06 May 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The government is also said to have obtained “the confidential cooperation of a person” who has worked for the ex-president at his private resort.
On Thursday, the jury that will decide whether to find the ex-president liable for allegedly raping writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in the mid-’90s heard him double down on the right to sexual assault people and, bizarrely, tell Carroll’s lawyer she wouldn’t be a “choice” of his. Meanwhile, the federal investigation into his handling of classified documents—and possible attempt to obstruct justice— is said to be “intensifying,” which is presumably not a happy development in Palm Beach.
The New York Times reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith have not only subpoenaed “nearly everyone who works at Mar-a-Lago,” but have also “obtained the confidential cooperation of a person who has worked for [Trump]” at the private resort, as they ramp up their effort “to determine whether Mr. Trump ordered boxes containing sensitive material moved out of a storage room there as the government sought to recover it last year.” The witness in question has reportedly provided investigators “with a picture of the storage room where the material had been held,” though little else is known about what other information might have been relayed. The cooperation of an insider, whose identity has not been revealed, is said to possibly be a “significant step” in Smith’s investigation. In addition, Smith’s team is said to have subpoenaed the software company that handles surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago; on Thursday, CNN reported that prosecutors have “been asking questions in recent weeks about the handling of surveillance footage” from Trump’s club. Matthew Calamari Sr., the chief operating officer of Trump’s family business, and his son, Matthew Calamari Jr., the director of security for the company, were expected to testify before a grand jury this week.
According to the Times, a subpoena was also issued to the Trump Organization for “records pertaining to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed professional golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of Mr. Trump’s golf resorts.” While it’s not clear what LIV Golf would have to do with the investigation, Trump and his son-in-law have an exceedingly friendly relationship with the Saudis, so…who knows! The Times also notes that a “related line of inquiry for Mr. Smith’s team is whether Mr. Trump misled one of his lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, about the movement of classified documents around Mar-a-Lago,” leading Corcoran to help draft a sworn statement—signed by another Trump lawyer—that said all classified documents had been turned over to the Justice Department, a statement that turned out to be very much not true.
The Washington Post reported last month that the Justice Department and FBI had “amassed fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction” by Trump. According to the outlet, which spoke to people familiar with the probe, investigators had “gathered new and significant evidence that after the subpoena was delivered, Trump looked through the contents of some of the boxes of documents in his home, apparently out of a desire to keep certain things in his possession.” In addition, investigators were said to have found evidence suggesting that Trump told people to mislead government officials in early 2022, when the National Archives was working with the DOJ to recover documents Trump had taken with him when he left the White House, which, y’know, seems pretty bad.
In a statement, a spokesman for Trump called the government’s case “a targeted, politically motivated witch hunt” that was “concocted to meddle in an election and prevent the American people from returning him to the White House.”
Here’s a clip of Donald Trump mistaking his rape accuser—whom he’s claimed is not his “type”—with his second wife
Surprise: Kellyanne Conway thinks those Ginni Thomas payments were fine
Ron DeSantis continues his quest to ruin as many lives as possible
The Florida governor is expected to sign into law a bill that will effectively allow the state to kidnap transgender children. Per The New Republic:
The Florida legislature passed a bill Thursday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 26–13, mainly along party lines, and the House shortly after by a vote of 83–28, again along party lines. The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who has previously expressed support for it and will likely sign it into law.
If he signs it into law, the measure will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures” and qualifies this care as a form of “physical harm.”
Earlier this week, Florida Republicans approved a bill preventing teacher and students from being required to use correct pronouns in schools; DeSantis is, not surprisingly, expected to sign that one too.
READ MORE 
Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Ginni Thomas. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
"The job is not worth doing for what they pay," Thomas said during a speech in 2001, The New York Post reported at the time. "The job is not worth doing for the grief. But it is worth doing for the principle."
Thomas was speaking to the Bar Association in Savannah, Georgia, according to the Post. In the speech, which was resurfaced this week by The Nation writer Jeet Heer, Thomas discussed his efforts to gain custody of his then-10-year-old grandnephew. The Post reported Thomas cried during the speech and thanked his lawyer who worked on the custody battle.
In 2001, the salary for an associate Supreme Court justice was $178,300, while the chief justice made $186,300. As of 2023, the salary for an associate justice is $285,400, while the chief justice makes $298,500.
