13 August 21
Disaster Fundraising: Is That All That Works?
It’s nearly impossible at this point to run a normal fundraiser. Unless things get seriously dire, we get no support. That is one bad formula.
Again a “reasonable” stream of donations fixes all of this.
At this stage, the August fundraising drive is — far — behind where it should be.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
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12 August 21
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Dontcha know, COVID cases in Texas are up 125 percent over the last two weeks. In Florida, they’re up 162 percent.
he party of Trump has a big problem, they have found themselves on a sticky wicket: They have radicalized their base to believe that public health measures are “Democrat overreach.”
In order to get the base excited, they have to rail against certain things, many of them public health-related (vaccine passports, masks, lockdowns, social distancing). But railing against public health means endangering the health of their base.
For a little while, this delicate balance seemed like it might hold, as Republican governors spent months sowing doubts about vaccines and complaining about masking and other supposedly freedom-harming public health basics. The right-wing press took a premature victory lap, with the National Review’s Rich Lowry asking, “Where Does Ron DeSantis Go To Get His Apology?”
But the Delta variant made it clear that DeSantis should be giving an apology, not asking for one, as red states have predictably been hit hardest. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from July showed that “Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say they have not been vaccinated and definitely or probably won’t be, 43% to 10%.”
And, dontcha know, COVID cases in Texas are up 125 percent over the last two weeks. In Florida, they’re up 162 percent. On Monday, as Gov. Greg Abbott asked hospitals in his state to cancel elective surgeries, Sen. Ted Cruz went on Sean Hannity and pronounced “No mask mandates. No vaccine mandates. No vaccine passports. No COVID mandates!” Indeed, Texas and Florida have similar laws prohibiting localities from making their own public health rules, although both Dallis and Austin are suing to allow masking.
It took at a lot of stupid to get Florida and Texas to this dark place, which is why the MAGA propagandists are trying to suggest, without much evidence, that this is about an unvaccinated wave at the border—when it appears to be about unvaccinated Americans, in a country with enough vaccine doses to go around, harming their own health and spreading the virus and helping it continue to mutate in the process.
In Florida, DeSantis has taken what can only be called a pro-COVID stance, suing cruise lines to try and stop them from using vaccine passports. That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face given the industry’s importance to the state, but the trolling was always the point. That’s why a defiant, some might say sadistic, DeSantis announced that “the Florida Board of Education could withhold the salaries of superintendents and school board members who defy the governor’s executive order prohibiting mask mandates” in a state that reported 134,506 new cases last week.
No wonder Dr. Jonathan Reiner told CNN this weekend, “The viral load in Florida is so high right now… that I think that if Florida were another country, we would have to consider banning travel from Florida to the United States.” Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis tweeted that, “Per NYT, ~1 out of every 945 people in Duval County, Florida (Jacksonville) is in a hospital bed tonight w/COVID. #1 highest in the USA.”
With COVID numbers way up, DeSantis’ numbers are down as he looks toward re-election and then, he hopes, a 2024 presidential run. It’s a game of chicken: Can he troll the libs without killing so many of his constituents that they turn on him?
Republicans often fume about how Democrats supposedly don’t treat them with respect. But how should we treat voters who refuse to connect their anti-public health rhetoric with all the deaths from a preventable disease?
The reality is that the GOP decided to target anti-vaxxers because they’re easy marks who don’t trust the lamestream press but rely on Facebook memes and Joe Rogan—the guy who used to tell people to eat bugs on Fear Factor.
What DeSantis and the other governors are doing is deadly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a bad political bet given the sick state of the base, in pretty much every sense.
Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. (photo: Getty)
resident Donald Trump’s last acting attorney general has told U.S. senators his boss was “persistent” in trying to pressure the Justice Department to discredit the results of the 2020 election.
In closed-door testimony Saturday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeffrey Rosen said he had to “persuade the president not to pursue a different path” at a high-stakes January meeting in which Trump considered ousting Rosen as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement officer.
According to a person familiar with the testimony, Rosen’s opening statement also characterized as “inexplicable” the actions of his Justice Department colleague, Jeffrey Clark, who was willing to push Trump’s false claims of election fraud and whom Trump considered installing as acting attorney general to replace Rosen.
The testimony — portions of which were previously reported by the New York Times — is part of a trove of information that congressional investigators are assembling about Trump’s frantic efforts to reverse his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden and use the Justice Department to stay in office.
Trump’s actions are also being investigated by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. The Justice Department’s inspector general is separately examining whether any current or former agency officials acted improperly to invalidate election results — an effort that could result in recommended disciplinary actions or, if the office finds potential crimes were committed, referrals to the department for prosecution.
The congressional probes got a boost last month, when the White House and the Justice Department cleared the way for Rosen and other former officials to discuss their election-related conversations with the president, saying the Biden administration would not seek to silence them by invoking executive privilege.
Two weeks ago, Congress obtained and released handwritten notes from Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, who participated in phone calls with Trump and Rosen in which the president urged them to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Donoghue’s notes describe Trump telling him and Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and Republican lawmakers. They also describe Rosen and Donoghue saying claims of election fraud did not appear to have merit.
