08 November 21
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Biden was once touted as the ‘New FDR’. That ambition is fast dying – as are Democrats hopes of remaining in power
Only 10 months ago, Biden came into office with great expectations – but greater terrors. Even more apparent at the start than now, Biden’s presidency has been defined by fear rather than hope. With the assault on the Capitol earlier in the month, the culmination of a four-year deathwatch for American democracy, the emergency could hardly evaporate overnight. With Donald Trump temporarily ousted, his replacement also drew 1930s comparisons. The question “is he or isn’t he?” had been asked of Biden’s predecessor for four years. To redeem the country from the fascist, was Biden going to be Franklin Roosevelt?
Like FDR, Biden led Democrats who have rightly stressed economic transformation for the sake of the poor and vulnerable but also for the angry and disaffected voters of the stagnating middle. But unlike Roosevelt, Biden’s coalition is fragile and fissures emerged to threaten his success almost from the start – fissures that broke it apart definitively last week even in the midst of Biden’s infrastructure victory.
Other causes were forced to the margins along the way. Biden subordinated even critical fixes to American democracy, like reforms of courts and elections, to the economic agenda. As for his immigration policies, which mostly resembled the disgusting ones of prior presidents, they were treated with a partisan silence, provoking rage among the few principled enough to demand fewer cruelties and restrictions no matter who is imposing them. But Biden got a pass because enough agreed with the priority to address the economic reasons for Trump’s breakthrough, which are undeniable.
Yet in comparison to Roosevelt’s first “100 days” – which saw 15 major bills and gave the early phase of every presidency its name – Biden’s first 100 days were bogged down. A Covid-19 relief and stimulus bill was passed, adding $1.9tn in emergency spending to the $2.2tn of the first such bill signed by Trump in March 2020. But the real hopes fell on the big-ticket measures for “infrastructure” and welfare that Biden resolved to pursue separately. After all, the American Rescue Plan was only meant to be a temporary stopgap for an American society beset with deeper ills even beyond those that the virus laid bare.
The game was on. At first the debate seemed to be about how costly to make the bills and how to fund them. This was especially true for the American Families Plan, which was supposed to take steps towards an American welfare state – including by making relief measures for children in earlier bills permanent. Progressives in Congress, understanding the risks, were lauded for an early victory in August, refusing to back the first narrower infrastructure bill if Democrats abandoned the second more ambitious social spending bill. Centrists tried to tag progressives as the obstructionists. But the mainstream narrative remained that by holding infrastructure hostage, progressives were wisely keeping centrists from returning to form.
Even as it became clearer and clearer that the Democratic centrist senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and like-minded Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives, were doing damage to the ambition of the bills, a breakthrough after generations of Democratic austerity and neoliberalism still seemed possible. Then came the critical event that allowed for the centrist breakthrough last week: the election for Virginia governor last Tuesday.
In an electoral shock, Republican Glenn Youngkin won – and, more important, grizzled and uncharismatic Democratic party sage Terry McAuliffe, who had once held the governor’s office, lost. Even though McAuliffe’s reputation for decades has been one of a centrist on economics – he served as Bill Clinton’s campaign chair in the 1990s – centrists scored a narrative victory. Wasn’t it because of progressive excess that voters were turning on the party? “Wokeness derails the Democrats,” one headline ran. Lawmakers in Washington scurried to marginalize progressives by passing the infrastructure bill, with some progressives voting no, and others citing promises that Democrats will still continue on to the welfare measures.
The rush to judgment was peculiar. It is not until 2022 that the Democrats will need to show something for themselves, and there was no reason to abandon the social spending plan. Suddenly, however, progressives holding tough – since some Republicans supported the infrastructure plan – were dispensable.
The new narrative was that Youngkin won because of antiracist rhetoric many Democrats have adopted, along with elites branded as “out of touch” by other elite commentators. Centrists saw a golden opportunity to call for a return to their moderation, including in containing spending.
In an extraordinary op-ed, the New York Times called for an “honest conversation” about abandoning progressive goals across the board – including the economy, where Americans demand “bipartisan solutions” that respect inflationary risks and refuse to spend very much. The truth was that Americans had gotten bipartisan neoliberalism for decades, but no matter. One Twitter commentator snarkily noted that it was hardly surprising that “the lessons from Tuesday’s election” matched the “ideological goals” neoliberal elites “had before the election and decades before that. What are the odds!”
Democrats blew by the possibility that McAuliffe’s failures were mainly his fault, and due less to “critical race theory” that allegedly was already reshaping public education than to an abandonment of parents forced to endure school closures for years (itself an economic issue). Either way, the critical error is assuming that voters rejected progressive economic policies, which are popular across the board.
Even before the events the other day, Democrats defined what was in Build Back Better – their slogan and the name of the welfare bill – downwards. Free college was stripped out early, family and medical leave – standard across industrialized democracies for decades – were killed late, and Biden kowtowed to centrists who demanded a more marketized version not just of environmental concern but of funding government across the board, as taxes hikes were reversed. With its fate no longer hostage to infrastructure, in spite of written promises from some centrists that progressives reportedly exacted at the last minute, there is no reason to be optimistic about the final bill’s fate.
An infrastructure bill for a country in decay and decline was much needed and has itself eluded Democrats for decades. Though cut in half to win acceptance, its $1tn for a grab bag of spending – much focused on transport – is nothing to trivialize. But rarely in history has a greater looming defeat been snatched from the jaws of a political victory as the other day.
In the first year of Biden’s presidency, Democrats agreed that the only alternative to barbarism is, if not socialism, some modicum of economic change. Many agreed that opening acts of Barack Obama’s administration had been fatefully insufficient. Now, despite the lessons of the Obama presidency, Republicans are set to recapture one house of Congress after two years – or both. By contrast, FDR gained seats in both houses after delivering substantive change, and won the presidency three more times.
Of course, even if progressives were to secure a welfare package and retain influence in their party, Trump – or an even more popular Republican – could still win the presidency. But this outcome is a near certainty if the Democrats return to centrist form – as seems the likeliest outcome now.