ProPublica reported this week that Thomas in 2008 sent his grandnephew, the one referred to in the speech, to Hidden Lake Academy, a residential program in Georgia, and that Crow covered the $6,000 per month bill. The outlet previously reported that Crow had paid for Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, to take extravagant vacations, and that Thomas has sold his childhood home to Crow but did not disclose the sale.
A group of 15 Democratic lawmakers now wants to withhold $10 million from Supreme Court funding until the court adopts a code of ethics, The Hill reported.
READ MORE 
Protestors chant at a vigil in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station Wednesday, May, 3, 2023, in Manhattan, New York. (photo: Barry Williams/NY Daily News)
The tragic killing came in a climate of fearmongering and New York City’s long failure to support people experiencing homelessness.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering whether to bring charges against the subway rider, who is reportedly a white 24-year-old former Marine, but authorities had not taken him into custody as of Wednesday night.
According to one eyewitness, who posted a video of the altercation on his Facebook page, Neely had allegedly yelled that he did not have food or something to drink, that he was ready to die, and that he didn’t care about facing life in prison. But that eyewitness also told the New York Post that Neely did not attack anyone in the car.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the case, but it has already brought to the forefront several of the systemic issues New York and the country are confronting: crime rates, fears about crime, and how politicians are exploiting those fears seem likely to have played a role. For those who have gathered in the subway to protest Neely’s killing this week, he’s become a symbol of New York City’s failure to provide an adequate safety net to vulnerable individuals and protect them from criminalization. Racial justice advocates have also called out the delays in the city’s decision to pursue charges against the 24-year-old subway rider as the latest example of violence toward Black Americans seemingly being condoned by the criminal justice system.
“This is about much more than just this one specific case,” said Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic strategist based in New York. “There’s a clear throughline between the endless demonization of unhoused people and mentally ill people and also the relentless campaign to fan the flames of fear about crime in the city.”
Some city officials have declined to condemn the man who killed Neely while the law enforcement investigation is ongoing and also declined to discourage other subway passengers from similarly taking matters into their own hands: “Each situation is different ... We cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that,” New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams told CNN Wednesday.
“I think [what happened to Jordan Neely] is yet another example of a whole host of responses we have to people who are experiencing homelessness, people with serious psychiatric impairments, race, fear, the jump to ‘my safety, you’re a threat.’” says Kendall Atterbury, a social work expert affiliated with Yale School of Medicine’s Program for Recovery and Community Health. “It’s unconscionable that we keep allowing this to happen.”
Crime messaging in New York put the public on edge
Some have come to the 24-year-old man’s defense, saying his actions were justified, and some media coverage has painted Neely as the aggressor. Headlines from local news outlets Wednesday described Neely as the “Man Who Threatened NYC Subway Riders” and “Man Harassing NoHo Subway Riders” and declared that the rider had tried to “Subdue Him.”
There is no evidence that Neely had become violent. And those headlines assume that Neely would have become violent if his fellow subway rider had not intervened — assumptions that are, experts say, rooted in years of political fearmongering over a pandemic spike in violent crime in New York City. That wave of violent crime has subsided, but nonviolent crimes were up in 2022 and at the forefront of New York state voters’ minds in the midterms.
“When politicians constantly use New York City as the emblem of danger and violence and they exploit that to motivate their voters, why would we be shocked that people in New York are walking around on pins and needles and afraid all the time?” said Jeffrey Butts, a professor and director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
As was the case across much of the US in 2020, the murder rate jumped significantly — by about 47 percent — in New York City. Though murders were still about 80 percent below their peak in 1990, New Yorkers had well-founded concerns that their city was less safe than it had been just a few years ago. Adams, a Democrat and former NYPD cop, rode a “tough on crime” message to win the city’s mayoral race in 2021.
By the end of 2022, city homicides had fallen to their lowest levels since the onset of the pandemic, though a surge in robberies and burglaries contributed to a 22 percent rise in overall crime since the previous year. That wasn’t enough to assuage voters’ concerns, which had been fed by New York City tabloid coverage, turning them into a full-blown “crime panic,” said Gabe Tobias, a Democratic strategist based in New York.
With headlines likening the city to Blade Runner and asking, “Will No One Help Us?” amid concerns about public safety, publications like the New York Post were amplifying the spike in crimes and individual crimes, including other violent attacks on the subway system in Manhattan.
