02 November 21
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Biden was beside himself to get something enacted before going to the G-20 summit and the COP-26 climate meeting. So he started tossing major pieces of his beloved bill overboard. He threw out paid family leave, got rid of free community college, took dental and eyeglasses away from the elderly and made a thousand other little cuts. He also decided the wealthy would not have to pay their true fair share of the taxes.
So Biden left for Europe without anything becoming law. In the weeks leading up to his trip, he (I mean the Republicans and the two lame Dems) also failed to raise the minimum wage and they failed to protect voting rights. The pundits howled. “Biden goes to Europe as a weakened president!” “Biden humiliated in front of the world!” “The US cannot govern itself and Biden enters these summits with America as the laughing stock amongst world leaders.”
Seriously?
Are the press and politicians that clueless as to why the world is laughing at us? I hate to tell you, it ain’t because of the roads and child tax credits. We are the laughing stock because we refuse to take care of our own people — and NO ONE around the world can understand why we force our old people to suffer and why we put our own children last.
Not other country’s children. OURS!
I hate to reveal this secret, but here it goes:
Every one of the E.U. countries has:
•Universal free health care.
•Free or nearly-free college.
•Paid Family Leave for at least four months.
•Complete care of all elderly.
•Robust funding of schools.
•All sorts of help for the jobless and the poor.
•Workers enjoy mandatory paid vacation with a minimum of four weeks off (some countries are almost double that).
•Women having full equal rights. Abortion and birth control is free and easily available in all but two E.U. countries (Malta and Poland). Most of their constitutions have what we don’t have — an equal rights clause for all women.
The list goes on. And not just social safety net policies. Portugal has stopped mass incarceration and made possession of drugs legal — and has seen drug use go down because they treat drug addiction as a medical problem, not a crime.
Countries like Slovenia and Germany not only have free college, they will let any foreign student come there and attend college for free. Yes, you read that right. They will even let American students come to their countries and get a free four-year degree! What? You say you can’t speak Slovenian? No problem! They have a whole curriculum taught in English!
Spain, France, Italy and others all have high speed affordable bullet trains. Cheap mass transit is everywhere.
In Austria you can vote at 16. Teenagers have held seats in the Austrian parliament!
In Norway, when you commit a crime you spend a few years going to school, learning a trade, making amends to those whom you’ve hurt — and no sentence can be longer than 21 years (including for the mass murderer of 77 people, mostly teenagers).
Yes, other countries have their own problems. But, while American school boards are enacting rules prohibiting teaching students about the history of American slavery, racism and genocide, these other countries REQUIRE its young people to be taught about their own evil past (and present) in the hopes that the next generation won’t make their parents’ mistakes. So German students are thoroughly enmeshed in learning about the Holocaust. French students are taught about their brutal colonial past in Algeria and Vietnam. Irish students are well aware of the abuse caused by the Catholic Church. Spanish students get courses on the evils of fascism and Spain’s fascist past. Antifa, you say? Right down the hall in Room 104, 3rd Hour social studies with Señora Valdez!
Yes, we are a laughing stock. Biden’s “humiliation” this week in Europe is that the nation he leads is a brute to its own people. It’s not that the other leaders are laughing at him. They feel sorry for him. They pity us. “Those poor Americans!” Most people around the world actually like us. They admire our creativity and inventiveness. Which makes their incredulity even worse — they simply can’t figure out why in a democracy we allow this misery to continue! Why we haven’t thrown the bastards out. Why 50+1 votes out of 100 senators isn’t called a majority. American math says 60 out of 100 is the majority. We look like idiots. The Europeans, the Japanese, the Australians, the Argentinians, the South Africans — they don’t hate us. They pity us and they cannot friggin’ figure us out.
And they fear us. Not because of our weapons and desire to invade other countries (although they should remain very, very afraid of that). No. They’re afraid because, if we treat our own people this way, if we require an enforced ignorance and teach lies to our students, then what they truly fear is what will happen to this planet if the wealthiest nation, the one blessed with the most resources on Earth, shits so easily and happily on itself. It is MIND-BOGGLING to the rest of the world that we are so hell-bent on destroying our Democracy and ourselves.
I do feel sorry for Joe Biden sitting on that world stage this week. But not because he couldn’t get an infrastructure bill passed. It’s because he has to sit there over Scottish tea and explain why our old people are now finally going to get to have free hearing aids! — but not glasses, and not a visit to the dentist. “You see,” Uncle Joe will explain, hanging his head, “in America, if you are old, you do have a right to hear — but not to see. And not to chew. God Bless America.”
Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Historic declaration at Cop26 commits countries to ending major cause of CO2 emissions
Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro and Joe Biden are among the leaders who will commit to the declaration at Cop26 in Glasgow on Tuesday to protect vast areas, ranging from the eastern Siberian taiga to the Congo basin, home to the world’s second largest rainforest.
Land-clearing by humans accounts for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, largely deriving from the destruction of the world’s forests for agricultural products such as palm oil, soy and beef.
By signing the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, presidents and prime ministers from major producers and consumers of deforestation-linked products will commit to protect forest ecosystems.
Boris Johnson will unveil the agreement at an event attended by the US president, Joe Biden, the Prince of Wales and the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo. He is expected to say: “These great teeming ecosystems – these cathedrals of nature – are the lungs of our planet. Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply, and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our very survival.”
The commitment on nature and forests comes as more than 120 world leaders came together in Glasgow to thrash out fresh commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, amid concerns that key countries have failed to step up.
On a day devoted to speeches by presidents and prime ministers that underlined the scale of the challenges ahead, Johnson said future generations “will judge us with bitterness” if the conference fails. Other key moments included:
- India pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2070. Although it is the first time the world’s third biggest polluter has set this target, and experts said it was a realistic commitment, it is 20 years behind the 2050 date set agreed by other developed countries.
- President Biden warned that greater urgency was needed at the talks: “Right now, we are falling short. There’s no time to hang back, sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves.”
- António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said the world was being driven to the brink by an addiction to fossil fuels. “We are fast approaching tipping points that will trigger escalating feedback loops of global heating,” he warned.
- In a recorded message, the Queen called on leaders to “rise above the politics of the moment, and achieve true statesmanship”. She added: “Of course, the benefits of such actions will not be there to enjoy for all of us here today: we none of us will live forever. But we are doing this not for ourselves but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps.”
Following his own speech, Johnson provoked some ridicule by admitting he would fly home rather than take the train.
Shortly before, he had told a roundtable of leaders of developing nations: “When it comes to tackling climate change, words without action, without deeds are absolutely pointless.”
The commitments on deforestation are an early win for the UK, which as host nation bears responsibility for forging a consensus among the nearly 200 countries present, amid concerns that an overall commitment on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by the 45% scientists say is needed this decade will fall short.
The political declaration, which is voluntary and not part of the Paris process, is one of a range of side deals that the UK presidency is pushing for at the climate summit in Glasgow alongside others on methane, cars and coal.
The package includes £5.3bn of new private finance and £8.75bn of public funding for restoring degraded land, supporting indigenous communities, protecting forests and mitigating wildfire damage.
A pledge from CEOs to eliminate activities linked to deforestation, and £1.5bn funding from the UK government for forests, are also part of the deal. £350m of that will go to Indonesia and £200m to the Congo basin, with a new £1.1bn fund for the west African rainforest.
While the forestry agreement has been cautiously welcomed by ecologists and forest governance experts, they point to previous deals to save forests that have so far failed to stop their destruction, including in 2014. But this time, the EU, China and the US alongside major forested countries like Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea will all sign the commitment.
Many details need to be clarified, particularly how the money is spent, according to Carlos Rittl, who works on Brazil for the Rainforest Foundation Norway. “Big cheques won’t save the forests if the money doesn’t go into the right hands,” he said, emphasising that it should go to indigenous groups and others who are committed to protecting the forest.
In a separate announcement, at least £1.25bn of funding will be given directly to indigenous peoples and local communities by governments and philanthropists for their role in protecting forests.
But the promised funds still fall far short of what some believe is needed. “We are undervalued and our rights are still not respected,” said Mina Setra, an indigenous rights activist from Borneo. “A statement is not enough. We need evidence, not only words.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, speaks at a press conference with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, and Rep. Jackie Speier, D-CA, at the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The party’s still-forming $1.75 trillion economic package jettisoned the long-time priority to win over the West Virginia moderate. But many Democrats aren’t yet ready to give up the fight.
The New York Democrat targeted the chief objector to the program, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). She hit the phones Friday and fired off a flurry of texts to her moderate-leaning colleague that continued into the weekend, saying she would be willing to “meet him in D.C. or anywhere in the country” to make the case for the benefits, she said in an interview.
Yet Manchin refused to relent, Gillibrand said, resisting her latest entreaties much as he had the many alternatives that Democrats had presented to him in recent weeks.
Still, Gillibrand remained undeterred. “It’s not over until it’s over,” she said.