Municipal workers march across the Brooklyn Bridge during a protest against the COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Oct. 25. (photo: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
It was a dramatic statement, but Lach wasn’t sure if anyone would really show up. It turns out: They did. Thousands of New York municipal workers came out to give speeches and wave placards. When Eric joined them, he says, it wasn’t quite what he expected. “It wasn’t just a right-wing political rally,” Lach said. “I’ve been to Trump rallies, and this was not that. It was colleagues standing around, everybody saying hi to each other, hugging each other, high fiving each other. There was some guys smoking cigars.
“I probably had conversations with 50 people, and five or six of them said they were vaccinated, and that they were just there to support their colleagues’ right to choose,” he added.
“These are people who were deemed essential workers who went into work through the pandemic. Sanitation workers were on the backs of garbage trucks in March and April and May 2020, when nobody knew if COVID was transmitted by surfaces, and they’re handling everybody’s garbage,” Lach said. “I talked to one EMS worker who was there. She was vaccinated, but she was just pissed. She was like, ‘We worked through the pandemic. They told us just to reuse our masks at the beginning when there wasn’t enough PPE to go around, and we got shunted this way and sent that way. And then now we’re being forced to do something.’ The frustration that her peers were expressing was totally resonating. She was mad. She was tired.”
On Monday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Lach about how the debate over who can dodge a vaccine—and who can’t—is heating up. What happened with these workers in New York reveals how the fight could end. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: The latest vaccine mandate in New York City applies to all kinds of people: EMTs, firefighters, sanitation workers, cops. The mayor announced it just a few weeks ago, and he gave these city employees just nine days to get their shots.
Eric Lach: The mandate did come with a carrot-and-stick component, where the stick was that you go on unpaid leave if you don’t get a shot. The carrot was that you would get $500 if you did get the shot on time. A lot of the city workers seemed to just dismiss this $500—at least the ones at the march. I’m sure there were plenty of city workers who were grateful for the $500, but the ones who were most vocally against the vaccine almost wanted to treat their $500 with suspicion. Like, Why are we being bribed to get this vaccine?
This latest rule came down after months of back-and-forth over the vaccine. Back in the summer, the city had given workers a gentler mandate: They could choose to get the vaccine or show up for weekly COVID tests.
The idea with that policy was that the weekly tests were going to be so annoying that people would eventually just give in and get the shot.
Is that how it worked?
In certain departments, particularly ones that turned out big for the march last week—the fire department, the sanitation department, and to a certain extent, the New York Police Department—those numbers proved more stubborn than you might have expected. Those departments were in the 60s, percentage-wise, in terms of vaccinations.
By the end of the summer, an average city resident was more likely to be vaccinated than a city worker. So the mayor and the governor began to crack down, starting with teachers and health care workers.
In September, City Hall had announced that teachers and health care workers were going to have to be vaccinated. And this all coincided with the FDA switching over the vaccine approval from emergency use authorization to just regular authorization.
I remember this because I have kids in school and it was a few weeks before school started—really up to the wire.
It was in the swirl of back to school. It was in the swirl of how are we going to make school safe? How are we going to get everybody back to school? What’s this going to look like? And in that mix is when this mandate comes out.
And the mandate gets rid of the weekly testing option. It just says you have to be vaccinated.
You have to be vaccinated. And there was an outcry from those workers, and there were lawsuits that were filed in response to that mandate. Those lawsuits just didn’t work out in the courts in the workers’ favor. And eventually what the city government did is they worked out a deal with the unions representing those workers that said there was a slight carve-out for medical and religious exemptions. You could apply for the specific exemptions, and you wouldn’t have to get the shot without those exemptions were being reviewed.
So the bulk of people were buying time. And then in the end, a few of those workers would actually get an exemption.
Yeah. Those departments ended up at over 95 percent vaccinated. That’s where they are today.
When the mayor noticed his vaccine mandate for teachers and health care workers seemed to be working, he decided to expand it—as quickly as possible—to everyone else. That’s how you ended up in a sea of firefighters and cops and sanitation workers on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Police Benevolent Association, which is the largest union that represents NYPD officers, has been a vocal, vocal presence in New York City politics for a long time. It’s no surprise to see them fight with City Hall. They hate this mayor. It was more of a surprise to see the firefighters union and the sanitation workers and parks department workers, and NYCHA, the public housing agency, has one of the worst vaccination rates in the city. This involved city workers that haven’t played very vocal roles in some of the political fights of the past few years in the city. So to that extent, it was surprising to see how widespread this was.
I wonder how you think about the politics of this nine-day warning that the mayor gave. I think that giving such a short timeline certainly led people to really burn hot in terms of their emotions, but they also seem to burn fast. We had a big protest. We had a lot of worry. And then it was here.
No matter what, there was going to be a vocal contingent of people who didn’t want to do this. There was going to be some people who just refuse to get the shot. And regardless of the timeline you put on it, there was going to be ugliness. There was going to be this expression of political rage that threatens violence. You had some firefighters that went in uniform to the office of the state senator in the city here and demanded to know what was going on.
They told them that they’d have blood on their hands if the mandate went forward.
That seems like it would have been expressed no matter what—if there was a three-month deadline or a nine-day deadline or a two-day deadline. There was some contingent of city workers that would feel that way and that would respond in this way.
As of right now, who are the main holdouts when it comes to getting vaccinated?
FDNY, the firefighters. FDNY includes firefighters and EMS workers, and the EMS workers are close to 90 percent vaccinated at this point. The firefighters are still under 80 percent.
Why firefighters?
I think that the firefighters have a really strong job identity. The other thing that we haven’t really quite touched on yet is that a lot of firefighters who I talked to say, “A lot of us already had COVID. We have antibodies, and therefore we shouldn’t be forced to get the vaccine.”
They believe in a previously acquired immunity.
Yeah, exactly. And so that argument really seems to have taken hold in the fire department.
And we should say: The evidence shows that that immunity is not as strong as vaccine immunity.
