31 August 21
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epresentative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, admitted that he spoke with former President Donald Trump "more than once" on the phone during the violent pro-Trump insurrection targeting the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Jordan had previously said that he was one of several Republican lawmakers who spoke to Trump at least once during the events of January 6. But the staunch Trump loyalist confirmed to Politico that there were multiple calls between him and the then president on that day, the publication reported on Sunday.
"Look, I definitely spoke to the president that day. I don't recall—I know it was more than once, I just don't recall the times," Jordan told Politico. The congressman said he was "sure" that at least one of the calls took place while he and other lawmakers were hunkered down in a safe room "because we were in that room forever."
The congressman did not tell the publication the specifics of what he discussed with Trump, but asserted that he had wanted the National Guard to get involved to address the riot.
Politico also reported that Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, joined Jordan on one of those calls. But Jordan did not confirm this, saying he had to "think about it." A spokesperson for Gaetz told the publication "Congressman Gaetz speaks with President Trump regularly and doesn't disclose the substance of those discussions with the media."
With the news of Jordan's multiple calls on Sunday, some on Twitter quickly began calling for subpoenas against the congressman. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, established a House select committee to investigate the January 6 attack against the U.S. Capitol. That body—which currently has seven Democratic and two Republican members—is chaired by Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.
Some on social media called for subpoenas against Jordan and Gaetz after the news broke.
Twitter user Jake Lobin, who describes himself as a "Devout Democrat," wrote: "Looks like Jim Jordan is now admitting that he multiple calls with the Former Guy *DURING* the Jan 6th insurrection, including one call where he & Matt Gaetz both BEGGED the orange traitor to call off his terrorist mob. Bring on the subpoenas"
The Twitter account for the anti-Trump MeidasTouch PAC shared a link to the news from Politico, writing: "Subpoena Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz immediately."
"I'm old enough to remember when Jim Jordan was not so forthcoming about that day. Amazing what a potential subpoena can do to your 'memory,'" Twitter user Pierce DeHart wrote.
Newsweek reached out to press representatives for Thompson to ask if the committee planned to subpoena the congressmen, and to Jordan's office for comments, and will update this article with any response.
Soldiers. (photo: PA)
“I’m here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., said at a news conference about an hour later as the final C-17 plane cleared Afghan airspace. The last to leave, he said, were Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and acting American ambassador Ross Wilson.
President Biden issued a written statement saying he would address the American people Tuesday afternoon. The statement said that the decision to end the final U.S. military mission, which evacuated more than 120,000 Americans, Afghans and others over the past several weeks, was the “unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and of all our commanders on the ground.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a formal address, said the U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan would be transferred for the time being to Doha, Qatar. From there, he said, “we will continue our relentless efforts to help Americans, foreign nationals and Afghans” at risk “to leave Afghanistan if they choose,” as well as what he said would be ongoing humanitarian and counterterrorism operations.
He said fewer than 200 American citizens are believed to still be in Afghanistan.
Calling it a “massive military, diplomatic and humanitarian undertaking,” Blinken said the evacuation mission was “one of the most difficult in our nation’s history.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement released Monday night that he hoped all Americans share his pride in the U.S. troops and diplomats who “raced to help save lives” in Afghanistan in August.
“Our service members secured, defended, and ran a major international airport,” he said. “They learned how to help consular officers screen and verify visa applicants. They provided medical care, food and water, and compassion to people in need. They flew tens of thousands of people to safety, virtually around the clock. They even delivered babies.”
The costs of the war were immense, lasting through four administrations — more than 2,400 U.S. military deaths and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, and trillions of defense and development dollars spent.
Yet at the end of the day, the final departure returned Afghanistan to the undisputed rule of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist militants whom U.S. forces ousted from power in 2001 and battled for nearly two decades.
After years of ups and downs on the battlefield, and in the size of the American and allied forces, which had dwindled to a few thousand during the Trump administration, the end came quickly. In barely a month, the Taliban spread its control to all major cities, and the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
The U.S. military has been in regular contact with Taliban officials since their arrival in Kabul two weeks ago, and McKenzie described their communications as “pragmatic” and “businesslike” as they did not contest U.S. control of the Kabul airport. He said Donahue had spoken with his Taliban liaison just before departure.
“They established a firm perimeter outside of the airfield to prevent people from coming onto the airfield during our departure, and we worked on that with them for a number of days,” he said. “They did not have direct knowledge of our time of departure — we chose to keep that information very restricted — but they were actually very helpful and useful to us as we closed down operations.”
As the last planes took off, the U.S. military had a protective fleet of aircraft overhead that included a mix of MQ-9 Reaper drones, B-52 bombers, AC-130 gunships and F-15 fighters, said a U.S. defense official familiar with the operation.
Once the Americans were gone, celebratory gunfire could be heard throughout Kabul.
“The last American occupier withdrew from [Kabul airport] at 12 o’clock and our country gained its full independence, praise and gratitude be to God,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid wrote on Twitter.
U.S. officials said that a total of 122,000 men, women and children — 79,000 of them on American military aircraft and the rest on charter and allied military flights — were flown out of the country in a heroic and unprecedented airlift, as the Biden administration struggled to meet its own Aug. 31 deadline. The White House has said the number included about 6,000 Americans who were evacuated or otherwise departed Afghanistan since Aug. 14.
