22 December 22
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At a time of declining observance of democratic values throughout professed democratic societies Zelensky and his Ukrainian countrymen and women are giving their lives to be free and to join a Western structure that gives them hope and inspiration. That inspiration sustains them in this struggle just as surely as it inspires those countries they hope to become a part of.
What is leadership? Is it given? Is it awarded? Or does it grow from struggle and triumph, adversity and perseverance? Does Volodymyr Zelensky not speak for all of us? Does he not lift us on his shoulders as he does his own people? Does he not renew our faith in democratic values as Ukrainians themselves live and die for them?
What is courage? Is courage making bold statements standing at a parliamentary lectern? Is it writing a check to support a struggle on the other side of the world? Or is it remaining in the line of fire and leading your people as a vastly superior invading army tries to overrun your country?
Who could be a more inspiring spokesperson for the thing we call freedom. Who could be a more courageous proponent of democracy? Can we now go back to the charade we have allowed democracy to become in Western societies?
If the Western Democratic Order survives in a material and functional form there will be no more important figure than Volodymyr Zelensky. His legacy is being written here, now as is ours. At a time when true leaders are increasingly rare one has risen.
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Migrants waited at the U.S.-Mexico border near El Paso on Tuesday as National Guard soldiers patrolled. (photo: Paul Ratje/New York Times)
Wednesday had been the day that a public health policy allowing for the rapid expulsion of migrants during the coronavirus pandemic, known as Title 42, was set to lift by order of a federal court, bringing a rush of asylum-seekers over the border.
The Supreme Court, in its own order this week, delayed the policy’s end date for at least several more days. But the expectation remained that a surge of arrivals unlike any seen on the border in years would soon take place.
And so a tense and uncertain limbo pervaded both sides on Wednesday. Many migrants who hoped to once again be allowed to cross and claim asylum held back, while others forged ahead, wading across the Rio Grande with children lofted above the water or clambering through heavy brush to avoid detection.
From a hilltop outside the border city of Eagle Pass, National Guard members, sent to the border by the State of Texas, surveyed the Rio Grande next to armored personnel carriers, positioned to be visible from Mexico as a deterrent. Along the river, a federal surveillance blimp hovered over a popular crossing point north of town.
In El Paso, newly placed concertina wire rimmed the riverbanks in an area where thousands of migrants had recently crossed. A National Guard member shouted in Spanish at migrants stepping through the shallow waters: “Crossing is illegal!” Some turned around, while others continued across.
“This is just a way to intimidate us, to deter us from trying to cross,” said Roberto Guanipa, 39, a Venezuelan who watched the scene from Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side. “We are trying to stay in line and ask for legal asylum. We are not trying to cross illegally.”
The Biden administration has been anticipating a spike in arrivals with the end of the pandemic-era policy, deploying additional personnel to the border, including employees from agencies that do not typically have a presence there. The Homeland Security Department has said that it needs $3.4 billion in additional funding to meet the challenge, but Congress’s new funding package, released on Tuesday, fell short of that.
One administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to relay internal discussions, said the department was facing potentially 12,000 illegal border crossings a day once the policy ended, with the resources to manage about 4,000.
The actual date that the policy would lift remained uncertain on Wednesday as the Supreme Court considered an emergency application from 19 Republican-led states, including Texas, seeking to preserve it. Advocates for asylum-seekers had sued to end the policy, arguing that there was no longer a valid health rationale for denying migrants their legal right to ask for safe harbor in the United States.
Also uncertain on Wednesday were the steps that federal officials might take to try to discourage illegal crossings once Title 42 ended.
The White House and immigration officials have considered barring asylum to migrants who traveled through another country to get to the United States, but did not first seek asylum in that country. The administration said any new policies that would restrict access to asylum would be rolled out alongside a new pathway for some migrants.
Even with the public health policy still in place, crossings have continued to rise, particularly in El Paso. The policy has not been used uniformly, largely because the Biden administration allows humanitarian exemptions and the U.S. government cannot repatriate people from certain countries because of strained diplomatic ties.