Crime in New York City became the subject of almost 800 stories in digital and print outlets each month after Adams’s inauguration, compared to an average of 132 stories monthly under his predecessor Bill de Blasio.
What many of those stories failed to get across was the critical context that New York was still a lot safer than many other parts of America and that the city’s violent crime levels were not nearly as high as they have been historically and had abated substantially in the years since 2020.
“It was certainly a big increase, and it was almost an overnight increase. But historically, it was nowhere near where it was when New York was having 2,000-plus murders in a year,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of the criminal justice data firm AH Datalytics.
For more than two decades, New York City’s murder rate has been consistently at or below the national average, which is extraordinary for a city of its size, Asher said. Shootings are down 23 percent this year. The per capita violent crime rate in New York City is also lower than in many small towns in the South, Butts said. (New York City remains safer than other big cities and safer than small-town America, Bloomberg’s Justin Fox noted last year.)
“People are bad at perceiving crime trends. And they’re especially bad at perceiving crime trends while they’re in the middle of them,” Asher said. “And so when you have highly public incidents, it can give people a false impression of what the overall big picture trends look like.”
Experts worry that Neely’s killing is, in part, a result of relentless political rhetoric that has contributed to the public’s incomplete understanding of actual crime levels, and that by refusing to outright condemn the killer, Adams is perpetuating that rhetoric. “Someone committed murder on the subway in broad daylight,” Neidhardt said. “You should be able to acknowledge what happened here.”
Neely’s killing renews scrutiny on NYC’s treatment of unhoused people
Neely’s killing has also raised new attention on the way that people experiencing homelessness have been treated both by the city and its residents. Advocates have been working for years to close gaps in mental health support and end punitive treatment of unhoused people. And the release of the man who conducted the fatal chokehold has prompted outcry given the message it sends about his actions.
“The fact that someone who took the life of a distressed, mentally ill human being on a subway could be set free without facing any consequences is shocking and evidences the city’s callous indifference to the lives of those who are homeless and psychiatrically unwell,” Dave Giffen, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement.
A 2016 United Nations report highlighted how people experiencing homelessness are subject to “inhumane and degrading treatment” both by the government and by private citizens. And according to a 2020 study published in The Lancet, unhoused people are at much higher risk of being the victims of crime and violence than people who are housed. Narratives about unhoused people being “dangerous” also spur a “climate of fear,” advocates say.
In recent years, there’s been a growing focus on such stories amid high-profile instances of unhoused people being involved in violence in cities including New York City. The increased homelessness in the city, where it’s at the highest levels since the Great Depression, has also drawn attention to these concerns. Advocates note that it’s important not to make sweeping statements, however, and stress that unhoused people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrators of fatal violence.
Experts have also criticized New York City’s plan to implement an involuntary hospitalization policy for people who are navigating serious mental illness. That proposal enables law enforcement and other government employees to hospitalize unhoused people who appear to be undergoing a mental health crisis. Those who’ve studied the issue say that it doesn’t provide a durable solution to challenges people may be having with mental illness and lack of housing.
“It’s a short-term solution, but it’s one that’s been shown not to work,” says Deborah Padgett, an NYU social work professor who has studied homelessness. “In a matter of days, these people are going to be back on the street and no better.” Mayor Adams touted the city’s commitment to mental health resources in a statement this week, noting that it was making “record investments in providing care to those who need it.”
Broadly, experts note that the reaction lawmakers across the country have had to homelessness has been focused on penalizing those who are unhoused and on reducing their visibility, when the focus should be on providing stable housing outside of shelters.
“Punitive police responses focusing on behaviors associated with homelessness — including everything from encampment visibility, to sleeping in public, to public displays of mental illness — is one of, if not the most common, response to homelessness across the country,” Charley Willison, a Cornell public health professor who studies the issue, told Vox. “Extensive previous research has shown that punitive responses do not end homelessness, and actually facilitate cycles of homelessness.”
Instead, Willison and Padgett note, increasing units of affordable housing and providing support services for people in these places has been proven to work.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, nearly 69,000 unhoused people spent each night in one of the city’s shelters in December 2022. “The bottom line is the lack of affordable housing, and so little has been done in that area for the last 30 to 40 years,” says Padgett.