But the administration acknowledged that many were left behind, including American citizens whom McKenzie estimated number in the “low hundreds,” and tens of thousands of Afghans who aided the U.S. and allied effort over the years but were unable or unwilling to breach the danger and chaos of reaching the airport.
“There’s a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure,” McKenzie said. “We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out.”
“We maintained the ability to bring them in until immediately before departure,” he said. “But none of them made it to the airport.”
There were no American civilians aboard the final five planes to leave, which carried the last 800 or so of more than 5,000 troops Biden had sent to handle the evacuation, along with what McKenzie said was “sensitive equipment.”
He said other equipment had been “demilitarized” on the ground, sometimes with explosives. The equipment left behind included 70 mine-resistant vehicles, 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft, none of which are usable anymore, he said.
Deaths continued throughout the final days, including 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans killed in a deadly suicide attack at the airport Thursday, and as many as 10 Afghan civilians, some of them children, who died when a U.S. drone hit a vehicle in a Kabul neighborhood Sunday.
The drone strike was targeting the Islamic State-Khorasan, the group’s offshoot in Afghanistan. U.S. officials have said ISIS-K was responsible for the airport bombing and five rockets fired at the airport Sunday.
The Taliban is a sworn enemy of the Islamic State, although it has long and strong ties to al-Qaeda. The United States has said it will continue to conduct over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations against both groups.
Blinken did not say whether the United States would recognize the still-to-be-formed Taliban government. He said the American posture in the future would be rooted in U.S. national interest, in particular whether the Taliban helped secure and return U.S. hostages and “bring security to the country.”
“We will not do it on the basis of trust or faith,” he said. “Not on what the Taliban government says, but what it does.”
That includes, he said, cooperating in counterterrorism efforts, refraining from any reprisals inside Afghanistan and forming an “inclusive government.” He said that the United States would “continue humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan,” but that aid would not go to the Taliban but through the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations. “We expect those efforts will not be impeded,” Blinken said.
He said that Ian McCary, the former No. 2 U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, would lead the new U.S. Doha office, while John Bass, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan assigned by Biden to handle the diplomatic side of the evacuation from Kabul, would continue heading a team to resettle Afghans who have left or may leave in the future.
The United Nations Security Council approved a resolution Monday to urge the Taliban to follow through on promises to allow Afghans to depart the country when they choose, calling on the militants to permit humanitarian activities and prevent extremists from launching attacks.
Thirteen nations, including the United States, as well as France and Britain — which sent troops to Afghanistan over the years along with Germany, Italy and many other NATO and non-NATO nations — voted in favor of the resolution. The measure also condemned last week’s deadly bombing at the Kabul airport and highlighted the need for a negotiated political settlement that would respect the rights of all Afghans. China and Russia abstained, criticizing the West’s handling of the exit from Afghanistan.
“By adopting this resolution, the Security Council has shown that the world expects the Taliban to live up to these promises today, tomorrow and after August 31st,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters after the vote. “This is of the utmost importance to us.”
Thomas-Greenfield said the United Nations was disappointed by the abstentions by Moscow and Beijing.
During the meeting, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said he abstained because the resolution did not include a passage about the fight against organizations including the Islamic State and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Nebenzia said such an omission underplayed those groups’ threats.
He also underscored the “negative impact” the evacuations had on Afghanistan’s economy.
“With this brain drain, the country will not be able to achieve its sustainable-development goals,” Nebenzia said.
Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun said that the resolution would intensify tensions in Afghanistan and that the international community should respect the nation’s sovereignty and “right to determine their own future.”
Jun criticized the “hasty and chaotic” withdrawal of U.S. troops and said countries that were present in Afghanistan “should be responsible for what they have done in the past 20 years.”
Earlier in the day, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi pleaded with the international community to remain focused on the plight of Afghan civilians, warning in a statement that “a far greater humanitarian crisis is just beginning” as evacuations end and “the tragedy that has unfolded will no longer be as visible.”
“The scenes at Kabul airport these past few days have sparked an outpouring of compassion around the world at the fear and desperation of thousands of Afghans,” Grandi said. “But when these images have faded from our screens, there will still be millions who need the international community to act. . . . When the airlift and the media frenzy are over, the overwhelming majority of Afghans, some 39 million, will remain inside Afghanistan. They need us — governments, humanitarians, ordinary citizens — to stay with them and stay the course.”
On Monday, the World Health Organization said it had delivered its first shipment of medical supplies to Afghanistan since the Taliban regained power. It was the first of three deliveries planned by Pakistani aircraft flown into the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif.
Although the air evacuations have ended, many Afghans are trying to cross land borders into neighboring countries, although Iran and Pakistan, which have hosted many of an estimated 3.5 million Afghans displaced during decades of war, have said they will admit no more refugees.
Lejla Duka, whose father and two uncles were among the 'Fort Dix Five,' speaks at a rally to protest against the New York Police Department surveillance of Muslim communities, in New York. (photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP)
In the “Fort Dix Five” case, the Duka brothers were convicted with the help of an FBI informant. Their family is still waiting for justice.
ight up until his death in 2018, Ferik Duka dreamed of seeing his three eldest sons, Shain, Dritan, and Eljvir, freed from prison. In 2009, the three brothers were sentenced to life for their role in an alleged plot to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey. The convictions followed a terrorism sting led by then-U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Chris Christie that ran for over a year and involved multiple government informants. The brothers’ incarceration put an end to Ferik Duka’s immigrant dream: Decades earlier, he had brought his family to the United States from Albania in search of peace and opportunity.