El Paso has been averaging about 2,500 new arrivals in recent days, overwhelming existing infrastructure. Mayor Oscar Leeser said he had been told by Mexican officials that thousands of migrants were on their way.
The city is using two closed-down schools and its civic center to house migrants in the coming days, when temperatures are expected to dip to dangerous levels. Mr. Leeser called all these measures “Band-Aids.”
“The immigration system is broken and we all know that,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “But at the end of the day, something has to change, because this is not a long-term solution.”
Ricardo Samaniego, the El Paso County judge, said what he did not want was a show of force along the river, pointing to the Texas National Guard’s actions in recent days.
“Witnessing all the state operations and uncoordinated activities concern me from a humanitarian perspective,” said Mr. Samaniego, the county’s top official. He added that blocking migrants from reaching Border Patrol agents and applying for asylum “could be illegal from a federal law perspective.”
Still, the presence of extra law enforcement in Texas appeared to send a message to many on the Mexican side. The line of people waiting to be processed next to a tall metal fence on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez numbered in the hundreds, a far cry from the thousands of people who were waiting just last week.
Many migrants waiting just across the border from El Paso were glued to their phones on Wednesday, looking for the latest news about the public health policy. Others had stayed more inside Mexico, knowing there was no use sleeping on cold ground next to the river until something changed.
“They know there is no point in coming now,” said Carlos Hernandez, 40, who left Venezuela in September. “Others are going back to Mexico, to save money and be ready for the next time. I’m already here. I can’t go back. I went through a lot just to get here.”
He watched with what he described as envy as migrants from Cuba and Nicaragua stood in a line along the towering border wall, waiting to enter the United States. Those countries are among several whose citizens are exempt from the public health rule, because they do not have agreements with the United States to accept deportation flights, and Mexico will not take them back.
“I want to be in that line,” Mr. Hernandez said. “It’s not fair that Title 42 lets some people go in and others stay back.”
At the southern end of the border, near the Gulf of Mexico, local officials in Matamoros, Mexico, said roughly 4,000 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, had gathered in an open-air encampment a few blocks from the border. Many were waiting for the end of Title 42 so they could enter the United States and apply for asylum.
Erika Moreno, 28, who came with her 2-year-old son from Venezuela, had been staying at a temporary shelter in the city but could remain for only a month and would soon end up in the encampment. “We have been waiting and waiting,” she said. “There are so many rumors, and for the most part we depend on the information we see on the internet.”
The increase in migrants arriving in El Paso had not diminished the number arriving in and around Eagle Pass, almost 500 miles away. Already, some 1,500 have been flowing each day into Eagle Pass, a city of about 28,000, one city official said, often overwhelming local resources and crowding the only hospital.
“It’s oversaturated,” said Ivan A. Morua, the acting city manager. He said the city was anticipating double or even triple the current number of arrivals with the end of Title 42.
Mr. Morua said he was also bracing for a more immediate crisis: how to provide shelter for those who need it when a strong cold front sweeps across the border region at the end of the week. He said city officials were weighing creating separate, temporary shelters for local residents and for migrants, and even putting people in the civic center.
The city has been the center of Gov. Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar, nearly two-year effort to increase law enforcement along the border, known as Operation Lone Star. But neither the wall of containers between the international bridges in Eagle Pass, nor the chain-link fence snaking for miles along the riverbank — both placed there by the Texas National Guard — appear to have altered the pace of arrivals.
A break in the state’s fence could be seen along with a field of discarded clothes and trash, signs of a large number of people crossing recently. “You can see clothing all along the water,” said Lt. Donny Kindred, a helicopter pilot with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Migrants spotted from a helicopter on Wednesday afternoon on the outskirts of Eagle Pass appeared to be seeking to turn themselves in to Border Patrol, the first step in applying for asylum. In one spot, a group of more than a dozen gathered by a National Guard vehicle. In another, three people walked along a ranch road, apparently looking for someone to surrender to, trailed by three head of livestock.
