11 December 22
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Anthony Fauci | A Message to the Next Generation of Scientists
Anthony Fauci, The New York Times
Fauci writes: "As I look back at my career, I see lessons that may be useful to the next generation of scientists and health workers who will be called on to address the unexpected public health challenges that will inevitably emerge."
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Media magnate Rupert Murdoch, at right, in London a decade ago on his way to give evidence at a British judicial inquiry. He is accompanied by his son (and now Fox Corp boss) Lachlan Murdoch, at left, and his then-wife Wendi Deng. (photo: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)
"This is the most humble day in my life," Murdoch testified before the British Parliament in 2011, interrupting the opening statement of his son James — then his heir apparent — to do so.
Others had "let me down," Rupert Murdoch added, intoning, "It's time for them to pay."
In front of MPs and, later, a judicial inquiry, Murdoch mumbled. He said he couldn't hear, playing up his age. (Murdoch was then in his early 80s.) He occasionally went on the attack — only to express regret. He said — again and again and again — that he simply couldn't recall what he had once known of the operations of his beloved London newspapers.
Oh, and Murdoch took a cream pie to the face. (His then third wife, and now third ex-wife, Wendi Deng, fended off the assailant.)
Starting Monday, the now 91-year-old media magnate will again have to face the music over a scandal at one of his most prized news organizations — this time, Fox News.
Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News and Fox Corp, which is its parent company, after an array of Fox hosts and guests promoted false claims that Dominion threw votes from then-President Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 elections.
Attorneys for Dominion privately questioned Murdoch's elder son Lachlan, the Fox Corp boss, under oath for hours at a powerful Los Angeles law firm earlier this week. (Lachlan is James' older brother.)
The company is seeking to find proof Lachlan Murdoch knew that the claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential elections were false and that he encouraged or simply allowed them to be broadcast anyway on Fox News, his family's dominant profit engine.
Fox says it was covering an inherently newsworthy claim from inherently newsworthy sources — a sitting president and his campaign attorneys. The network contends the lawsuit is an affront to free speech.
Dominion accuses Fox of destroying messages from stars Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and others
In fresh court filings Wednesday, Dominion's attorneys accused Fox of destroying evidence from some of its most important figures: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, top stars Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, along with other stars, network executives and sources, presumably related to the claims of election fraud.
Dominion is asking a special master in the case, who is aiding the Delaware judge overseeing the discovery process in the lawsuit, to issue an order finding "that Fox acted recklessly or with the intent to deprive Dominion of the spoliated information's use in the trial."
The company asked for sanctions against Fox and its attorneys, which would include covering legal fees and directing the jury in the upcoming trial, scheduled for April, that it must presume the evidence would have hurt Fox's defense.
Fox has already accused senior Dominion executives, including its CEO, of destroying private electronic messages relevant to the case. That claim has not yet been addressed by the court. Fox News declined to comment on the allegation that it had destroyed any evidence.
With his father, Lachlan leads the family's media empire, which also includes News Corp., owner of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. Rupert, however, is the patriarch of the family, and looms above its corporate holdings, with the title of chairman. And now Dominion wants to see what it can secure from the elder Murdoch.
Reporters from both the Journal and Fox repeatedly debunked Trump's claims; editorials in the New York Post and the Journal called on Trump to concede his loss.
Dominion lawyers want to show that the Murdochs had every reason to know they should prevent their stars from promoting such false claims of fraud and yet did not do so — the heart of their claim that the alleged defamation was orchestrated from the top.
The News of the World scandal threatened Murdoch's hold on media empire
Back in 2011, a separate scandal flushed Rupert Murdoch into public view on the other side of the Atlantic. The News of the World, the British Sunday tabloid that had helped to propel Murdoch's global expansion decades ago, had been caught hacking into the voice mails and emails of hundreds of royals, celebrities, politicians, war veterans and more. It all came crashing down when The Guardian revealed a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl had been among them.
The repercussions were far-reaching. There was a movement to push him out as chief executive over the entire media empire. Several of his former British journalists were sentenced to jail. Murdoch shut the paper down (soon replacing it with a Sunday edition of his Sun tabloid). He split his newspapers from his television properties, and ultimately was compelled to abandon his $15 billion bid for total control of the British satellite TV giant, Sky.
Called before Parliament and a judicial inquiry in 2011 and 2012, however, his years-long pursuit for Sky still hanging in the balance, Murdoch knew he had two jobs: to convey that this press baron was chastened, not arrogant. And to deflect any notion that he had any culpability for what had happened.
He managed to execute the job in a way that cut off his younger son, James, at the knees. The judgment of James, at that time the chairman of the Murdochs' News UK, had been called into question, especially for approving a $1 million settlement to a former executive of a soccer players association whose phone had been hacked into by private investigators for News of the World. James Murdoch had previously said he hadn't read down far enough into an email trail to realize how damning — or illegal — the paper's actions had been.