“My dad’s prayers, before he passed away, were the saddest thing in the world,” said Ferik’s youngest son, Burim Duka. “He’d pray to God to bring his sons home, so he could see all of them together as a family one last time, and then he could die happy.”
The investigation into the “Fort Dix Five,” as the case became known, was marred by outrageous law enforcement and legal abuses, documented in a 2015 investigation and documentary by The Intercept. Their case was just one of many in which zealous FBI officials and prosecutors, operating in the heated atmosphere of post-9/11 America, branded individuals who posed no appreciable threat to the country as enemies of the state. Many of them, like the Duka brothers, were given long prison sentences or otherwise had their lives ruined after being convicted on material support for terrorism charges.
Today, U.S. officials have begun signaling their desire to move on from the war on terror and pivot to new security threats at home and abroad. For those whose lives were impacted by post-9/11 abuses, as well as the lives of their family and community members, moving forward is impossible. They want a measure of justice for the terrible events of years past — not least the reevaluation of convictions that in hindsight appear obviously abusive — and accountability for those who benefited from foiling plots that they themselves had concocted.
“There hasn’t been any reckoning with the legacy of this era,” said Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York School of Law professor and founder of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project. “Instead, people have moved on with their careers, often after scoring political points off these cases. Down the chain, that is kind of the story of the war on terror, at least domestically.”
“Many prosecutors see these big splashy cases as a way to make a name for themselves and fulfill career ambitions,” Kassem said.
Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government has prosecuted over 800 people on terrorism charges. Not every case was as flagrantly concocted as the Fort Dix Five. Many, though, included a similarly troubling mix of judicial and law enforcement bias. The people who ended up in the crosshairs were often not serious threats, but rather those susceptible to the tactics employed by the authorities.
Kassem said, “It is alarming when you look across these cases and see an overrepresentation of suspects who were mentally deficient, marginalized, or otherwise vulnerable being the targets of these sting operations, and it raises questions about the reality of the terrorist threat that was depicted by the FBI.”
Instead of hardened terrorists, the war on terror as it was waged at home often went after people who posed no real threat to the United States. “There ought to be some kind of process where these cases are looked at collectively in retrospect and reexamined,” said Arun Kundnani, an expert on counterterrorism and author of “The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror,” who has examined the now-debunked radicalization theories behind many terror convictions. “There are still people sitting in prison as a result of flawed prosecution theories or who served short sentences yet have had their lives ruined as a result of their convictions.”
FBI Informants
The Fort Dix Five case was a huge career boon to at least one person: Chris Christie, who would go on to become governor of New Jersey and launch a serious presidential run.
Christie has continued to brag about his role in prosecuting the Fort Dix Five, highlighting it as one of his signal achievements. His boasting masks the reality of a case that was as farcical as it was tragic for the families involved. At trial, the government’s case relied heavily on a now-discredited terrorism expert named Evan Kohlmann, whose testimony was used to establish the key prosecution argument that because of their religious and political beliefs the Duka brothers had an ideological predisposition toward violence — a connection that itself has fallen into disrepute among scholars of terrorism.
Even the judge on the Fort Dix Five case, Robert Kugler, was forced to acknowledge the dearth of actual evidence against the men, even as he condemned them to life in prison. “That there isn’t more explicit evidence does not concern me and obviously didn’t concern the jury either,” Kugler said at Shain Duka’s sentencing. “I cannot deter this defendant, because of his belief system, from further crimes.” (In June 2016, Kugler upheld the brothers’ sentences.)
At the center of the case was an FBI informant who himself later said that he believed the Dukas were innocent and that the men had never even known about an ostensible plot to attack the Fort Dix military base. The informant, who was paid upward of $238,000 by the FBI for his efforts, would later describe the brothers as “good people.” He added, “I still don’t know why the Dukas are in jail.”
The wide-ranging use of undercover informants was one of the most controversial tactics used by the FBI and U.S. prosecutors in domestic counterterrorism cases. By some estimates, the FBI employed more than 15,000 informants across the United States, many of whom were tasked with going on so-called fishing expeditions, in which they infiltrated communities without knowledge of any actual criminal plot.
Some of the most egregious terrorism sting operations that used informants later became the subjects of documentaries and investigative reporting. Among them were the so-called Newburgh Sting case, the “Liberty City Seven” case, the Herald Square bombing plot, and many others involving individual or small groups of men allegedly coaxed into breaking the law by FBI informants.
”FBI agents are rated and scored on their ability to recruit informants, as well as how prolific those informants are,” Kassem said. “Even if they didn’t join law enforcement to do knock-and-talks or surveil people at mosques, they discover that if they don’t fulfill that tasking, their career prospects might be hampered.”
In addition to sowing paranoia and mistrust in communities across the country, the heavy use of informants led to an abundance of cases in which seemingly innocent people found themselves targeted. Informants themselves often had their own motivations for delivering results to their handlers, whether it was to obtain financial reward from the U.S. government or to escape their own legal or immigration problems.