The helicopter circled over a spot where migrants seeking to evade the authorities appeared to have hidden among the low trees and mesquite, leaving a backpack and other belongings behind. It flew over a state highway that has been a common route for smugglers, and for state troopers pursuing them at high speeds.
“There were several pursuits this morning,” said Lieutenant Kindred. “It’s just been overwhelming.”
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Ursula von der Leyen ‘oversees the commission like a military operation’. (photo: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters)
The president of the European Commission has earned the title bestowed on her by Forbes magazine
A good choice. After a weak start three years ago, the former German defence minister is becoming Europe’s crisis manager par excellence. With her somewhat formal, stiff demeanour, Von der Leyen may have won few hearts and minds, but during the pandemic, and especially since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, she has established a reputation for getting things done in Europe. VDL, as she is also known, “is a machine”, a senior official in the commission told me. “She’s tough, focused and extremely efficient.”
The “Qatar-gate” corruption scandal unfolding in the European parliament may have put Von der Leyen on the spot for not having proposed a stronger EU ethics body. But that criticism is unfair. She has worked on it, but the parliament has so far rejected the much stricter rules that apply to the commission. For EU governments, which find parliament a nuisance anyway and are in no mood to subject their own institution – the law-making European Council – to the commission’s transparency standards either, VDL’s worth lies elsewhere. In a turbulent world, Europe’s self-perception – as a peaceful, values-based community with a relatively open market and scant geopolitical clout – is sorely tested and requires urgent adjustment. Without the commission they cannot even begin to do this.
With Russia waging an economic and information war against the EU, China trying to squeeze political capital out of economic dependencies and the US embarking on a protectionist path, Europe’s successful model needs protection. So Europe’s leaders are now taking steps towards “more Europe” that they were previously unwilling to take. During the pandemic, they agreed on joint vaccine procurement and large financial injections to stricken economies. Since February, they have beefed up common security and border controls, welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees, relaunched the EU’s enlargement process and moved to secure common energy supplies. Meanwhile, Europe is seeking to become the world’s first carbon-neutral bloc.
European governments do not like to “Europeanise” powers held at national level – unless, as the founding father Jean Monnet once said, there is a crisis and “they do not know what to do”. Now is such a moment. National leaders face huge problems they cannot solve on their own. They look for joint solutions, with Von der Leyen both service-provider and midwife.
The commission’s first female president’s secret is neither that she occupies an unchallenged powerful position, nor her charisma. EU decision-making has become increasingly intergovernmental in recent years, with a corresponding loss in power for “Brussels”. The member nations’ leaders may agree to European solutions, even on issues that are politically sensitive for their citizens, such as security, monetary policy, health or migration. But they want to keep their implementing body, the commission, on a short leash.
They constantly ask the commission to submit to them draft proposals for new European laws and regulations. At the same time, they weaken EU institutions – and often bypass parliament – by cutting budgets and keeping control of the implementation of policies to themselves. During the pandemic, they agreed to jointly borrow more than €700bn to support affected countries, while insisting that all 27 heads of state and government co-decide what to allocate to whom. The same is now happening with energy security, migration and foreign policy. Last week, all 27 had to sign off on an €18bn aid package for Ukraine – which Hungary threatened to veto unless its own funding from Brussels was unblocked.
Thus, the EU is becoming one big bazaar for national governments, complete with haggling and dramatic walkouts. This renders compromises more byzantine and complex, less transparent and less accountable. But more than ever, member states need the expertise of the European Commission, legal and otherwise, to draw up common policies, plans and compromises. Von der Leyen is supplying this around the clock.
A commission official tells me she is “better” than her famous predecessor Jacques Delors. This remark underlines how the EU is evolving. Delors drove the single market and monetary union, sealed in the Maastricht Treaty. He was a visionary. Von der Leyen is more of a pragmatist. Member states demand more than ever of Brussels – from cheap gas and tougher anti-corruption rules to a new state aid policy to prevent companies moving to the US.