The public health recommendation is to get vaccinated anyway, but they dismiss that.
I think of firefighters as risk takers. They run into burning buildings.
And risk assessors.
Yeah.
Just talking to some, especially the older firefighters, there’s still this legacy of 9/11 and this special class that first responders were put in after 9/11. Some of them will say, “We were told that working down on the pile after 9/11 was safe, and then a lot of us got sick.” And there’s been a multidecade fight with Congress for proper funding for people who got sick. There’s this institutional memory and residual feeling that this is a particular kind of job and we are a particular kind of city worker.
There were other ways that New Yorkers were feeling this resistance from municipal employees who just weren’t comfortable with the shot. Like, my trash wasn’t picked up for a day or two. I know that 311 complaints quadrupled. And union heads were warning, like, “Oh, we’re not going to have enough people to send to fires,” or “We’re not going to have enough people to respond to medical calls.”
Yeah, obviously that was one of the big questions going into the deadline: Is this going to affect the functioning of city government? Even if it’s a fraction of the total city worker population that holds out.
Was the government worried about that?
Mayor de Blasio seemed pretty sanguine about that all week, saying, “Friday is the deadline. The city workers have to get their shots by then. And after that, we move on.”
There have been some anecdotal reports of trash piling up on city sidewalks. And then last week, many, many firefighters called in sick. But so far, there haven’t been signs that this is really going to mess with the functioning of the city government in some visible or troubling way.
So where do we stand now? I think the latest I saw was 9,000 workers were on leave, but then 12,000 workers have applied for a religious exemption.
There’s about 20,000 unvaccinated city workers and about half have applied for some kind of exemption. Those cases will be evaluated and then resolved one way or the other. It’s yet to be seen whether this is the kind of holdout that is relatively temporary and a lot of those people come back or if they just hold out indefinitely.
There’s a Facebook page for firefighters that I have been reading where they’ve been posting tributes to people who retired, people who already had their 20 years—and in some cases, much longer than that, 30 years, 40 years—and they just opted to retire instead of getting vaccinated.
There were reports that the Police Benevolent Association held an event where people could donate to people who would rather take early retirement than get vaccinated.
Definitely those people exist. We still don’t know how many people those are. And over the next week or two, I think it’s going to be a lot more clear if we’re talking about a couple of hundred versus a couple thousand.
As of Thursday, 91 percent of all municipal workers in New York City had been vaccinated. That means that after lagging behind the rest of the city for months, municipal workers are now more likely to be vaccinated than everyone else. Does that mean the vaccine mandate is working?
That’s the outcome that City Hall was looking for. They just wanted everybody vaccinated.
So I think this is a success story.
Obviously the people who are holding out don’t feel that way. But overall, this is a city policy that was put in a place in relatively short order that got the results they were looking for.
When you called back some of the sources you’d met at that march, once the mandate was in effect, what did they sound like?
I don’t think anybody who I kept in touch with is holding out. On Friday morning, at fire department headquarters, people were lined up waiting for their vaccine. This was hours before the deadline. I went down there trying to catch people on their way out. And I talked to one firefighter who was like, “I didn’t think I would ever get it. I didn’t want to get it. But you know, I have a car, I have a mortgage, I have a family. I can’t afford to not get it. So I just did it.” He was sad. And he said to me, “You want to stand with your colleagues. But sometimes, unfortunately, you have to look out for yourself.”
Former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. (photo: EPA-EFE)
The defeat in Afghanistan offers a chance to rethink America’s war machine, but Congress is on the verge of raising military spending to $740 billion.
Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war” after 9/11, the one with a legitimate purpose and a happy ending. That also didn’t turn out to be true, but while the war’s momentum favored the Taliban for years, its final act had the suddenness of a guillotine, with a lot more pain. At Kabul’s airport, desperate Afghans clung to the sides of a departing U.S. cargo plane. Panicked families tried to get onto the diminishing number of evacuation flights. And 13 U.S. troops helping keep the airport open were killed in a suicide bombing. Just before midnight on August 30, the last U.S. aircraft and the last U.S. soldier got out of Kabul.
This defeat could have been an opportunity to rethink the logic of America’s war machine. That’s what defeats often do: They force you to reconsider the destructive tendencies that got you into the hole. One of those tendencies has been a nearly ceaseless rise in military spending that has little popular support. Even before the fall of Kabul, opinion polls consistently showed that only a minority of Americans think that the U.S. should spend more on its defense — just 26 percent in a survey conducted by Gallup in February. And on the day that the U.S. got out of Afghanistan, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the lone member of Congress to vote against the invasion in 2001, called on Republicans as well as Democrats to finally reconfigure the nation’s spending priorities. “Now is the time to shift our investments away from endless wars and toward addressing human needs,” she said.
Guess what happened?
To understand the next step, you need to go back to April, when President Joe Biden proposed a $715 billion Pentagon budget for 2022, which represented a 1.6 percent increase from 2021. Progressives like Lee were not pleased — and were even less pleased in late July when the Senate Armed Services Committee added $25 billion to Biden’s proposal. This “plus-up,” as it’s called, raised the budget to $740 billion, a 5 percent increase over the previous year. At that rate, military spending over the next decade would easily exceed $7 trillion, or four times more than the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better program that Biden is trying to push through Congress.
That was the legislative prelude to Lee’s call for new priorities. Two days later, on September 2, the House Armed Services Committee met to consider the military budget, and as expected, an amendment was introduced by the ranking Republican to match the Senate increase. This set off a debate in which one of the strongest backers of the plus-up was a Democrat, Rep. Elaine Luria, a former Navy officer whose Virginia district includes the naval station in Norfolk.
“In one word, we can sum up the ‘why,’ and that’s China,” Luria said. “We are ending our longest conflict of 20 years, but more than ever, the world is watching what we do here today. … Right now there are malign actors who seek to attack us and do us harm.”
This has been a reliable power move over the decades: When one threat fades away, another seems to come along at just the right time. The so-called war on terror is a spent force, but now there is China, which devotes two-thirds less to its defense than the U.S. and is not known to be planning any 9/11-style attacks on the homeland — but is having a conveniently timed “Sputnik moment.”