The burst of activity from Gillibrand reflected what some reluctantly have acknowledged is a last-gasp attempt to salvage one of their most popular policy promises. With the House set to vote on a sweeping spending measure as soon as Tuesday, it marked a new test as to whether Democrats, largely led by women in the House and Senate, could sway Manchin and deliver the help they long have promised to millions of Americans.
The paid-leave plan that Democrats originally envisioned would have provided 12 weeks of aid for Americans who fall ill, need to care for a sick loved one or are tending to the birth of a new child. Tens of millions of workers don’t have access to some or all of these benefits now through their employers, according to federal estimates, resulting in a gap that has hit low-income families and women the hardest.
Lawmakers tucked the expansive proposal into the original $3.5 trillion economic package they unveiled earlier this year, a broader overhaul of federal health-care, education, immigration, climate and tax laws. But it soon became a casualty of the tense negotiations between Congress and the White House. It surfaced less frequently in some of President Biden’s public remarks — and eventually fell out of his spending blueprint — as top aides whittled down their ambitions to win over Manchin.
Democrats, including Gillibrand, stress that the resulting $1.75 trillion deal is historic in its own right. But its omission of paid leave has left many party lawmakers spoiling for a new fight. At a news conference Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pledged to reporters that she would keep fighting “for the babies.”
A day earlier, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hammered Manchin indirectly, saying that Democrats are “not going to let one man tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave.” And a wide array of lawmakers, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), have placed calls to Manchin directly about the issue, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
“I do believe this is a unique moment in time,” said Gillibrand, who spoke by phone late Friday, as she acknowledged that time is running out. “If I can get more time with him, I’m optimistic I can find the right form.”
Manchin declined to comment.
The last-minute push on paid leave arrives as congressional leaders are racing toward key votes on the president’s fuller economic agenda this week. Little time remains to rethink the delicate $1.75 trillion plan that Biden forged in an attempt to unite warring centrists and liberals in his party, resolving a months-long logjam.
The unfinished bill amounts to one of the largest investments in the federal safety net in history. It aims to help parents pay for child-care programs, establish universal, free prekindergarten and extend tax credits that have allowed millions of families to collect monthly checks.
Initially, Biden also hoped to include an expansive, 12-week program for paid family and medical leave as part of the package. He first proposed it as part of the American Families Plan he unveiled in the spring, building off a commitment he made on the 2020 campaign trail to ensure millions of Americans could take time off without risk of losing their jobs or paychecks — especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
“No one should have to choose between a job and paycheck or taking care of themselves and a loved one — a parent, spouse or child,” the president said in a speech to Congress this spring.
By summer, lawmakers had set out to turn those ideas into legislation, culminating in a nearly $500 billion House proposal to provide 12 weeks of leave with benefits scaled by income. An architect of that plan, Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), aimed to fund the program in the same way they hoped to cover the rest of the bill, using tax rate increases targeting wealthy Americans and profitable corporations.
“I felt pretty strong it was one of the most popular items in the package,” Neal said in a recent interview
Yet House Democrats’ foray immediately encountered trouble. Manchin and Sinema each had demanded massive cuts to the overarching $3.5 trillion price tag. Even though paid-leave programs had been popular among lawmakers in the party — and some, including Sinema, had unveiled related legislation in the past — the centrist duo said the total package cost too much.
Manchin, meanwhile, privately expressed to Democratic lawmakers, White House officials and paid-leave advocates evolving concerns specifically with the proposed benefit program, according to five people familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private negotiations.
At times, the senator from West Virginia said a paid-leave program could invite fraud, likening it to those who tried to collect unemployment even when they were not eligible. In some conversations with lawmakers and advocates, he asked about work requirements, even though employment is a condition for one to take leave in the first place, some of the people said.
In other instances, Manchin raised the potential effect on small businesses, which needed workers to remain on the job. And in public and private, Manchin highlighted issues with the “solvency” of a new social benefit program, pointing to his long-documented concerns that existing federal entitlements, including Medicare, are running out of funds.
“I’m talking to everybody, but I’ve been very clear. To expand social programs when you have trust funds that aren’t solvent, that are going insolvent — I can’t explain that, it doesn’t make sense to me,” Manchin said last week, adding that lawmakers need to “start paying for things.”
Manchin’s opposition put the White House in a bind. The paid-leave program, once a fixture in Biden’s speeches, appeared to advocates to come up less frequently in his public comments starting in the summer. The change in tone troubled supporters of the program, some of whom said they were told privately by the White House for months they had nothing to fear — and should instead focus their attention toward shoring up support from Manchin.
By mid-October, though, the White House informed Democrats they had to scale back the paid-leave program, which opened the door for lawmakers to consider only a temporary, four-week benefit. The cuts left some in the party upset and advocates seething, though many accepted it as better than nothing.
