Cassidy Hutchison, a former special assistant to Trump, said in pre-recorded testimony that Gaetz and Brooks had advocated for a blanket, preemptive pardon for multiple members and that Gaetz was personally pushing for a pardon for himself. Hutchison also said that Gaetz had been pushing for a pardon “since early December” but she wasn’t sure why.
Hutchison also said that Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Scott Perry, R-Pa., all asked for pardons. She said that while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., had not contacted Hutchison personally for a pardon, Hutchinson had “heard that [Greene] had asked the White House Counsel’s Office for a pardon from [deputy counsel Pat Philbin].”
Hutchison added that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, had asked her whether the White House was going to pardon members of Congress but hadn’t asked her specifically for one for himself.
ASKED FOR PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS:
Matt Gaetz, R-FL.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa.
MO BROOKS, R-ALA. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who led much of Thursday’s hearing, highlighted a Jan. 11 email Brooks sent a White House staffer in which he recommended pardons for himself, Gaetz and the 147 Republican members of Congress “who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania.”
Yesterday, Benzinga reported on a curious statement made by Fed Chair Jerome Powell during his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday. Powell was asked by Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) if the Fed had been tracking the events in the crypto markets in the past several weeks. Powell responded that the Fed was watching those events “very carefully” but the Fed “did not see significant macro-economic implications.” The article goes on to lend credence to this observation from the Fed by noting the following:
“It is important to note the entire cryptocurrency market cap is $889.25 billion versus the American GDP, which is $25.34 trillion, and an equities market that controls more than $49 trillion.”
Before we drill down into the weeds of that crypto market cap figure, it’s important to note that former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan told Congress that he saw no major economic threat coming from subprime debt. In October 2008, as much of Wall Street and the U.S. economy lay in ruins from subprime debt bombs and related derivatives, Greenspan testified to a House Committee that “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Seriously? The most corrupt industry in America for more than a century and the head of the U.S. central bank thinks it’s an altruistic protector of shareholders’ interests?
The Fed and fellow Wall Street regulators appear to have made the same mistake today with crypto. As large financial institutions have entangled themselves deeper and deeper into all things crypto, federal regulators have been studying the problem rather than taking action.
So exactly how big is the problem? The $889.25 billion market cap for crypto cited by Benzinga is a miniscule part of the problem. That’s just the market value of all of the crypto that trades. And it should be noted that the market cap of crypto stood at $2.7 trillion as of last November, so investors have already experienced a negative wealth effect of $1.8 trillion.
But what about all of the crypto mining stocks that went public and have now lost 70 to 90 percent of investors’ money? What about the loans taken out by the crypto mining companies to buy all of that energy-guzzling computer equipment? What about the billions of dollars in margin loans sitting at federally-insured banks that were made to hedge funds to leverage their crypto bets? What about the bank loans to venture capital firms to invest in hundreds of crypto startup firms?
Estimates are that the real size of the crypto market is more in the range of $10 trillion. Anyone who thinks that a market of that size can implode without “significant macro-economic implications” is likely not an economist. (Unfortunately, Jerome Powell, the head of the monetary policy setting institution in the United States has a law degree, not an economics degree. And not to put too fine a point on it, but Powell was dead wrong on inflation being transitory and we’re all paying a steep price for that botched forecast.)
Another potential negative wealth effect may come from investors who bought cryptocurrency on their credit card and are watching the value of their crypto collapse while the interest rate on their credit card balance soars as a result of the Fed’s rate hikes. LendEdu reports that its survey showed that “18.15% of Bitcoin investors answered ‘I used a credit card to fund and purchase.’ ”
If you are gasping for breath at the news that U.S. regulators have actually allowed cryptocurrencies (variously called “rat poison squared” and a Ponzi scheme by very smart people) to be purchased on credit cards, you might want to sit down and put aside any cup of hot liquid in your hand while we fill in the rest of the details.
Over the past few days, we have been emailing some of the major providers of credit cards to find out if they allow their card members to purchase crypto on their credit cards. (We did that because crypto exchange, Coinmama.com, shows a Mastercard and a Visa emblem directly below the “Buy” button on their website. The crypto exchange, Binance, also prominently features Mastercard and Visa and says this: “At Binance, you can buy crypto with everyday fees using a VISA or Mastercard credit card. Alternatively, Binance also provides crypto purchases via bank transfer, fiat deposit, and e-wallet.”)
Here are the answers we have received thus far from the credit card companies:
Mastercard responded as follows: “Mastercard is working with over 60 crypto leading wallets and platforms. We continue to launch a range of products and services with these players, including the 24 crypto card programs that have been publicly announced. Consumers can buy crypto using their Mastercard card to instantly convert their crypto holding into fiat and spend wherever Mastercard is accepted at more than 90 million merchants worldwide. Only fiat currency enters Mastercard’s network. Mastercard is leading in innovation through programs like our recent partnership with Nexo and the launch of the Gemini Card with a simple mission — to deliver people new and one-of-a-kind choices in how they pay and to make crypto more accessible across the ecosystem. We also have partnerships with Bakkt and Uphold to make crypto card spend more accessible. You can learn more about our programs here and here.”
American Express told us this: “In line with industry practice, today we don’t allow our cardmembers to purchase crypto using their credit card, as much as we wouldn’t allow them to buy stocks. We see decentralized crypto, like Bitcoin, still largely an asset to store value, rather than a good or service. As the space evolves, we will continue to monitor it and to pursue parity. We are, however, working with partners to help them launch payments products on our network. For example, Abra just launched the Abra Crypto Card on the American Express network. This card transacts in U.S. dollars, and offers cryptocurrency as rewards. We are not the issuer, rather, facilitating their U.S. dollar transactions in our capacity as a payments network, while extending some of the unique American Express benefits to their customers.”
The entanglements at Visa with crypto are so mind-numbing that you’ll have to read it for yourself.
