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09 July 21
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resident Joe Biden’s plans for the biggest expansion in social spending in decades is in the hands of the Senate’s only professed democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, who must unite both fellow progressives and moderate Democrats in the face of a tricky path through a sharply divided Congress.
Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, wants to address income inequality and environmental challenges -- central to his two failed White House bids -- in even greater scale than Biden. His opening bid for a $6 trillion package vastly outweighed the roughly $4.5 trillion vision the president outlined in the spring.
To succeed, the 79-year-old Vermont independent needs the votes of the entire Democratic caucus, including moderates like Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to overcome almost certain opposition from all 50 Republicans in the chamber.
It’s a task before a lawmaker known less for give-and-take compromises than for staking out far-left, unyielding positions. Yet those working with him say he’s negotiating daily toward a consensus measure that will likely be notably smaller than his initial pitch -- while seeking to build in the priorities of individual Democrats.
“I’ve found him to be totally realistic and flexible” in discussions on a broad fiscal plan, said House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who is working with Sanders to produce identical proposals in coming days. “He’s not just standing up on an altar and preaching. He’s working it, and I feel good about the way he’s managing it.”
Sanders, who declined an interview, said before a two-week Senate recess began last month he thought $6 trillion “the appropriate amount of money to address the crises facing this country, but obviously I have to work with 49 other senators to come up with a bill.”
An initial measure, known as a budget resolution, will open the way toward a so-called reconciliation package that’s expected to encompass a raft of tax increases on companies and the wealthy, along with trillions of dollars of spending in areas Sanders has championed for years -- such as climate change, expanded health and child care and free tuition at community colleges.
Sanders also said last month he’ll do what he can to help nudge the U.S. well toward the left in this debate.
Leftward Push
“Our job right now is to continue working on a major bill which addresses the crises of working families and, by the way, has the wealthy and the powerful large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes,” he said.
Republicans on the Budget Committee expect little outreach and say time will tell if Sanders can manage Democrats’ competing demands.
“Bernie’s a wartime consigliere, he’s not a peacemaker,” said Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.
A two-time runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders already influenced a leftward shift in the Democratic Party through his time on the campaign trail in 2016 and 2020. Biden has embraced a series of progressive priorities, including an expanded child tax credit and a subsidies for clean energy, and made an attempt at increasing the national minimum wage earlier this year.
Seeking More
In this year’s economic-agenda debate, Sanders wants to go further than the White House. Besides the administration’s proposals for expanded tax credits for lower- and middle-income families, universal pre-kindergarten, more health care premium subsidies for Obamacare and more funding for public housing and infrastructure, Sanders wants more for climate change, electric buses and cars, improvements in the power grid and residential solar technologies.
The Vermonter is also pursuing some initiatives Biden isn’t, like lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 from 65 and expanding its health benefits for the elderly to dental, vision and hearing. He wants to expand the federal deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, that was limited in 2017 and provide green cards for immigrants including migrant agricultural workers and so-called dreamers -- young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
The draft budget outline from Sanders relies for about half of its financing from increased debt, with $2.4 trillion coming from tax hikes.
That’s sharply different from what key centrist Manchin has supported.
Manchin Hurdle
“If they think, in reconciliation, I’m going to throw caution to the wind and go to $5 trillion or $6 trillion when we can only afford $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion or maybe $2 trillion and what we can pay for, then I can’t be there,” Manchin said on ABC’s “This Week” on June 27.
Yarmuth said Sanders is talking regularly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and potential defectors, a process that will continue after the Senate and House return to work in the coming week.
“He’s told me he’s talking to Manchin every day, he’s talking to Schumer,” he said. “So he’s working at it.”
For his part, Schumer warned senators on Friday to be prepared to cut short their planned August recess as he seeks to pass both the bipartisan infrastructure package and the budget blueprint before they depart.
Making Deals
Sanders typically doesn’t participate in the Senate “gangs” that seek bipartisan bargains, and he hasn’t backed the $579 billion infrastructure plan worked out by five Democratic and five Republican senators, which Biden has endorsed.
Still, Sanders has shown the occasional ability to cut a deal.
In 2014, as chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, he forged a compromise that yielded a $17 billion overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs after findings about excessive health care wait times and poor treatment of veterans. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate and House.