To deliver on all these things, Von der Leyen oversees the commission like a military operation. She sleeps in a small space next to her office (for which she pays rent), regularly asking staff on Friday evenings to prepare reports for Sunday morning meetings. In policy terms, she runs a tight ship, keeping everything close to her chest (including Brexit talks), often leaving other commissioners in the dark. This does not make her popular among staff. Employees complain they are chronically overworked. Vacancies stay open for months because appointments have not had VDL’s imprimatur.
This, however, is how the former physician delivers. National diplomats, always ready to scapegoat the commission, now praise it for giving them the service they demand. Occasionally, she uses that trust to steer them as in the old days when the commission was a more powerful force. She has nudged them, for example, towards controversial decisions they disliked – such as withholding more than half of Hungary’s European funding for violating the EU’s rule of law conditionality. This principled stance has earned Von der Leyen much respect in the parliament, whose members had started the first procedures against Hungary years ago and were keen to see them bear fruit in the end.
Herding the 27 governments towards common decisions should be a task for the president of the European Council, Charles Michel. He commands little respect in European capitals, even less in Brussels. So heads of government often turn to the commission president to perform this role too. In VDL, Europe seems finally to be getting that single telephone number that Henry Kissinger always said he needed if he wanted to call Europe.
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A North Atlantic right whale sounds while feeding on plankton in Cape Cod Bay, off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts on April 12, 2012. (photo: Bill Greene/Getty)
Provision allows Maine’s lobster industry to continue using fishing gear that maims the species, often fatally, until 2028
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, an unprecedented right whale policy rider inserted by Democratic senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Patrick Leahy of Vermont into the omnibus funding budget released on Tuesday effectively condemns the right whale to extinction.
By most estimates, the species counts 340 individuals, including just 70 breeding females, and has been declining markedly in population numbers over the past decade. Environmentalists maintain that right whale mortalities often result from their becoming tangled in ropes and buoys used to mark lobster traps.
Any delay in forcing the introduction of ropeless traps will almost certainly put the right whale on a course toward extinction, the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.
“Schumer and Leahy are extinction Democrats who just heartlessly put special interests above our nation’s beautiful natural heritage,” the center’s government affairs director, Brett Hartl, said.
“Right whales have migrated along New York’s coastline for thousands of years, but … Schumer’s action will make this generation the last to witness these remarkable creatures. What a horrific legacy to leave to one’s grandchildren.”
Speaking with the Guardian, a spokesperson for the center, Patrick Sullivan, said that the decision to legislatively overturn an earlier federal court ruling that delayed the implementation of changes to lobster fishing practices by two years meant that Democrats had caved in to the industry.
“Apparently it was able to pressure even Senator Schumer and others to take this really appalling approach to the problem,” Sullivan said. “We’ve always said that the lobster industry needs support as it transitions to whale-friendly approaches, but it cannot come at the cost of the extinction of the right whale, which is what this bill is about.”
Last month, Joe Biden signaled his support for Maine’s $1bn lobster industry when the president served the crustacean to 200 guests at a White House state dinner for the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
The right whale legislation attached to the year-end omnibus bill orders additional whale protection measures “utilizing existing and innovative gear technologies, as appropriate” by 4 December 2028, and for a report on the status of the right whale to be submitted each year.
Despite some additional funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, the interior department and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the “amounts remain well short of what’s needed to address the extinction crisis”, according to the biological diversity center.
According to Sullivan, the next few years will be crucial for the right whale. “When you see high levels of mortality and low levels of reproduction it doesn’t take long for a species to get to a point where recovery becomes very, very difficult, if not impossible,” he said.
Studies show that climate change-induced warming in the Gulf of Maine has resulted in decline in copepods, the whale’s food source. That has probably contributed to a decline in the number of female whales reproducing.
In 2009, 39 calves were born, according to one study. No right whale calves were born in 2018.
Over the past decade, the population is estimated to have decreased by approximately 26% from about 500. Mortalities have been blamed on ship strikes in the Gulf of St Lawrence and, increasingly, from entanglement in lobster fishing gear.
“There are very few whales and a lot of gear in the water,” the We Are All Whalers author Michael Moore – of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – told the Guardian earlier this month. “We’re not managing to avoid lethal entanglement or entanglement that’s detrimental to their health. For whales to reproduce and for their numbers to recover, they have to be fit, fat, healthy.”