How Black Americans are treated as threats
The fatal violence toward Neely, and the release of the white Marine who perpetrated it, also points to how such attacks on Black people have been treated differently by the criminal justice system. Multiple racial justice advocates including Rev. Al Sharpton have urged authorities to consider manslaughter or murder charges. As the New York Times reported, under New York law, “a person can only use deadly physical force if they have reason to believe that an attacker is doing or about to do the same.”
“Racism that continues to permeate throughout our society allows for a level of dehumanization that denies Black people from being recognized as victims when subjected to acts of violence,” New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement.
In multiple cases, including the shooting of teenager Ralph Yarl and the killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, law enforcement has moved slowly to formally charge white perpetrators involved in these acts of violence. “[Homicide] cases with a white perpetrator and a Black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim,” according to an Urban Institute study.
“The perceptions of Black people have long been interpreted through a distorted, racialized lens that aims to justify violence against us,” Adams, the New York City Council speaker, noted.
In a 2017 study, researchers found that people perceived Black men who were the same size as white men to be larger and more threatening. Such perceptions likely contribute to the willingness by police and other residents to use more force against Black Americans in settings where they otherwise would not.
READ MORE 
Eight of the 16 fake electors in Georgia who sought to falsely declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 elections have taken immunity deals. (photo: Erik S Lesser/EPA)
The eight people are now protected from prosecution, limiting the possibility of a conspiracy indictment
The immunity deals to the eight came in April, according to the filing, after the Fulton county district attorney’s office called their lawyer and said prosecutors were willing to make the arrangement – about four months after the lawyer asked about the prospect of such deals.
With half of the fake electors now apparently immune from prosecution, the scope of a potential conspiracy indictment ensnaring Trump and the electors – identified as targets in the case – may have narrowed, not least because the immunity deals did not compel any incriminating information in return.
The filing also raised new questions about how prosecutors might handle the fake electors more broadly, after the lawyer for the eight, Kimberly Debrow, effectively accused the district attorney’s office of misrepresenting key facts in an earlier motion seeking to have her disqualified.
The latest twist in the Georgia election criminal investigation comes as the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, is expected to ask a grand jury starting in mid-July to return charges against Trump and dozens of people involved in efforts to reverse his defeat in the state of Georgia.
Last month, the district attorney’s office sought to disqualify Debrow from the case entirely, citing her clients’ testimony that they were not told of immunity offers, and citing a conflict of interest after some of her clients implicated another one of her clients in a separate crime.
In the 68-page brief filed on Friday, Debrow vehemently disputed the claims, saying that transcripts and recordings of interviews – submitted to the court for a confidential review – showed that none of her clients told prosecutors that immunity offers were not brought to them in 2022.
The filing also revealed that although eight fake electors received immunity deals, two of the fake electors – whose identities were not disclosed and were until recently her clients – had not. One of them is understood to be Cathy Latham, a local Republican party leader.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Debrow claimed in the filing that the transcripts of interviews with her clients showed one of the prosecutors, Nathan Wade, sought to intentionally confuse them by suggesting they were offered immunity last year, though no actual offers had been made before April 2023.
In one instance, Debrow claimed, the prosecutor threatened to “tear up” the immunity deal that was already in force and binding if Debrow did not stop clarifying that the discussions about immunity prior to April were only potential offers.
“Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Either [Elector E] is going to get this immunity, and he’s going to answer the questions – and wants to talk – or we’re going to leave. And if we leave, we’re ripping up his immunity agreement,” Wade is said to have told Debrow and her client.
Debrow also claimed she could find no testimony in her clients’ interview transcripts showing them implicating another fake electors in a further crime, noting that the district attorney’s office had refused to say what the alleged crime was, or who had made the allegations.
“All of the electors remain united in their collective innocence and defenses, and none testified or believe that they or any other elector committed any wrongdoing, much less ‘criminal acts’,” the filing said.
Debrow added that even if it were true that some of clients incriminated another of her clients, it would not matter since they could not be prosecuted as a result of the immunity deals.
READ MORE 
A Proud Boys rally in Washington, D.C. (photo: WP)
Andy Campbell, senior editor at the Huffington Post, said on Up First that "it's a very rare and serious charge that the government usually saves for terrorists on American soil."
"Though their leaders sit behind bars, the Proud Boys don't need a green light from the national organization to continue on their parade of violence," Campbell told NPR's A Martinez. "Their stated goal is to physically fight for the GOP's grievances out in the street, and they've continued to do so week after week since January 6."