Capital One shared this: “Capital One does not enable consumers to purchase cryptocurrencies by borrowing on their Capital One credit cards. Consumers can, however, purchase cryptocurrencies via their debit cards and direct ACH transactions with their Capital One 360 checking accounts.”
Chase, part of JPMorgan Chase, told us this: “We decline crypto purchases on credit cards.”
Adding to the insanity of allowing cryptocurrencies (many of which are backed by nothing) to continue to make major encroachments into the U.S. financial system, the Fed has taken no action, other than to say it’s studying the problem. On November 23 of last year, the Fed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a joint statement on crypto which said this:
“Throughout 2022, the agencies plan to provide greater clarity on whether certain activities related to crypto-assets conducted by banking organizations are legally permissible, and expectations for safety and soundness, consumer protection, and compliance with existing laws and regulations related to:
Crypto-asset safekeeping and traditional custody services.
Ancillary custody services.
Facilitation of customer purchases and sales of crypto-assets.
Loans collateralized by crypto-assets.
Issuance and distribution of stablecoins.
Activities involving the holding of crypto-assets on balance sheet.”
Citigroup, the bank holding company which received the largest bailout in U.S. banking history during and after the 2008 financial crash, apparently isn’t waiting to find out from its regulators what’s legal and what’s not legal.
According to a press release yesterday at Business Wire, Citigroup has selected Metaco “to develop a platform to enable clients to store and settle digital assets seamlessly and securely. Citi intends to fully integrate METACO’s bank-grade digital asset custody and orchestration platform, Harmonize, into its existing infrastructure, to develop and pilot digital asset custody capabilities.”
Citigroup’s exposure to risky derivatives and subprime debt instruments collapsed its stock price during the 2008 financial crash. Its stock traded at 99 cents in early 2009. Beginning in December 2007 and lasting through at least June of 2010, Citigroup received the following in bailouts: $2.5 trillion in secret cumulative loans from the Federal Reserve; $45 billion in capital injections from the U.S. Treasury; the Federal government guaranteed over $300 billion of Citigroup’s assets; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed $5.75 billion of its senior unsecured debt and $26 billion of its commercial paper and interbank deposits.
Citigroup has apparently received a warning from the SEC that if it builds a crypto platform and begins to act as a custodian for cryptocurrencies, it’s going to impact its balance sheet – which means that the Fed will also have to require it to hold more capital against risky assets. Citigroup reported the following on its quarterly filing (10-Q) with the SEC for the quarter ending March 31, 2022:
“In March 2022, the SEC issued Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 121, which expresses the views of the SEC staff regarding the accounting for obligations to safeguard crypto-assets an entity holds for platform users. Specifically, the guidance requires issuers that hold digital assets for their platform users to recognize a liability for their obligation to safeguard the digital assets held and a corresponding asset, measured initially and subsequently at fair value. The guidance is effective for interim and annual periods ending after June 15, 2022, with retrospective application to the beginning of the fiscal year, with early adoption permitted. Citi is currently assessing the application of SAB 121, but based on its current activity does not expect any impact to its results of operations as a result of adopting SAB 121.”
Today six unelected judges issued a decision that will make our communities less safe. A radical supermajority in the Supreme Court–including three Trump-appointed justices–overturned a century-old New York State law requiring people to have a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public spaces.
With this decision, the Court sided with the gun lobby’s ‘guns everywhere’ agenda. We know that more guns in public spaces means more gun violence. It means more lives will be lost.
This decision does not signal the end of gun responsibility laws, but it rewrites legal standards in the gun lobby’s vision. And it will embolden gun rights extremists to challenge other evidence-based gun safety laws in court.
We have proven, time and time again, that we can take the gun lobby on in court and win. Right now, we are battling THREE gun lobby lawsuits, and the path to victory just got harder. We know that with your help, Washington’s evidence-based gun laws will continue to be upheld as constitutional.
But our opponents are working overtime to try to get other courts to follow in the Supreme Court’s extreme footsteps to throw out popular, lifesaving gun laws with no regard for how many lives will be lost. We are determined to keep fighting for as long as it takes to protect the important progress we have made. But we can’t do it alone. Please, donate $5 today to help us fight back against the reckless guns everywhere agenda.
It felt like a historic occasion when the leaders of Europe’s largest states, Germany, Italy and France, finally visited Kyiv last week. Air-raid sirens howled as their night train pulled into the Ukrainian capital. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of “a message of European unity.” But behind the warm words, there was also plenty of cold calculation as Europe’s leaders push to end the war as soon as possible.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, none of the European Union heavyweights had seen fit to visit Ukraine. Macron, who boasted that he has spent “at least a hundred hours” on the phone with Vladimir Putin, declared that he would travel to Kyiv only if he felt it was “useful.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke dismissively of not wanting to “join the queue of people who do a quick in-and-out for a photo opportunity.”
But the visit didn’t turn out to be particularly “useful” to Ukraine, which has been pleading desperately for more weapons; nor was it much more than a photo op. Apart from six additional howitzers from France, all the European leaders offered was support for Ukraine’s bid to become a member of the E.U. at some point in the future.
But how large the Ukrainian state will still be if it joins is anyone’s guess. The visitors made it clear that they want the war to end as soon as possible — and that they expect Kyiv to make concessions to make that happen.
Italy, which gets 40% of its imported gas from Russia, had already begun to circulate a peace plan that would implicitly compel Ukraine to give up political control over Crimea and Donbas. Both Italy and Germany have also begun to undermine sanctions against Russia by allowing their energy companies to open ruble accounts to pay for gas and oil, thus helping fuel Putin’s war machine.
Macron, who had been widely criticized for recently declaring that Russia shouldn’t be “humiliated,” doubled down on that notion. He said that the harsh terms imposed on Germany after its loss in World War I had been “a historic mistake” that “lost the peace because [France] wanted to humiliate Germany.” The implication is that if Russia is not treated with leniency now, it will commit far worse crimes in the future, just as Germany did in World War II.