“They’re really susceptible, much more so than other whales,” said the Leviathan author Philip Hoare, “and it’s pretty sad and kind of crazy that this is happening off the shores of the richest democracy on Earth.”
With politicians resisting swift implementation of measures to save the whale, it may be up to consumers to take action. The Whole Foods chain in November removed lobster from its stores after California-based Seafood Watch added US and Canadian lobster fisheries to its “red list”, meaning that they are considered to be at high risk of harming the environment.
Earlier this month, the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council’s suspension of the certification it awarded to the Maine lobster industry takes effect. The council called whale entanglement a “serious and tragic situation”.
Sullivan, the biological diversity center spokesperson, said the right whale species could still be saved through immediate action to protect it from entanglement.
“The window is really narrow and this legislation shuts it,” he said. “It really puts the right whale on a very bad trajectory and we are very concerned about where things go from here.”
“A four-year delay is devastating not only because of the whales who might have been saved, but because of the inevitable delays between agreeing on a policy and implementation, resulting in even more avoidable losses,” said the director of animal legal education at George Washington University, Kathy Hessler.
“It’s long past time to do what we can to stop causing the harm to the whales, as well as other aquatic animals, and the ecosystem. We have options that we aren’t using that would protect the whales and allow the industry to continue. There is no excuse not to try them.”
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U.S. House Ways and Means Committee staff members transport boxes of documents after a committee meeting to discuss former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 20, 2022. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
After taking office, Donald Trump said he’d keep his tax turns secret because of an audit. We now know he was lying — but that wasn’t the only problem.
As regular readers know, a lengthy legal fight followed, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court last month rejecting a last-ditch plea from the former president. The committee, which has jurisdiction over tax laws, soon after obtained six years’ worth of tax materials that the Republican had desperately tried to keep hidden.
Last night, the House Ways and Means Committee voted along party lines to make the documents public.
Before going further, let’s make one thing clear: This will not be a one-day story. There will be a great many documents to review in detail, and the revelations — to the extent that there’s anything important to be learned from the materials — will take time to evaluate and assess.
In fact, as of this morning, we don’t yet have the tax returns themselves. After the committee vote, the Democratic-led panel said the records would be fully released in the coming days, and members instead released a 29-page report on its investigation.
My expectation ahead of last night’s vote was that the powerful committee might’ve uncovered evidence of wrongdoing from the former president. In an unexpected twist, congressional investigators apparently exposed a different kind of problem. The New York Times reported:
The Internal Revenue Service failed to audit former President Donald J. Trump during his first two years in office despite a program that makes the auditing of sitting presidents mandatory, a House committee revealed on Tuesday after an extraordinary vote to make public six years of his tax returns. Mr. Trump filed returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the I.R.S. began auditing those filings only in 2019 — the first on the same day in April the Ways and Means Committee requested access to his taxes and any associated audits, a report by the panel said.
Let’s pause to review a little history.
In late 1973, Richard Nixon faced a tax audit that determined that the then-president owed quite a bit in back taxes. (As we’ve discussed, all of this coincided with the Watergate scandal, but the competing controversies were not directly related.)
“The people have to know whether or not their president is a crook,” Nixon told reporters at the time. “Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I’ve got.”
In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, a series of ethics reforms were created, including an automatic audit of every sitting president’s taxes, every year, regardless of circumstances. A president need not be suspected of any wrongdoing; the reform was simply created to help bolster public confidence.
Most modern presidents, eager to appear forthcoming, released their tax returns to the public anyway. Trump — the only modern major-party presidential nominee to refuse to disclose his tax returns — used the post-Watergate reform as an excuse to justify secrecy.
Indeed, even after taking office in 2017, the Republican refused to release the materials, insisting that he couldn’t because he was under audit. Even at the time, the argument didn’t make sense: Trump was free to release the documents anyway, as other modern presidents from both parties had done.
But we now know that the underlying assumption was also wrong: The automatic, mandatory audit didn’t happen.
