in that state.
Voting rights groups and Democrats in both states say the legislation is intended to appease Trump and his supporters despite the fact that election fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States.
They also say the new laws will intimidate voters, particularly people of color, while providing a pretense for politicians to undermine confidence in election outcomes.
"It's just finding a new way to stop people from voting in the same way that has always been done in this country," said Stephanie Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a voting rights group.
A coalition of organizations, including Fair Fight Action, the voting group founded by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, announced a nearly $1.5 million campaign on Tuesday opposing the Georgia bill.
Georgia and Florida had already passed sweeping voting restrictions last year, part of a wave of such legislation among Republican-controlled states.
Georgia's new measure would grant the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) statutory authority, and subpoena power, to investigate election fraud. Under current law, claims of voting irregularities are initially investigated by the state elections board or the secretary of state's office.
Trump has attacked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, both Republicans, for failing to overturn the state's 2020 election results, which Trump falsely says were tainted by fraud. Both incumbents face Republican challengers endorsed by Trump as they seek re-election this year.
Senate approval of Georgia's House-passed bill - both chambers are majority-Republican - would send it to Kemp for his signature or veto. A spokesperson for Kemp said he does not comment on pending legislation.
The chief sponsor of the Georgia bill, Representative James Burchett, insisted the measure was designed mainly to bolster the "chain of custody" for ballots and codify safeguards already in place, thus strengthening election integrity.
He added that the GBI "has been investigating elections for years," and that the bill merely allows the agency to open voter fraud inquiries on its own, without a request by the elections board or secretary of state.
OTHER STATES COULD FOLLOW
The new Florida bill creates an Office of Election Crimes and Security under the auspices of the Department of State, part of the executive branch of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis' administration.
In addition, the legislation calls for the governor to appoint sworn officers at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as special agents dedicated to investigating election crimes.
The measure would allow the department to examine a range of potential illegal activities, a Department of State spokesman said, including threats to election officials, forged signatures on petitions, fraudulent registration forms and misuse of mail ballots.
DeSantis, a Trump ally widely seen as a leading presidential contender in 2024, has said the bill would improve public trust in elections.
"Allocating sufficient resources to deter fraud and ensure our election laws are enforced should not be controversial or politicized," said DeSantis' press secretary Christina Pushaw. She said the governor plans to sign the bill.
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley, the incoming president of the state's association of elections supervisors, said the legislation gives credence to the false notion that voter fraud is a serious problem.
"The context is clear – there's a massive disinformation campaign across the nation, and this bill plays right into that," Earley said.
Dozens of courts and election officials around the country have concluded that Trump's fraud allegations have no factual basis. But the former president continues to assert that President Joe Biden's 2020 victory was illegitimate, and polls show a significant number of Republicans believe him.
Lawmakers in a handful of other states also have introduced bills to increase investigations of alleged election fraud, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, though prospects for their passage is uncertain.
In Arizona, a Republican lawmaker's proposal to create an election crimes investigatory agency failed to win committee support in time for this year's legislative session.
Some states, such as Texas, have increased prosecution resources for election cases in the absence of new legislation, said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Brennan Center's democracy program.
A young girl holds shrapnel in the Yemeni city of Taiz in March 2021. (photo: Khalid al-Banna)
As the U.S. and U.K. push for Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to offset a rise in global energy prices amid sanctions on Russia, the kingdom on Saturday announced it had executed 81 people — the country’s largest mass execution in decades. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, says the muted criticism of Saudi abuses reveals a double standard when it comes to how Western countries deal with the absolute monarchy, which has been waging a brutal assault on neighboring Yemen for almost seven years with U.S. support. If the U.S. wants the world to oppose Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, “then it’s got to stop supporting the war in Yemen,” says Whitson, who adds that disparate coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Yemen point to “inherent racism” in Western media.
Today, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to hold talks on energy security, even as critics raise concerns about the countries’ human rights records. This comes as U.S. officials are also reportedly talking to Saudi officials about President Biden visiting to Saudi Arabia to discuss global oil supply, while the U.S. refuses to directly condemn Saudi Arabia for executing 81 men on Saturday — its largest mass execution ever. Efforts to negotiate with the Saudis to increase oil and sanctions on Russian oil come as much of the world is horrified by the atrocities in the war in Ukraine. UNICEF reports the Ukraine war is creating a child refugee almost every second in Ukraine.