On Saturday, Rosen appeared before the Senate committee to deliver his account directly. Donoghue testified as well. During a seven-hour interview, Rosen emphasized how he and other senior leaders resisted Trump’s entreaties.
“The president was persistent with his inquiries, and I would have strongly preferred that he had chosen a different focus in the last month of his presidency,” he said in his opening statement, according to a person familiar with the testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door session. “But as to the actual issues put to the Justice Department, DOJ consistently acted with integrity, and the rule of law held fast.”
Rosen said he thought Trump’s claims about voting irregularities were “misguided, and I disagreed with things that President Trump suggested the Justice Department do with regard to the election. So we did not do them.”
He stressed that when Trump was told he was “misinformed or wrong, or that we would not take various actions to discredit the election’s validity, he acquiesced to the department’s position.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who attended Rosen’s interview, said the former Trump appointee was “very forthcoming” and provided new details to the committee. He declined to discuss the specifics of Rosen’s testimony, citing committee rules that prohibit such disclosures. But he said that just days before Jan. 6, when Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol as the election was being certified, “another plot was being worked to try to overturn the election using the name and reputation of the Department of Justice.”
The person familiar with the testimony said Rosen described his interactions with Clark, who had led the department’s environmental and natural resources division and its civil division.
Clark had at some point connected with Trump through a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. Rosen learned after the fact that Clark, his subordinate, had met with Trump at the White House to discuss pursuing claims of voter fraud. Rosen said he cautioned Clark that such communication was inappropriate and told him not to do so again, according to the person familiar with Rosen’s testimony.
Clark’s lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment. Clark has previously denied that he devised a plan to oust Rosen or that he formed “recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the Internet.”
Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Trump, said in a statement Wednesday night: “We don’t need selective, partisan leaks from closed door testimony to know that President Donald J. Trump rightfully voiced his belief that America deserved a complete investigation into the 2020 election. He has been doing exactly that publicly since Election Day.”
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the committee’s ranking Republican, defended Trump’s right to privately discuss strategy with his advisers, noting that Trump did not end up firing Rosen or Donoghue.
“Eventually the facts will come out, and Trump will have to address them — good or bad depending on the facts at hand,” Grassley said in a Senate floor statement this week. “However, the essential question that should be asked is: What was the final decision?”
Among the material being examined by the Senate committee is a draft letter Clark circulated, addressed to Georgia officials, that he wanted Rosen and Donoghue to sign. The letter, dated Dec. 28, falsely claimed that the Justice Department was “investigating various irregularities” in the presidential election and had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.”
The letter and emailed responses, published by ABC News, recommended that state lawmakers hold a special session to “take additional testimony, receive new evidence, and deliberate on the matter.”
Rosen and Donoghue did not sign on to Clark’s letter, and Donoghue said in an email to Clark that sending it was “not even within the realm of possibility.”
After hearing from Rosen on Saturday, Whitehouse praised both him and Donoghue for not succumbing to the pressure from the Trump White House and for refusing to “go off on an unprecedented political errand.”
“A completely unjustified letter cooked up outside the department’s chain of command could have gone out from the U.S. Department of Justice to battleground states giving them license to overturn the election results in their states,” the senator said.
In addition to Rosen and Donoghue, committee investigators on Wednesday interviewed the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of a nonpublic interview.
Pak, who also was appointed by Trump, resigned his job abruptly on Jan. 4, at the suggestion of Donoghue, after Trump publicly complained that Pak was not investigating alleged voter fraud in Georgia, a state that was crucial to Biden’s victory. Multiple reviews in that state showed Trump’s claims of irregularities were unfounded.
Pak’s lawyer did not return a message seeking comment on his testimony.
Some current and former law enforcement officials credit Donoghue and Rosen with resisting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. But others fault Justice Department leaders for what they characterize as caving to White House pressure to bring about the resignation of Pak as a way to appease Trump.
Those critics say Rosen and Donoghue’s actions were part of a broader pattern of department decisions during the Trump administration that were designed to publicly placate the president while not actually pursuing the substance of investigations or issuing the public statements that Trump wanted them to make.
Protesters call for a reduction in inequality. (photo: Getty)
Analysis finds 99% levy on pandemic wealth rise could also pay all unemployed $20,000 – and still leave super-rich $55bn richer
very adult in the world could get a Covid-19 vaccine if the wealth billionaires collected during the pandemic was taxed 99% once, according to an analysis published on Thursday by several groups that advocate for economic equity.
This one-time tax on the world’s 2,690 billionaires could also cover $20,000 in cash paid to all unemployed workers, according to the analysis by Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Patriotic Millionaires.
That tax would still leave the billionaires with $55bn more than they had before the pandemic, the analysis said.
Morris Pearl, the former managing director of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said in a statement countries could no longer bear “the surge in global billionaire wealth as millions of people have lost their lives and livelihoods”.
Pearl, now the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people who support higher taxes on the wealthy, said governments have historically used wealth taxes after crises to help communities rebuild.