Macron’s analogy is particularly ill-suited since it assumes that Russia has already lost the war. But this could not be further from the truth. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia controls one-fifth of his country. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said that Russia outnumbers Ukraine in artillery fire by 20 to 1 in some areas. By contrast, Germany was defeated in 1918 and forced to accept terms that cost it 13% of its territory in Europe. Nobody can or will make such demands on Russia. Macron’s analogy is wrong in every way, and he knows it.
Behind the desire to end the conflict soon lies the false assumption that this will allow Europe to resume business as usual. Russia is a crucial trading partner for Germany. Macron wants an end to the painful side effects of the war that are threatening to unravel his new tenure as president, and his Italian counterpart Mario Draghi, too, is struggling with the fallout from the sanctions. The trio sees a swift end of the war as necessary if they are to form a new axis of economic and political power in continental Europe after Brexit.
But this realpolitik approach is not only morally wrong, it is also shortsighted. Putin has notoriously argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a constituent republic, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He has made it clear that he seeks to undo this “catastrophe.”
If Putin is appeased now, as he was in 2014 when Germany and France failed to freeze the conflict in Ukraine, he will simply take the time to regroup. Bowing to economic pressures undermines the entire concept of deterrence. Germany long dismissed warnings that Moscow might try to leverage its deep dependence on Russian natural gas, thereby emboldening the Kremlin. Now Germany, Italy and France seem prepared to make the same mistake again.
Russia, meanwhile, shows little sign of concern. During the Kyiv visit, former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev sneered at the European leaders, calling them “fans of frogs, liverwurst and spaghetti.” Yet even as Moscow continues its indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Ukrainian civilians, Russia’s politicians are still treated as rational actors by those who seek peace at all costs.
Putin cannot, and will not, give up his claim on Eastern Europe. The supposed realpolitik of Europe’s most powerful countries is both shameful and ill-considered. France and Germany, of all countries, should know that an ambitious dictator can never be appeased.
The ruling expands upon a 2008 decision that said the Second Amendment safeguards a person’s right to possess firearms at home for self-protection.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Constitution provides a right to carry a gun outside the home, issuing a major decision on the meaning of the Second Amendment.
The 6-3 ruling was the court’s second important decision on the right to “keep and bear arms.” In a landmark 2008 decision, the court had said for the first time that the amendment safeguards a person’s right to possess firearms, although the decision was limited to keeping guns at home for self-defense.
The court has now taken that ruling to the next step after years of ducking the issue and applied the Second Amendment beyond the limits of homeowners’ property in a decision that could affect the ability of state and local governments to impose a wide variety of firearms regulations.
The decision, which came as Congress advanced the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in almost 30 years, involved a New York law that required showing a special need to get a permit to carry a concealed handgun in public. The state bans carrying handguns openly, but it allows residents to apply for licenses to carry them concealed.
The law at issue said, however, that permits could be granted only to applicants who demonstrated some special need — a requirement that went beyond a general desire for self-protection.
Gun owners in the state sued, contending that the requirement made it virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to get the necessary license. They argued that the law turned the Second Amendment into a limited privilege, not a constitutional right.
The court agreed with the challengers and struck down the heightened requirement, but it left the door open to allowing states to impose limits on the carrying of guns.
"The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not 'a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. "We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need."
In a concurring opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the ruling does not bar states from imposing licensing requirements for carrying handguns for self-defense, such as fingerprinting, background checks and mental health records checks.
New York's law was "problematic because it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials and authorizes licenses only for those applicants who can show some special need apart from self-defense" — in effect, denying citizens the right to carry a gun to protect themselves, he wrote.
"The dangers posed by firearms can take many forms," Breyer wrote. "Newspapers report mass shootings occurring at an entertainment district in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (3 dead and 11 injured); an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas (21 dead); a supermarket in Buffalo, New York (10 dead and 3 injured); a series of spas in Atlanta, Georgia (8 dead); a busy street in an entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio (9 dead and 17 injured); a nightclub in Orlando, Florida (50 dead and 53 injured); a church in Charleston, South Carolina (9 dead); a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado (12 dead and 50 injured); an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut (26 dead); and many, many more."
"And mass shootings are just one part of the problem," he added. "Easy access to firearms can also make many other aspects of American life more dangerous. Consider, for example, the effect of guns on road rage."
"New York’s Legislature considered the empirical evidence about gun violence and adopted a reasonable licensing law to regulate the concealed carriage of handguns in order to keep the people of New York safe," he concluded.
All states allow carrying concealed guns in public, although many require state-issued permits. Thursday's decision casts doubt on laws similar to New York’s in several other states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia, which provide local officials with more discretion to deny requests for permits.
In a statement, President Joe Biden said he was "deeply disappointed" by the ruling, adding that the decision "contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all."
The president said he was committed to doing everything in his power to reduce gun violence and called upon states to enact "commonsense laws" to make communities safer.
"In the wake of the horrific attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde, as well as the daily acts of gun violence that do not make national headlines, we must do more as a society — not less — to protect our fellow Americans," he said.
New York's Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, also responded to the ruling Thursday, first tweeting, "It is outrageous that at a moment of national reckoning on gun violence, the Supreme Court has recklessly struck down a New York law that limits those who can carry concealed weapons."
"In response to this ruling, we are closely reviewing our options — including calling a special session of the legislature. Just as we swiftly passed nation-leading gun reform legislation, I will continue to do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe from gun violence," she said.
At an event celebrating a new law to enhance school safety in the state, Hochul also called on Congress to strengthen federal gun laws by closing loopholes by raising the age to buy a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21.
State Attorney General Letitia James said she would work with Hochul and the Legislature to amend the licensing statue in a way that would continue to protect New York residents.
"I want to reassure all New Yorkers that our robust gun protection laws remain intact, and we will be working with our partners in government to further strengthen them," James said.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the ruling "has made every single one of us less safe from gun violence” and vowed to work to “mitigate the damage” of the decision.
Adams and New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell stressed that the laws remained unchanged in New York for now because the Supreme Court’s decision sent the case back to a lower court for implementation. But they both warned the ruling would likely lead to more guns on the streets and would change how police and other public safety authorities work in the cities.