If Sanders succeeds in getting a budget resolution through the Senate, which then passes also in the House -- where Speaker Nancy Pelosi can only afford to lose three or four from her caucus -- focus will shift to the specific committees charged with detailing policy measures.
Later in the legislative process, Sanders will again be in focus in a partisan battle before the Senate parliamentarian if there are divisions over what qualifies for filibuster protection inclusion in the reconciliation bill, which needs just a simple majority for passage. He will then help shepherd the measure through a grueling “vote-o-rama” of unlimited amendments, which could change the bill to make it unpalatable to the House.
Sanders is well aware of the limitations of reconciliation packages.
He lost a bid to include a $15-an-hour nationwide minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion March pandemic-relief bill. Back in 2017, he was on the winning side in a battle against a Republican drive for a comprehensive measure repealing Obamacare, successfully arguing to the parliamentarian that some key provisions failed to meet requirements. Republicans instead were forced to pursue a so-called “skinny repeal” of the law, which failed on the floor.
“He’s worked very hard on both a bipartisan basis and with his Democratic colleagues in the past in order to move legislation successfully through Congress,” said Eric Ueland, who was the Senate Budget Committee’s GOP staff director in 2017 and later served as White House legislative affairs director under President Donald Trump. “I suspect we’ll see that again in the next few months as this process unfolds.”
President Biden. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
ALSO SEE: Biden Takes Aim at Big Tech, Broadband With Sweeping Competition Order
Order takes several steps to restore telecom oversight, ban sneaky fees, and kill harmful, exclusive landlord broadband deals.
he White House this week unveiled a new executive order that will rein in anticompetitive behavior across numerous industries, including a mandate to restore telecom oversight stripped away during the Trump era.
According to a fact sheet circulated by the White House, the executive order includes 72 different initiatives across a dozen federal agencies aimed at boosting competition and reining in predatory monopolies. Several aspects of the order specifically target big telecom, including a provision urging the current FCC to restore net neutrality.
83 million Americans are stuck under a broadband monopoly, and millions more live under a duopoly usually consisting of a cable giant or apathetic telco. This lack of competition directly results in high prices, spotty coverage, slow speeds, and terrible customer service.
Under Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai, the government’s answer to these problems was to largely ignore them. Or make the problem worse by eliminating consumer protections, removing barriers to media consolidation, or rubber stamping harmful mergers that reduced competition even further.
The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules not only prevented telecom giants from abusing their power to give their own services an unfair market advantage (like imposing pointless broadband caps to make using streaming alternatives more expensive), but required ISPs to be clear about any throttling or other restrictions imposed on your broadband connection.
The rules were repealed in 2017 by Pai in a wave of controversy. Not only were the justifications to repeal the rules proven repeatedly false, the broadband industry was caught using fake and dead people to create the illusion of support for the extremely unpopular decision.
The repeal also eliminated much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority, while also banning states from stepping in and protecting consumers in the wake of federal apathy. Both decisions proved problematic during the subsequent pandemic, which highlighted the essential importance of broadband for employment, education, and health care.
By law the White House can’t directly tell an independent agency what to do, so the executive order “encourages” the FCC to take steps to restore not only net neutrality rules, but the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the Communications Act.
The order also urges both the DOJ and FTC to engage in greater scrutiny of megamergers that eliminate jobs and reduce overall sector competition. That didn’t happen during the Sprint T-Mobile merger review, approved before many officials had even reviewed the data.
The order also bans annoying early termination fees on telecom bills, and urges the FCC to restore efforts (also scuttled during the Trump administration) that would have required ISPs include a “nutrition label” on broadband connections, making it clear if your broadband line includes any network throttling, hidden fees, usage caps, or other limitations.
The executive order also takes aim at exclusive arrangements between many landlords and ISPs that effectively create block-by-block broadband monopolies. While the practice is technically banned under 2007 FCC rules, loopholes in the restrictions have allowed ISPs to tap dance around them for years.
“This impacts low-income and marginalized neighborhoods, because landlord-ISP arrangements can effectively block out broadband infrastructure expansion by new providers,” the administration said.
