19 May 22
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Who's funding it, why it's inspired by Viktor Orban, and what it aims to achieve
Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, writes “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15 million to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” And Thiel has donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who repeat Trump’s big lie.
Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.
It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.
If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?
On Tuesday night, Doug Mastriano, a January 6 insurrectionist and Trump-backed Big Lie conspiracy theorist, won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (the fourth largest state in the country, and the biggest state that flipped from 2016 to 2020). Mastriano was directly involved in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election by sending an “alternate” slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College — despite the fact that Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. If Mastriano wins in November, he will appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will oversee the 2024 election results in one of the most important battleground states in the country.
Meanwhile, the major annual event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — the premier convening organization of the American political right — starts today in Budapest. That’s no accident. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orban’s agenda as that of a “Trump before Trump.”
Orban has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy — rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary, and muzzling the press. He remains on such good terms with Vladimir Putin that he’s refused to agree to Europe’s proposed embargo of Russian oil.
Tucker Carlson — Fox News’s progenitor of white replacement theory — will be speaking at CPAC and broadcasting his show from Budapest. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows will also be speaking (although he refuses to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on American democracy).
If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power — which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.
Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights against arbitrary authority and a voice in what’s decided.
If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we’ll need to meet today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government both from authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his wannabes, and from big money like Peter Thiel’s.
Russian servicemen patrol the destroyed part of the Ilyich steel plant in Mariupol. (photo: Olga Maltseva/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Ukraine Invasion Could Cause Global
Food Crisis, UN Warns
Russian deputy foreign minister, Andrei Rudenko, was quoted as saying:
You have to not only appeal to the Russian Federation but also look deeply at the whole complex of reasons that caused the current food crisis and, in the first instance, these are the sanctions that have been imposed against Russia by the US and the EU that interfere with normal free trade, encompassing food products including wheat, fertilisers and others.
Rudenko’s remarks come after the United Nations food chief, David Beasley, pleaded with Vladimir Putin, saying millions would die around the world because of the Russian blockade of Black Sea ports.
Addressing the Russian president directly, Beasley said:
If you have any heart at all for the rest of the world, regardless of how you feel about Ukraine, you need to open up those ports.
Beasley’s World Food Programme feeds some 125m people and buys 50% of its grain from Ukraine. Ukraine is among the top five global exporters of several vital agricultural products, including corn, wheat and barley, as well as being a key exporter of sunflower and meal.
Earlier today, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, warned that the food shortages stoked by the war in Ukraine could cause “malnutrition, mass hunger and famine, in a crisis that could last for years” across the world.
The Buffalo Bills' Josh Allen visits the scene of Saturday's mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
The vote comes in the wake of a horrific mass shooting over the weekend at a supermarket in a predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 people and wounded three others. The Justice Department is investigating the shooting as a hate crime and "an act of racially-motivated violent extremism."
The bill passed -- the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 -- will next go to the Senate for consideration, where its fate is uncertain.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters Wednesday that he plans to take procedural steps to force a vote on the bill next week, something that would require 60 votes.
Lawmakers are under pressure to take action in the wake of the tragedy in Buffalo, but the highly polarized partisan climate makes it unlikely that any significant policy changes will pass both chambers of Congress to be signed into law.
Though Democrats control the House and the Senate, their majority in the Senate is not sufficiently large enough for them to enact most legislation on a party line vote and most Republicans remain steadfastly opposed to any kind of gun control bills.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would set up offices specifically focused on domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The offices would track and analyze domestic terrorist activity with the goal of better preparing the federal government to identify risks in order to take preventative action.
The bill creates a requirement for biannual reporting on domestic terrorism threats. It also calls for assessments of the threat posed specifically by White supremacists and neo-Nazis.
The measure is sponsored by Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois. It has three Republican cosponsors: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Fred Upton of Michigan.
House Democratic leaders had planned to bring an earlier version of the bill to the floor in April, but the effort was derailed after progressive members objected to the measure, which they said could be used to target civil rights activists or left-leaning groups. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he believes those issues have been resolved.
"We've worked out some of the concerns people have about civil liberties, which were legitimate concerns, and I think we've worked that out and I think we'll have agreement on that," Hoyer said during his weekly meeting with reporters.
Earlier this week, Schneider called on the House to swiftly take up the bill in the aftermath the Buffalo shooting.