“For a city like this — densely populated — this decision is just not rooted in reality,” Adams said. “This is a city and a country where people have A-K 47, assault rifles, multiple shots. I don’t know what the Supreme Court was thinking about.”
Hey, in case you did not hear, the Texas Department of Public Safety admitted that the doors to the classroom in Uvalde where kids and teachers were being slaughtered…
…were NOT LOCKED. Yes you heard that right.
For weeks, the police claimed to need keys and battering rams to get into the classroom.
The cops never even turned the damn door knobs.
And they knew exactly what they did. Uvalde Police and the city hired a private law firm to stop the body camera footage and other records from ever being public.
Uvalde County District Attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee, has been working hard to make sure that the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the city not release any records related to the police response.
My blood is boiling. I don’t even know what to say.
Not only did the police completely fail to protect anyone, they tried to cover it up and make false excuses.
A Texas police commander said that officers could have stopped the gunman within 3 minutes. They took 2 HOURS. Because they were only protecting themselves and refused to perform any basic duties.
Now that we know that they lied for WEEKS, we can’t allow them to continue preventing transparency and avoiding accountability.
Now, what I’m about to say won’t bring back the lives of the 19 children and 2 teachers these police let get slaughtered, but I want to take a moment to thank Steve McGraw, a lifelong cop, and the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, for telling the truth in the hearing for Uvalde, calling what these police did “an abject failure.”
Police normally do not do this. Trust me, we’ve needed cops to say hard shit for the past decade and they rarely do. But now, with his new information we can’t sit and wait for justice.
The first step is releasing all footage and records so we can hold these cops fully responsible for what they did with cold, hard proof.
As Congress prepares for summer recess, average working Americans are facing increasingly hard economic times — including a likely recession (see here). Yet Congress has so far failed to provide most Americans with what they need to weather the storm — subsidies for childcare and eldercare, paid sick leave, an increase in the federal minimum wage, lower pharmaceutical costs, additional help with the next strain of COVID, and so on.
At the very same time, American corporations are lining up with their hands outstretched, seeking all sorts of special benefits. And there’s bipartisan support for giving them what they want.
Today I want to explain why corporations so often get what they want while average Americans don’t. It’s not simply that corporations bribe legislators with campaign donations, although that’s a big part of it. There’s another phenomenon at work that you need to know about.
Consider semiconductor chips. They’re the brains of modern electronics — embedded in everything from smartphones, radios, TVs, computers, video games, and advanced medical diagnostic equipment, to automobiles. As the world supply of almost everything tries to catch up with roaring post-lockdown demand, chips inevitably are in short supply.
This week, Congress is putting final touches on the CHIPS Act, which will provide more than $52 billion to companies that design and make semiconductor chips. The subsidy is demanded by the biggest chip makers as a condition for making more chips here.
It’s pure extortion.
You see, the world’s biggest chip maker (in terms of sales) is already an American corporation — Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. Intel hardly needs the money. Its revenue rose to $79 billion last year. Its CEO, Pat Gelsinger, got a total compensation package of $179 million (which was 1,711-times larger than the average Intel employee).
From the perspective of the United States, the problem is that Intel is not dealing with the current American shortage of chips by giving preference to producers in the United States, and it’s not keeping America on the cutting edge of new chip technologies. In addition to its facilities in the United States, Intel designs, assembles, and tests its chips in China, Israel, Ireland, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam. And it sells them just about everywhere. (To add another layer of complication, many of Intel’s “American” customers don’t actually make their products in the United States. They’re headquartered in the United States but, like Intel, they design and make stuff all over the world.)
Obviously, Intel would like some of the $52 billion Congress is about to throw at the semiconductor chip industry — but why exactly should Intel get the money?
Among the other likely beneficiaries of the CHIPS Act will be GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries currently makes chips in New York and Vermont, but in many other places around the world as well. GlobalFoundries isn’t even an American corporation. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co. — the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates.
The point is, the nation where a chipmaker (or any other global corporation) is headquartered has less and less to do with where it designs and makes things or where its customers are located.
Every industry that can possibly be considered “critical” is now lobbying the U.S. government for subsidies, tax cuts, and regulatory exemptions, in return for designing and making stuff in America. But they’re lobbying in other nations, too.
It’s a giant global shakedown. India, Japan and South Korea have all recently passed tax credits, subsidies and other incentives amounting to tens of billions of dollars for the semiconductor industry, and the European Union is finalizing its own chips act with $30 billion to $50 billion in subsidies. Even China has extended tax and tariff exemptions and other measures aimed at upgrading chip design and production there. “Other countries around the globe … are making major investment in innovation and chip production,” says Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “If we don’t act quickly, we could lose tens of thousands of good-paying jobs to Europe [emphasis added].”
Who is “we,” Senator?
John Neuffer, the chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association (the Washington D.C. lobbying arm of the semiconductor industry) says the industry has been under “withering pressure” to build new manufacturing facilities to respond to the explosion of demand for chips, but he warns that chipmaking facilities are often 25 to 50 percent cheaper to build in foreign countries than in the United States. Why are they so much cheaper to build abroad? As he admits, it’s largely because of the incentives foreign countries have offered.
As capital becomes ever more global and footloose, it can play nation against nation to get the best deals in return for where it agrees to do what. Most people, by contrast, are rooted within particular nations, which gives them far less bargaining power.
This asymmetry helps explain why Congress is ready to hand over $52 billion to a highly-profitable global industry but can’t come up with even the $22.5 billion that the Biden administration says is necessary to cope with upcoming variants of COVID in the United States — for testing, therapeutics, vaccines, and essential treatments for the next generation of vaccines.
The reality is that global corporations have no loyalty to any nation. As the then-CEO of U.S.-based ExxonMobil unabashedly stated, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
If they are publicly owned, corporations have to be loyal to their shareholders by maximizing the value of their shares. But not even this guarantees that they’ll act in the best interest of the United States. Over 40 percent of the shareholder value of American-based companies is owned by non-Americans. There’s no reason to suppose a company’s American owners will be happy to sacrifice investment returns for the good of the nation, either.