As Rupert and James sat before a parliamentary committee, the younger man set out to apologize to the victims of illegal phone hacking and to explain how he intended to set the British newspaper group back on an honorable footing.
The father interrupted the son almost instantly, putting his hand on James's arm.
"Before we get to that, I would just like to say one sentence," Rupert Murdoch interjected. "This is the most humble day of my life."
(That line had been scripted for Murdoch ahead of time by his advisers, including senior figures from the PR giants Edelman and Rubenstein Associates, though they had not realized he would interrupt his son to offer it.)
A notoriously hands-on CEO seeks to explain "laxity"
In so doing, Rupert Murdoch made it clear the company remained his, though not the responsibility. "This is not as an excuse, maybe it's an explanation of my laxity," he testified. "The News of the World is less than 1 percent of our company. I employ 53,000 people around the world who are proud and great and ethical and distinguished people."
Blame should fall, he said, on "the people that I trusted to run it, and then maybe the people they trusted."
"I'm the best person to clean this up," he said.
Murdoch was not known for laxity — he was a notoriously involved CEO, especially with his tabloids.
Before the committee, and again in questioning during a judicial review, Murdoch downplayed his vaunted political influence, and suggested he simply could not recall details of his interactions with editors and with leading political figures, including prime ministers.
On Monday and Tuesday mornings, lawyers for Dominion are scheduled to grill Murdoch privately, this time about events leading up to and following the November 2020 elections. He will be asked once more about his interactions with news executives and journalists, this time at Fox News, and politicians, this time, then President Donald Trump and his advisers.
Rupert Murdoch is a decade older. His hearing is far from perfect. But associates say, when it comes to news and politics, the media mogul hasn't lost a step.
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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni talks to the press after the EU-Western Balkans summit in Tirana, Albania, on Dec. 6, 2022. (photo: Ludociv Marin/AFP/Getty Images)
Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has inspired a surge of far-right threats and attacks against journalists and critics.
With Italy slated to get its most extremist government since Mussolini gave fascism its name, the messages were a chilling reminder of just how confident Italy’s far-right exponents had become. For Berizzi, however, they were not new. Nearly 200 Italian journalists have been receiving police protection in recent years, two dozen of them living and working under escort around the clock. But the veteran correspondent with La Repubblica was the first reporter in Italy — and in Europe — to need 24-hour police protection not because of his reporting on organized crime, traditionally the greatest threat to journalists’ safety in Italy, but because of his investigations of the country’s emboldening extremist and neofascist groups.
“It’s not a record to be proud of,” Berizzi told The Intercept in a recent interview. “It reflects the climate in Italy around those who cover fascists and neofascists, and who more broadly write about hatred, racism, homophobia, antisemitism. … In Italy, fascists have reached a level of intimidation of journalists that is comparable to the mafia’s.”
“This is a party that’s rooted in the fascist tradition,” he added, referring to the Brothers of Italy. “The entire galaxy of the extreme right feels protected and galvanized now.”
The threats are not limited to social media — although they are rampant and relentless there. There are currently 16 different court proceedings relating to threats against Berizzi, and a court recently issued the first conviction against a man who called for his death online. “In recent years, they have attacked all my physical spaces,” Berizzi said. “They vandalized my home, my car. They hung signs on streets, overpasses, inside stadiums.”
While he is one of the most prominent journalists regularly covering Italy’s extremist right, including top officials in the new government, Berizzi is hardly the only one facing intimidation campaigns that are sometimes directly incited by members of Italy’s far-right political parties, all the way up to new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Another is Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian-Italian political analyst and writer who is also a frequent commentator on U.S. networks. As a Muslim, Black immigrant woman with a history of calling out racism, misogyny, and extremism in her adopted country, Jebreal has for years been on the receiving end of torrents of racist and sexist abuse, as well as death and rape threats. But after this year’s election, and after she reminded her audience of some of Meloni’s most extremist statements in the past, Jebreal saw the abuse spike. In September, Meloni threatened to sue her over a tweet in which Jebreal conflated separate comments made by the new prime minister, albeit without changing the gist of her message. Within hours of Meloni naming Jebreal on Facebook — “lighting the fire,” as the writer put it — hordes of social media trolls were unleashing threats toward her. Italian mainstream publications soon chimed in — in a tone that was hardly more civil. Il Giornale, a daily owned by the family of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, just a few weeks earlier had referred to Jebreal with words like “kefyah,” “Islam,” “#metoo,” and “intifada” — not exactly subtle dog whistles.