Then, days later, the White House shelved the proposal entirely as part of the $1.75 trillion compromise that the president presented to Democrats during a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week.
“It’s outrageous, it’s shameful,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, an advocacy group. “Our view is very clear: A budget deal that doesn’t include paid leave fails working families, and it will not do what this package intends to do, which is build back better.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Karine Jean-Pierre, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters last week that paid leave remains “a big priority” for the president, adding of the debate: “It doesn’t end here.”
The omission immediately touched off a frenetic new lobbying effort on Capitol Hill. The dissent last week even spilled out onto the Senate floor, where Murray joined other women in cornering Manchin as the news broke to press him on paid leave.
In an interview, Murray said on Saturday she and other women sought to explain to Manchin “what every woman and a lot of men in this country understand, which is when you just had a baby, [when] you have a seriously ill family member, it is an economic issue for [workers] that they be able to have that time.”
Manchin in response told Democrats in that conversation he is not a “hard no,” Murray said. But the situation still troubled Murray, who said she fretted that they had already made substantial cuts — and found it unacceptable to eliminate the program because “one man said he didn’t want it.”
Publicly, some of the new political pressure campaign came from women who knew firsthand the importance of the paid-leave program that Manchin opposed. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), who as a staffer in the 1980s took time away from her job to recover from cancer, expressed deep concern that Congress found itself unable to provide the same aid to all Americans that they have made available to federal employees.
“Why is it good enough for us and not good enough for everyone else in the country? We’re the only industrialized nation that does not offer paid family and medical leave,” said DeLauro, who helped craft the House proposal, as she pledged in an interview to keep pushing for it.
Pelosi, a mother of five, echoed the need to assist parents and promised to keep fighting for it at a news conference last week. Privately, she called Manchin to push to revive the program in recent days, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the speaker’s conversations. The speaker’s office declined to comment on the call.
So did Sinema, a former social worker, according to another person, who said Sinema voiced her support for paid leave and discussed with Manchin potential ways to pay for it. Manchin in the past seemed receptive to a proposal that could use payroll taxes to fund leave benefits, three people said. But the idea has presented political challenges because Biden has promised not to raise taxes on Americans making under $400,000.
Sinema’s office declined to comment for this story.
Gillibrand, meanwhile, ratcheted up her personal advocacy campaign.
Behind the scenes, she and Manchin have discussed a wide array of ideas — including limits on paid-leave benefits that might have provided the aid only to new parents. In a later interview, Gillibrand acknowledged the approach as imperfect, given the fact that it threatened to leave out a majority of Americans who take leave as a result of an illness experienced by themselves or a loved one. But she said it presented an option that might have opened the door for more legislating down the road.
Nevertheless, Manchin rejected the idea, Gillibrand recalled. She also presented data to him showing that 12 weeks of aid are critical for new, nursing mothers, who cannot obtain child care before that point, and stressed it would help reduce the financial strain on federal health-care programs by promoting wellness — and still, she said, Manchin didn’t budge.
“He wants to [work on it] later,” Gillibrand said, adding that some of the senator’s objections stemmed from the vehicle by which Democrats hope to secure the new spending. “I think he has a misimpression that this can be done easily with Republican support.”
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Activists argue that the President could cancel student debt with the stroke of a pen, fulfilling a campaign promise. Newly uncovered documents suggest that Biden has been “reviewing” the issue for months.
Occupy ended, but the debt-cancellation idea kept evolving. The amount of student debt in the country surpassed a trillion dollars, then a trillion and a half. The Occupy Student Debt Campaign tried to persuade a million student debtors to default, openly and collectively, on their loans. This failed, but this campaign eventually grew into one called Strike Debt, which later reëmerged as the Debt Collective. The activists kept organizing debtors, but they also started trying to convince politicians of the need for debt cancellation, and trying to identify legal mechanisms that could make it happen. “Our position was always that the government can and should cancel federal student debt,” Astra Taylor, one of the Debt Collective’s co-founders, who has also contributed to The New Yorker, told me. “But it wasn’t until 2015 that we started doing the government’s homework for them to lay out how it could be accomplished.”