Cynthia Miller-Idris, head of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, agrees: "They have helped to normalize the idea of political violence," Miller-Idris said. "And we're seeing support for political violence, of course, rise in the mainstream as well." She spoke with NPR's Leila Fadel on Morning Edition.
Interview highlights
On how the Proud Boys' trial has impacted the larger group
Leila Fadel: So what impact has this trial had on the Proud Boys?
Cynthia Miller-Idris: It really hasn't had as much of an impact as you'd like to think. I mean, they have continued. They've really evolved. Their members are all across the country. And they're just now moving into other types of protests. So they've been protesting at children's reading, drag reading, and libraries, and protesting anti-racist education, and just kind of opportunistically jumping on other types of protests that are happening across the country.
Leila Fadel: And when you say protesting, often this can be violent.
Cynthia Miller-Idris: Exactly. It's either violent or it carries the whiff of violence. And that's part of the impact they've had, is they have helped to normalize the idea of political violence. And we're seeing support for political violence, of course, rise in the mainstream as well.
On preventing a culture of political violence
Leila Fadel: So given what you've just described, these convictions, will they act as a warning, as a deterrent, not just for the Proud Boys, but other violent extremist, white nationalist, so-called patriotic militias across this country?
Cynthia Miller-Idris: The vast majority of violence, including virtually every terrorist attack in the last 25 years, coming from the far right, has not been from anyone affiliated with a group. So most of what we see in the violent actions are individuals who are radicalized online into toxic cultures. And this doesn't really affect that at all. And so I think we should be glad that we got the convictions, but we also shouldn't put too much hope in it. The genie is kind of out of the bottle right now, and we need a much deeper and earlier prevention effort if we're going to intervene in ways that prevent violence.
Leila Fadel: What would a deeper and earlier prevention system look like?
Cynthia Miller-Idris: I mean, most other countries invest, you know, up to 95% of their counter extremism resources in what we would call primary prevention. So digital media literacy, civic education, helping people recognize and reject propaganda and not be persuaded by it. We invest almost no resources in that and instead kind of focus on this security and carceral approach.
On the state of violent extremism
On every measure we have available, domestic violent extremism has been increasing both on the hate fueled violence side. We have record breaking anti Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Asian, American and Pacific Islander hate, anti LGBTQ hate. We have record growth in the support for political violence as well. So it's a crisis and we need to see serious investment in the prevention model, not just in the security one.
READ MORE 
A group of Senate Republicans hold a news conference to pass the House GOP legislation that would raise the debt limit and cut federal spending, outside the U.S. Capitol on May 3, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/The Intercept)
It’s not about debt at all. It’s about turning back the political clock 100 years.
No one knows what would happen at that point, because it’s completely unprecedented. But it almost certainly would be deeply unpleasant, with huge job losses, unpredictable bits of the economy imploding, and knock-on effects in other countries that will make them both fear and hate us for decades. It would be the kind of massive self-inflicted wound that can be pulled off only by empires in their dotage.
Congress has veered close to this disaster in the past. But I’ve always believed that it would be impossible for it to actually happen, because the Republican Party’s funders on Wall Street and in corporate America understood how much damage it would do — not just to the country in general, which they don’t care about, but also to them specifically — and wouldn’t allow it.
I still believe that’s the most likely outcome, fingers crossed. However, the GOP donor class, never fans of reality to start with, has been drifting further and further into the fever swamps where the party’s politicians and base live. Many of the right’s ultra-wealthy used to understand the world well enough to act in their own best interest. Some still do. However, that minority now has far less power than billionaires who are as glued to Fox News as the party’s rank-and-file are. And these billionaires are suffering from the same cognitive impairment Fox causes all of its devotees.
And this brain-damaged community has a coherent worldview: that for the survival of America, they must destroy the “administrative state” — aka the New Deal, aka everything people like about the federal government, such as Social Security or regulations that stop chemical companies from dumping poison in your drinking water. Meanwhile, normal Americans have no idea the right has this planned, or even what those words mean.
Any non-hard-right reading of history suggests that the New Deal, and the basic infrastructure of U.S. politics it created, was a compromise that allowed human beings to live with capitalism. The only alternatives in the 1930s were (on the right) some form of fascism that would keep capitalism but eliminate democracy, or (on the left) dismantling capitalism and trying something wholly different.