Meloni did not, in the end, sue Jebreal. (In 2020, while a member of the opposition, she did sue another prominent Italian journalist, Roberto Saviano, one of the reporters living under full-time police protection for his coverage of the mob, in a defamation case that’s currently underway). But the mere threat of legal action, and the fact that an incoming prime minister would directly attack an individual journalist, explicitly naming her, was a remarkable escalation in the already hostile relationship between Italy’s far-right politicians and a dwindling number of members of the Italian media willing to challenge them.
“They feed you to their audience,” Berizzi noted of those politicians’ use of social media platforms to direct abuse at their critics. “When political powers abuse that power to put you in the viewfinder, that’s something that’s against the principles of democracy.”
That’s by no means an Italian trend alone. “An autocratic party is going to attack journalists, they all do,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian who wrote a book about authoritarian leaders and who has noted the similarities, as well as direct connections, between Meloni’s party and the Republican Party.
For Jebreal, the latest round of personal attacks was a reminder that she represented the very kind of Italian diversity that Meloni’s party had for years campaigned against.
“She’s been trafficking in these conspiracies that are white supremacist, and antisemitic, for a while,” Jebreal told The Intercept, referring to Meloni’s past invocation of the racist “great replacement” and “ethnic substitution” theories, and her antisemitic references to conspiracy theories about billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros. “And there’s little or no pushback. I’m one of the few voices that’s been pointing out how this is radicalizing people, how hate crime is skyrocketing in Italy.”
“I think ultimately Meloni and her team are trying to make an example out of me, to say, ‘We’re in power now,’” she added. “Intimidating journalists is typical fascist politics. They’ve done it before, they’re doing it again. She has never disavowed her fascist base. … She’s trying to depict herself as a moderate. She is no moderate, she is an extremist.”
Normalizing Neofascism
Meloni co-founded the Brothers of Italy in 2012 after an earlier ultraconservative party, the National Alliance, merged with Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia. The National Alliance was a direct descendent of the Italian Social Movement, shortened to MSI in Italian, a fringe party established shortly after World War II by former supporters of Mussolini (his original National Fascist Party was banned after the war). Meloni got her start in politics in the MSI’s youth wing. Like MSI and the National Alliance before it, Brothers of Italy never got rid of the tricolor burning flame in its logo, a clear assertion of its ideological continuity with the earlier neofascist parties. The party’s slogan — “God, Fatherland, Family” — is also a relic of Mussolini’s days.
But as they gained in popularity as the only party in opposition to the national unity government of Mario Draghi, the Brothers of Italy launched a largely successful campaign to rebrand themselves as mainstream conservatives rather than neofascists, while Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, became a glass ceiling-shattering trailblazer.
That kind of rebrand is something the far-right has mastered, and not just in Italy, said Ben-Ghiat. “The political right is very skilled at consolidating certain narratives, and this one is that Meloni and her party are conservatives. And yes, they have the logo of a neofascist party, but that just means they’re patriots,” said Ben-Ghat. “This is covering up their history of hatred and fascism.”
Italian media, for the most part, has gone along with the rebrand. That’s in part because of a reactive, polemics-driven kind of journalism with little historical memory — and out of publications’ tendency for self-preservation or opportunism. “It’s a terrible Italian habit, to jump on the winner’s bandwagon,” noted Berizzi.
“I think even before the election, we saw this tendency to normalize Meloni,” echoed David Broder, author of a book about fascism in contemporary Italy and of several columns warning against the whitewashing of the current government’s neofascist roots. As the Italian press has begun to cover Meloni’s tenure, Broder added, “it has very much sought to normalize, or treat as kind of irrelevant, even very extremist statements from quite recently.”
Meloni’s references to great replacement theory, for instance, are largely “erased from the collective memory,” said Broder, even as she has gone on appoint to top ministries a spate of far-right extremists. Deputy Infrastructure Minister Galeazzo Bignami was once photographed wearing a swastika armband. Minister for Regional Affairs Roberto Calderoli once compared Italy’s first Black minister to an “orangutan.” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani once praised the “positive things” Mussolini did. (Meloni famously called Mussolini “a good politician,” adding that “everything he did, he did for Italy.”)
Not Just Yelling
Meanwhile, journalists like Berizzi who continue to write about the new government’s extremist connections are being dismissed, when not outright targeted. “They are quite intolerant of criticism,” said Broder, referring to Meloni and her allies. “And they very much tend to reply to criticism from journalists by accusing the journalists of being just left-wing ideologues, whom they therefore don’t have to answer to.”
They have also increasingly taken to threatening legal action, although they have rarely followed through with it.
“We’ve seen in recent weeks how quickly some of these ministers have been to start claiming that they’re going to sue people, even for making very well-founded criticisms of them,” noted Broder. Even when the legal action doesn’t materialize, he added, “there is an attempt to cow critics of the government into submission through these legal threats.”