"The rise of racially motivated violent extremism is a serious threat to Americans across the country," he said in a statement. "The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is what Congress can do this week to try to prevent future Buffalo shootings -- to prevent future California shootings, future El Paso shootings, future Charleston shootings, future Pittsburgh shootings, future Wisconsin shootings. We need to ensure that federal law enforcement has the resources they need to best preemptively identify and thwart extremist violence wherever the threat appears."
The 18-year-old suspected of opening fire at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday told authorities he was targeting the Black community, according to an official familiar with the investigation.
The alleged gunman made disturbing statements describing his motive and state of mind following his arrest, the official said. The statements were clear and filled with hate toward the Black community. Investigators also uncovered other information from search warrants and other methods indicating the alleged shooter was "studying" previous hate attacks and shootings, the official said.
Eleven of the people who were shot were Black, officials said. The victims range in age from 20 to 86, police said. Buffalo police identified all 13 victims Sunday. Among them were a former police officer who tried to stop the shooter, the octogenarian mother of the city's former fire commissioner and a long-term substitute teacher.
Starbucks shift supervisor Gailyn Berg and barista Tim Swicord outside of their store in Springfield, Virginia. (photo: Michael A. McCoy/NPR)
Workers at the coffee chain have filed petitions for union elections at more than 250 stores, but chief Howard Schultz publicly opposes the movement
The news comes as Starbucks workers have filed petitions for union elections at more than 250 stores, spanning 35 states in the US. Starbucks’ chief executive, Howard Schultz, has led a campaign against the union movement calling it “some outside force that’s going to dictate or disrupt who we are and what we do”.
The US’s top labor regulator, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), has issued complaints against Starbucks over many of the firings, demanding reinstatement and backpay for seven fired workers in Memphis, Tennessee, three fired workers in Overland, Kansas, six fired workers in Buffalo, New York, and three fired workers in Arizona. These cases will go before an administrative law judge unless a settlement is reached before those hearings.
The NLRB has accused Starbucks of more than 200 violations of federal labor laws over the course of union organizing campaigns since late 2021. NLRB regional offices have issued complaints in regards to 45 cases against Starbucks, according to the NLRB. Starbucks also incited more legal concerns over recently announcing the rollout of new benefits for all employees, but exempting workers at unionized stores. Workers at several Starbucks stores have held strikes in protest of the company’s behavior toward union organizing.
Laila Dalton, a shift supervisor at Starbucks for about three years in Phoenix, Arizona, was fired the day before her store’s union election ballots were being sent out. Dalton said she started getting write-ups for minor infractions and was interrogated and intimidated by management shortly after her store went public with its intent to unionize. Dalton filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB before her firing over harassment from management.
“I filed a complaint, an unfair labor practice charge, and that’s when it kind of all started,” said Dalton.
She was fired on 4 April and has since been included in the NLRB complaint calling for reinstatement for her and two co-workers.
“It was the day before the ballots were sent out. It was in front of people I’ve never met before and it was an hour into Howard Schultz being in office and his town hall speech,” added Dalton. “I still can’t believe they fired me since I already had a complaint against them.”
Union organizers at Starbucks have also been fired in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana and Rochester, New York.
Ashlee Feldman, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks store in St Louis, Missouri, for three years, was fired a few days before her store’s union election ballots were to be mailed out. Feldman said she was fired after she closed the dining area of her Starbucks store to drive-thru only temporarily due to short staffing.
“I believe I was fired for being a shift supervisor who was pro-union,” said Feldman. “I’ve been with Starbucks almost three years and have never had any issues.”
She is in the process of filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board to get reinstated.
“I’m shocked at this firing and all I can think about is my eight-year-old autistic son who needs therapy and care that costs money,” added Feldman. “These higher-ups don’t care about us. They aren’t in the stores busting ass like we are. They don’t connect with the customers like we do.”
In regard to Feldman’s termination, a Starbucks spokesperson said: “A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held. Any claims of anti-union activity are categorically false.”
According to the National Labor Relations Board, as of 13 May, 69 Starbucks stores have voted to form unions, nine stores voted against, and six union elections are still pending an outcome, based on challenged ballots.
Wells Fargo has struggled to carry out its diversity initiatives. (photo: Getty)
Black and female candidates are sometimes interviewed after the recipient of a job is identified, current and former employees say.