“The years after 9/11 saw a shift away from the more traditional role of informant as the passive eyes and ears of the federal government inside an organized criminal syndicate towards something far more central, active, and participatory,” Kassem said. “Informants proposed so-called terrorism plots, funded them, provided means of execution, coaching, and even coaxed the targets of stings over prolonged periods of time in order to enable prosecutors to paint their conduct as criminally punishable.”
Reexamination?
Years of pushback from civil liberties groups have generated a few improvements in the way that law enforcement agencies, courts, and the nation’s sprawling national security bureaucracy approach many terrorism investigations.
A lawsuit by CLEAR and the American Civil Liberties Union resulted in the retraction of a debunked New York Police Department report on terrorist radicalization that had been employed by law enforcement agencies across the country to justify surveillance and other operations. Similar lawsuits were won on behalf of individuals who had been subject to various forms of unwarranted surveillance and harassment. Meanwhile, investigative exposés revealed some of the more egregious anti-Muslim biases that had been used in law enforcement training, leading the most bigoted documents to be pulled from curricula.
Despite these changes aimed at improving law enforcement and judicial practices, questionable terrorism cases have continued to be prosecuted across the United States, including at the state level. Even as the government has haltingly changed its approach in response to criticism, it has yet to reexamine the hundreds of cases in which people were sent to jail in concocted terrorism cases. Many such cases were justified on the basis of academic theories of terrorism and political violence purveyed by individuals like Kohlmann but are widely rejected by national security experts today.
“The assumptions that went into many terrorism convictions often rested on a flawed theory of radicalization that claimed certain people had a predisposition to violence based on their beliefs,” said Kundnani, the counterterrorism expert. “That theory was indispensable to getting convictions in many cases, regardless of how ridiculous the entrapment itself was, but the academic consensus on this subject is the opposite of what it was 15 years ago.”
The Fort Dix Five case was one of the very cases in which that theory of predisposition was used to secure a conviction, sending the Duka brothers to jail for life and devastating their family. Yet they were involved in no obvious plot, nor was anyone harmed. They remain in prison to this day, waiting for a sympathetic administration to review their case. Their family, too, is left hoping that the Biden administration’s promises to turn a page on the mistakes of the past, including on national security policy, do not ring hollow.
“I just wish people higher up would read about this case,” said Burim Duka, who was left the sole breadwinner for his family after his brothers’ incarceration and the death of their father. “I want them to keep an open mind. I’m not asking for them to just free my brothers. I want them to read about what happened and say what they honestly think about their convictions.”
He added, “I really don’t ask for much. Even if I spoke to the president, I wouldn’t simply ask for a pardon. I just want people to pay attention to this.”
The boarding school was a mechanism in the U.S. to separate Native American families. (photo: Twitter/@Birdonwing)
The government closed most of these institutions once the dispossession was complete
n Canada, the horrifying news that the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children were found at former residential schools is another painful episode in a national dialogue that has been going on for years. But for many in the United States, the conversation is, perhaps, just beginning. In June, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — who, like most American Indians, has ancestors who attended government boarding schools — outlined her department’s plans to review “the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies.”
As a historian, and as a descendant of Ojibwe grandparents who attended these schools at the height of the assimilation movement, I have had many conversations with my community and students about this complex period. Recently, a reporter asked me if the United States needs a truth and reconciliation commission to address this history. The discovery of mass graves of children in Canada has shocked many non-Indians. For them, boarding schools are a distant and relatively unknown chapter. They may wonder what will be uncovered here — what the country has collectively forgotten or failed to learn. (American Indian scholars, including me, have spent decades researching and calling attention to students’ deaths from tuberculosis and the influenza pandemic of 1918, documented in records of the former schools.)
Indian education in the United States and Canada originated in the same colonial project — one that imposed private property rights and Christianity on Indigenous people at a time when their lands and resources were viewed as ripe for plunder. But it’s important to note that the two school systems differed in design and scope. Canada farmed out Indian education to organizations like the Catholic and Anglican churches. Here, the federal government ran Indian boarding schools, employing teachers and staff from the Indian School Service, some of whom were American Indians. In Canada, residential schools continued for a half-century after their assimilation-model counterparts in the United States began to shutter in 1933.
This is because the U.S. schools had a very specific purpose: They helped the government acquire Indian lands. Beginning with Carlisle in Pennsylvania in 1879 and ending with the Sherman Institute in California in 1903, the U.S. government operated 25 off-reservation boarding schools. (Some religious denominations also opened their own mission schools.) At the same time, a massive dispossession took place in the form of the General Allotment Act, which authorized the president to survey and divide Indian lands. Boarding schools, designed to reeducate Indian youth who would no longer have a tribal homeland, went hand in hand with this genocidal policy.
Though the schools were motivated by greed, humanitarian language about assimilating Indians ran deep. Politicians claimed that tribal life was obsolete and that our ancestors needed U.S. citizenship and American values of individualism. Young people were trained as agricultural or industrial workers as their homelands were being carved up and sold. Like most boarding school girls, my grandmother was sent out to work as a domestic servant in a White household. Boarding schools were English-only environments, damaging our languages as well as our cultural institutions.