A commentator on U.S. as well as Italian politics, Jebreal has long been used to the abuse directed at her. But nothing prepared her for the harassment campaign that followed Meloni’s threat to sue her. “They know exactly what will follow: the death threats, the rape threats, the looming violence,” she said.
“They’re basically telling their supporters whom to target,” she added, referring to Meloni and her allies’ references to her as a “wink wink nudge nudge,” giving their supporters permission to target her for abuse. “I receive more death threats and rape threats than when I appear on CNN to denounce Trump’s racism.”
In Italy, as in the U.S., that online abuse has increasingly spilled into real life. Racially and politically motivated attacks have been on the rise for some time, and last year, a group of neofascists attacked and destroyed the headquarters of one of Italy’s largest trade unions after failing to reach the prime minister’s official residence. Local commentators dubbed the episode the “Italian Capitol Hill” in reference to the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., but it was also an eerie reminder of a tactic — attacking unions — that had defined the ascent of Mussolini and his supporters.
“It was a sign they sent,” said Berizzi. “‘Look, we’re not just yelling on social media, we are for real.’”
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View of the site where the Keystone pipeline crosses U.S. Route 36 just east of Washington, Kansas, Dec. 8, 2022 in this image taken from social media. (photo: Fred Knapp/Nebraska Public Media News/Reuters)
Canada-based TC Energy on Thursday estimated the spill on the Keystone system at about 14,000 barrels, or 588,000 gallons. It said the affected pipeline segment had been “isolated,” the oil had been contained at the site with booms, or barriers, and environmental monitoring had been set up, including around-the-clock air-quality monitoring. It did not say how the spill occurred.
After a drop in pressure on the pipeline that carries oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, the company said it shut down its Keystone system Wednesday night. Oil spilled into a creek in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City.
Zack Pistora, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Kansas, noted the spill in his state was larger than all of the 22 previous spills combined on the Keystone pipeline, which began operations in 2010.
“This is going to be months, maybe even years before we get the full handle on this disaster and know the extent of the damage and get it all cleaned up,” he said.
In September 2013, a Tesoro Corp. pipeline in North Dakota ruptured and spilled 20,600 barrels, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data.
A more expensive spill happened in July 2010, when an Enbridge Inc. pipeline in Michigan ruptured and spilled more than 20,000 barrels into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. Hundreds of homes and businesses were evacuated.
The Keystone pipeline’s previous largest spill came in 2017, when more than 6,500 barrels spilled near Amherst, South Dakota, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released last year. The second largest, 4,515 barrels, was in 2019 near Edinburg, North Dakota.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said drinking water wells were not affected by this week’s spill and the oil didn’t move from the creek to larger waterways. The spill was in pastureland about 5 miles (8 kilometers) northeast of Washington, the county seat of about 1,100 residents and no evacuations were ordered.
Pipelines are often considered safer than shipping oil by railcar or truck, but large spills can create significant environmental damage.
The nearly 2,700-mile Keystone pipeline carries thick, Canadian tar-sands oil to refineries in Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas. An arm of the Transportation Department that oversees pipeline safety permitted operator TC Energy run the pipeline at pressure greater than is usually allowed if the company used pipe made from better steel.
In a report to Congress last year, the Government Accountability Office said Keystone’s accident history was similar to other oil pipelines, but the spills have gotten larger in recent years. Investigations ordered by regulators found that the four worst spills were caused by flaws in design or pipe manufacturing during construction.
The TC Energy permit included more than 50 special conditions, including on its design, construction and operation, the GAO report said. Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy Pipeline Safety Trust, said Friday that he would have thought that the additional safety measures would have been enough to offset the pipeline’s higher pressure.
“When we see multiple failures like this of such large size and a relatively short amount of time after that pressure has increased, I think it’s time to question that,” Caram said, noting the 2017 and 2019 spills.
Concerns that spills could pollute waterways spurred opposition to plans by TC Energy to build another crude oil pipeline in the Keystone system, which would have cut across Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. Critics also argued that using crude from western Canada’s oil sands would worsen climate change, and President Joe Biden’s cancelation of a U.S. permit for the project led the company to pull the plug last year.
The spill caused a brief surge in crude prices Thursday. Benchmark U.S. oil was up more modestly — about 1 percent — on Friday morning as fears of a supply disruption were overshadowed by bigger concerns about an economic downturn in the U.S. and other major countries that would reduce demand for oil.
Tom Kloza, an Oil Price Information Service analyst, said that oil is now perceived as plentiful, “and this mishap will not have any appreciable impact on gasoline or diesel prices.” Prices at the pump will continue to drop a few cents a day, or even more, and that between Canadian imports and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the U.S. has enough crude to last more than three years at current demand, he said.