There’s one problem: most of the initiatives require that the Biden administration first appoint a full suite of agency commissioners and a permanent FCC boss. The fact this hasn’t happened nearly six months into Biden’s term has started to annoy consumer groups, who warn that the process of appointing and confirming a permanent agency head alone will take months.
In recent years problems in the heavily monopolized US telecom industry have been put on the back burner as the lion’s share of DC policy attention fixates on the problems created by big tech. But the executive order makes it clear that while perhaps not its top priority, the government hasn’t forgotten about the massive problems consistently created by big telecom.
Migrants speak with a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Roma, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico on March 28. (photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
ICE’s new policy is even more expansive than it was during the Obama era, when President Biden was vice president. The Obama administration generally exempted pregnant women from immigration detention, but the Biden administration is also including women who gave birth within the prior year and those who are nursing, which could last longer than a year.
The policy adds to the growing list of immigrants exempt from arrest or deportation for violating civil immigration laws. Critics have said that Biden is abandoning his responsibility to enforce U.S. laws, but the president has said he wants a more humane approach to immigration, especially for parents and children arriving in increasing numbers from regions such as Central America.
ICE officials said in a statement that the new policy takes into greater account the “health and safety” of expecting and new mothers and recognizes “the time needed for infant development and parental bonding.”
“ICE is committed to safeguarding the integrity of our immigration system and preserving the health and safety of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing individuals,” acting ICE director Tae Johnson said in a statement. “Given the unique needs of this population, we will not detain individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.”
The agency administers pregnancy tests to female detainees after they are taken into custody as part of its regular health screenings, and some discover that they are pregnant after the test. In those cases, the policy says, ICE should “generally” release them from custody.
Pregnant and postpartum women may still be detained in “very limited circumstances,” the policy said, when the woman “poses an imminent risk of death, violence, or physical harm” or is a national security concern. A field office director must approve the arrest and detention and ensure that the women receive medical care.
The policy revokes a 2017 Trump administration directive that “ended the presumption of release for all pregnant detainees.” ICE detained nearly 2,100 pregnant women the following year, a 52 percent jump over the last calendar year of the Obama administration, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Most pregnant women detained in recent years have been apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border seeking refuge in the United States, according to the GAO. Most did not have prior criminal records.
Proponents of immigration enforcement argue that ICE must detain immigrants to ensure their deportation. Releasing pregnant women in the United States to await an immigration court hearing virtually guarantees that their children will be born here and automatically granted the benefits of U.S. citizenship, they say.
Advocates for immigrants counter that detaining pregnant and postpartum women endangers their physical and mental health. Some women were raped as they fled to the United States. Others complained of inadequate health care in detention.
The new directive does not limit the “temporary placements” of pregnant women in “family staging centers” in South Texas, where several hundred pregnant women traveling with children have passed through this fiscal year, according to ICE data.
The Biden administration ended family detention earlier this year, and is instead releasing most migrant families within 72 hours to await a hearing in immigration court.
Thirteen pregnant women were in ICE custody as of Thursday, and they are being considered for release under the new policy, officials said.
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum anchored Fox News's election coverage. (photo: Fox News)
Landslide offers some juicy gossip about the death rattle of a bizarre presidency, almost all of it attributed to anonymous sources.
here’s not much to Landslide, the desultory end of Michael Wolff’s Trump trilogy that began with Fire and Fury, a book that shocked and awed with gossipy revelations, largely provided by Steve Bannon, about the incompetence of his administration before that had been so widely recognized.
The new book, which The Daily Beast obtained a copy of ahead of its publication next week, is supposed to give an inside track of what happened as Trump’s presidency went off the rails in its final months, adding some insidery and usually vaguely sourced details to that well-documented disaster, as process was abandoned and a raving Trumpand a handful of his remaining henchpeople and true believers just made things up as they went.
It’s written in an omniscient third person that finds space for multiple mentions of Rudy Giuliani’s farts, and windily proclaims that “in the event that factual matters have been disputed, they have been included only if confirmed by multiple sources.” Which doesn’t sound so different from saying that the gossip only made it into print if two people shared the same story. Some of that gossip:
—Trump, at a meeting with Karl Rove at the beginning of the summer in 2020, as Joe Biden remained largely in his basement, told “Bush’s Brain” that “he had come to understand that the Democrats wanted him to attack Biden so as to weaken and destroy him. And then, when he had destroyed ‘Sleepy Joe’ as only Trump could, the Democrats’ plan, he had it on super-secret authority, was to replace Biden as the nominee” with Andrew Cuomo, adding “there is a very good chance that Michelle” Obama would then replace Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket.