By the 1930s, the United States had accomplished what it set out to do at the beginning of the assimilation era: control reservation properties and turn them over to White landowners. Twice dispossessed, my grandfather was forced from his home on the Mille Lacs Reservation to White Earth, where the state of Minnesota illegally took his and other allotments, allowing timber companies to clear-cut the white pine forests.
With dispossession and impoverishment complete, it was no longer necessary to keep Indians in segregated schools. Progressive educators suddenly found little resistance to integration. By the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, even bureaucrats disparaged the boarding schools: Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, referred to them as “medieval” institutions. Most of them closed, though some, including the Sherman Institute in California, remained open largely to offset the poverty of Indian families during the Great Depression, providing regular meals, clothing and housing for children. Though these often-underfunded schools continued to exploit student labor — which included farm work, baking, sewing and laundry, tasks that allowed the schools to operate — they adopted modern education policies not from the assimilation model, encouraging students to visit home during holidays and summer vacations.
The boarding school system yielded a surprising continuum of experiences among the students. Some were clearly abused, and suffered. Some tolerated school or even found happiness and refuge there: George White Bull, for example, describes being impatient to enroll as a fifth-grader in 1913 and join the school band. My grandmother told me stories of the times she was rebellious at school, and the friendships she made there; she also talked about how she re-embraced her culture and language upon returning home to her family. She and other students, most of whom I encountered in documents and letters, made it impossible for me to view this history as one of simple victimization. Students, even young children, resisted school policies by running away, burning down buildings and staging protests. And families, even from hundreds of miles away, parented as best as they could, keeping in close communication with officials to challenge school policies or to check on their children’s well-being and classwork. After reading hundreds of boarding school letters, I have learned never to underestimate American Indian families.
These experiences are complex and wide-ranging, and impossible to reduce to a single, universal narrative. Understandably, though, many American Indian people invoke the broad concept of the boarding school as a way to build a shared past, linking tribal people of diverse backgrounds to a devastating common history. Perhaps, like the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee, the boarding school is symbolic of American colonialism at its most genocidal: The system’s start coincided with the end of the Indian Wars; the oldest and best-known school, Carlisle, was once a military establishment. Boarding schools aligned federal authority with the zealotry of religious missions. They depended on national and local authorities, including police, to abduct and remove children from their parents. They suppressed Indian cultures while opening the door to alienation from land and the extension of Anglo-American culture into the lives and souls of Indian people. Boarding school, with its links to all of these institutions and abuses, functions as a potent political metaphor for colonialism itself.
The Interior Department’s investigation may lead to a long-delayed public reckoning, prompting the question: How can the United States make amends for a half-century of boarding schools? The boarding school era stripped American Indian landowners of 90 million acres; we have never recovered. My own tribe in northern Minnesota has been asking for the return of a portion of Upper Red Lake that was illegally taken from us after 1887. The Lakotas have pursued a land settlement in the Black Hills of South Dakota for generations, rejecting a monetary payment favored by U.S. courts. Americans are about to confront a horrific history they never learned. Perhaps this will lead them to confront another buried truth, about the loss the boarding schools were designed to abet: the largest dispossession of land in American history.
Rashida Taylor with her four-year-old daughter Riley outside of their home in Washington, D.C., on August 19. (photo: Alyssa Schukar/Guardian UK)
For many American parents struggling to make ends meet during the Covid crisis, Biden’s child tax credit has already made a huge difference
our weeks ago the Biden administration officially began implementing the child tax credit in what was hailed by Columbia University as an initiative that could “cut child poverty in half in the US”. Most eligible families have received just one monthly installment so far – but for many American parents struggling to make ends meet during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, it has already made a huge difference.
The American Rescue Plan – passed in March – included expanded credit payments, which increased from $2,000 in 2020 to $3,600 for each child under age six, and $3,000 for children ages six through 17, this year. The funds are distributed in monthly payments of either $250 or $300 for each child.
Experts have said this action could help lift millions of children out of poverty. Even before the pandemic, more than one in six children in the US lived in food-insecure households, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, and nearly 11 million children were living in poverty. But as it stands now, the expanded credit applies only to this tax year, and some Democratic leaders and advocates have called for it to be made permanent.
The Guardian talked to three parents about how the tax credit would affect their families this year.
Rashida Taylor
Location: Washington DC
Occupation: Parent advocate, home-based business selling natural products, volunteer.
Household: Single parent to a four-year-old daughter.
Income: Preferred not to give a specific figure but says surviving on income from a part-time job and a home business hard hit by the pandemic requires her to stretch every penny to make the monthly bills.
Biggest financial challenges: Covering basic expenses in a high-cost-of-living city while also buying educational supplies and putting a small amount into a home-based business.
Most of Rashida Taylor’s hours are devoted to either parenting her own child or supporting and educating other parents. She works part-time as a parent advocate at the Early Childhood Innovation Network. She’s the executive director of It Takes a Village DC, a nonprofit organization she started in January, and also volunteers for Spaces in Action, a DC-based organization focused on promoting early childhood learning. “It’s very expensive to live in DC. You need to make at least $30 an hour just to afford a relatively comfortable life in a safe area. Even with a minimum wage of $15.20 an hour, we’re barely halfway there.”