Patrick De Haan, an analyst for GasBuddy, which operates a price-tracking app, said there is pressure to repair the pipeline quickly and keep refineries supplied, adding that “if it lasts more than a few days, that could spell trouble.”
Past Keystone spills have led to outages that lasted about two weeks, but this outage could possibly be longer because it involves a body of water, RBC Capital Markets analysts said in a note to investors. Though it’s possible that a portion of the pipeline could restart sooner, they said.
The spill was 5 miles (8 kilometers) northeast of Washington, the county seat of about 1,100 residents.
The pipeline runs through Chris and Bill Pannbacker’s family farm. The hill where the breach happened was a landmark to locals and used to be a popular destination for hayrides, said Bill Pannbacker, a farmer and stockman. He disagreed with the company’s decision to build the pipeline over that 80-foot hill rather than bore through it, now questioning himself for relenting.
“I wish I would have held firmer. And I bet now they wish I would have held firmer too because I’m assuming the flow against that bend in the pipe is maybe what caused some of the problem.”
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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee hearing to examine social media's impact on homeland security, Sept. 14, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
So it's not shocking that she decided this week she's officially switching from the Democratic Party to be an independent.
"Arizonans are strong and independent."
"A fiercely independent record."
"Independent, just like Arizona."
Those weren't quotes from her announcement Friday. Those were from one of her widely run 2018 Senate campaign ads (which is still at the top of her YouTube page).
Making herself look like an "independent" has been part of her brand for some time – despite her earlier days as a liberal activist.
She's not the first senator to switch parties – Jim Jeffords of Vermont defected from the GOP 20-plus years ago, giving control of the Senate to Democrats.
Facing a difficult reelection, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania left the Republican Party in 2009 to become a Democrat. (Democrat Al Franken's victory in Minnesota then gave Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority that helped pass the Affordable Care Act.)
After serving as the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee in 2004, the hawkish Joe Lieberman of Connecticut bolted to become an independent in 2006. The writing was on the wall for a while with Lieberman and Democrats. When he visited Arizona in 2003, for example, right as the Iraq war was starting – a war he voted for and defended – he was greeted by anti-war protests.
"He's a shame to Democrats," the organizer of the protest said. "I don't even know why he's running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him — what kind of strategy is that?"
That protester? None other than Kyrsten Sinema.
Ironically, though she hopes her decision to remove the "D" from next to her name will bolster her brand back home, it may contribute to a Republican being elected senator from Arizona in 2024.
No room for moderates?
Practically speaking, the deregistration won't change much on Capitol Hill. Because incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock won his runoff election in Georgia, Democrats still have firm control of the chamber, 50-49.
Sinema says she didn't make her decision because of Warnock's win but the timing, that she's keeping her Senate committee assignments through Democrats and won't be caucusing with Republicans suggests otherwise.
Sinema also says this move fits her more ideologically. That, some may see as proof of a lack of ideological diversity within the Democratic Party.
But while the party has gotten more liberal over the last 50 years and both parties have become more ideologically cohesive, Republicans have gotten far more conservative than Democrats have become liberal in that time, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Pew notes:
"Five decades ago, 144 House Republicans were less conservative than the most conservative Democrat, and 52 House Democrats were less liberal than the most liberal Republican, according to the analysis. But that zone of ideological overlap began to shrink....
"Since 2002,... there's been no overlap at all between the least liberal Democrats and the least conservative Republicans in the House. In the Senate, the end of overlap came in 2004, when Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia retired. Ever since, the gaps between the least conservative Republicans and least liberal Democrats in both the House and Senate have widened – making it ever less likely that there's any common ground to find."
Voting with Democrats most of the time
Going forward, Sinema says she won't attend Democratic caucus meetings, though unlike now-fellow independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, Sinema rarely did anyway.
Sinema has been a thorn in the party's side on some major pieces of legislation. The Arizona Democratic Party censured her over her opposition to changing the filibuster. But she has actually voted with Democrats on most – almost all – things.
She voted with the party 93% of the time, which is not even the lowest of other Democrats (or those who caucus with them). Sens. Sanders, Jackie Rosen of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia all have voted with the party to a lesser degree, albeit slightly, according to a tally by 538.
So what's this really about?
It's certainly good publicity for someone with low approval ratings – just 37% overall, including 41% of independents, approved of the job Sinema was doing, according to a bipartisan survey conducted by Impact Research and Fabrizio Ward.
She also needs to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, because Arizona is a state where they matter a lot. More than a third of the state's voters identify as "other," and Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 166,000.
Fellow Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, during his successful reelection campaign this year, also appealed to the middle, separating himself from Biden administration border policies, for example.
But it's not at all clear that, politically, Sinema's tactic will benefit her as much as she'd like.