In the end, the committee voted 42-17 to increase the budget, with 14 Democrats joining 28 Republicans. The committee spent far more time debating critical race theory (about two hours) than the amendment to cut the budget (about 30 minutes).
“It’s as if we have learned nothing from the past 20 years,” said Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, during the debate. She noted that rather than pumping money into the military, more resources could go toward diplomacy, education, infrastructure, and public health. “That is what will determine if we are competitive with China, not whether we have one more F-35 that even the Pentagon says they don’t need,” she concluded.
The fundamental idea behind her argument was evoked during the Vietnam War by Martin Luther King Jr., who warned in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
A Beverly Hills Mansion
If you want to understand the soul-killing trajectory of U.S. military spending, you should look at a recent home purchase in Beverly Hills, California.
Last month, a wealthy buyer paid $20.9 million for a mansion with 8,600 square feet of living space that includes five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and an interior courtyard with an olive tree. The buyer’s name, according to a news article that was widely shared on social media, is Daoud Wardak. Little is known about Wardak except that his father was a defense minister in Afghanistan and his older brother founded an obscure logistics company that landed more than a quarter billion dollars in U.S. military contracts.
It’s not clear how Wardak was able to purchase his new residence or the $5.2 million condo he also owns in Miami Beach, Florida. But what’s known is that nearly half of U.S. military expenditures since 9/11 — the total is about $14 trillion — have gone to contractors. Some are global brands of lethality, such as Raytheon and General Dynamics, while others are pop-up entities with headquarters that are post office boxes. The money that has vanished through corruption is legendary as well as unknowable, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit, and until recently, it didn’t even try to conduct one.
It’s a scenario of national deformation that was predicted in 1961 by President Dwight Eisenhower, who warned in his farewell address of the rise of a military-industrial complex. The numbers behind this deformation are stunning. Since 2001, the five largest weapons manufacturers in the U.S. have spent more than $1.1 billion lobbying the government — and that statistic doesn’t even include their donations to candidates, their funding of think tanks, or their payments to generals who become board members. These investments have paid off, according to Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute, which calculates that those five firms have received more than $2 trillion in government contracts since 2001.
And then there is the revolving door. Biden chose as his defense secretary a board member of Raytheon — retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, who received a payout of up to $1.7 million when he left the company. Austin was also a member of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton’s national security advisory board, for which he was paid $200,000 in the year before he became defense secretary. The revolving door was operational during the Trump administration too: President Donald Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, Mark Esper, was a senior lobbyist for Raytheon before joining the Cabinet; the company paid him more than $1.5 million in his final year.
The door continues to spin. Just last month, the Pentagon’s head of foreign military sales, Heidi Grant, left her government job and a day later started her new one as Boeing’s vice president for business development. The closeness of the industry and the government, to the point of being indistinguishable at times, was even referenced in a conference call last month between investors and the chief executive of Raytheon, one of the largest weapons producers in the U.S.
“Defense spending is nonpartisan,” noted Gregory Hayes, the Raytheon CEO whose compensation exceeded $20 million last year. “We’re encouraged to see Congress supporting plus-ups to the president’s budget that are also aligned to our business and our investments.”
America Against the World
This is a story about a reckoning that gets mugged every time it ventures into daylight.
A year ago, a group of House Democrats led by Lee and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., banded together to support an amendment to cut U.S. military spending by 10 percent. There were only 96 of them, so their amendment didn’t come close to passing, but it was the start of what progressives knew would be an incremental effort to narrow the distance between military spending and common sense.
Things seemed to look better this year.
The upstarts had created the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus and sent a letter to Biden in March to remind him that if the Pentagon’s budget was cut by 10 percent, it would still be larger than the next 10 largest militaries combined (and most of those are U.S. allies). They argued that a clear lesson could be learned from the war on terror, which not only cost trillions of dollars, but also took the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers and at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. “The premise of a military-centric foreign policy is a failure,” their letter stated, well before the fall of Kabul.
On September 22, the $740 billion budget, which had been approved by the Armed Services Committee, arrived for a vote on the House floor, where there was a short debate on the amendment to reduce it by 10 percent. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., cited China and warned of “catastrophic effects on our training and readiness” if there were any cuts. His remark drew a sharp response from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who said it wasn’t the military’s readiness that was threatened but “the profit margins of defense contractors.”
The amendment got only 86 votes, all from Democrats, which was fewer than the 93 votes it got a year earlier, before the humiliation in Afghanistan.
There were several reasons it fared worse, including the fact that this year the Pentagon budget came from a Democratic rather than Republican administration; some Democrats were willing to reduce the budget only if the other party was asking for an increase. Additionally, an amendment was offered this year to cut just the $25 billion plus-up, and this less radical proposal got 142 votes, which wasn’t enough to pass but was more than the budget-reducing amendment got. It appears to have functioned as an easy way for Democrats to signal their slight concern about military spending without going against their president or seeking a true reduction.
The House approved the $740 billion budget with strong support from both parties. The budget is now in the hands of the full Senate, which is expected to vote on it soon. Despite the failure in Afghanistan, there seems little likelihood that U.S. military spending will slow down.
Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, 39, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, at Bryant Park on 21 October in Manhattan, New York. (photo: Desiree Rios/Guardian UK)
Special rapporteur Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng argues in brief filed in a US court that overturning abortion rights would violate international human rights treaties ratified by the US
The special rapporteur, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, is one of just a handful of global observers whose mandate is to travel the world defending human rights.
Mofokeng has argued in a brief filed in a US court that overturning abortion rights would violate international human rights treaties ratified by the US, including the convention against torture, should women be forced to carry pregnancies to term.
In an interview, Mofokeng told the Guardian she could have filed a brief on abortion rights, “in any other court, in any other abortion case,” globally. However, she chose the US courts because of the direct threat posed to abortion rights in the supreme court’s upcoming session.
“We have this joke among us that when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches a [cold],” said Mofokeng. “So we know that politically that what happens in the United States… does have an impact in precedents elsewhere in the world.”