Most people assumed that any vast shift in student-loan policy, such as broad-based cancellation, would require new laws. President Barack Obama, citing a lack of “bold action” in Congress, ordered his Department of Education to make incremental reforms, consolidating some loans and reducing some interest rates—far less than what activists wanted, but in line with what most experts thought was possible via executive action. Then, in 2016, Robyn Smith and Deanne Loonin, lawyers at the National Consumer Law Center, wrote a memo pointing out an obscure provision of the Higher Education Act. The provision, which has been on the books since 1965, gives the Secretary of Education the authority to “enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand.” They proposed that the Department of Education, by far the largest student-loan collector in the country, already had the unilateral power to modify those loans as it saw fit. Smith and Loonin suggested that the department should use this power to cancel the debt incurred by a few thousand alumni of predatory for-profit colleges. But Luke Herrine, then a law student at N.Y.U. and another co-founder of the Debt Collective, saw no reason that the department couldn’t use its discretion in more sweeping ways. “As far as I can tell, nothing in current law prevents the Department from using its compromise authority to cancel broad swaths—or even all—of its student loan portfolio,” Herrine wrote in 2017. In other words, he argued, the President could order the Education Secretary to cancel any amount of student debt at any time, without waiting for any further action from Congress. This was more of a remote hypothetical than an imminent possibility, especially given that the President at the time was Donald Trump. “When I first put the idea out there, I didn’t expect it to go anywhere,” Herrine, who is now a Ph.D. student at Yale, told me recently. “At least not in the short term.”
The idea started to gain some acceptance within legal academic circles. “There was a lot of scoffing at first,” Herrine said. “Now there are still experts who disagree with my interpretation, but it’s more along the lines of ‘This isn’t the way it traditionally works,’ not ‘Here’s a clear, knock-down reason why this can’t work.’ ” (Two Harvard law professors, for instance, recently called Herrine’s interpretation “a plausible textual reading” but cautioned that an executive debt-relief initiative “might be tied up in court for many years.”) In 2019, Julie Margetta Morgan, who was then a researcher at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, asked Herrine to write a white paper called “An Administrative Path to Student Debt Cancellation.” Later that year, after Morgan joined Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign as a policy adviser, Warren announced a new plan: as President, using executive authority, she would cancel more than a trillion dollars of student debt. (Morgan now works at the Department of Education.) Warren argued that her plan, although it looked expensive, would ultimately be a boon to the economy, promoting consumer spending and narrowing the racial wealth gap. Representative Ilhan Omar, an ally of the Debt Collective, persuaded Bernie Sanders to get on board with broad-based debt relief, and he soon outflanked Warren: whereas she proposed cancelling up to fifty thousand dollars of debt per person, he pledged to cancel all of it.
Joe Biden, then the leading moderate candidate, began getting questions about debt cancellation, and, as he often did during the campaign, he forged a compromise between the left and the center. In April, 2020, Biden pledged to “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person.” He didn’t specify whether he would do this through executive action or by urging Congress to pass a bill, though the word “immediately” seemed to imply the former. During his first month as President, at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, Biden was asked how much debt he planned to cancel. He spoke for several minutes, mentioning that one of his sons had graduated from Georgetown and Yale Law School “a hundred and forty-two thousand dollars in debt” but that he had paid it off, in part, by working for “a parking service down in Washington.” (The same son, of course, also earned astronomical sums of money while working for a hedge fund, lobbying for various companies, and serving on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company, but Biden happened to omit those details.) Finally, he concluded, “I’m prepared to write off the ten thousand dollars’ debt, but not fifty. Because I don’t think I have the authority to do it by a sign of the pen.” He appeared to be suggesting that the President has the power to cancel debt up to but not beyond some unspecified amount of money—an interpretation that is, at best, legally ambiguous.
The members of the Debt Collective were both encouraged and dispirited. They had moved their proposal from the fringes to the mainstream more quickly than they had thought possible. And yet, for all their momentum, they wondered whether they were running into a brick wall: they could make the legal arguments; they could get their allies hired by the Administration; they could even draft an executive order, but they couldn’t make the President sign it. Some activists thought that the problem was ideological—that Biden, a son of corporate Delaware, believed deep down in the free market, not a free ride. Or perhaps he was waiting for his lawyers to tell him what he could do. On April 1st, in an interview with Politico, Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, was asked whether Biden planned to cancel student debt via executive action. Klain said that the Department of Education was preparing “a memo on the president’s legal authority. Hopefully we’ll see that in the next few weeks. And then he’ll look at that legal authority, he’ll look at the policy issues around that, and he’ll make a decision.” A few weeks passed. Then a few months. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked several times—in June, in August, in October—whether the legal review was finished, and what it had concluded. “I don’t have an update on that,” she said.