Global corporations also have to obey the laws of the countries where they make or sell their stuff — which can cause problems when those laws or policies conflict with those of other nations. Last December, Intel was slammed by China for writing a letter to its suppliers, published on its website, stating that the corporation had been "required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region” — as required by the United States (which has accused China of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, home to the country's predominantly Muslim Uyghurs). Intel then deleted the reference to Xinjiang and apologized for the "trouble" it had caused, explaining that its commitment to avoid supply chains from Xinjiang was an expression of compliance with U.S. law rather than a statement of its position on the issue. (The apology caused Senator Marco Rubio to threaten to make Intel ineligible for CHIP Act subsidies. “Intel’s cowardice is yet another predictable consequence of economic reliance on China,” Rubio said. “Instead of humiliating apologies and self-censorship, companies should move their supply chains to countries that do not use slave labor or commit genocide.”)
This is not to dismiss the critical importance of semiconductor chips to the United States, but only to suggest that paying $52 billion in subsidies to global chipmakers to make them here is a peculiarly inefficient way of responding to that importance. The real question is what conditions the United States (or any other nation that subsidizes chip makers) should place on receipt of such subsidies.
It can’t be enough that a company merely agrees to make or design chips in America, because chip makers are already doing that. It can’t be that they’ll create more American jobs in chip making, because jobs in low-end fabrication that require little skill won’t build the technological capabilities of the U.S. workforce. And it can’t just be that the chipmakers agree to produce more chips in the United States, because additional production in the United States is no guarantee against future shortages in the United States. Remember, these corporations are global. They sell their chips around the world to the highest bidders, wherever the chips are produced.
If we want to tie the public subsidy to the public interest, we should demand that any chips produced in America, over and above those already produced here, focus on the highest value-added parts of chip making — design, design engineering, and high precision manufacturing — so Americans gain that technological expertise. And we should demand that in the event of chip shortages, the subsidized chipmakers give highest priority to their American-based customers — customers using the chips in products made in the United States, by American workers.
But what happens if every nation subsidizing chipmakers demands the same? Obviously, the chipmakers can’t grant most-favored-nation status to every nation. They’ll have to choose.
Also: How do we ensure that a big chunk of the $52 billion isn’t frittered away on shareholders and executive pay — as has been the case every time the U.S. government has subsidized Wall Street banks? Perhaps make chip makers agree not to buy back their shares of stock or pay their executives more than 50 times the pay of their median workers, and also give the government partial ownership in the form of equity interest. As Senator Bernie Sanders (who is pushing these conditions in an amendment to the CHIP Act) has said, there’s no reason to socialize the chipmaker’s risks and privatize their profits. If American taxpayers are going to give the semiconductor industry $52 billion, we should get a return on our investment.
Ukraine is set to be approved as an EU candidate at a Brussels summit on Thursday, after the European Commission gave the green light.
Ukraine applied days after the Russian invasion in February, and the process has since moved at a record speed.
Its ambassador to the EU told the BBC it would be a psychological boost for Ukrainians.
But Vsevolod Chentsov admitted "real integration" could only start when the war was over.
Candidate status is the first official step towards EU membership and France said this week there was "total consensus" on Ukraine. But it can take many years to join and there's no guarantee of success.
The Western Balkan countries of Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia have been candidate countries for years; in some cases for over a decade. Bosnia and Herzegovina applied for candidacy in 2016 but has still not succeeded.
As he arrived for an EU summit with Western Balkan leaders, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said it was a good thing that Ukraine was getting candidate status, but Kyiv should be under no illusions: "North Macedonia is a candidate [for] 17 years if I have not lost count, Albania eight, so welcome to Ukraine."
Some members states are pushing for Bosnia to be given candidate status, although that is not expected to happen.
'Why should we wait?'
"We do not accept the idea of the queue," Ukraine's envoy told the BBC, arguing Kyiv's eagerness could set an example to other states.
"Every state has its road map, has its path. And if there is political will, if there is support of society [and] business operators to move forward to implement reform in a bold and fast way, why we should wait?"
Moldova's application is also recommended for conditional approval while Georgia is set to be turned down, although the European Commission said the country could belong to the EU in "due time". More than 100,000 people attended a rally on Monday night in the Georgian capital appealing for candidate status.
Several EU states have agreed to back Ukraine's candidacy, provided conditions are attached before accession negotiations can begin, including judicial and anti-corruption reforms.
Mr Chentsov has insisted some reforms can take place, even while the country is at war and not in control of its whole territory.
"We are not starting from scratch," he insists, pointing to work carried out since the EU and Ukraine signed an association agreement in 2014. But it would be "logical" to carry out bigger reforms once the situation on the ground became more stable, he added.
Some EU diplomats have previously voiced concerns that giving candidate status could offer Ukraine false hope.
But Mr Chentsov said no-one had a crystal ball and he felt there was a will "to help Ukraine to get there".
Macron plan for broader EU community
As well as deciding on which countries should be given candidate status, EU leaders will also discuss food security in light of Russia's blockade of Ukrainian ports, condemned by the EU's foreign policy chief this week as a war crime. And they will assess President Macron's proposal for a wider "European Political Community".
According to draft summit conclusions seen by the BBC, the aim would be "to foster political dialogue and co-operation to address issues of common interest so as to strengthen the security, stability and prosperity of the European continent".
The French leader has suggested the community could include countries waiting to join the EU such as Ukraine and the Western Balkan states, or even those that have left, which would currently just include the UK. However, a number of EU diplomats have rejected the idea as half-baked. The UK left the European Union in 2020.
The Ukrainian ambassador did not dismiss the idea out of hand, saying: "Probably it will be something to consider for the EU, for the UK to join and we can sit at the same table together with the EU, Ukraine and UK."