Mofokeng’s brief was filed ahead of oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case advocates fear will undermine abortion rights nationally. Dobbs poses a direct threat to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a Constitutional right to abortion based in privacy.
Roe invalidated dozens of state abortion bans and restrictions, and allowed people to terminate a pregnancy up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally understood to be about 24 weeks gestation. A full term pregnancy is 39 weeks.
“If that gets overturned, it has catastrophic implications, not just for the US,” said Mofokeng, who said she feared overturning Roe would embolden global attacks on reproductive rights.
Mofokeng is also a practicing doctor and well-known sex-positive author in South Africa. Most often, she goes by “Dr T”, an informal title which underscores the empathy in her academic analysis. Her most recent UN report outlined the challenges Covid-19 posed to reproductive rights, and how colonialism continues to affect global policies on reproduction, from sterilization to abortion bans.
“It means that even those people who are conservative, who are anti-rights, in any country in the world, will actually now start referencing the US court as an example of jurisprudence that should be followed,” said Mofokeng. “And this is why this is so dangerous”.
In Dobbs, the court will consider whether Mississippi can ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation. For the court to uphold Mississippi’s law, it would require the court to rewrite standards that determine whether abortion restrictions are constitutional. Advocates fear that could once again allow states to severely restrict or ban abortion.
A majority of the court’s nine justices would need to agree to rewrite such standards. Conservative justices hold a 6-3 supermajority on the court. Many observers view the court’s decision to take the Mississippi case as an ominous sign. About six in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal in “all or most cases”.
“If Roe … [were] overturned, many US states will implement bans or near-bans on abortion access that will make individual state laws irreconcilable with international human rights law,” the brief argued. “This would cause irreparable harm to women and girls in violation of the United States’ obligations under the human rights treaties it has signed and ratified.”
While the US has not ratified several United Nations treaties, it has ratified the convention against torture, which Mofokeng’s brief argued would be violated if states were allowed to ban abortion.
“The denial of safe abortions and subjecting women and girls to humiliating and judgmental attitudes in such contexts of extreme vulnerability and where timely health care is essential amount to torture or ill treatment,” Mofokeng’s brief said, citing a 2016 report by the rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Conversely, Mofokeng’s brief argued, contrary to Mississippi’s assertions, that “the right to life emanating from human rights treaties does not apply prenatally,” and that the “overwhelming trend for the past half-century has been toward the liberalization of abortion laws worldwide”.
Further, since the court has accepted the Dobbs case, it also allowed a six-week abortion ban to go into effect in Texas in September, effectively allowing the nation’s second largest state to nullify Roe within its borders. Experts estimate that if Roe were overturned, roughly two dozen US states mostly in the south and midwest would immediately ban abortion.
Such bans would have immediate and direct consequences for women and people seeking abortions.
In one recent analysis, the Guttmacher Institute found 26 states are certain or likely to outlaw abortion should Roe be overturned. In just one example, that would require a woman seeking a legal abortion in Louisiana to travel to Kansas to access care.
“The rise in global anti-gender and anti-women’s rights is such that people will grasp at anything that seems to make their case solid,” said Mofokeng. And, she said, the case before the supreme court now relies on “non-medical, non-scientific” misinformation.
“It means we have a risk of now having global jurisprudence – or at least influences in the global world – using jurisprudence that’s ill-informed. And that’s very dangerous,” said Mofokeng. “To undo the court’s decisions takes decades, sometimes a lifetime – and that’s why it’s dangerous.”
A superintendent speaks at a rally opposing mask requirements in schools in front of the state Capitol in Helena, Mont. (photo: Iris Samuels/AP)
The victories notched, and the intense heat the races generated, could have ramifications nationwide
Last week’s election results may complicate those efforts.
In Virginia, education was a significant factor in Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s victory, after a campaign in which he emphasized parents’ rights to, for instance, block the teaching of a novel that shows the brutality of slavery.
And race was a factor in hundreds of school board elections and attempted recalls of school board members. It appears these challengers may have lost the majority of their races, though there is no comprehensive tally. Still, many observers argue that the victories these conservative candidates did notch, and the intense heat the races generated, will have ramifications nationwide.
People on both sides of the debate predict a chilling effect on school board members, superintendents and teachers who may now fear any effort to address racism inside their school systems will be called out as divisive, and that parents who oppose these efforts will feel newly emboldened to loudly protest.
“I think it’s a major impact frankly,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. He said curriculums might be modified when parents complain and superintendents who support robust racial equity work might not be hired.
He noted that most school board members are elected in the spring and predicted these debates will grow more intense in the run-up to those contests.
“In those places where they have not had these problems yet, they are very cautious, concerned and careful,” he said. “This isn’t going to go away. This is going to spread and this is going to grow.”
And in communities where conservatives won seats, school boards may reconsider lessons about systemic racism, which often get labeled “critical race theory,” and scrutinize policies aimed at promoting diversity.
Scott Henry easily ousted an incumbent to take a seat on the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Houston after a campaign focused on how race is taught in schools. Teaching critical race theory, an academic area of study, is against the law in Texas already, but Henry alleged it is “sprinkled in” to lessons nonetheless.
“That’s what we have to address and be careful about,” he said.
Henry campaigned with fellow conservative candidates Lucas Scanlon and Natalie Blasingame. The trio were supported by national conservative political action committees that sent out mailers and created websites for them, touting the group as “Christians, conservatives [and] patriots” who believe in a “Biblical World View.”
Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics, identified 96 school districts with a total of 302 seats up for election where social issues and the coronavirus response were major campaign issues. That includes, for example, questions of mandatory masks in school, comprehensive sex education, rights for transgender students and how race is taught in classrooms.
The group found school board members in these districts were less likely to run for reelection than is typical, and incumbents who did run were less likely to win.
Still, Ballotpedia found that candidates who took conservative stances on race, gender and pandemic issues did not win most of their races. Of the 275 candidates that Ballotpedia was able to label, about 28 percent of the winners had taken a conservative stance.