Taylor felt a financial hit immediately after the pandemic began. With gatherings and in-person events coming to a halt, she couldn’t hold events or pop-ups, a core part of her home-based e-commerce business. Her daughter had been enrolled in a school that initially transitioned to a hybrid model but later closed after a Covid outbreak, so Taylor took on the task of teaching her daughter at home. With her drop in income, she struggled to keep up with the basic essential expenses like rent, food, utilities and the car payment. That left no extra without the credit.
“With the first child tax credit payment, I got [my daughter] a bunch of school supplies and educational products. When the packages would arrive, she would get all excited and ask, ‘Is that for me?’ That was the most rewarding thing.”
Her daughter is attending an instructional preschool and Taylor will likely use part of future CTC payments towards school clothes or uniforms, but she’s also hoping to be able to use some of the funds to expand her business, which she hopes others will do too. “That’s a way of investing in themselves and their families that might end up paying off many times over in the long run.”
She’s also passionate about educating other parents about the child tax credit and how to receive it if they aren’t already. “The child tax credit is a blessing and other people deserve to get it if they are entitled to it. It’s important they don’t miss it.” Right now, parents must file their taxes to get the CTC, but Taylor believes there should be an online mechanism for non-filers to claim it, similar to stimulus payments.
Stormy Johnson
City: Kingwood, West Virginia
Occupation: Student support specialist with the Preston County Board of Education.
Family Income: $38,000/year
Household: Single parent to three children, ages 13, 14 and 20.
Biggest financial challenge: An income that doesn’t stretch far enough to cover essentials, let alone emergencies, and a rural location that means lack of access to public transportation or a range of grocery shopping options.
Stormy Johnson meets with families to educate them about resources and help coordinate services. During the pandemic, that meant helping the school district provide meals to students’ families. “People assumed we had time off, but my job actually went into overdrive. I wasn’t out of work – I worked extra.”
Although her workload may have increased, her income didn’t. “Essential workers should have been given bonuses.”
Her older child no longer lives at home, and the younger two are old enough that she doesn’t need childcare. But there are added expenses involved with having children home all day when they would normally be in school. (Their district was doing virtual school, but halfway through the year, the family decided to switch to homeschooling.)
“I don’t qualify for Snap, so when my kids went from getting breakfast and lunch at school to being home all day, it made a big difference with the grocery bill. For five days a week, I went from having to plan one meal a day to three meals. And teenagers can eat, that’s for sure.”
Johnson says her rent, car payment, insurance and utilities come to within $100 of her take-home pay for the month, before she even buys food, cleaning supplies or hygiene products.
That little bit of money never seems to stretch from payday to payday because something inevitably comes up. “At the beginning of the year, I had a fire in the house that I lived in. That put us in a hotel for two months. Then I got to where I’m at now, and less than a month later the motor blew up in my car. I didn’t have a car payment before, but I do now. It’s just been a heck of a year.”
“We should never be forced to make a choice of whether we can afford to get food. There have been times when I have gone without eating so my kids could eat because I didn’t have enough to buy food for all of us. As parents, we always put our kids first.”
She plans to use most of the child tax credit money towards the car payment and insurance – living in a rural area, a car is a necessity to get to work – and anything left over will be spent on groceries and basic living expenses.
“Now with the child tax credit, that gives me an extra $500 a month, which will make it a little more manageable. But that’s only a short-term thing, and once December comes along, if they don’t make it a permanent thing, I’m going to be struggling again.
Paul Merchan
City: Raleigh, NC
Occupation: Senior vice-president at Peppercomm, a marketing/PR agency.
Household: He and his wife Teresa have four children: ages nine, six, and two-year-old twins.
Biggest financial challenge: The high cost of childcare, which is difficult to manage even for a senior-level professional with a good income.
Like many working parents with young children, the Merchans have found the cost of childcare to be shocking – and virtually impossible to afford. Their older two kids are in school, but he said they can’t afford day care for the twins on one income “even though I have a well-paying job with more than a dozen years of professional experience”.
His wife Teresa has a master’s degree in mental health counseling and recently applied to and got accepted to a PhD program in counseling and counselor education at North Carolina State University, which offers her a work-study stipend.
With monthly daycare costs for the twins exceeding $2,100 – an amount higher than their mortgage payment – combined with fixed monthly expenses and variable costs like groceries and medical expenses, Merchan said his income combined with his wife’s stipend could not cut it. The $1,100 a month they get from the child tax credit will be the only thing keeping their heads above water.
“When we did our budget, we were short, until we factored in getting the monthly child tax credit. That literally saved us. Because we have four small children, the credit is substantial enough to help us with a good portion of the twins’ day care, so that I can work and Teresa can go to school.”
Merchan said both Teresa’s and his upbringing makes it hard for them to come to terms with the reality that parents who have worked hard to give their family a better life can be financially overwhelmed by the high cost of childcare and essential expenses. Teresa came to the US. from Ecuador when she was nine years old. Paul was born in the US but both of his parents emigrated from Ecuador as well, and spoke little English.
“Teresa and I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in modest, but dignified, living situations. We went to public college, got our degrees and have worked hard to get to the point where we are homeowners and are providing for our children what we didn’t have growing up. That’s why it’s so difficult for us to feel like we’ve done everything ‘right’ but are still struggling to make ends meet.”