The Debt Collective activists developed a theory: that the lawyers at the Department of Education had already written their memo, that they had advised Biden that he did have the authority to cancel debt, and that the Administration was keeping the memo quiet because they didn’t like its conclusions. But this was mere speculation. So Gokey, one of the organizers, submitted a request through the Freedom of Information Act. If a memo had already been drafted, then he asked the Department of Education to send it to him. On August 20th, he got the results: dozens of pages of e-mails among Department of Education officials, including a seven-page memo called “The Secretary’s Legal Authority for Broad-Based Debt Cancellation.” The memo’s contents were redacted—in hot pink, for some reason—but it was proof that a memo existed. “I really felt this version was excellent,” the general counsel at the Department of Education wrote, on April 5th. Three days later, the word “draft” was removed from the memo’s header. This all seemed to vindicate the activists’ theory.
After reviewing Gokey’s documents, I asked both the White House and the Department of Education whether the department’s internal legal review was complete, but I didn’t get a specific answer. Nor is it clear whether, if Biden’s lawyers do conclude that he has the authority to cancel a large (or unlimited) amount of student debt, he is willing to use that authority. “The Department of Education is continuing to work in partnership with colleagues at the Department of Justice and the White House to review options with respect to debt cancellation,” a spokesperson from the Department of Education told me. A White House official told me that the President “continues to look into what debt-relief actions can be taken administratively” but that “these steps take time.” The Debt Collective is not mollified. “We’re a signature away from wiping out everyone’s federal student loans, and Biden apparently just doesn’t want to,” Gokey said. “We’ve given him a magic wand, a way to help millions of people and get them excited to come out to vote for him. Who wouldn’t want to do that?” The President’s party almost always loses seats during a midterm election—which would mean, in this case, that the Democrats would lose control of one or both houses of Congress next year. A way to prevent that, Astra Taylor said, “would be to materially improve people’s lives in ways that are intelligible to them. And, believe me, if you cancel forty-five million people’s debt, they will notice.” On Friday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram that it was time to “bring the heat on Biden to cancel student loans. He doesn’t need Manchin’s permission for that.”
As of now, the two bills that make up most of Biden’s agenda are still stalled in Congress. They might soon pass, in some form, but they are likely to be Biden’s last major legislative accomplishment before the midterms, if not the last one of his Presidency. After that, if Biden wants to get big things done, he will have to do most of them via executive order. But if the protracted and bitter struggle over debt cancellation is any indication, Biden’s base may want to temper its expectations. In early 2020, Taylor, who is also a filmmaker, made a short documentary called “You Are Not a Loan.” “We filmed it in February, when the Bernie dream was still alive,” she said. What happened over the next year and a half—Biden campaigning on a promise of broad-based debt cancellation but, as President, hesitating to deliver—struck her as disappointing but not shocking. “The only thing that does continue to surprise me,” she said, “is the Democratic Party seems so unwilling, or unable, to act in its own self-interest.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Protesters at the visit carried a placard with the slogan: "At the side of the Brazilian people, Bolsonaro out." (photo: Luca Bruno/AP)
“Bolsonaro is fascist, homophobic, and racist. Besides devastating the Amazon forests with his policies, he has killed thousands of people... Out with Bolsonaro,” stressed Letizia, a young Italian woman.
The politician linked to the far-right party La Liga justified her decision by arguing that Bolsonaro was democratically elected, represents Brazil in the G20, and his great-grandfather emigrated from that town in 1888. These arguments, however, were not enough to prevent the gardens the mayor's office woke up covered in manure.
“That he visits the city where his family comes from is fair, but it is not fair that they grant him honorary citizenship and present him as a role model,” Councilman Antonio Spada said.
"It is not enough that great-grandfather Vittorio was born in Anguillara in 1878... According to the city council... one can become an honorary citizen even if one is a criminal," an anti-fascist militant said, as reported by local outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Militants from left-wing parties, trade unionists, college students, and activists from the National Anti-Fascist Association of Italy (ANPI) took to the central square of Anguillara Veneta to reject a Brazilian politician who has been accused of crimes against humanity.
“Bolsonaro is fascist, homophobic and racist. Besides devastating the Amazon forests with his policies, he has killed thousands of people ... Out with Bolsonaro,” stressed Letizia, a young Italian woman.
Among the most outraged protesters was the Italian missionary Massimo Ramundo, who lived 20 years in Brazil, 12 of them in Marañon, a state located in the Amazon area.
“He is a disgrace. I am furious with the Mayor. She does not know what Bolsonaro has done. She has not heard his hateful statements against Indigenous peoples, vaccinated citizens, and women. He wants to turn the Amazon into a business. He does not respect the values of Pope Francis,” Ramundo stressed.