At the end of the meeting, Wolff writes, Rove asked where this crazy idea came from, and is told it’s from Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “POTUS believes it,” then-campaign manager Brad Parscale tells him. “If you could call Hannity and tell him to let up, that might be good.”
(Trump briefly returns to Cuomo in a rambling, raving interview with Wolff at Mar a Lago that concludes the book, with the ex-president saying that “Andrew is a thug,” while saying how surprised he is that Cuomo’s grip on power in New York appears to be slipping.)
—As to Cuomo’s old friend Chris Christie, Wolff reports that the final rift between him and Trump came at the last prep session before the first presidential debate, where the former New Jersey Governor, playing Biden, really rips into the president for the first time: “You have blood on your hands. You’re a complete failure. All these people have died from the virus. And it’s your fault.” It was a moment, Wolff writes, that “observers would judge in hindsight broke [Trump’s] relationship with his old crony”—not to mention that “Trump blamed getting COVID on Chris Christie… [who] had sat across from him at the debate prep table, and Trump had seen the spittle come out of his mouth and tried to duck from the droplets.”
(In the Mar a Lago interview, Trump says of Christie: “I helped him out a lot with his problems, and he turned out to be a very disloyal guy—and he had big problems. He’s not going anywhere.”)
—According to Wolff, who as usual does not cite his sources, it was Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch, with his father Rupert’s backing, who made the decision to call Arizona for Biden on election night, pulling the rug out from under Trump. According to Wolff, Fox News’ independent election desk operation “was merely cover…to bypass the news desk and be directly answerable to the Murdochs. Certainly, there was every reason, if you wanted a reason to delay the Arizona call, to yet forestall it and still have no fear of being preempted by anyone else. Lachlan got his father on the phone to ask if he wanted to make the early call. His father, with signature grunt, assented, adding: ‘Fuck him.’”
Fox News didn’t return a request for comment from the Beast on Friday about Wolff’s depiction of the election night events.
Later, Wolff quotes Fox News boss Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, saying after a debate practice session in 2016 that “Rudy is Rudy, and Donald is Donald, and together that’s an equation which adds up to a loss of contact with most other rational people, if not reality itself.”
—Speaking of Rudy, Wolff reports that after Maria Ryan, who Giulani has called his “good friend” and Wolff describes as his “girlfriend,” emailed a Trump aide that he would charge $20,000 a day to fight the election results—an ask that was promptly leaked to The New York Times and that “America’s mayor” fiercely denied, leading the aide she’d emailed to ask her how it felt to have her boyfriend call her a liar in the paper of record—Trump flatly told Giuliani he would be paid only for a win.
Later, Wolff writes, as Giuliani and “constitutional lawyer” Jenna Ellis held bootleg meetings with Trumpist state lawmakers to try and get them to overturn their election results, Ryan, who travelled with him, put in “an invoice to the Trump campaign for her services. The remaining campaign officials would take some pleasure in refusing to pay it and in conveying to a very sour president that Rudy’s girlfriend had put in for her fees.”
—As then-Attorney General William Barr separated himself from Trump’s attempts to overturn the election he lost, Wolff writes, “Trump had been personally calling around to various U.S. attorneys in swing state districts, among them his appointee William McSwain in the Easter District of Pennsylvania” to try and convince them to open their own probes. When they did not, Trump blamed his A.G., saying that “if I had won, Barr would have licked the floor if I asked him to. What a phony!”
—When the Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit Texas originated trying to challenge the results in other states, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing, Trump was furious at “his” three Supreme Court justices, according to Wolff, with most of the president’s bile spent on Brett Kavanaugh, who Trump said he hadn’t wanted to appoint while growling, “Where would he be be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.” In his interview with Wolff, Trump added, “I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh… he just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks alongside Vice President Kamala Harris on the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill at the White House, 2021. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
ate last month, a poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico gauged Americans’ opinions on several health care measures expected to be included in the Democrats’ forthcoming reconciliation bill. Its conclusions were striking: of the six proposed reforms put to respondents, each enjoyed majority support across the electorate with four even eliciting more than 50 percent from Republican voters.