Jair Bolsonaro. (photo: Evaristo Sa/Getty Images)
After winning the 2018 election on an anti-corruption campaign, President Bolsonaro’s popularity has plummeted due to accusations of corruption during the pandemic.
n Brazil, the country with the second highest Covid-19 death toll in the world, the political scene is currently focused on a single room in the Senate. For three months, that is where senators have accumulated evidence of Health Ministry negligence in offering vaccines to the population and other governmental missteps during the coronavirus pandemic, such as recommending chloroquine for Covid-19 treatment.
Brazil’s ruinous management of the pandemic led to thousands of avoidable deaths. As investigations intensify, there are more and more accusations, denials on top of denials, and fights between opposition members and Bolsonaro loyalists. Every day, this endless ball of thread further unravels the narrative of a government that claims to be free from corruption.
Far right President Jair Bolsonaro capitalized on anti-corruption fervor to win the 2018 elections. He rode a wave of popular dissatisfaction after exaggerated allegations of corruption took down the previous center-left government of Dilma Rousseff and politicized investigations jailed the likely 2018 frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And Bolsonaro nearly won in the first round when he received almost 50 percent of votes. But two and a half years into his presidency, overpricing schemes for Covid-19 vaccine doses are further undermining his anti-corruption claims, inflaming protests, and bolstering calls for impeachment.
Covaxin Corruption Allegations
In April, the Brazilian Senate formed a parliamentary inquiry commission, known as CPI, probing the government’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. In late June, evidence emerged that the Health Ministry overpaid for the vaccine produced by the Indian laboratory Bharat Biotech.
In the Covid-19 CPI, public officer LuÃs Ricardo Miranda, head of imports at the Health Ministry, denounced inconsistencies in the Covaxin contract and “abnormal” pressure to sign the contract. According to Miranda, the invoice had to be amended three times to correct the numbers and included an advance payment of $45 million to a company that was not the Indian manufacturer, but an intermediary based in Singapore.
Faced with these irregularities, the whistleblower informed his brother, a lawmaker aligned with Bolsonaro, about the case. His brother, who is also named LuÃs Miranda, said he went personally to Bolsonaro and reported the corruption in the ministry. According to the Miranda brothers, the president said that he knew who could be involved in the case, mentioning the name of the government whip in the Lower House, Ricardo Barros, and promising a federal police investigation.
However, Bolsonaro did not contact the police or any government financial control agency at the time. Barros still leads Bolsonaro’s bloc in Congress and frequently meets with the president. He represents centrist parties in Congress that support the president in exchange for space in the government and funds for their electoral bases.
The February contract detailed the purchase of 20 million doses of the Indian Covaxin vaccine for an equivalent of $323 million. At the time, this was the most expensive vaccine among those contracted by the government. The price was 10 times higher than what the manufacturer had announced six months earlier.
President Bolsonaro not only knew who was responsible for the scheme, he promised to investigate and did not follow through.
Despite repeated offers made by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer in 2020, the Brazilian government delayed purchasing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, saying it would only make a deal with already approved vaccines. However, it made a deal with the Indian laboratory in record time, before the immunizer had the approval of the Brazilian health regulatory agency Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa). The Pfizer process took 330 days, while the Covaxin agreement was reached in 97 days.
Health Ministry officials also claimed that, at $10 a dose, the Pfizer vaccine was too expensive, but Covaxin cost $15 per dose. This was before the phase 3 clinical trial, which measures effectiveness, was even published. In addition, the contract was made without attending to a set of 10 recommendations made by the legal counsel. In February, officials said the first 8 million doses would arrive in March, another 8 million in April, and the last 4 million in May. At the time of writing, no doses have been delivered, due to restrictions from Anvisa and other problems.
On June 23, the CPI levied accusations of corruption. The government’s attempts to disqualify that allegation failed when the documents presented to refute accusations of irregularity were proven fraudulent, with spelling errors in English and evidence of montage.
Days later, the government changed its strategy, finally ordering an investigation by the federal police. However, the Attorney’s Office, led by a Bolsonaro supporter, has already mentioned the lack of evidence of crimes committed by the president, even before opening the case.
In his defense, Bolsonaro also stated that “he doesn’t know what happens in all the ministries,” a claim that contradicts previous statements emphasizing his authority over everything in his administration. On June 29, Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga suspended contracts with irregularities.
Bolsonaro Anti-corruption Message Tanks
Bolsonaro came to power with a promise to fight corruption after Operation Car Wash. Disbanded in early 2021, the Car Wash investigation was one of the largest initiatives to combat corruption and money laundering in Brazil’s history, though it had its own fair share of controversy. The operation began by investigating money laundering and ultimately uncovered the international Petrobras corruption scandal, which involved hundreds of people around the world, from high-ranking politicians to important businessmen.
In Brazil, Operation Car Wash investigated more members of the Progressive Party than any other. From 2005 to 2016, Bolsonaro was in Barros’s Progressive Party. In 2018, former President Lula da Silva of the Worker’s Party (PT) was arrested as a result of the investigation. However, this year, the Supreme Court overturned the charges, ruling that Judge Sergio Moro, responsible for the conviction, was biased and colluded with the prosecution. Moro was appointed Minister of Justice at the beginning of Bolsonaro’s term; he stepped down in April 2020.