"The information comes in the wake of evidence of dysfunction and corruption in the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics." (image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/Getty Images)
Beginning in 2019, the EPA stopped releasing crucial toxics reports. Even agency staffers have a hard time accessing them.
During this time, chemical companies have continued to submit the critical studies to the agency, according to two EPA staff members with knowledge of the matter. Since January 2019, the EPA has received at least 1,240 reports documenting the risk of chemicals’ serious harms, including eye corrosion, damage to the brain and nervous system, chronic toxicity to honeybees, and cancer in both people and animals. PFAS compounds are among the chemical subjects of these notifications.
An EPA spokesperson acknowledged the problem in an emailed response to questions from The Intercept. “Due to overarching (staff and contractor) resource limitations, the agency was not able to continue the regular publication of 8(e) submissions in ChemView, a very manual process, after 1/1/2019.” The statement went on to note: “The TSCA program is underfunded. The previous Administration never asked Congress for the necessary resources to reflect the agency’s new responsibilities under amended TSCA. These shortfalls have implications that matter to all stakeholders, not just industry.” Despite the funding challenges, the EPA pledged to try to rectify the situation.
The Black Hole
Not only has the agency kept all but one of these reports from the public, but it has also made them difficult for EPA staff to access, according to the two agency scientists, who are choosing to remain anonymous because of concerns about possible retribution. The substantial risk reports have not been uploaded to the databases used most often by risk assessors searching for information about chemicals, according one of the EPA scientists, who has worked closely with the 8(e) statements. They have been entered only into an internal database that is difficult to access and search. As a result, little — and perhaps none — of the information about these serious risks to health and the environment has been incorporated into the chemical assessments completed during this period.
“The fact that these studies aren’t being included means there’s a very good chance there are some chemical assessments where we should have reached different conclusions,” said another EPA staff member who is familiar with the chemical assessment process. The information comes in the wake of evidence of dysfunction and corruption in the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics that five whistleblowers have provided to The Intercept, the EPA inspector general, and members of Congress since July. All five remain employed by the agency and are working with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an organization that represents whistleblowers.
According to the emailed response from the agency, “EPA routinely uses all studies submitted to the agency, including 8e submissions, in TSCA new and existing chemical risk evaluations.” The statement acknowledged the difficulty of using the internal database, called CIS, on which the reports were loaded. “Some aspects of navigating CIS may be cumbersome, especially for assessors with less experience in doing so, and EPA has developed plans and proposals for updates and modernization, but their implementation has been hindered by a lack of resources,” it said.
The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act clearly intended for the EPA to act on the information sent in by industry. And according to an agency spokesperson, each 8(e) submission is promptly reviewed and evaluated to determine the degree of concern that should be attached to it as well as recommendations for appropriate follow-up actions.
But the two EPA staff members who spoke with The Intercept said that the reports do not trigger an immediate response. “I would think most people in the public would assume that when we would get these reports, we give them incredible scrutiny and say, ‘Oh no! What are we going to do about this?’ But basically, they are just going into a black hole,” said one of the two scientists. “We don’t look at them. We don’t evaluate them. And we don’t check to see if they change our understanding of the chemical.”
In its response to The Intercept, the EPA disputed the scientists’ description of the process. “This is not a factual representation of how EPA deals with TSCA 8(e) submissions,” the agency spokesperson wrote, going on to say that agency staff do review the submissions to determine the “degree of concern.”
For decades, companies routinely claimed that much of the information in an 8(e) report could be declared confidential business information, allowing them to strike the name of the chemical from the report and making it impossible to address the harm. In 2010, the Obama administration changed course, announcing that it would begin reviewing the confidentiality claims and, if they were not legitimate, publicly post the reports along with compounds’ names.
The chemical industry pushed back against the policy, arguing that forcing companies to reveal the names of their compounds was a violation of their intellectual property rights. And close observers of the industry believe that pressure from companies that held this view was likely what led the Trump EPA to decide to stop publicly posting the reports.
“It is not easy to keep selling your chemicals when people know they likely cause cancer or other serious disease,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who manages the toxic exposure and health program at Earthjustice. “It makes perfect sense that in an EPA that was largely controlled by industry, chemical manufacturers would lobby to get EPA to stop releasing significant risk studies, and EPA would agree to keep this basic health and safety information secret.”
Gartner said it’s harder to understand why the Biden administration, which has repeatedly expressed its commitment to scientific integrity, has not already fixed the problem and made this backlogged health and safety information available to the public.