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has said her preference would be to build on existing structures such as the G7 and Nato.
Have you recently played America’s exciting new game, Gas Tank Gamble?
You know the one: Drive past your local station, hoping to reach a spot with a slightly lower price.
I won big this weekend, passing up my local station’s $4.799 a gallon, pulling into Costco with half a gallon to spare and saving 20 cents per gallon.
I drove on feeling like a millionaire. But then I did the math: My fill-up would have been a whopping $3 more closer to home.
Expect a similar reaction nationwide if President Joe Biden persuades Congress to pause the federal gasoline tax for three months, an idea Biden announced Wednesday afternoon.
Federal taxes add 18.4 cents to a gallon of unleaded, and 24.4 cents for diesel. (In Texas, state taxes add 20 cents a gallon to either). The Associated Press calculates that at a national average of about $5 a gallon, people would save about 3.6%.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Every bit of savings helps, particularly for poorer families. Rapid inflation is crushing people, and there’s often not much they can do to use less fuel. Economists say, however, that such a modest cut might not even be noticed — especially cast against the rapid rise in prices since Biden took office.
This move is clearly meant to stem the tide of Americans’ anger and pessimism, which has Biden’s approval ratings at Trumpian levels and Democrats panicking about huge midterm losses in November.
And yet if Congress enacted his plan, the tax would be set to return at the end of September — a sudden spike right as voting gets underway in some states. Smart!
But Biden has to try something, because the blame-everyone-else strategy isn’t working. The White House is still trotting out the sad “Putin’s price hike” framing, as if people didn’t notice higher prices before the invasion of Ukraine. He’s attacking oil companies and asking them to reduce profits — without acknowledging that he all but invited them to take profits short-term by taking steps to curtail production long-term.
Next month, he’ll go to Saudi Arabia and implore it, too, to boost production. What happens if leaders of the state he condemned as a “pariah” asks: Why should we?
Energy prices underlie all inflation because of shipping costs. And the effect is cumulative; farmers are warning of possible food shortages if diesel prices keep rising. It’s one thing when people are stressed about the cost of feeding the family; it’s another if they can’t even get groceries.
Like most of the economy, gas prices are complex. No, it’s not all Biden’s fault. But people aren’t buying his blame games, and for many voters, weak steps like suspending fuel taxes merely emphasize that it’s time for someone with better answers.
John Mellencamp is slamming lawmakers for not doing more to stop school shootings.
The "Small Town" singer criticized politicians over their response to gun violence, saying they "don't give a f*** about our children."
"Only, in America, can 21 people be murdered and a week later be buried and forgotten, with a flimsy little thumbnail, a vague notion of some sort of gun control law laying on the senators' desks," the 70-year-old musician and painter wrote on Twitter Tuesday, referring to the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting on May 24.
"What kind of people are we who claim that we care about pro-life?" he continued. Just so you know, anyone that's reading this... politicians don't give a f*** about you, they don't give a f*** about me, and they don't give a f*** about our children."
He concluded, "So, with that cheery thought in mind, have a happy summer, because it will be just a short time before it happens again."
Mellencamp's comments came on Tuesday as the Senate voted to advance a new bipartisan gun control bill. It would enhance background checks and give authorities up to 10 business days to review the juvenile and mental health records of gun purchasers under 21. Funding would also go to help states implement red flag laws as well as to expand mental health resources in communities and schools and boost school safety, among other things.
The Uvalde shooter legally purchased an AR-15-style rifle on May 17 — one day after he turned 18. Three days later, he purchased a second rifle, and in between bought 375 rounds of ammunition. On May 24, he killed19 fourth graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary. The gunman also shot his grandmother in the face.
Mellencamp has long spoken out against gun violence, joining 200 other artists and music execs in 2016 in calling for gun reform in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting. Following the Uvalde shooting, he said on MSNBC's The Beat last week that news outlets should start showing the carnage of school shootings to open the eyes of those resisting reform.
"I don't know if you’re old enough, but I remember when Vietnam first started, and it was a conversation on the news," the father of five said. "But then, when they started showing dead teenagers, people did something about it, and the country united. I think that we need to start showing the carnage of these kids who have died in vain... If we don't show it, then they're dying in vain, because they're just going to pass more bulls*** laws like they're trying to get through now. Show us. Let the country see what a machine gun can do to a kid's head."
People protest in support of the unionizing efforts of the Alabama Amazon workers, in Los Angeles, California, March 22, 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Advocates say ruling will ‘flip the First Amendment on its head’ and endanger the free speech rights of all Americans.
A US court of appeals upheld an Arkansas law that restricts state contractors from boycotting Israel, raising concerns about governmental infringement on free speech when it comes to criticism of Israeli abuses.
The Eighth Circuit Court ruled on Wednesday that boycotts fall under commercial activity, which the state has a right to regulate, not “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
But advocates say laws that prohibit boycotting Israel, which have been adopted by dozens of states with the backing of pro-Israel groups, are designed to unconstitutionally chill speech that supports Palestinian human rights.
Such laws aim to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which pushes to exert non-violent pressure on Israel to end abuses against Palestinians that have been described by leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International, as “apartheid”.
“It’s a horrible reading, and it’s very inaccurate,” said Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
“I think this is a very un-American ruling and position. This will flip the First Amendment on its head. It’s shocking to see we’re living in a time where our courts are deteriorating our rights and abilities to express ourselves.”
The Arkansas case started in 2018 when The Arkansas Times, a Little Rock-based publication, sued the state over its anti-BDS law after refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel in order to win an advertising contract from a public university.
The law requires contractors that do not sign the pledge to reduce their fees by 20 percent.
A district court initially dismissed the lawsuit, but a three-judge appeals panel blocked the law in a split decision in 2021, ruling it violates the First Amendment. Now the full court has revived the statute.
The Arkansas Times cited its publisher Alan Leveritt as saying on Wednesday that he will discuss “future steps” with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a civil rights group that helped the newspaper sue the state.