This is important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Trump lied. For another, there was an apparent breakdown in the system that warrants additional scrutiny: If the IRS was required to audit the then-president as a matter of course, there should be some kind of explanation as to why this didn’t happen.
But let’s also not miss the forest for the trees: The whole point of the congressional exercise, the foundational basis for Neal’s initial outreach to the Treasury Department nearly four years ago, was a Ways and Means Committee investigation into the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program.
The former president, his lawyers, and his GOP allies insisted that there was no “legislative purpose” to the inquiry, and the committee’s work on the issue was little more than a political fishing expedition.
Those complaints have now collapsed. The committee set out to scrutinize the IRS’s presidential audit program and it found a problem with the IRS’s presidential audit program.
“The tax forms were really never audited,” Neal said during a news conference after the vote, “and only my sending a letter at one point, prompted sort of a rear-view response."
As an NBC News report added, the Massachusetts Democrat has proposed legislation to codify the mandatory audit policy into law, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised the idea late yesterday in a statement.
The political conversation about Trump’s secrecy has been going on for years. The policy conversation about the IRS and presidential tax returns is just getting started.
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Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a ceremony when Israeli President Isaac Herzog handed him the mandate to form a new government on Nov. 13. (photo: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)
Netanyahu said the new coalition, which includes once-fringe ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties, would serve “all citizens of Israel.” He has said that he aims to swear in the new government in the coming week.
Most of the agreements, made after 1½ months of marathon negotiations between Netanyahu and his six coalition partners, have not been finalized. But the new government has already sparked concern among Israelis and members of the international community over bills that seek to prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides has refused to comment in Israeli media on the question of working with far-right members of the government. But he said that he would work with Netanyahu, who has promised that his “hands are on the wheel,” Nides said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The Religious Zionism bloc, made up of formerly fringe far-right parties and which propelled Netanyahu back to power, has called to cancel the Jerusalem gay pride parade, increase funding for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority, hollow out the judicial system, and legitimize Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank so as to operationally, if not legally, set the stage for Israeli annexation of that disputed territory. The move would signal the end of prospects for a two-state solution, in which a Palestinian state would exist alongside Israel.
Firebrand politician and West Bank settler Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of incitement and racism and was barred from serving in the Israeli military because of his activism in extremist organizations, is set to be the minister of national security. The rebranded and expanded portfolio will allow him to exercise unprecedented control over the Israeli police and over forces that operate in the occupied West Bank.
His Jewish Power party may also be granted representative power in the committee in charge of appointing judges, according to Israeli media. He is also among the proponents of a bill that would allow the parliamentary partners to override decisions made by the Supreme Court, which often rules in favor of human rights issues and against settlement expansion in the West Bank. The court also has long been seen as the last standing liberal bastion in a country that has sharply pivoted to the right over the past two decades.
“Without judicial review and independent legal advice, we remain with only the principle of majority rule; a democracy in name but not in essence,” warned Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara at a conference in Haifa last week, referring to the bills that the new government plans to enact.
Netanyahu swept to power in the Nov. 1 elections, the fifth held in less than four years. His win ended an elongated political stalemate that stemmed from questions around his fitness as a leader while he remains embroiled in an ongoing corruption trial.
Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party has in recent years been the largest in Israeli politics, and it was able to clinch 64 out of 120 Knesset seats in the recent round of elections with the support of the ultra-Orthodox and newly united far-right Religious Zionism bloc.
His extremist, ideologically driven allies have made demands that have held up coalition negotiations, and they compelled Netanyahu to request an extension to his four-week mandate to form a government.
On Dec. 9, Israeli President Isaac Herzog granted Netanyahu a 10-day extension, with the caveat that the new government must respect the rights of minorities and “must preserve the powerful bond with the Jewish Diaspora.”
Netanyahu’s ultranationalist, ultra-Orthodox political allies have announced plans to change the Law of Return, a 1950 law that guarantees citizenship for all Jews, from any country in the world, who can prove to have at least one Jewish grandparent. The law is widely seen as a fundamental legislative framework through which Israel supports the diversity of the Jewish diaspora.