Teachers unions, which support the racial equity work, said their tracking also found more wins among liberal candidates. “The vast majority of them won even when they were facing right-wing candidates who were well-funded,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest union, though she did not have data to support that assertion.
But others see a chilling effect from the run-up to Election Day and the results. Pedro A. Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, said he has received a lot of questions from superintendents about how to handle the backlash.
“My hunch is many will be silenced out of fear,” Noguera said. “These are mobs that are angry, coming to the board meetings. It’s not easy to go out and talk to folks in a reasonable manner when dealing with angry people.”
Threats of violence against school board members were so intense that the National School Boards Association wrote President Biden in September suggesting they might constitute a form of domestic terrorism. The group later apologized for some of the language in the letter after it was criticized by some of its state affiliates, though the FBI said it would create a task force to respond to the violence.
The intense focus on racial equity by school districts came in the wake of the accountability movement in education that aimed to improve schools by holding officials responsible for results. Testing required by the No Child Left Behind law put a sharp focus on racial achievement gaps across the country, but the accountability measures in the law failed to solve the problem.
After that, many schools turned their attention to “equity” and how they were handling issues of race. Efforts included trying to hire more teachers of color and adopting alternative discipline practices aimed at reducing suspensions, which often were delivered disproportionately to students of color. In the classroom, teachers worked to better incorporate diverse perspectives and cultures.
Floyd’s murder in May 2020 set off a more intense drive to confront systemic racism directly. But critics, including President Donald Trump, argued these lessons cast all White people as oppressors and all people of color as victims. Spurred on by activists such as Christopher Rufo, Trump labeled any effort by schools to address systemic racism as critical race theory, which is not taught by any K-12 systems but does take as its starting point that racism is baked into American institutions.
This year, conservative donors and groups focused money and resources on school board races.
That includes the 1776 Project PAC, a conservative group that opposes anti-racist education and says it spent about $137,000 in 58 races. A separate group called 1776 Action, inspired by Trump’s now-defunct 1776 Commission, recruited at least 75 conservative school board candidates to sign a pledge vowing to “defeat toxic, critical race theory-inspired curriculum,” said Adam Waldeck, the president of 1776 Action.
More than 200 other candidates, including many on ballots next year, have also signed the pledge, a six-point promise that calls for ousting officials “who promote a false, divisive, and radical view of America and our fellow citizens with new leaders who respect our history, our values, our rights, and the God-given dignity of every person.”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem, considered a potential Republican contender for the White House in 2024, was the first to sign the pledge.
“If you asked most people years ago, they probably didn’t know who was on their school board,” Waldeck said in an interview. “So much of the focus for people is on the White House and Congress, and I think people sort of almost forgot that the decisions that are most important and affect us are right under our noses on the local level.”
Conservative influence was intense in Douglas County, Colo., where a slate of four conservative school board candidates ran a pitched campaign against critical race theory and other diversity initiatives. All four won.
Krista Holtzmann, a four-year incumbent who lost reelection, blamed national conservative groups, which she said “stirred up a far-right base that kind of puts all of their anger and fears in a bucket called CRT [critical race theory] and uses it as something that’s divisive.”
“CRT was an issue that no one on the other side could ever give me an example of that happening locally,” said Holtzmann, 52. “It was a national talking point that was brought to our district.”
Juli Watkins, another losing candidate in the race, initially dismissed “a loud minority” of people who accused teachers of “indoctrinating students with critical race theory.”
But she saw mounting anger toward issues about race, gender and pandemic restrictions during school board meetings debating when children could go back to school in person. In the months that followed, billboards and signs for previously unknown school board candidates flooded Douglas County, a Trump stronghold south of Denver. The group even ran campaign ads denouncing the teaching of critical race theory during ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.”
“I thought it was a joke when people told me that,” Watkins, 52, said of the school board ads on “Monday Night Football.” “I was always aware of [the conservative candidates], but I truly didn’t think of them as much of a threat.”
Other communities rejected similar conservative campaigns.
In 2020, the seaside community of Guilford, Conn., reckoned with the murder of Floyd by a White police officer in Minneapolis by implementing more diverse perspectives into the school curriculum and changing the school’s nickname, the Indians.
As this was unfolding, some students expressed confusion and frustration talking to their parents about the complex issues around race, gender and history that were being addressed in the classroom, said Guilford resident Arnold Skretta, an attorney who was not on the school board at the time.
Educators and the school board emphasized to families that critical race theory was not being taught in the classroom, but some parents and officials didn’t believe them, accusing the district in a Zoom forum of trying to make people of color feel more welcome “at the expense of White Judeo-Christians,” Skretta said.
“At that point, it was blatant, overt racism,” said Skretta, 42.
Five conservatives were already running for the school board, having ousted three more traditional Republican school board members in the GOP primary in September. Skretta had tracked their rise and joined a group of Democratic and independents to run against them.
The conservatives drew national interest and money to their race, appearing on Fox News several times, but last week, they lost by 2-to-1 margins.
Skretta credited high turnout and said he could not have won without significant voter engagement. He hoped that could be a blueprint for races elsewhere.
“What happened here in Guilford is the consequence of a town getting engaged,” he said. “Democrats can’t let the right wing weaponize school boards.”
US president John F. Kennedy meets with Mobutu Sese Seko, the commander-in-chief of the Congolese armed forces that ousted and assassinated Patrice Lumumba, at the White House in 1963. (photo: Keystone/Getty Images)
From undermining national liberation leaders to playing a central role in the assassination of Congolese radical Patrice Lumumba, not enough attention is paid to the CIA’s shameful role in Africa. A new book aims to correct that.
In fact, the agents Nkrumah feared were already present. Not long after the event began, Ghanaian police arrested a journalist who had been hiding in one of the conference rooms while apparently trying to record a closed breakout session. As it was later discovered, the journalist actually worked for a CIA front organization, one of many represented at the event.