For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else.
He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong.”
Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.
Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank’s wealth management unit to interview “diverse” candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it.
The interviews, they said, seemed to be more about helping Wells Fargo record its diversity efforts on paper — partly in anticipation of possible regulatory audits — rather than hiring more women or people of color. All but three spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were afraid of losing their jobs at Wells Fargo or their new employers.
In an emailed statement, Raschelle Burton, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said the bank expected all employees to follow its hiring policies and guidelines, which are communicated across the firm. “To the extent that individual employees are engaging in the behavior as described by The New York Times, we do not tolerate it,” Ms. Burton said.
Ms. Burton said she was aware that informal directives about hiring diverse candidates had long circulated inside the bank. But those rules were from an earlier era that the bank’s current leaders had nothing to do with, she added. Most of Wells Fargo’s top management turned over in 2020 after a scandal involving the creation of fraudulent accounts damaged the bank’s reputation and led to more than $4.5 billion in fines.
The internal confusion around Wells Fargo’s diversity policies highlights how even the noblest goals can end up getting warped as they make their way from idea to practice, ultimately hurting the very people they were meant to help.
Two years ago, in light of the national reckoning on race that followed the murder of George Floyd, Wells Fargo was among the companies that pledged to increase diversity.
In a June 2020 memo to employees, Charles W. Scharf, who became the chief executive of Wells Fargo the year before, pledged to consider a wider array of candidates for jobs at the bank, but added that the bank struggled to find qualified Black candidates. He later apologized for the comment when the memo became public in September.
Following Mr. Scharf’s directive, Wells Fargo adopted a formal policy in requiring that a diverse slate of candidates would have to be interviewed for all open jobs paying more than $100,000 a year.
That August, Wells Fargo paid nearly $8 million to settle a claim by the Department of Labor that it had discriminated against more than 30,000 Black job applicants for positions in banking, sales and support roles.
Wells Fargo had already been trying to increase diversity. In 2013, a group of Black financial advisers at Wells Fargo sued the bank for racial discrimination, saying they were corralled into poor neighborhoods and kept away from opportunities to win new clients and partner with white financial advisers.
The bank settled the case in 2017. Wells Fargo paid nearly $36 million to about 320 members of the class-action lawsuit, and pledged to “take actions designed to enhance opportunities for employment, earnings, and advancement of African American financial advisors and financial advisor trainees.”
As the lawsuit progressed, Wells Fargo began requiring that at least one woman or person of color needed to be interviewed for each open job, Ms. Burton said. She added that the policy was not written down and was only for certain senior positions.
The policy was similar to the National Football League’s Rooney Rule, named for Dan Rooney, a former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The rule was devised after researchers demonstrated to league officials that Black coaches were being shut out of job opportunities. It required the league to interview at least one nonwhite candidate for senior positions like head coach and general manager. Earlier this year, the N.F.L. was sued by Black coaches, who claimed they were subject to “sham” interviews.
“Well-intentioned people created these initiatives, but when they hit the ground the energy was devoted not to implementing them but finding a way to get around them,” said Linda Friedman, the lawyer for the Black financial advisers involved in the 2017 Wells Fargo settlement.
Mr. Bruno joined Wells Fargo in 2000 and worked his way up to market leader for Wells Fargo Advisors in Jacksonville, Fla. He oversaw 14 branches of the bank’s wealth management operation. He saw himself as a champion of diversity.
Mr. Bruno was mainly responsible for filling two categories of jobs — financial advisers and financial consultants, who work alongside advisers. He said that he was often told to conduct interviews with Black candidates for the financial consultant positions, which were lower-paying jobs. In most such cases, Wells had no intention of hiring those people because either he or his superiors had already picked someone for the job, Mr. Bruno said.
Mr. Bruno said he eventually refused to conduct the interviews. “I got a Black person on the other side of the table who has no shot at getting the job,” he told his bosses.
Barry Sommers, the chief executive of Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management business, said that fake interviews wouldn’t even have been necessary for the financial consultant positions that Mr. Bruno was hiring for. Their salaries, Mr. Sommers said, fell below the $100,000 threshold that required a diverse slate of candidates to be interviewed per Wells Fargo’s 2020 policy.