After two and a half years in office, Bolsonaro is experiencing his worst crisis yet. The Covaxin case is not the only investigation of irregularity in medical supply procurement during the pandemic. In 37 sessions, the CPI revealed that there are more accusations and scandals, including signs of bribery and overpricing between intermediary companies and the Health Ministry.
While the investigations may not lead to legal consequences for the president, the scandals damage his image and weaken his standing in the 2022 electoral race. He is likely to face Lula, a strong competitor whose support in the polls has grown since the charges against him were scrapped.
Bolsonaro turned a blind eye to suspicions of bribes and overpricing, which is at odds with the threats he made about anyone caught committing irregularities in his government. Previously, Bolsonaro defended violent methods, saying that he would put ministers involved in corruption in the “pau-de-arara,” a torture technique used in Brazilian dictatorship between 1964 and 1985. He also said that he would “kick the neck” of anyone who committed any crime in public administration. Bolsonaro has most often directed his rage at journalists.
Despite his harsh rhetoric against corruption, Bolsonaro insists that in the Covaxin case there were no irregularities because the purchase did not actually take place. However, he ignores that funds had already been reserved for Covaxin. The crime of corruption is not only receiving an undue advantage, but also requesting or accepting the promise of such an advantage. Bolsonaro admitted that there are people “with a financial interest” in the Health Ministry because of the large budget available.
Uncertain Campaign Footing
Bolsonaro has been criticized by the Left since the start of his campaign, but he is now losing support from segments that had previously stood by him, including right-wing and center-right groups that led protests in favor of the impeachment of former President Rousseff in 2015.
For example, Congress member Joice Hasselmann of the Social Liberal Party (PSL) emphasized that she would “never again” vote for Bolsonaro, even under threat. A former government whip in the Lower House, Hasselmann broke away from the Bolsonaro bloc in the first year of his administration and joined the opposition.
“I was the first one on the right-wing to leave when his popularity was soaring, and I apologize for helping his election,” she said.
The Covaxin scandal developments have also fueled protests in the streets.
“The street movements will grow and we will have to welcome groups that made a mistake in supporting Bolsonaro,” said Magno Karl, director of a right-wing movement that joined left-wing protests calling for the president's impeachment.
Social movements have also been demanding Bolsonaro’s impeachment. Civil society movements and party leaders signed a letter to Congress that lists more than 20 crimes committed by the president. However, their efforts might be once again ignored by the speaker of the Lower House, Arthur Lira, a Bolsonaro ally from a center-right party.
“The Bolsonaro government is very profitable for several deputies, in the sense that they gain access to budget resources for their electoral strongholds. This means that political elites are not interested in overthrowing the president,” said Mayra Goulart, a political scientist from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
As he loses voters, Bolsonaro has repeated threats to cancel the upcoming presidential elections and created conspiracy theories about the Brazilian electoral system—the same one that elected him in 2018 in the second round. He also continues to claim that he was elected in the first round vote as opposed to the run-off, but he has never proved any fraud to sustain his arguments.
For analysts, this Bolsonaro maneuver doesn't make sense because restructuring the electoral system is not a simple process. According to Goulart, it requires the approval of more than 300 of the 513 deputies, the majority of whom do not support the idea.
Despite a decrease in popularity, Bolsonaro is still the presidential candidate with the highest number of followers on social networks: 40 million, according to the big data analytics platform MonitoraBR. Lula, his main rival, has 10 million followers on social networks. While not reflective of the full picture, these numbers are not insignificant.
“Digital militancy has always been a safe haven for Bolsonaro since before the 2018 elections,” said political scientist Max Stabile, adding that studies show that followers on social networks tend to be “very loyal voters.”
Though Bolsonaro’s popularity has plummeted, Stabile says support on the networks, at least for now, could help ensure the president's shot at reelection.
An alligator swims in the waters at the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach, Florida. (photo: Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images)
federal judge on Monday tossed out a Trump administration rule that rolled back protections for streams, marshes and wetlands across the U.S.
Why it matters: Environmental and tribal groups have pushed the court to vacate the rule, which the Biden administration has kept in place while coming up with its own protections policy. The new ruling will expand protections for drinking water supplies for millions of Americans and thousands of wildlife species, per the Washington Post.
- It comes as the world confronts the climate crisis' severe impacts around the globe.
What they're saying: U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez wrote in the ruling that Trump officials made serious errors while formulating the policy, which replaced Obama-era standards for dredging or filling waterways.
- "The concerns identified ... are not mere procedural errors or problems that could be remedied through further explanation," Márquez noted. "Rather, they involve fundamental, substantive flaws."
- Approximately 76% of water bodies reviewed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers between June 22, 2020 and April 15, 2021 did not qualify for federal protection under the new rule, according to Márquez.
- Federal agencies reported 333 projects that would've required a permit before draining or filling under the Obama rule but did not under Trump's, per the ruling.
- Leaving it in place would risk "serious environmental harm," Márquez said.
The other side: Some business and farm groups have argued that states are better positioned to regulate their own waterways.
- Homebuilders, oil drillers and farmers have also said earlier restrictions caused challenges for their work.
What to watch: The ruling will likely face an appeal, according to the Washington Post.
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