The U.S. right has now come to the conclusion that this compromise was a disastrous mistake, one that they now hope to start to correct by manufacturing this crisis. Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform and a key right-wing strategist said in 2001, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Right on time, they see a key opportunity to begin fulfilling Norquist’s dream.
This perspective not always enjoyed popularity within the Republican Party. Dwight Eisenhower famously wrote this to his older brother in 1954:
The Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. … Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
You can judge for yourself whether people like this are stupid, but it’s inarguable that their number is no longer negligible. Indeed, today Eisenhower would be considered a terrifying Woke Marxist by much of the Republican Party. Newsmax would run 37 segments exposing his damning admission to his brother that “the policies of this Administration have not been radically changed from those of the last.” In other words, he was starting from the same essential premises as New Deal Democrats.
That is no longer the case; GOP leaders do want radical change and believe they can get it. As former Vice President Mike Pence recently said, “I think the day could come where we can replace the New Deal with a Better Deal.” Strategists like Steve Bannon vow to conduct the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” The kinds of spending cuts demanded by the bill passed by the House would be a powerful first step to disemboweling the administrative state of taxes and regulation that have oppressed us for so long.
Reaching Bannon’s ultimate goal would mean a return to pre-New Deal politics, with Americans once again facing the kind of vicious predatory capitalism that can only exist when democracy is severely hobbled: It’s underappreciated that the glory days of this form of capitalism took place when most adults couldn’t vote. This is what Peter Thiel had in mind when he decried “the extension of the franchise to women” and explained that freedom for capital was incompatible with democracy.
The right’s thinkers have managed to convince its most prominent politicians that this is the way to go. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, has constantly fulminated about the administrative state in his embryonic presidential campaign. They all either don’t understand the implications of what they’re pushing for, or do understand it but are sincere authoritarians. In any case, they feel they have no choice, since what Republicans like Eisenhower considered normal politics is in fact the road to some kind of apocalypse. If U.S. continues within the New Deal framework, they think, it will inevitably lead us to a totalitarian future, with starving Americans trapping rats to eat and all 5-year-olds being forced to undergo sex reassignment surgery. As Tucker Carlson recently told the Heritage Foundation, probably the most powerful think tank on the right, what they now face “is not a political movement. It’s evil.”
This sounds absolutely bonkers, and it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that a significant chunk of the U.S. right believes it. Some do understand that a U.S. default would cause a significant dose of pain. But they believe this is necessary to avoid the far greater pain currently headed our way, when Bill Gates will personally vaccinate everyone at gunpoint every three days. Indeed, in private moments they probably tear up at their own courage, perceiving themselves as true patriots willing to make this sacrifice for the greater good.
They also understand that any suffering by regular people would likely redound to their political benefit. After all, the Democratic Party has itself been trumpeting the awful consequences of the national debt for the past 30 years. Bill Clinton announced in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” In Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, he told us “we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable.” Just last fall, the Biden White House proudly declared they’d achieved “the largest ever decline in the federal deficit.” All the Republicans want to do now is to negotiate to restore the kind of fiscal sanity that the Democrats have endorsed since the 1990s. How can Joe Biden refuse?
The Biden administration apparently did have a plan to deal with this situation. It was to close their eyes and hope it was still 2011. The Washington Post quotes a top Obama official from that time — during a previous debt limit standoff — as saying their playbook had been “really getting business leaders in key districts to lobby their congressman to tell them how important it was that the U.S. doesn’t default on its debts.” However, “This is not the Republican Party of George W. Bush or his father. Most of them do not care if Fortune 100 CEOs are freaking out.” Finding this out has apparently flummoxed the Biden team and left them with no other ideas except trying the same thing again.
It would be nice to believe Biden has a secret team ready to spring into action and execute one of the potential bold solutions if the debt limit isn’t increased in time. However, no journalists or pundits close to the White House have been able to locate much sign of this. The most that appears to be happening is fervent debate within the Biden administration over whether they could claim the 14th Amendment of the Constitution requires them to ignore the debt limit and continue borrowing money — i.e., a debate that, given the obvious trajectory of the GOP, they should have settled two seconds after Republicans took the House in the 2022 midterms. The possibility that the people at the summit of power have no credible plan to ward off onrushing catastrophe seems impossible, unless you are familiar with all of human history.