“There is absolutely no reason why anyone would conduct a fake interview,” Mr. Sommers said. Rather than tracking the identities of interviewees, the bank focused on the results, and “the numbers are getting better,” he said.
Of the nearly 26,000 people the bank hired in 2020, 77 percent were not white men, Ms. Burton said. And last year, 81 percent of the 30,000 people hired were not white men, she said. She declined to specify how many of those new hires were for jobs above the $100,000 salary threshold.
But six current and former Wells Fargo employees, including Mr. Bruno, said that fake interviews were conducted for many types of positions. Three current employees said they conducted fake job interviews or knew of them as recently as this year.
In 2018, Tony Thorpe was a senior manager for Wells Fargo Advisors in Nashville, overseeing 60 advisers. Mr. Thorpe said his boss and the human resources manager overseeing his area both told him that if he found a financial adviser worth recruiting, and that adviser wanted to bring a sales assistant along, it was permissible — but the assistant’s job had to be posted publicly.
Mr. Thorpe, who retired from Wells Fargo in 2019, said he was instructed to reach out to colleges and business associations in the area where he could meet nonwhite candidates for the assistant job. Mr. Thorpe said he never conducted a fake interview, but was required to document that he had tried to find a “diverse pool” of candidates, even though he knew exactly who would be getting the job.
“You did have to tell the story, send an email verifying what you’ve done,” Mr. Thorpe said. “You just had to show that you were trying.”
Ms. Burton said that she couldn’t speak to practices under Wells Fargo’s prior management, but that the bank kept records of every job interview. The record-keeping is necessary because the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the nation’s top banking regulator, conducts periodic audits. While the O.C.C. doesn’t impose its own diversity standards for banks, it does check to make sure they’re following state and federal laws, including anti-discrimination laws.
Don Banks, 31, a Black wealth manager living in Monroe, La., was contacted by Wells Fargo twice before he was hired. In 2016 and 2017, a human resources representative from the bank told Mr. Banks that he had advanced past an initial interview round for a financial adviser trainee position and would be getting a call from a manager. Both times, no one called.
Mr. Banks had been submitted to fake interviews, according to a former employee who was a manager in the area where Mr. Banks had applied, and who participated in the hiring process involving Mr. Banks’s application. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the industry.
Mr. Banks was eventually hired in 2018 by Wells Fargo in a more junior position. Two years later, he was laid off during cutbacks in the pandemic.
“It doesn’t sound like a great experience,” Mr. Sommers, the wealth management chief executive, said. “It shouldn’t have happened that way.”
A woman shops for baby formula in Annapolis, Maryland, on May 16. Only a handful of companies supply baby formula in the country, a factor that has contributed to the current shortages being experienced in parts of the country. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP)
The Food and Drug Administration announced emergency measures this week to get more baby formula on the market, and soothe the nerves of anxious parents who've been facing shortages.
President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act Wednesday to ensure that formula manufacturers are first in line for any ingredients they need. Biden also directed the Defense Department to use its contracts with commercial airlines to speed the delivery of formula from overseas.
Formula has been hard to find in some parts of the country since suspected contamination led to a recall and the shuttering of a big manufacturing plant in Michigan.
That plant reportedly supplied as much as one-fifth of all the infant formula in the country.
But the problem is bigger than that.
The episode highlights how highly concentrated the formula industry is — thanks in part to government policies — and the risks that can result.
Here's what to know about how the U.S. get into its infant formula mess.
A few companies control an entire industry
The infant formula industry is a multi-billion dollar business dominated by a handful of firms. In the U.S., just four companies control about 90% of the market, including Abbott Nutrition — the firm behind the shuttered Michigan plant.
These companies operate a relatively small number of formula factories in order to maximize efficiency and keep their production costs low.
"They're concentrating production into a few, very large plants but that creates a lot of risk," says Claire Kelloway of the Open Markets Institute, and anti-monopoly think tank. "A huge part of the crisis we're seeing now is from the closure of one plant."
This week the FDA struck a deal allowing Abbott to re-open its Michigan plant with new safety precautions.
The plant not only produces a large share of the country's regular baby formula, but is a critical supplier of specialized formula for infants with allergies and other health conditions that require a particular diet.
Other parts of the food chain have similar vulnerabilities. When the giant meatpacking company JBS was hit by a ransomware attack last year, 20% of the nation's beef and pork slaughtering capacity was temporarily idled.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf acknowledged that concentration in the formula industry deserves more scrutiny.