For its part, the ACLU called the ruling “wrong” and a departure “from this nation’s longstanding traditions”.
“It ignores the fact that this country was founded on a boycott of British goods and that boycotts have been a fundamental part of American political discourse ever since. We are considering next steps and will continue to fight for robust protections for political boycotts,” Brian Hauss, staff lawyer with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement.
Judge Jonathan Kobes, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, wrote in the decision that the state law does not ban criticism of Israel.
“It only prohibits economic decisions that discriminate against Israel,” Kobes said. “Because those commercial decisions are invisible to observers unless explained, they are not inherently expressive and do not implicate the First Amendment.”
But in a dissenting opinion, Judge Jane Kelly dismissed the notion that the law is rooted in economic concerns.
“By the express[ed] terms of the Act, Arkansas seeks not only to avoid contracting with companies that refuse to do business with Israel,” Kelly wrote. “It also seeks to avoid contracting with anyone who supports or promotes such activity.”
She said the law allows the state – in violation of the First Amendment – to “consider a company’s speech and association with others to determine whether that company is participating in a ‘boycott of Israel'”.
Such speech, which would be prohibited under the law, Kelly argued, may include “posting anti-Israel signs, donating to causes that promote a boycott of Israel, encouraging others to boycott Israel, or even publicly criticizing the Act”. It is not clear how many of Kelly’s colleagues from the 11-judge court joined her in dissent.
The appeals court’s ruling comes at a time when Americans across the country are encouraging economic and cultural boycotts of Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Republican- and Democratic-leaning US states have passed and enforced anti-BDS laws, discouraging businesses from boycotting not only Israel, but also illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem and Syria’s occupied Golan Heights.
Most recently, many states have pushed to divest from Ben … Jerry’s parent company after the ice-cream maker pulled out of the occupied West Bank over human rights and international law considerations.
Free speech advocates say antiboycott laws carry potential effects beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, several states have introduced bills modelled after anti-BDS laws to penalise companies that boycott the fossil fuel industry.
Ayoub of ADC stressed the interpretation that freedom of expression can be suppressed for the benefit of the state’s economic interests enables significant infringements on the First Amendment.
He said he can see a scenario based on this ruling where a state would criminalise boycotting certain major corporations over ethical or environmental concerns.
“This is not just about boycotts. This is opening the door to strip away First Amendment rights of all Americans. It’s very frightening,” he said.
Multiple federal courts across the country have taken up and mostly blocked anti-BDS laws, but the appeals court’s ruling on Wednesday complicates the legal analysis on whether such statutes are constitutional.
Abed said the Supreme Court should settle the debate, but he noted the top court’s conservative majority has recently been moving to strip away – not protect – individual rights.
“You just have to put trust in a court that really has been [chipping away] at a lot of our rights lately,” he said.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director at the Council on American Islamic Relations, echoed Ayoub’s remarks, saying the appeals court’s ruling “endangers the free speech rights of every American”.
“By ruling against The Arkansas Times, the Eight Circuit has broken with nearly every other court that has reviewed and struck down these unconstitutional, un-American anti-boycott laws,” Mitchell told Al Jazeera.
A new community survey exposes widespread cancer, asthma, anxiety, and depression in Wilmington, California.
When I visited Christina Gonzalez and her family in April, she sat slumped in her family’s worn black faux-leather couch, trying to recall which explosion had shaken her neighborhood the most. The seven decades they’ve lived in Wilmington, California, are marked by the dates of the high-octane industrial fires that have erupted at each of the five refineries that surround their home.
There were so many disasters, she and her husband, Paul, both 73, told me. Was it the one in ’84? Or maybe the one in ’92 or ’96? Each fire painted the sky in different shades of black and orange. Paul believes the biggest one might have been later — closer to ’01, maybe, or even 2007 or 2009. He shifted uncomfortably in their living room; a recent procedure on his hip still made sitting difficult. “When that refinery blew, there were black dots everywhere,” Christina said, her short dark red hair framing her face, which was marked by lines from the stress. “All over the cars, the house, our fruit trees and patio furniture.”
“It was raining oil,” she said. She retired soon after that.
She had worked in the attendance office at Wilmington’s Banning High School. She remembered how often students came through, their faces flushed with sickness. “I’d see it in their notes,” she said. “Gone to the doctor, asthma, breathing issues, coughing — all the time. It was kind of heartbreaking to see these kids have to suffer as teenagers, and you could see it in their faces, how they didn’t feel well.” That was around the time her second-youngest grandchild was born.
Poor health, she says, is a painful but routine fact of life in her South Los Angeles community, an 8.5-square-mile tract surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in California, as well as the third-largest oil field in the continental U.S., and the largest port in North America. A recent Grist investigation found that since 2020, Wilmington has experienced a dramatic rise in deaths related to Alzheimer’s, liver disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, and diabetes — all conditions known to be exacerbated by high levels of pollution.
Illness has spread through the Gonzalez home, too. Christina has been diagnosed with lung disease, lupus, and fibromyalgia, while her daughter, Jennifer Gomez, 42, has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the blood cells. Jennifer’s husband has had two heart attacks, and her teenage son has “been hospitalized more times than a 90-year-old” for multiple severe respiratory infections.
Eight members of the family reside in the house today. Paul’s mother, the first to move in, battled breast and skin cancer. Paul himself beat testicular cancer — twice. With his daughter’s diagnosis, that’s three generations of cancer in the same household. Since the early 1960s, the family has lived on Island Avenue, just one block from the Port of Los Angeles and about one mile from the Phillips 66 Los Angeles refinery. Jennifer jokes that a sane family would have moved, but the family knows it’s not that simple.
Housing in Los Angeles is more expensive now than it has ever been. Besides, there aren’t many places in Southern California where industry’s grasp is any looser. Riverside, located in California’s Inland Empire, is a prime example. The city used to be one of the most popular locations for Black and Latino families locked out of housing in Los Angeles, but today it’s the site of a major warehousing boom and has the country’s highest concentration of diesel pollution. “We can’t afford to sell, because where could we afford to buy?” Paul said. “It used to be that you could afford to buy out towards Riverside, but now that’s getting to be more expensive than LA. There’s no escape route.”