British scholar Susan Williams has spent years documenting these and other instances of the United States’ secret operations during the early years of African independence. The resulting book, White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, may be the most thorough investigation to date of CIA involvement in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Over more than five hundred pages, Williams counters the lies, deceptions, and pleas of innocence of the CIA and other US agencies to reveal a government that never let its failure to grasp the motivations of Africa’s leaders stop it from intervening, often violently, to undermine or overthrow them.
Though a few other African countries appear on the sidelines, White Malice overwhelmingly concerns just two that preoccupied the CIA during this period: Ghana and what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ghana’s appeal to the agency was based merely on its place in history. As the first African nation to gain independence, in 1957, and the homeland of Nrukmah — by far the most widely respected advocate of African self-determination of the day — the nation was inevitably a source of intrigue. The Congo stepped out of its colonial shackles soon after, in 1960. Because of its size, position near southern Africa’s bastions of white rule, and reserves of high-quality uranium at the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga Province, the country soon became the next locus of the agency’s attention — and interference — in Africa.
“This is a turning point in the history of Africa,” Nkrumah told Ghana’s National Assembly during a visit from Congolese prime minister Lumumba a few weeks into the Congo’s self-rule. “If we allow the independence of the Congo to be compromised in any way by the imperialist and capitalist forces, we shall expose the sovereignty and independence of all Africa to grave risk.”
Nkrumah possessed an acute understanding of the threat and of the people behind it. Only months after his speech, Lumumba was assassinated by a Belgian and Congolese firing squad, opening the door to decades of pro-Western tyranny in the country.
Lumumba’s assassination is remembered today as one of the low points of the early years of African independence, but a lacking documentary record has allowed partisan investigators to minimize the CIA’s role. It’s a failure of accountability that has allowed the agency to appear blameless while reinforcing a fatalistic view of African history, as if the murder of an elected official was merely another terrible thing that “just happened” to a people utterly unprepared for the challenge of independence.
But, as Williams shows, the CIA was actually one of the chief architects of the plot. Only days after Lumumba’s visit to Ghana, Larry Devlin, the agency’s leading man in the Congo, warned his bosses of a vague takeover plot involving the Soviets, Ghanaians, Guineans, and the local Communist Party. It was “difficult [to] determine major influencing factors,” he said. Despite a complete lack of evidence, he was certain the “decisive period” when the Congo would align itself with the Soviet Union was “not far off.” Soon after, President Dwight D. Eisenhower verbally ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba.
The CIA’s agents did not, in the end, man the firing squad to kill Lumumba. But as Williams makes clear, that distinction is minor when one considers everything else the agency did to assist in the murder. After inventing and disseminating the bogus conspiracy plot of a pro-Soviet takeover, the CIA leveraged its multitude of sources in Katanga to provide intelligence to Lumumba’s enemies, making his capture possible. They helped to deliver him to the Katanga prison where he was held before his execution. Williams even cites a few lines from a recently declassified CIA expense report to show that Devlin, the station chief, ordered one of his agents to visit the prison not long before the bullets were fired.
When Nkrumah learned of Lumumba’s assassination, he felt it “in a very keen and personal way,” according to June Milne, his British research assistant. But horrifying as the news was to him, the Ghanaian statesman was hardly surprised.
White Malice is a triumph of archival research, and its best moments come when Williams allows the actors on both sides to speak for themselves. While books about African independence often show Nkrumah and his peers to be paranoid and hopelessly idealistic, reading their words alongside a mountain of evidence of CIA misdeeds, one sees how fear and idealism were entirely pragmatic reactions to the threats of the day. Nkrumah’s vision of African unity wasn’t the pipe dream of a naive and untested politician; it was a necessary response to a concerted effort to divide and weaken the continent.
In Nkrumah’s own country, the US government appears not to have pursued a course of outright assassination. But it acted in other ways to undermine the Ghanaian leader, often justifying its ploys with the same kinds of paternalistic rationalizations the British had used before them. Those efforts reached their nadir in 1964, when the US State Department’s West Africa specialists sent a memo to G. Mennen Williams, the department’s head of African affairs, titled “Proposed Action Program for Ghana.” The United States, it said, should start making “intensive efforts” involving “psychological warfare and other means to diminish support for Nkrumah within Ghana and nurture the conviction among the Ghanaian people that their country’s welfare and independence necessitate his removal.” In another file from that year, an official from Britain’s Commonwealth Relations Office mentions a plan, ostensibly approved at the highest levels of the foreign service, for “covert and unattributable attacks on Nkrumah.”
The level of coordination between governments within and outside the United States might have shocked Nkrumah, who, until the end of his life, was at least willing to believe the CIA was a rogue agency, accountable to no one, not even US presidents.
White Malice leaves little doubt, if any still existed, that the CIA did grave harm to Africa in its early days of independence. But while Williams presents numerous instances of the CIA and other agencies undermining African governments, often violently, the CIA’s wider strategy in Africa — apart from denying uranium and allies to the Soviet Union — remains opaque. What we call “colonization” as practiced by Britain, France, Belgium, and others involved a vast machinery of exploitation — schools to train children to speak the masters’ language, railroads to deplete the interior of resources — all maintained by an army of functionaries. But even in the Congo, the CIA’s presence was comparatively small. Huge budgets and the freedom to do virtually whatever they wanted in the name of fighting communism gave them an outsize influence over Africa’s history, but their numbers never rivaled the colonial bureaucracies they supposedly replaced.
Williams shows how the CIA plotted with businesspeople who stood to benefit from pro-Western African governments in both the Congo and Ghana. But far from a systematic practice of extraction, the agency’s designs for Africa often seem befuddled with contradiction.
That is especially true in the aftermath of Lumumba’s assassination; an overabundance of secrecy still prevents a full accounting. But what records have been pried from the agency’s hands detail a multitude of CIA aerial operations in the Congo involving planes owned by agency front companies and pilots who were themselves CIA personnel. During a period of upheaval, the agency appears to be everywhere in the country at once. “But,” Williams writes, “it is a confusing situation in which the CIA appears to have been riding several horses at once that were going in different directions.” The agency “supported [Katangan secessionist president Moïse] Tshombe’s war on the UN; it supported the UN mission in the Congo; and it supported the Congolese Air Force, the air arm of the Leopoldville government.”