A proposal to add dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare, for example, scored 84 percent in favor (89 percent among Democrats; 79 percent among Republicans). Even less resoundingly popular items like lowering the eligibility age of Medicare to sixty still boasted high levels of support (61 percent overall, with 49 percent of Republican voters in favor).
In other words, there’s considerable buy-in for each proposal across the political spectrum. Why, then, does it seem so hard to imagine any actually passing into law?
At surface, the answer mostly has to do with the confusing and labyrinthine process now unfolding as the White House pursues a bipartisan infrastructure bill alongside another containing the few of things Democrats nominally promised to do if given a mandate. As is typically (and predictably) the case, proposals related to health care, education, and climate change have been relegated to the reconciliation bill even though many are quite popular. Almost by definition given the Democrats’ razor-thin majority and consistently demonstrated ambivalence about digging in around their own stated agenda, this means that measures like those recently polled by Morning Consult/Politico look vastly more precarious than those in the bipartisan infrastructure plan — ironic given their support among voters from both parties.
It’s a dynamic all too familiar to Washington, where the most popular and commonsensical policies tend to be given short shrift while things absolutely no one was asking for (see: “asset recycling”) are the basis for “consensus.”
Indeed, whatever the received wisdom might be about politicians putting polls over principle, it’s breathtaking how out of step with majority opinion the leaderships of the two parties often are. The most obvious and topical example is Medicare For All, which has enjoyed widespread support for years but was near-universally opposed by candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries and can barely even get a hearing in DC.
The compromise was ostensibly a public option, the alternative embraced by Joe Biden which has tellingly received little mention since he actually took office. It’s now July, and the suite of proposals being discussed is mostly limited to a handful of Medicare reforms, packed into a reconciliation bill with an arguably negligible chance of success despite their overwhelming popularity among Democrats and Republicans alike.
The lesson in all of this is that the inner workings of Beltway lawmaking often operate independently of public opinion: the interests which shape and control the legislative process being able to do so without having to worry much about what the majority wants or thinks. Here, the Medicare reforms currently slated to appear in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill are a good case in point.
Having helped to push Biden’s proposed public option to the sidelines, and more recently spent unfathomable sums to defeat a local version of the idea in Colorado, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) — a front for various corporate health care interests including the private insurance racket and Big Pharma — is now working to stop Congress from lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to sixty. To this end, it’s released a fearmongering report filled with deficit alarmism and taken out a seven-figure ad buy to discredit the idea. While the group, which has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, is not required to disclose donor information, an April report from the Intercept pegged the value of a single contribution from corporate leviathan CVS Health at $5 million.
It’s just one small illustration of the scale on which private interests operate, and the bottomless reserve of cash many have at their disposal to ensure that even modest and popular reforms stand little chance of success in Congress. By way of comparison, PAHCF’s official Facebook page has fewer than thirty-five hundred followers and its daily posts receive little to no engagement. Its Twitter feed is exactly the same, the few replies that it does receive consistently being from people hostile to its mission.
Though it’s admittedly a less than scientific way of measuring things, the spectacle of a multimillion dollar corporate lobbying effort unable to muster even the most perfunctory engagement on social media is a pretty potent metaphor about how America’s lawmaking process typically works. It’s pretty hard to fake grassroots enthusiasm or popular buy-in, especially when the objective is to prevent millions of people from getting things they both urgently want and desperately need.
The point is, with enough cash and lobbying power at your disposal, you don’t have to. Through astroturfed PR offensives, campaign donations, and the various privileges now afforded to dark money by America’s Wild West political financing regime, public opinion can be treated as basically irrelevant — even, and especially, when explicit promises have been made and a clear majority wants something that will imperil industry profiteers’ balance sheets.
U.S. soldiers load onto a Chinook helicopter to out on a mission in Afghanistan. (photo: Reuters)
Major press outlets are trying to goad Biden into staying in Afghanistan.
here are plenty of reasons to criticize the foreign policy of President Biden: his failure to fully end U.S. participation in the Yemen war more than five months after he pledged to; his staffing out of his foreign policy to a shadowy consultant firm called WestExec whose clients include military contractors and powerful corporations; his support for Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza.