The formation of the new government also coincides with an escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has reached the deadliest level for both Israelis and Palestinians in years. Members of the coalition have advocated changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, the flash point holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City that has for decades been central to both the Israeli and Palestinian battles for sovereignty, and giving a freer hand to Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, which critics warn could further ignite tensions.
Minutes after the formation of the government was announced, at least one Palestinian was killed in a clash with the Israeli army, which had accompanied Jewish worshipers to a sensitive religious site in Nablus, a city in the occupied West Bank.
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Legal experts estimate future PFAS litigation could cost 3M more than $30 billion. (photo: Getty)
Legal experts estimate future PFAS litigation could cost the company more than $30 billion.
3M makes Scotchgard and other water-repellent products which contain a class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that do not break down in the environment. PFAS has been found in nearly every state in the country and in everything from polar bears to fast food wrappers. Research has shown a link between these chemicals and public health concerns such as high blood pressure in mid-life women, stunted developmental growth, infertility, as well as kidney, liver, and testicular cancers.
In a statement, the St.Paul-based company said the decision comes on the heels of an “evolving external landscape,” which includes increased regulatory pressures. In the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, released a PFAS Strategic Roadmap, which plans to create new policies to protect public health and the environment while holding polluters accountable. In addition to the increased federal pressure, 3M has been the target of various lawsuits directed at PFAS manufacturers.
California announced a lawsuit in November that alleges 3M, DuPont, and other PFAS producers have caused far-reaching damage to public health and the environment by dealing in products laced with “forever chemicals.” The lawsuit is similar to a dozen others filed in states across the country. While the lawsuits are mounting, 3M’s awareness of their production problem has been festering for decades.
As early as the 1970s, the manufacturing company knew that PFAS was accumulating in human bloodstreams. According to The Intercept, 3M was sued by its home state of Minnesota in 2010 and settled the suit for $850 million, which lead to a mountain of internal documents, memos, and research to be released by the state’s Attorney General’s Office, showing exactly what the company knew about the harm of the products it produced.
Minnesotans are still grappling with the potential health effects of PFAS, which has had devastating effects on the area’s youth. According to the Minnesota Reformer, a study of children who died between 2003 and 2015 in Oakdale, a Twin Cities suburb, found that a child who died there was 171% more likely to have had cancer than a child who died in the surrounding area. The state of Minnesota alleges that PFAS made its way into the area’s groundwater after decades of 3M discarding PFAS-contaminated waste products in unlined dump sites.
The EPA announced in November that PFAS pollution from 3M had caused an “imminent and substantial endangerment” of the drinking water for nearly 300,000 people in the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa and ordered an investigation into 3M’s role in the pollution.
In 2000, 3M pledged to stop the use of two specific strains of PFAS chemicals in their production process, but the company argued, in its recent announcement, that the continued use of PFAS was “critical” to make products necessary for modern life, such as medical technology, phones, and automobiles. Legal experts estimate future litigation could cost the company upwards of $30 billion.
In the wake of the announcement, environmental groups say the decision is long overdue and hope that the company is still responsible for decades of inaction and harm to the public.
“This is a big win for public health and the environment,” Mike Schade, a program director for the nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, told Grist. “3M historically has been one of the biggest PFAS polluters not only here in the US but globally, and for decades they have proceed and released massive amounts of PFAS that have contaminated communities, water supplies, fish and wildlife, all across the planet”
Schade said that this decision is part of a growing trend of major corporations abandoning PFAS in their manufacturing process. While the manufacturers are looking at a PFAS-free future, he noted that downstream businesses, like clothing companies that still trade in these chemicals, should stop the trail of toxic pollution. He said it’s likely that more companies will be looking for PFAS alternatives and the EPA and industry regulators should remain vigilant that the chemicals these companies replace PFAS with aren’t bound to create the same harms already documented by the forever chemicals.
“In the years going forward, we’re going to be seeing hundreds of communities that have to clean up toxic chemicals, “ Schade said, “and 3M must be held financially liable for that pollution.”
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