So get ready. One political faction has decamped to a fantasy world. Meanwhile, the other faction is living in another fantasy world in which the first faction hasn’t done this. Things here in the reality of our fading empire may be about to get pretty dicey.
READ MORE 
Researchers have found microplastics deep in lungs and in the bloodstream, findings that could spur more research into health consequences of the tiny specks. (photo: pcess609/iStock)
A team of international scientists sampled water inside a new recycling facility at an undisclosed location in the U.K. They suggest that the facility could be releasing up to 75 billion microplastics — tiny plastic pieces less than 5 millimeters, or 3/16 of an inch, in length — per cubic meter of wastewater per year. That’s about 6% of the plastic that entered the facility to be recycled. However, the researchers only considered microplastics as small as 1.6 microns (μm), which means these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, they say.
The researchers tested the wastewater before the facility installed a water filtration system, as well as after the filtration system was installed. They found that while the system filtered out about 90% of the microplastics larger than 10 μm, it didn’t remove the pieces smaller than 10 μm.
The study, which was recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances, suggests the recycling plant discharged up to 2,933 metric tons of microplastics each year prior to the water filtration system, and up to 1,366 metric tons of microplastics each year after the system was in place.
“We wouldn’t have done this study if we hadn’t thought there was any pollution in the water, but it was just shocking numbers,” study lead author Erina Brown, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, tells Mongabay. “Over 80% of the particles that we found were under 10 microns, which have been shown to be really harmful, both to humans and so many different organisms — from large organisms down to tiny zooplankton.”
The world currently produces nearly 400 million metric tons of plastic each year, but only about 9% is recycled. This means that global plastic recycling facilities could be producing about 2 million metric tons of microplastic waste each year, says study co-author Deonie Allen, also from Strathclyde and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and the University Canterbury in New Zealand.
“This is not including the other pathways microplastics may be released into our environment,” Deonie Allen says in a statement. “Given the size of these microplastic particles, the environmental repercussions and risk of ingestion by all manners of invertebrates, biota and humans is worrying.”
The results also showed high levels of microplastics in the air around the plastic recycling facility, with 61% of the particles being less than 10 μm in size. Research has shown that when inhaled, plastics of this size can cause interstitial lung disease and other respiratory illnesses.
“We should definitely start thinking about workers within these plastic recycling facilities, and whether they should wear masks and what remedial impacts we can take to protect the workers who are working within these plants,” Brown says.
Ian Williams, an expert on pollution and waste management at the University of Southampton in the U.K., who was not involved in this research, says he agrees with the themes that emerge from the paper.
“Microplastics clearly leak from mixed plastics recycling facilities causing potentially significant [microplastic] pollution releases,” Williams tells Mongabay in an email. “The use of filters for microplastics is highly unlikely to remove very small particles but is likely to be very effective for microplastics >5µm. But regular cleaning and maintenance of such installations will be crucial, and there is the question of what you do with the dirty filters and filtered materials.”
Wastewater polluted with microplastics isn’t the only issue with plastic recycling facilities. Experts say that facilities using “advanced recycling” (or “chemical recycling”) processes can also produce a toxic cocktail of chemical waste, including benzene, lead, cadmium and chromium, and emit hazardous air pollution that can cause severe health problems. However, proponents of these facilities say advanced recycling is a solution to plastic pollution and that these facilities don’t emit more air pollution than food factories.
In March 2022, delegates from 175 countries agreed to develop a legally binding framework to fight global plastic pollution, known widely as the “global plastics treaty.” But nations are still discussing what the treaty should cover, including how the recycling of plastic products should be dealt with, and how the treaty requirements should be implemented.
“With the plastic treaty entering its second round and plastic recycling being touted as the solution, it is apparent that more responsibility on proper handling of plastic is desperately needed,” Steve Allen, a microplastics expert at the Ocean Frontier Institute at Dalhousie University in Canada, says in a statement. “A plant leaking that much plastic as part of a state-of-the-art operation, is just utterly shameful.”
Brown says she doesn’t necessarily want the study to suggest that recycling should be stopped, but that recycling shouldn’t be used to “justify our increasing plastic consumption and production.”
“We really do need to massively reduce our plastic consumption instead of focusing on recycling … and [the study] highlights that it’s so important that we consider the impacts of the solutions that we present,” Brown says, “because otherwise, it just seems a little bit backward, if we end up polluting the same environment that we are intending to protect.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.