Complicated politics
One benefit is that by declaring herself an independent and deregistering with the Democratic Party, she would avoid that primary competition and buy herself a go-straight-to-general-election pass, provided she can meet the higher signature threshold for an independent to qualify to get on the ballot.
"Last month, the voters of Arizona made their voices heard loud and clear – they want leaders who put the people of Arizona first," said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., someone progressives have been clamoring to see challenge Sinema in a primary. He added, "[A]t a time when our nation needs leadership most, Arizona deserves a voice that won't back down in the face of struggle. Unfortunately, Senator Sinema is once again putting her own interests ahead of getting things done for Arizonans."
The reality is Sinema is less popular in the state than Kelly or Biden, and Democratic polling has shown her getting trounced in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup against Gallego in a Democratic primary.
So going "independent" may be her only path to a general election. But there's no guarantee a Sinema independent bid would win her reelection.
What's true in politics is that you have to start with a base of support. Sinema abandoning the Democratic Party may alienate her further with the voters that used to be that base.
National Democrats will also have a decision to make – whether to support a "Democrat" in the 2024 Arizona Senate election or to back Sinema.
There's a real danger here for both the party and for Sinema. Backing someone wearing the team jersey could imperil Democrats' chances at retaining the seat. It's very likely her candidacy would pull more from the Democratic nominee and open up a path for a Republican to win with a mere plurality.
But backing Sinema could enrage the Democratic base and also potentially cost them the seat.
Without party support, Sinema could find herself in something of a political no man's land. But she's banking on her brand being enough to pull from moderates on both sides.
That's going to be a difficult test, especially since Sinema is widely unpopular.
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Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley. (photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
The legal hurdles facing Biden’s student loan cancellation plan underscore the need to overhaul our democracy—and make debt relief universal.
The Supreme Court announced on December 1 that it will hear oral arguments in February for a case challenging the constitutionality of the program. It’s unclear whether a majority of justices on the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will find it in their hearts to reject the flimsy litigation (though experts expect them to strike down the plan), but the challenge has already ground the first steps at widespread student debt cancellation to a halt. As a result, debtors have been left unsure of whether they will remain on the hook for the amounts covered under the program, which was itself inadequate, canceling just a fraction of the $1.6 trillion in federal student loans held by around 43 million people nationwide. In May 2022, when the program was first announced, NAACP president Derrick Johnson declared that “canceling $10,000 in student debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire. In other words, it won’t do anything, especially for the Black community.” Biden’s quarter-measure pales in comparison to Bernie Sanders’ plan to cancel all student debt without exception.
The Biden program’s tepid moderation notwithstanding, it was a step forward: it established a precedent for further debt relief and provided a clear, specific example of how people’s lives can concretely be improved through politics. The Republicans’ legalistic objections to student debt relief are clearly made in bad faith. Their true qualms about the legislation stem from the GOP representing the interests of private loan companies and elites who are invested in stoking cynicism about government’s capacity to change people’s material conditions for the better.
But two can play at technicalities. If establishment Democrats were genuinely interested in putting student debt relief on a solid legal foundation, Congress could theoretically act to pass a student debt relief law, thereby depriving the Republicans of their “power of the purse” objection and obviating the lawsuits that are currently in progress. And they could do so this month, while both houses are still under Democratic control, with the same remarkable alacrity that Congress used to pass a flagrantly anti-worker compromise to prevent a nationwide rail strike. There is a precedent for such action. When oil industry regulation during the New Deal era confronted legal challenge and the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional, a new law passed by Congress succeeded where the previous statute had failed.
The current Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade—and a slew of other anti-democratic decisions which fly in the face of public opinion, including Citizens United, which opened the floodgates for dark money in elections, and the Janus case, which kneecapped labor unions—have led to calls from some progressives for “court packing,” i.e. adding justices who would counter the conservative majority. But Joe Biden, an institutionalist to his core, has shown almost no enthusiasm for court reform. The most his administration has done is convene a 34-person bipartisan panel whose 280-page report, released in December 2021, has yet to even be favored with public comment from Biden.
Moderate Democrats like Biden will always find themselves on losing terrain when they accept our political system and its labyrinthine limitations as a given. Take, for example, the Democratic establishment’s unconscionable and completely unnecessary deference to the unelected Senate parliamentarian, which caused them to punt on a $15 an hour minimum wage; their incapacity to end the filibuster, which has strangled countless progressive initiatives; and their failure to pass the desperately necessary Democracy Act to overhaul our dilapidated electoral and legislative machinery, which allows gerrymandering, state-level voter suppression schemes, and the systematic underrepresentation of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam to continue unabated. One could ascribe this to mere political ineptitude from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the rest of the Democratic Party’s ancien régime. Less charitably, corporate Democrats’ inaction could be interpreted as structural — an unsurprising extension of their personal class interests and the interests of their rich patrons.