As the scientists who spoke with The Intercept see it, part of the explanation may be budgeting constraints. The Biden EPA was left with a situation that puts public health at risk and is expensive to fix. “The Trump administration created this huge backlog for them, and then it became just this intractable problem,” said one of the EPA scientists, who added that several other staff members have expressed concern about the problem.
In its response to The Intercept, the EPA spokesperson said the agency is planning to address the problem. “The Biden-Harris Administration has asked for significantly more resources for this program in the 2022 budget request to ensure we’re meeting our obligations under TSCA, most importantly protecting human health and the environment. In the future, as resources allow, EPA will continue to strive to make TSCA 8(e) reports publicly available in ChemView in the interest of increased transparency.”
While the Trump EPA stopped posting the 8(e) reports, it was also putting more resources into accommodating the companies the agency regulates, fast-tracking the approval of chemicals they considered high priority, pressuring risk assessors to downplay or ignore the risks presented by chemicals, and creating digital tools to ease the regulatory experience. “Together it shows EPA cares more about industry and getting their products out than it does about protecting human health and the environment,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at PEER.
Toxics, the Next Generation
Even before 2019, when the EPA was making the risk reports from industry publicly available, the agency did not always respond to the information in them with any urgency. In 2016, The Intercept reported on 16 8(e) reports that DuPont submitted to the EPA between 2006 and 2013. The reports detailed the potential dangers of GenX, a then-unknown PFAS compound that the company had introduced to replace another chemical in the same class, PFOA, which had been found to cause thyroid disease, cancers, and other health problems.
The studies showed that the replacement compound caused many of the same health problems in lab tests that the original chemical did, including cancer and reproductive problems. Although the studies were in the ChemView database, the EPA appeared to be unaware of them. The agency had made no public announcements about the information and had taken no actions to protect public health. As an agency employee said of the 8(e) reports to The Intercept at the time, “A lot of them do just get filed away.”
In 2019, The Intercept used the ChemView database to find 40 new PFAS compounds that had been the subject of 8(e) reports. Among the health effects listed in the animal studies the companies sent the agency were neurotoxicity; developmental toxicity; decreased conception; severe convulsions; bleeding in the lungs; tooth problems; post-natal loss; hair loss; depression of sperm function; abnormal development of skulls, ribs, and pelvises; and testicular, pancreatic, and kidney cancers. Despite the concerning reports, all 40 PFAS compounds were allowed onto the market and remain unregulated.
Last week, more than 15 years after DuPont submitted the first of those reports and more than five years after The Intercept first reported on them, the EPA took action on GenX using the 8(e) reports. On October 25, the agency released new toxicity assessments that found two closely related chemicals, both known as GenX, to be very toxic. The assessments were based largely on the information that DuPont sent the EPA in 8(e) reports years earlier. They also included information from a letter Chemours sent the EPA as an 8(e) report in March, which noted that approximately 80 percent of blood samples taken from workers at one of its plants outside the U.S. had tested positive for one of the two GenX compounds.
“This science-based final assessment marks a critical step in the process of establishing a national drinking water health advisory for GenX chemicals and provides important information to our partners that can be used to protect communities where these chemicals are found,” said Radhika Fox, EPA assistant administrator for water, when announcing the finalized assessment.
Yet in the years between the EPA’s receipt of the information about GenX’s toxicity and the assessment, the chemical was released into the drinking water of more than 1 million people in North Carolina. As happened with PFOA and many of the new PFAS compounds introduced after GenX, the chemical was allowed to contaminate the environment and harm countless people — all while the EPA sat on information about its dangers.
A Toxic Pizza Tracker
In 2019, some of the EPA staff members who had been entering the 8(e) reports into the EPA’s public database were reassigned to another project. To help chemical companies track the progress of their products as they move through the approval process, the agency created an online tool that it refers to internally as a “pizza tracker,” which was launched later that year. According to a strategic plan of the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, work on the pizza tracker is expected to continue through 2024.
While acknowledging that it prioritized the chemical tracking process and “that resources used to sanitize and post 8(e) submissions to ChemView … were reduced and eventually stopped,” the EPA denied that funding was “shifted specially” from posting the 8(e) reports to funding the pizza tracker.
Like the Domino’s app, the chemical-tracking tool is user-friendly, allowing companies to quickly and conveniently access information about their products as they move through the regulatory process. The two EPA scientists say that in order to protect public health, risk assessors need to be able to see the industry reports with the same ease. And, they say, taking resources away from protecting the public from health and environmental hazards while directing them toward the improvement of industry’s experience of being regulated betrays misplaced priorities.
“The whole concept of a pizza tracker is that you’re delivering an order to a customer,” said one of the EPA scientists. “But the companies are not our clients, the public is.”
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