"The question of whether we need more diversity in terms of the overall supply is one that, I think, will be much discussed and needs to be considered in light of the levers that we have to make that happen," Califf told reporters Monday.
State contracts lead to reliance on a single supplier
The federal government not only regulates formula makers. It's also their biggest customer. About half of all formula sold in the U.S. is paid for by the Department of Agriculture, through its Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
Each state signs an exclusive contract with one of the formula manufacturers to supply subsidized product for low-income families. The government gets a big price break. In exchange, the formula maker gets a large, captive market.
The USDA's own research found that whichever company gets the WIC contract in a state enjoys a powerful market advantage there, with a monopoly over WIC sales and "spillover" effects in the non-WIC market as well.
Supermarkets tend to give preferential shelf space to the formula maker with the WIC contract. And pediatricians may be more likely to recommend that brand to their patients.
"Because the WIC program is such a large purchaser — it buys about half the formula on the market — once a company has an exclusive deal to service a state, competitors don't have a financial incentive to compete in that state," Kelloway says.
Abbott — the company behind the shuttered Michigan plant — has the WIC monopoly in about two-thirds of all states. The administration has asked states to relax those rules temporarily, so WIC recipients can use their benefits to buy any brand of formula.
There are also almost no imports
Typically, the U.S. buys almost no infant formula from other countries. There are steep, 17.5% tariffs on most formula that is brought in. And regulatory barriers make it almost impossible for formula makers outside the country to sell to the customers in the United States.
"It's clear that the U.S. has basically closed off its market to imports," says Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Regulations governing the manufacture and labeling of formula are ostensibly designed to protect the safety of U.S. infants. But they also serve to protect the domestic formula companies from overseas competition.
"There's really no reason we should be blocking perfectly nutritional formula coming out of high-quality, sanitary plants in the European Union," Lovely says. "There is no reason why we can't be importing baby formula from Canadian plants, which could very easily be inspected by FDA."
To address the current formula shortage, the FDA has relaxed its rules to allow for imported formula — a tacit admission that foreign supplies can be sold safely, with adequate precautions.
Lovely says the formula shortage illustrates the pitfalls of believing that an entirely domestic supply chain is necessarily more secure.
"Having one or two factories in the U.S. or suppliers in the U.S. is not a way to be resilient," she says. "In fact, it's a recipe for being vulnerable."
Security comes from having a variety of suppliers — at home and in friendly foreign countries. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket, or all your baby formula in one bottle.
It will take time to sort out the mess
So how soon will the formula shortage end? Not overnight.
The FDA says it will take about two weeks to restart production at Abbott's Sturgis plant and another six to eight weeks to bring that plant to full capacity. Imported formula will also need to be screened and is probably weeks away from showing up on store shelves, although use of the military's air freight contracts might speed delivery somewhat.
In the meantime, the administration is working with domestic formula makers and retailers to ensure that existing supplies get to where they're needed most.
While specialty formulas and particular brands may be hard to locate, overall formula sales in April were 13% higher than before the Abbott recall, according to the market research firm IRI. The increase suggests that fear of shortages may be driving some parents to buy more formula than usual.
President Biden attempted to appoint anti-trust people who would break up MONOPOLIES and as a consequence, the right wing is organizing ad campaigns to promote the advantages of BIG CORPORATIONS & corporate consolidation.
This tragedy should heighten our awareness of the pitfalls in the system.
How does this even make sense?
"...just four companies control about 90% of the market.."
The FDA ignored a WHISTLEBLOWER complaint. Can we trust the FDA or Califf?
Where was ABBOTT's Quality Control? Why weren't they testing their products?
There will be additional information forthcoming and don't trust the FDA coverup.
From POLITICO:
— FDA refuses to tell Congress why infant formula response took months: FDA Commissioner Robert Califf refused to answer questions from lawmakers today about why it took the agency months to respond to reports of infant illnesses and a whistleblower complaint regarding the infant formula plant at the heart of the current formula shortage. “We have an ongoing investigation about the details of exactly what happened, from point A to point B along the way, and since it is ongoing, I can’t give extensively more details on that part of it,” Califf said during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/19/fda-refuses-to-tell-congress-why-infant-formula-response-took-months-00033805?nname=politico-nightly&nid=00000170-c000-da87-af78-e185fa700000&nrid=0000015d-dd7d-d8ea-abff-ddff29130000&nlid=2670445
In time, the Facts, Faults and Failures of ABBOTT's contaminated infant formula that sickened and killed BABIES will be known.