Setting such motivations aside, the legal setbacks for Biden’s student debt cancellation plan underscore an important point for the Left. Changes to the Supreme Court and other unsexy structural reforms are just as important as popular, grassroots mobilization if we want to realize the fundamental progressive changes this country urgently needs. History bears this out: the New Deal era was the last time transformational programs of the scope that we need today were passed, and the Supreme Court ruled many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most important programs unconstitutional until he threatened to pack the court, prompting a leftward shift and rescuing the remainder of the New Deal from judicial reversal. Political theorists Samuel Moyn and Corey Robin have argued cogently that the Constitution’s fierce opposition to true, genuinely representative democracy and the straitjacket it imposes on governmental action are among the most severe pathologies of American politics. They set a hard limit on the kinds of progressive reforms that can be enacted, dooming us to reenact the past.
The short-term fix to the crisis of student debt, and Americans’ more general indebtedness — which entails about $200 billion in medical debt, $925 billion in credit card debt, $1.75 trillion in student debt and $1.42 trillion in car loan debts — would be quite simple: a debt jubilee where the federal government cancelled all debts. Summing up those figures, we can estimate that such a program of general debt relief could cost around $4.3 trillion, but that pales in comparison to the $5.8 trillion that the Pentagon, which recently failed its fifth audit in a row, has spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the social, economic, and cultural benefits of liberating every American from debt would be immense, providing a tremendous fillip to democracy and human happiness which could then spur longer-term fixes. These could include enacting Medicare for all to prevent the stranglehold of medical debt, guaranteeing debt-free public college for all to make student loan debt a thing of the past and adopting countless other social democratic reforms.
As long as our corrupt political system renders bold redistributive legislation impossible, and as long as centrist and neoliberal Democrats oppose the sweeping policies necessary to truly resolve the debt crisis, such measures will remain utopian; piecemeal charity programs like RIP Medical Debt will be the best we can do. But a society liberated from debt, in the short, medium, and long terms, is a worthy vision to galvanize organizing. Left-wing candidates and organizers should talk openly about debt relief and rake Republicans and corporate Democrats over the coals in the court of public opinion. Only by enacting comprehensive relief will we be able to banish the oppressive role of debt once and for all, creating new political space for bold action.
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U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Isabelo Rivera, the Adjutant General of Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló, visited the areas affected by Hurricane María in the municipalities of Loíza, Canóvanas and surrounding areas, September 21, 2017. Loíza is one of the municipalities suing fossil fuel companies. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
The groundbreaking case — filed November 22 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico — is the first climate-related class action lawsuit in the United States filed against the fossil fuel industry to target the industry with federal charges of racketeering. It alleges that the fossil fuel defendants engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort to promote climate denial and defraud consumers by concealing the climate consequences of fossil fuel products in order to inflate profits.
Sixteen Puerto Rican municipalities are suing as a class or representatives on behalf of the more than 60 municipalities on the island that all experienced devastating losses from the 2017 hurricanes. The case demands that fossil fuel companies pay for damages associated with catastrophic storms, beginning with the 2017 hurricanes, and their lingering impacts, arguing that these disasters are worsened by climate change.
The more than 200-page complaint alleges that fossil fuel companies’ products and deceptive conduct greatly accelerated global warming, including warming oceans. Climate models predict that as oceans warm, hurricanes will become more intense, leading to more turbocharged storms like Maria and Irma.
The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, in which both Irma and Maria hit, saw six major hurricanes and resulted in nearly $300 billion of damage. In Puerto Rico, Maria alone caused almost 3,000 fatalities and more than $120 billion in damages, destroying the island’s power grid and devastating other critical infrastructure like roads and health care facilities. This September, almost five years to the day after Maria hit, Hurricane Fiona slammed Puerto Rico, again impacting infrastructure and compounding damages from the 2017 storms. With mounting climate-related disaster costs, the question becomes, how can Puerto Rico pay for this?
Through this new litigation, the island’s municipalities are trying to compel some of the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal companies to pay for the consequences of the climate crisis their products have fueled. As explained in a press release announcing the lawsuit, the companies’ “failure to disclose the truth about their products had disastrous effects for Puerto Rico, which was defenseless against the historically strong hurricanes that hit the island in 2017.” The Global Climate Risk Index report from 2020 noted that between 1999 and 2018, Puerto Rico was the country most affected by climate change, due in part to “exceptionally devastating” storms.
Companies named as defendants in the lawsuit include BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, Occidental Petroleum, Motiva Enterprises, BHP, Arch Resources, Peabody Energy, and Rio Tinto. All are among the 90 corporate entities, or “carbon majors,” that research indicates are responsible for nearly two-thirds of carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution; the companies listed above together account for about 40 percent of industrial emissions from 1965 to 2017, according to the complaint.