But when it comes to U.S. press outlets, they’re more likely to critique Biden when he steps away from militarism. This reality was on full display following the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Bagram Air Base, which began in late June as part of the Biden administration’s broader exit from Afghanistan (which, it is important to note, does not constitute a full withdrawal and is likely to result in the farming out of the war to the CIA).
A wave of media coverage followed Biden’s evasive outburst at a July 2 press conference. He was responding to questions from reporters implying that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was irresponsible or harmful to Afghans, including one reporter who asked whether the U.S. exit would touch off a civil war. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” the president said, cutting off the journalist. The president continued, “I’m not gonna answer any more questions on Afghanistan… it’s Fourth of July [weekend].”
While the president’s remarks are certainly eyebrow-raising, given his responsibility for waging and shaping that war over the past two decades, they do not constitute a meaningful departure from Biden’s numerous other incidents of lashing out. Except in this case he was chafing at journalists’ questions that came from a seemingly pro-war perspective. And it did not take long for media segments criticizing the president’s remarks to start rolling in.
CNN’s The Lead ran a segment on July 2 titled, “President Biden grew visibly frustrated after reporters asked him about the Afghanistan withdrawal” that used the press conference as one hook for a broader story about the U.S. exit. In the segment, correspondent Kaitlan Collins painted a grim picture of what a U.S. departure would mean. “Although the official drawdown from Afghanistan isn’t over yet, the departure from Bagram air base sends a strong signal that U.S. operations are…This sprawling compound was often visited by U.S. leaders and became the center of military power in Afghanistan after being the first to house U.S. forces following the 2001 invasion. The U.S. is handing the air base over to the Afghan government amid new concerns about what they’re leaving behind.”
Nowhere does the segment mention that Bagram Air Base was once the site of grisly U.S. torture, where prisoners were held in dismal conditions, deprived of sleep, subjected to sexual degradation and humiliation, and suspended from ceilings — all while being held in legal limbo without charge, much like those detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay.
But beyond that omission, the segment fails to wrestle with a single tough question about the war itself, which is an undeniable failure even according to the military’s own stated logic, and has brought 20 years of occupation, death and displacement to the Afghan people. According to a September 2020 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, 5.3 million people in Afghanistan have been displaced (either internally or externally) by the U.S. war since it began in 2001. Where are the probing questions about whether the war ever should have been waged in the first place, or whether some of those people would still be in their homes if the United States hadn’t invaded? Instead, Collins postured as if she was being oppositional to power, when she was in fact siding with the Pentagon — the easiest thing on Earth for a journalist to do. (Jake Tapper, host of The Lead, knows this better than anyone. The war in Afghanistan has been a major boon to his career, the subject of his book about an “untold story of American valor” that will soon be turned into a Hollywood movie.)
NBC Nightly News, hosted by Lester Holt, struck a similar tone in its July 2 broadcast, with correspondent Richard Engel saying that Biden “did not want to draw attention” to Afghanistan when pressed about the “impact of the withdrawal.” Engel continued, “but not talking about it won’t stop this. As U.S. troops leave, some Afghan security groups are collapsing…Most Afghans do not want the Taliban to return.”
Despite Engel’s claim, there’s no evidence after nearly 20 years of war that U.S. presence erodes the Taliban’s power. In fact, all evidence suggests the opposite: Since 2001 the Taliban has significantly expanded its foothold in the country (yet the role of the U.S. occupation in strengthening the Taliban has been scrubbed from much media coverage). While polling is notoriously difficult in conditions of war, a survey from the Institute of War and Peace Studies from January 2020 found 80% of Afghans surveyed believe that peace can only be obtained through a political solution, not a military one. (The poll received funding from the European Union and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.)
The survey also found that 46% of Afghan respondents wanted U.S. and NATO militaries out of the country after a peace deal, compared to 33% who wanted them to stay. While such a definitive peace deal never came, this survey data does not show that the Afghan people want U.S. troops to remain in their country indefinitely. Yet, the framing from NBC Nightly News gives the impression that Afghan public opinion is in favor of an indefinite American presence.