The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, says that air pollution can cause adverse health effects months or even years after initial exposure. “I know even if the pollution gets better and these refineries close, it is something that will stay within all of us for the rest of our lives,” Jennifer said.
Since 2000, more than 16 million pounds of toxic chemicals, primarily hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, have been spewed into Wilmington’s air from industrial sites in the city, according to the EPA. That amounts to more than 2,000 pounds of chemicals every single day. Two-thirds of the chemicals were emitted by the Phillips 66 refinery.
In response to an inquiry from High Country News and Grist, a representative from Phillips 66 sent an email statement, writing that its Los Angeles refineries are striving to improve operations in a “safe, reliable and environmentally responsible” way and noting that company has employed $450 million in “emissions-reduction technology” since the early 2000s. The EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory data does not include another major source of pollution in Wilmington: The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the largest in the nation as well as the single largest fixed source of air pollution in Southern California; collectively, they are responsible for more pollution than daily emissions from 6 million cars.
The walls of the Gonzalez home are decorated with family photos. When I visited Jennifer and Christina in April, Christina wore a shirt with the word “JOYFUL” written on it in five different colorful fonts. Our conversation was sobering, despite the presence of a six-foot-tall stuffed animal that the children adore. “You can’t go outside without hearing trucks from the port going down your street, seeing a cloud of smoke from one of the refineries filling the air, or tasting the sulfur,” Christina said. “I’ve gotten to the point where you could say I’m depressed.
“I get tired of calling the doctors to make appointments because I’m having breathing problems,” she added, “and then with the pandemic, being stuck inside watching my daughter (Jennifer) get so severely sick with leukemia.”
Just a few weeks after we spoke, Christina was hospitalized for a serious infection. She spent two weeks in the hospital and was then released for daily treatment at home.
This year, I moved back to Wilmington, where I grew up, after five years away. In part, my return was driven by a desire to write about — and on behalf of — my old hometown, an assignment that started with uncovering the hidden impacts of a century of environmental injustice. For three months, I canvassed the 1.5 square-mile area around the 103-year-old Phillips 66 refinery, an area that included my childhood home. My project, supported by Grist and the University of Southern California as well as by High Country News, focused on the physical, environmental and mental health impacts of air pollution. It came down to this: What is it like to live next to an oil refinery? Roughly 2,200 homes were initially contacted through in-person canvassing and postcards. Ultimately, 75 households, home to more than 300 people, opted to participate. The collected survey data has a 10 percent margin of error, equivalent to that found in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Here is what we found:
While I found the survey responses to be shocking, Alicia Rivera, a community organizer in Wilmington, reacted stoically when I shared the data with her. “None of this is unexpected,” said Rivera, who organizes with the Wilmington-based environmental justice organization Communities for a Better Environment. “In fact, it corroborates and legitimizes what we see every day, and it brings into question the ‘official’ data and stories we’re told from regulators.”
For more than a decade, Rivera has been an integral part of Wilmington’s community-organizing ecosystem, seeking accountability from both industry and regulators. Most recently, she was a lead organizer for a successful drive to phase out oil drilling in the city of Los Angeles. But it will take more than a few legislative changes to bring justice to the residents, she said.
“We struggle, and we struggle,” she told me, sitting in her organization’s office a few blocks from the port. “No one seems to understand how much frontline communities have put on the line — our health and lives — just for these polluting companies to profit.”
California is often held up as a model for climate policy, environmental legislation, and pollution regulation, but those standards are rarely reflected in frontline communities, said Hillary Angelo, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Angelo, who recently published a study analyzing climate plans in 170 California cities, found that local governments aren’t adequately implementing structural changes now.
“Communities on the front lines dealing with legacies of pollution, bad planning, and exclusionary practices are already confronting climate impacts directly,” she said during an interview earlier this year. Her research showed that local governments were more inclined to pass legislation with an obvious aesthetic appeal, such as tree-planting initiatives, rather than initiatives that took “histories of racial and economic injustice” into account.
“The inclusion of ‘green’ policies doesn’t seem to have any relationship to the needs in particular places,” she explained. In a place like Wilmington, it is “much harder to pass the important life-saving policies like improving public transit and affordable housing or funding contamination cleanup and renewable energy.”
Few of the Wilmington residents Rivera works with initially make the connection between the climate crisis and the issues plaguing their community. Once they do, however, it is an eye-opening experience. “Their biggest concern initially is the pollution from refineries, because it’s the more visible thing,” she said. “Then they realize its impact on their quality of life, their crumbling streets, the smells in the air. They start to put things together about how it is associated with their poor health.”
Our survey found that Wilmington’s industrial makeup hampers access to the outdoors:
Over the last four years, Rivera and other local organizers have created the Just Transition Fund to ease the impacts of life in an industrialized community. From President Joe Biden’s proposed Civilian Climate Corps to California’s Climate Jobs Plan, various attempts have been made to fund and otherwise support the nation’s shift to clean energy, but the programs tend to neglect the cumulative impacts of the country’s historical dependence on fossil fuels. The Just Transition Fund, Rivera said, would not only help fund training programs for clean energy workers and environmental remediators, it would also pump cash directly into frontline communities like Wilmington.
“We need accountability,” Rivera said, “and one way to do that is by using federal funds and corporate funds to help pay for things like health care and disability coverage in places paying the price for our pollution.”
Jennifer Gomez acknowledges that programs like Rivera’s would have an immediate positive effect on Wilmington. At the same time, however, they won’t erase the past, and they certainly won’t cure those already suffering from cancer in the community.
“I told my oncologist that if I survive, I want to fight back against the refineries and pollution,” Gomez wrote in her response to our survey earlier this year. “I firmly believe it’s why I got cancer, and why my best friend died of cancer, too, as well as so many other Wilmington residents.”