The complaint, supported by excerpts from industry communications, delves into how oil companies knew over half a century ago about the potential catastrophic impacts of a warming planet, and that this warming resulted from the use of their products. It also details how they deliberately acted to conceal what they knew about climate impacts and to publicly disseminate disinformation, fund climate denial, and obstruct policy responses and attempts to shift to alternative energy sources.
“Instead of acting to limit the potential greenhouse gas emissions, they mobilized with the coal and fossil fuel dependent industries to manufacture and spread propaganda and deception about climate science, contrary to their own internal scientific conclusions, in order to ensure unabated emissions and the sale of their products to consumers worldwide and in Puerto Rico,” the complaint contends.
As part of their disinformation and deception campaigns, fossil fuel companies funded various “free market” think tanks and front groups to amplify their misleading messaging. The lawsuit calls out a handful of these organizations, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which received more than $2 million from Exxon, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which took funding from Exxon, Chevron, and Peabody.
Another group that the complaint alleges was central to the deception campaign was the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby organization formed in 1989 by companies and trade associations in carbon-intensive sectors such as fossil fuels, chemicals, automobiles, and electric utilities, to undermine climate science and thwart climate policies. The complaint details the GCC’s obstructionist role, which included the formation of a communications task force that in 1998 created the infamous “victory will be achieved when” internal memo that outlined the coalition’s objective to manipulate the public’s understanding of climate science.
Such conduct demonstrates an orchestrated attempt to obfuscate and obstruct, and this misleading behavior is ongoing, according to legal counsel for the municipalities.
“This is a laid out, multifaceted plan that was decades in the making that is still being perpetuated to this day,” Melissa Sims, an attorney with the law firm Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman PLLC, which is representing the Puerto Rican communities, told DeSmog.
A ‘New Front in the Climate Liability War‘
The lawsuit brings more than a dozen legal claims under federal and Puerto Rican law, such as consumer fraud, violation of Puerto Rican consumer protection rules, and violation of federal antitrust law. Notably, it also alleges violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a federal statute designed to fight organized crime or other corrupt conduct.
RICO has been successfully used to hold the tobacco industry accountable for lying about the health hazards of their products, and has been applied in litigation against opioid and auto manufactures. Until now, it had yet to be asserted in a climate liability lawsuit, although several Democratic senators have previously called for a federal probe of Big Oil that could result in potential racketeering litigation.
Patrick Parenteau, emeritus professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he had been expecting a RICO claim to arise in climate liability litigation.
“I think this opens a whole new front in the climate liability war,” he told DeSmog via email. “It sends yet another signal to the financial markets that fossil is a bad investment.”
Parenteau acknowledged that a racketeering claim adds extra challenges, since plaintiffs will need to prove collusion between the defendants. “But it ups the ante in terms of potential remedies and damages,” he explained.
Additionally, Parenteau explained that since the lawsuit was filed in federal court, it can avoid the venue disputes that have delayed the other climate liability lawsuits targeting fossil fuel companies.
Representatives for several of the oil company defendants said in emailed statements that this litigation is a “baseless distraction” and that climate solutions must be reached through “smart policy from governments” rather than courts.
“Addressing a challenge as big as climate change requires a truly collaborative, society-wide approach. We do not believe the courtroom is the right venue to address climate change,” Shell spokesperson Anna Arata said in a statement.
A lawyer for Chevron also described the climate crisis as a societal challenge resulting from “worldwide conduct” of consumers, including Puerto Ricans.
“Residents and public officials in Puerto Rico rely every day on oil and gas to live and work on the island, power their homes, become a tourist destination, and grow their economy. This lawsuit is one in a series of suits that attempt to punish a select group of energy companies for a challenge that is the result of worldwide conduct stretching back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” said Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, counsel for Chevron Corporation.
A 2021 peer-reviewed study by Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, however, suggests that these kinds of statements are part of a misleading narrative framing that downplays the gravity of the climate crisis, normalizes dependency on oil and gas, and focuses blame on individual consumers. According to the study, which examined communications from ExxonMobil, “These patterns mimic the tobacco industry’s documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations—which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms—and onto consumers.”
ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuit from Puerto Rico.
Boutrous added: “Chevron believes the claims alleged are legally and factually meritless, and will demonstrate that in court.”
But if the federal racketeering litigation that determined that tobacco companies had committed fraud on a massive scale is any indication, the fossil fuel companies could be in real legal peril with this new RICO litigation.
“Tobacco opened the door to using RICO, and let’s face it—RICO was enacted to fight organized crime,” said Sharon Eubanks, an attorney who previously led the U.S. Justice Department’s successful RICO litigation against Big Tobacco in United States v. Philip Morris USA, et al. “That seems to be what we have here with Big Oil as well.”
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