At the same time, we’re hearing very little about the world’s worst humanitarian crisis unfolding in Yemen, which is now seven years into the Saudi-led war and blockade, backed by arms sales and technical assistance from the United States and its allies, including the United Kingdom. The United Nations warns acute cases of hunger in Yemen have reached an unprecedented level, with over 160,000 people likely to experience famine in the next half-year. More than 17 million people in Yemen are in need of food assistance, with high levels of acute malnutrition among children under the age of 5.
This was the focus of Part 2 of my conversation with Sarah Leah Whitson. She’s the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN. We spoke to her Tuesday about DAWN’s civil lawsuit against the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey in 2018 and was DAWN’s founder. I asked Sarah Leah Whitson: How is it possible that the U.S. is continuing to support the Saudi-led war and blockade of Yemen?
SARAH LEAH WHITSON: It’s mind-boggling. And it’s mind-boggling that Mohammed bin Salman has actually said that he will not increase oil production unless the U.S. increases its support for the war in Yemen. Basically, the Biden administration is bargaining to do more to save the children of Ukraine by massacring more children in Yemen. That is the formula. And that’s why it’s just — it’s so discombobulating to see Secretary Blinken and President Biden falling over themselves to decry Russian atrocities in Ukraine while they support very similar, if not worse — certainly, to date, worse — atrocities by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen.
We have to be very clear: Saudi and UAE are starving the people of Yemen with a seven-year air, land and sea blockade that has eviscerated the country’s ability to import food, medicine and fuel. Yemen is a country that imports over 90% of its food. Of course people are starving when Saudi and UAE impose a total blockade on the country. Of course people are starving when sanctions continue to be in place. They haven’t entirely been lifted. The U.S. just redesignated so-called Houthi financiers, that will further debilitate the ability of the country to import even legitimate products like fuel and food and medicine imports.
What the Biden administration has now done is what even the Trump administration refused to do, which is reengage as a party of the conflict, putting American troops on the line as part of the fighting effort, as part of the war, making them legitimate military targets in the UAE, where U.S. forces from the military base in the UAE have actively participated in firing Patriot missiles against the Houthis in Yemen, ostensibly to defend the UAE from incoming Houthi missiles. But really the best way for the UAE to protect itself is to stop supporting proxy forces, to stop arming and funding proxy forces, which it dramatically increased in doing in the beginning of this year, and to end its blockade of Yemen. Same goes for Saudi Arabia. This is a dead-end war.
Best news I heard this morning: Reportedly, the Saudis have invited Houthi representatives for talks to Riyadh. I don’t know if the Houthis will trust this offer. There have been prior offers like this. But the whole world knows that the Saudis and the Emiratis are not going to win this war. It’s been seven years. They thought it was going to take weeks. What a joke. They have decimated this country.
And if the United States expects the entire world, which has not gone along, to sanction Russia, to buy what it’s selling in terms of defending Ukraine, then it’s got to stop supporting the war in Yemen, because the world sees this. The world sees that when the United States talks about sovereignty and violence and not attempting to extract concessions by force, it’s got to follow, to talk the talk in Yemen, not just tell the world what to do in Ukraine, because the world is not buying it. This is why there is not more support for the war against Russia in Ukraine.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, maybe that’s where you’ve got it wrong, when you say the world sees. I think the world doesn’t see the way it sees what’s happening in Ukraine right now. I want to read a tweet from CodePink. “Why is there such a disparity between coverage of the war on Ukraine vs. the war on Yemen? Coverage of Yemen reveals the US and UK’s complicity in creating the humanitarian crisis. Coverage of Ukraine constructs the US, the UK, & their allies as the 'saviors of democracy.'” So, let’s talk about the difference. I mean, you have for example, CNN anchors — and this is not wrong. Perhaps it should be a model of coverage of war in so many different cities, in Ukraine, so you see the real effects of what war looks like, feels like, smells like, the destruction of hospitals, the bombing of schools, and people feel it viscerally. Could you imagine if you had those same hosts in Sana’a, in Aden, in other places in Yemen each day to feel this humanitarian catastrophe, the worst in the world? Can you talk about that, the actual lack of coverage of what’s happening on the ground in Yemen, so the world doesn’t respond, right? As Noam Chomsky says, the media manufactures consent for war, and lets people know what’s happening so they can respond.