These aren’t the only examples of major media outlets criticizing Biden over the withdrawal. “This July Fourth, America will leave Afghanistan independence in its death throes,” reads a July 1 piece by USA Today ’s editorial board. Other outlets recirculated 2001 talking points from Laura Bush by declaring that the U.S. withdrawal will harm women and girls. “We don’t have to wonder what will happen to Afghan women when the U.S. leaves,” reads an opinion headline in the Dallas Morning News. Yet the same pundits who supposedly care so deeply about the wellbeing of people in Afghanistan have been remarkably silent about the at least 47,245 civilians who have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the war, a rate that has been disturbingly high for years. And they’ve had little to say about the fact that only 1.2% of people in Afghanistan have been vaccinated against Covid-19, portending a much broader humanitarian crisis to come.
Since it began, the war in Afghanistan has been met with protests around the world, and those protesters have had to contend with a bipartisan pro-war U.S. consensus — both in Washington, and in the press. The system functions by ensuring that anyone who steps out of line — even slightly, and even 20 years too late — is disciplined. This was apparent as early as September 30, 2001, when the New York Times ran the headline, “A NATION CHALLENGED: Protesters in Washington Urge Peace With Terrorists.” And it persists to the present — even amid signs the war is deeply unpopular among the U.S. public.
There are manifold other ways that U.S. media outlets could frame American withdrawal. They could examine the rampant corruption and war crimes of the U.S.-backed Afghan military, air the voices of people who want the United States to leave, or ask hard questions about what a complete American exit — and U.S. reparations to the Afghan people — could look like. But after two decades of occupation, bombings, home raids and drone strikes, we’re still a long way from a free press that asks difficult questions when it comes to war and militarism. Instead, it’s relying on rote, self-serving cliches about a supposed humanitarian mission that simply never existed.
A crane takes flight in Mobile, Alabama. On the horizon is one of many oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. (photo: Michael Watkins/Getty)
The report, published Wednesday, calculated that oil and gas companies had dumped at least 66.3 million gallons of fracking fluids into the vulnerable waters of the Gulf between 2010 and 2020 with government approval.
"Offshore fracking threatens Gulf communities and wildlife far more than our government has acknowledged. To protect life and our climate, we should ban these extreme extraction techniques," CBD oceans program director Miyoko Sakashita said in a press release. "A decade into the offshore fracking boom, officials still haven't properly studied its public health impacts. The failure to curb this major source of pollution is astounding and unacceptable."
CBD compiled its figures based on scientific studies and federal reports obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The figures reveal both the extent of industrial pollution and the fact that the federal government has allowed it.
There has been a fracking boom in the Gulf of Mexico in the past decade, and the waters off Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas account for around 98 percent of all the offshore oil and gas produced in the U.S. Since 2010, the federal government has approved at least 3,039 incidences of fracking and at least 760 incidences of acidizing in the area.
When fracking occurs, water and chemicals are blasted into the seafloor to release oil and gas. Acidizing, on the other hand, involves using hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acid to carve channels in the rock for the fossil fuels to flow out.
"The federal government allows oil companies to dump produced wastewater, including fracking and acidizing chemicals, into the Gulf without limit," the report authors wrote.
There is evidence that the chemicals involved in fracking can harm human and animal health. They have been shown to kill marine life in laboratory settings at concentrations equal to the ones measured near fracking platforms. Chemicals involved in fracking can also cause reproductive harm, cancer and death.
Further, fracking contributes to the climate crisis and threatens the economy of the Gulf. Tourism and fishing, which are both put at risk by offshore fracking, create more than 10 times the jobs that the fossil fuel industry provides.
To address its findings, CBD called on the federal government to halt all fracking and acidizing permits in the Gulf and to ban the release of toxic chemicals. Further, the organization called on the Secretary of Interior to create a program for restoring and protecting Gulf communities and workers impacted by the fossil fuel industry.
Fracking isn't the only way that fossil fuels harm the Gulf and its ecosystems, of course. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill continues to harm human and animal health ten years after the fact, as National Geographic reported in 2020. And an Oceana report also published that year warned that another such disaster could easily occur in the same waters.
"Offshore drilling is still as dirty and dangerous as it was 10 years ago," Oceana campaign director Diane Hoskins said at the time. "If anything, another disaster is more likely today as the oil industry drills deeper and farther offshore."
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