ABBOTT failed!
The FDA failed!
Today, what matters is getting INFANT FORMULA to BABIES.
excerpts:
Nine Republicans voted against a bill that would help poor families buy baby formula.
The bill is a measure that expands on a federal program to help low-income women and children.
Separately, 192 Republicans voted no on a bill to staff up the FDA to help manage formula supply.
THESE HOUSE REPUBLICANS VOTED AGAINST THE BILL:
The "no" votes were cast by GOP Reps. Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie, Clay Higgins, Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The bill now goes to a vote in the Senate.
WE have a massive REPUBLICAN PROBLEM when these NIT WITS just vote NO and continue to OBSTRUCT.
A resident watches as abortion-rights advocates stage a protest near the home of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on May 11, 2022, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
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The legislation, which takes effect in October, makes it a second-degree misdemeanor to protest with the intention of harassing or disturbing someone in their home. It’s the latest effort to crack down on protesters by DeSantis, who pointed to recent demonstrations outside of the homes of Supreme Court justices living in Virginia as justification for the law.
Those demonstrations came earlier this month after the leak of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito overturning 50 years of abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade touched off a political firestorm. “Sending unruly mobs to private residences, like we have seen with the angry crowds in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, is inappropriate,” DeSantis said in a statement Monday. “This bill will provide protection to those living in residential communities and I am glad to sign it into law.”
Florida’s legislation is similar to a growing number of “anti-protest” laws being enacted by Republican legislatures across the country in recent years that impose harsh new penalties on demonstrators, including Indigenous and climate activists who are protesting fossil fuel pipelines and power plants.
Social justice and environmental advocates have increasingly turned to protest and civil disobedience as a way to call for change in response to a spate of high-profile police killings of unarmed Black people and a lack of government action on climate change. Since 2017, at least 38 states have enacted such laws, according to the Informational Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Many impose harsh penalties on protesters, including making it a felony to trespass on property where “critical infrastructure,” such as fossil fuel pipelines and power plants, are operating, ICN’s oil and gas reporter Nicholas Kusnetz reported last year.
Those bills emerged after a pair of stinging losses for the pipeline industry. Activists had used civil disobedience and mass arrests to draw attention to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access projects, and the Obama administration eventually blocked both. States’ critical infrastructure legislation raised the stakes for protesters by increasing penalties for acts like blocking access to a construction site, in many cases converting the offenses from misdemeanors to felonies. Some laws allow prosecutors to seek 10 times the original fines for any groups found to be “conspirators,” prompting concerns from civil liberties advocates and environmental groups, who fear they could be roped into trials and face steep fines for having joined with broader coalitions that include an element of civil disobedience.
Left unchallenged, some legal experts say these laws could jeopardize climate protests in particular, just as more and more environmental advocates grow frustrated by political roadblocks to climate action and turn to public demonstrations and civil disobedience out of desperation. The Biden administration has pledged to enact sweeping climate reforms, but many of those have stalled as Republicans and right-leaning Democrats continue to raise hurdles.
Last fall, demonstrations amassed around the houseboat of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has impeded much of President Biden’s climate agenda. In October, nearly 50 people were arrested for protesting outside the office of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, another centrist Democrat who has blocked much of Biden’s environmental efforts. And last month, more than 1,000 scientists from around the world staged demonstrations to decry a lack of action to address global warming, including several U.S. researchers who were arrested for locking their bodies to private property.
Florida’s new law should be especially concerning for climate activists, considering DeSantis’ popularity in the Republican party and his past attempts to limit free speech on progressive issues. DeSantis, who is seen as a possible contender with Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, signed an “anti-riot” protest law in 2021 that granted civil immunity to drivers who hit protesters blocking roadways. That law was later blocked by a federal judge, who said the bill was vague, overbroad and criminalizes “vast swaths of core First Amendment speech.”
“While there may be some Floridians who welcome the chilling effect that this law has on the Plaintiffs in this case,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in his ruling, “depending on who is in power, next time it could be their ox being gored.”
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Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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