SARAH LEAH WHITSON: There are three elements to this, Amy. The first is the lack of coverage is not an accident. It is by design. Saudi and the UAE have done everything they can to block international media, block international human rights investigators, including myself, from traveling to Yemen. When the war started, we — when I was at Human Rights Watch, we were on the ground in Yemen. We were able to travel to Yemen to document what was happening, to document the destruction, to interview victims. The Saudis made that increasingly difficult, including banning, forcibly banning, by threatening to withdraw funds from U.N. planes that were still traveling to Yemen and taking in humanitarian organizations. So, the Saudis, they understand the power of the media. They understand the power of the coverage that you described. And that’s why they have done everything they can to make it impossible. It is so difficult for international media to get anywhere near the fighting in Yemen. Aden remains accessible, but you have to take a boat from Djibouti to get there. It’s virtually impossible to fly into the country. So, the restrictions on getting in for international media are tremendous, versus, of course, Ukraine, where anybody can go in freely to document what’s happening.
The second is just the factor of time. The media jumps from one crisis to another. The Ukraine crisis is new. The Yemen crisis is old. It’s been seven years. And we have seen, time and again, how the media loses interest and has to move on to the next thing. So there’s an attention span issue.
And finally, there is the inherent racism that we see and that we’ve seen on such grotesque display by the Western media, talking about the white and blue-eyed, blond-haired Ukrainians who are somehow different. Their refugee status is different. Their suffering is different. They’re civilized people. They’re European people. And so there is an inherent bias in the Western media, in particular, who are the bulk of those present in Ukraine, to sympathize with, to feel compassion and suffering for Ukrainians under bombardment, but not the same suffering, not the same pain for Yemenis under bombardment, for Yemenis who are literally being starved to death. And I think this is a good moment for everyone in the media to check their biases, to really think about why that is and what they can do to fix it. I would hope that the international media uses this as an opportunity to redouble its efforts to travel to Yemen and see for itself. When they have shown up, as the BBC did last year in some unbelievable footage, unbelievable coverage, it did make a difference. And I really think and hope and I wish that the international media spends just a fraction of the effort they’re making now to cover Ukraine to get into Yemen, to show the world what’s happening. This is a good moment to draw out the comparisons, the strong, strong parallels between what’s happening in Yemen and what’s happening in Ukraine.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sarah Leah Whitson, I wanted to ask you about Congress and what it’s doing about Yemen right now, because this isn’t just the Saudi-UAE-led attack on Yemen. It is supplied militarily and helped in its funding by the United States. Can you talk about what’s happening in Congress?
SARAH LEAH WHITSON: Sure. So, while, under the Trump administration, the U.S. Congress, in a remarkable show of bipartisan support, Republican and Democrat, voted three times to ban U.S. support for the war in Yemen and ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, under the Biden administration they approved arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, using the handy fig leaf of calling them defensive weapons. It’s quite disappointing, if not disgusting, that even members of Congress, like Chris Murphy, who have been so vocal in condemning the war in Yemen and so vocal in condemning arms sales to Yemen, and even vowing that he would not support arms sales to Yemen, voted in support of arms sales to Yemen that the Biden administration put forward.
I think, unfortunately, it reveals a great deal about the conflict of interest within the U.S. government that is so beholden to the defense industry and defense industry profits and defense industry employment, both before and after — they are part of the government — but as well as the notion that we must continue to cajole the Saudi Arabians for acquiescence to a new arms deal with Iran, or now for increasing oil production, by doing what they want and sacrificing Yemen and the Yemeni people if we have to. There are efforts to introduce a new war powers resolution, led by, among others, Representative Ro Khanna, that would resubmit the renewed, reengaged American fighting in the Yemen war to a congressional war powers resolution and war powers approval. But I’m not entirely confident that that will pass.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain exactly what is the U.S. role in the attack, the decimation of Yemen?