As contradictory as these efforts seem to have been, all of them, Williams writes, “contributed to the objective of keeping the whole of the Congo under America’s influence and guarding the Shinkolobwe mine against Soviet incursion.”
Even if such conflicting plans shared a common goal, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether we should consider them colonialism — neo- or otherwise — or rather the schizophrenic response of an agency drunk with power it never should have been afforded. In White Malice, the CIA’s capacity for committing murder and sowing discord is on full display. Its capacity to rule, however, is less so.
Flooding. (photo: Sumit Ahmed/Eyepix Group/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)
Without it, there will be even worse "loss and damage" costs down the line.
International cooperation to cut emissions hinges on rich countries recognizing and rectifying that injustice. But by all accounts, they’re failing. Developed countries have yet to meet the $100 billion per year promise they made to help poorer countries pay for clean energy and climate adaptation projects. And most of the money that has flowed has gone toward climate change mitigation, and not adaptation.
A report released by the United Nations today finds a growing gap between the cost of climate adaptation in developing countries and the amount of public finance available for it. The report estimates that developing countries need five to 10 times more funding than they’re currently getting to help them manage climate impacts, or up to $300 billion per year by 2030.
Adaptation refers to any action to reduce the risks that communities face due to climate change. That could mean developing early-warning systems for storms, increasing access to air conditioning during heat waves, making infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather, moving homes away from coastlines, or shifting agricultural practices to become more resistant to drought.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 stipulates that when doling out money, rich nations “should aim to achieve a balance between mitigation and adaptation.” But in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, only 25 percent, or $20 billion*, of the climate-related financing flowing from developed to developing countries went to adaptation projects — the rest went to clean energy or projects that cut emissions.
“The word ‘balance’ is open to a wide variety of interpretations, but I don’t think there will be many people who say a quarter is balanced,” said Joe Thwaites, an associate at the World Resource Institute’s Sustainable Finance Center.
Vulnerable countries are pushing for a 50-50 split between funding for adaptation and mitigation. Much of the developing world is at much greater risk of dangerous climate impacts than of becoming a major source of carbon emissions. But the U.S. doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. On Monday, President Biden proclaimed that the U.S. would give $3 billion in annual adaptation funding to developing countries by 2024, or about 26 percent of America’s total climate-related international finance.
Adaptation has always been a politically difficult subject in international climate negotiations. Developed countries are more bullish on cutting emissions because the benefits are global, and the faster we cut carbon, the less adaptation the world will need to do.
“I think that’s a misunderstanding of the problem, because we’re already at a point where there’s going to be huge impacts,” Thwaites said. He added that there are global benefits to helping poorer nations reduce their risks, considering how extreme weather events can disrupt global supply chains or create refugee crises.
There are other challenges to increasing finance for adaptation projects. Wealthy countries like to finance international projects that can attract additional private investment in order to scale up overall funding. It’s much easier to attract private investment for a project that has expected financial returns — like a solar farm, for example — than for an essential project that doesn’t directly generate revenue, like stormwater infrastructure. Many rich countries also provide much more of their climate aid in the form of loans rather than direct grants, and loans don’t make sense for projects that don’t turn a profit. In 2019, 71 percent of public climate finance took the form of loans, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental research group.
The United Nations adaptation report also sounds the alarm about another concerning gap. The authors note that finance is “a means rather than an end: the availability of funds does not guarantee that they will be used efficiently and effectively.” But there’s a lack of information about whether the money that does go to adaptation, in countries rich and poor, is making a difference. They found that only 26 percent of countries around the world have systems in place to monitor and evaluate whether their adaptation plans are working, and only 8 percent of countries have actually completed an assessment.
A recent paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change highlights the widespread lack of data showing whether adaptation projects are reducing risk. A group of more than 100 researchers undertook an enormous review of the peer-reviewed literature on adaptation to climate change. Of more than 48,000 articles about adaptation, only about 1,700 documented projects that had actually been implemented. And only 58 of the 48,000 studies analyzed whether a given adaptation project or plan was working.
“A response to climate change, even if it’s well intended, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to reduce risk, and that needs to be evaluated,” said Paige Fischer, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, and one of the authors of the Nature Climate Change review.
Harjeet Singh, a senior advisor for climate impacts at the Climate Action Network, sees the adaptation gap as a harbinger of another growing problem that is becoming more urgent in international climate talks: “loss and damage.” Loss and damage refers to the unavoided or unavoidable losses that many countries are experiencing due to climate change, including loss of life, impaired public health, economic losses, and damage to homes and infrastructure.
Singh said you can think of climate action on a continuum: The less we do to mitigate climate change, the more we will need to adapt. But if the adaptation gap is not filled, and countries cannot manage the risk of extreme weather and other impacts, they are going to suffer increasing amounts of loss and damage. Many countries don’t have an agency like the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States to help people rebuild their lives after disaster strikes.
Small island states and the world’s least developed countries are pushing for a new stream of funding for loss and damage in addition to mitigation and adaptation. Singh said that while there are already international funding mechanisms for humanitarian aid, loss and damage should be a distinct, additional type of funding. “You have to look at it much more from a responsibility and obligation perspective,” he said.
Historically, the U.S. and other developed nations have shown huge resistance to the idea of loss and damage, and tried to keep it off the agenda during international climate negotiations, due to the sticky legal implications of admitting liability for damages. But the tide may be shifting at COP26. On Monday, Antigua, Barbuda, and Tuvalu announced a new commission to explore whether they might actually have legal rights to loss and damage funding from polluting countries. That same day, Scotland became the first country ever to pledge funding for loss and damage. Though the amount was tiny — just $1.4 million — Singh said it was a breakthrough.
“This is a tangible way of saying that the world stands in solidarity with people who are suffering now,” he said. “Yes, we are talking about 1.5 degrees, but what about people who are suffering at 1.1 degree of temperature rise?”
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