SARAH LEAH WHITSON: Sure, it’s multifold. Number one, of course, is the provision of American weapons. They are the bulk of the weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and those are the weapons that are landing on the heads of Yemeni children, Yemeni women, Yemeni homes, Yemeni farms, Yemeni schools, Yemeni universities. This is how this country is being destroyed, with American weapons. In addition, there has been years of so-called intelligence support — I should say dumbness support — in supposedly helping the Saudis carry out their targeting and decimation and bombardment, which of course has been wildly indiscriminate, because the Saudis insist on flying their planes so high, to avoid being shot, that they really can’t target anything with any sort of precision. And now we have the direct engagement of U.S. forces, as I was mentioning, in the UAE to support Emirati forces to fire missiles back at incoming Houthi missiles. So the United States is directly a party to this conflict again, and its troops are at risk in the UAE as parties to the war. And it’s just remarkable to me that President Biden would endanger Americans this way.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Even minor census undercounts could have substantial knock-on effects and deprive needy communities of investment and representation. (photo: Lev Radin)
Even minor census undercounts could have substantial knock-on effects and deprive needy communities of investment and representation.
Given the high stakes involved, even minor deviations between the census count and the country’s actual demographics can have substantial knock-on effects. On Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau released a statistical analysis that illuminated a persistent trend in the undertaking: the undercounting of people of color. Black Americans, Latinos, and Indigenous people living on reservations were undercounted by roughly 3, 5, and 6 percent, respectively. Those undercounts are consistent with 2010 results, though Latinos experienced a far greater undercount than in 2010, when it was just 1.5 percent. White Americans and Asian Americans, on the other hand, were overcounted in the most recent census.
Census undercounts happen for several reasons: language barriers, variable literacy rates, lack of internet access, and distrust of the federal government, which may have played an outsize role in 2020. The Census Bureau was able to pinpoint miscounts with a post-census survey asking a sample of people where they were living on the day of the census and matching their responses to information collected during the initial effort.
Given the persistence of extreme residential segregation in the U.S., low population tallies in communities of color can drive divestment and divert much-needed dollars for things like affordable housing, transportation, health care, and environmental remediation. Environmental justice projects like replacing lead pipes, cleaning up contaminated soil, updating failing sewage systems, and fortifying housing stocks against heat waves, storms, and floods could also suffer. Finally, undercounts can lead to communities of color having diluted political representation if districts are drawn based on incomplete data.
Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, issued a statement last week saying the results “confirm our worst fears.”
“Despite the challenges of the 2020 Census, [American Indians and Alaska Natives] living on reservation lands deserve to be counted and to receive their fair share of federal resources,” she added.
Even beyond the undercounts, population trends underscored by the most recent census could have destabilizing effects on environmental policymaking. For example, nine out of the ten U.S. cities with the largest Black populations have experienced substantial drops in Black residents since 2000. Topping that list, Detroit and Chicago lost over 250,000 Black residents each during that time period. Across the country, Black residents are moving out of big cities because of worries around violence, access to safe and affordable housing, and the health and economic issues stemming from their disproportionate exposure to the most toxic and polluted urban areas.
In one census tract in Chicago’s Englewood community, which was 97 percent Black in 2010, the exodus is particularly apparent. Just a decade ago, the corner of 57th Street and Normal Boulevard was adorned by greenery and homes. Since then, however, 400 homes have been demolished to make way for the expansion of a freight yard. In that time, the area’s census tract lost 1,600 Black residents, though its total population only declined by 1,400 overall because of increases in white and Latino residents.
The railyard’s expansion exacerbated pollution in the community, which already suffered from proximity to hazardous waste and experienced more diesel pollution than roughly 95 percent of the country, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. Longtime Englewood resident Deborah Payne told Grist that she was forced to move out after the community around her disappeared to make way for the railway. In many ways, she added, the pollution helped drive the exodus around her.
“We were always affected by dust and pollution,” she said. “It was noisy and dusty, they didn’t do anything to keep up greenery, and it affected the community because a lot of people around there would go up on most freight trains and open them up to take things.”
While environmental issues might be driving some of the migration of Black people out of cities, the suburbs to which they’re moving don’t reliably offer refuge. In Chicago’s case, thousands of Black residents are choosing to move to neighboring areas facing their own acute environmental challenges: Joliet, Illinois, a warehouse and logistics hub where industry has left the city in dire need of new water sources, has grown by just 3,000 residents since 2010, but its Black population has grown by 2,200.
In other words, while census undercounts jeopardize the tool’s effectiveness, the count has nevertheless illuminated patterns and challenges that policymakers will want to take into account.
“How could anyone not be concerned?” Census Bureau Director Robert Santos said of the shortcomings when announcing the Bureau’s analysis last week. “These findings will put some of those concerns to rest and leave others for further exploration.”
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