During the first world war, the US increased its tax rate for people with the highest incomes to 67%. In the second world war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to cap individual income at $25,000. In December last year, Argentina put in place a one-off tax on people with more than 200m Argentinian pesos ($2.5m, £1.8m) that had raised 223bn pesos ($2.4bn) as of May.
“Our economies are choking on this hoarded resource that could be serving a much greater purpose,” Pearl said. “Billionaires need to cough up that cash ball – and governments need to make them do it by taxing their wealth.”
The analysis used data from the financial magazine Forbes, which showed that billionaires increased their wealth by $5.5tn from 18 March 2020 to 31 July 2021. The increase over 17 months was greater than the $5.4tn billionaires gained in the 15 years from 2006 to 2020, the analysis said.
Each vaccine dose is estimated to cost $7 in the analysis, which determined two doses for 5 billion adults would cost $70bn.
At least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine has been administered to 30.7% of the world’s population, but only 1.2% of people in low-income countries have received a first dose.
To determine how much money from the one-time tax could go to unemployed workers, the group looked at a February report by the International Labour Organization, which found that 220 million people were unemployed globally.
In an unprecedented move last month, four multilateral institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), warned the global economic recovery will be held back unless there is more equity in vaccine distribution.
The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zuckman warned in the preface of the 2020 edition of their book about how rich Americans dodge taxes, Triumph of Injustice, that while crises are usually bad for the wealthy, the Covid-19 pandemic “may turn out to be different”.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-AZ, speaks at a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C., Aug. 4, 2021. (photo: Michael Brochstein/AP)
ublic relations experts working for a mysterious client have been preparing ghostwritten opinion columns set to run in Arizona newspapers.
The columns sharply warn Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose civil litigation reform legislation designed to prevent Americans from being forced into binding arbitration. If enacted, the legislation would ensure consumers’ and employees’ rights to pursue civil litigation against corporations, rather than going through a private arbitrator.
The catch? The consultants couldn’t find local Arizona residents to author the columns. Instead, they are offering as much as $2,000 to help identify “normal, everyday” people willing to sign their names to prewritten arguments.
Emails shared with The Intercept show that Drew Johnson, a former journalist, reached out to a group of consumer attorneys last week for assistance with the ghostwritten push to pressure Kelly and Sinema. The American Prospect first reported on the ghostwriting effort earlier on Tuesday.
“I’m a columnist and a scholar at several public policy think tanks in Washington,” wrote Johnson. “I’m currently working on an effort with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of think tanks, arbitration professionals and businesses to fight back against the FAIR Act.”
“I’ve written several Arizona-focused newspaper op-eds explaining why a ban on arbitration would harm employees, consumers and businesses. My hope is to find a normal, everyday person who has benefitted from arbitration to sign on to the op-ed pasted below as the author,” Johnson explained. “If one of your clients is willing to sign on to the piece, I can offer you $2,000 for your time.”
The attached draft opinion column imagines a hypothetical situation in which “it’s six o’clock on a Friday night and you come home to find your refrigerator and freezer are broken.” The cold beers are warm, and groceries must be thrown out. The best way to resolve the dispute with the refrigerator manufacturer, the column argues, is through binding arbitration, a process placed in danger by the FAIR Act.
The FAIR Act, also known as the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, sponsored by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., eliminates forced arbitration agreements in employment, consumer, and civil rights cases. The bill passed the House of Representatives in 2019 before stalling in the Senate; the legislation has been revived this year. If signed into law, the bill would allow voluntary arbitration only if the customer or employee agrees to it instead of civil litigation.
The use of binding arbitration in consumer and employment cases has expanded radically in recent years. The once obscure practice, typically relegated to disputes between businesses, has become commonplace in employment contracts, and most major corporations now include binding arbitration clauses when selling consumer products.
Opponents of the practice argue that the private arbitrators tend to favor corporations, which usually stipulate in arbitration clauses that they have the sole power to select which arbitration firms are used. Private arbitrators are not required to follow legal precedent; appeals are rarely allowed; and most arbitrations are conducted in secret, meaning that cases involving defective products or employment abuse are kept hidden from public view.
The proceedings also tend to restrict discovery, the process by which parties obtain information, and do not allow punitive damages, a basic element of civil litigation to deter businesses from fraudulent or abusive practices.
The results have been sprawling. Uber drivers claiming they have been denied payment and misclassified as independent contractors have been forced into binding arbitration. Customers who have found bedbugs in furniture ordered online have had cases thrown out of court and been forced into binding arbitration.
Yet proponents argue that arbitration is a cheaper and faster process than civil litigation. The cases are quickly brought to arbitration firms. Disputes are resolved rapidly, without the need for an employee or customer to seek the costly services of an attorney. The proponents claim that the civil litigation process is a financial boon primarily for class-action attorneys, not customers or employees.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate trade association in America, which spends more on lobbying Congress than any other entity and represents firms ranging from Goldman Sachs to AT&T to Walmart, has made the defeat of the FAIR Act a major focus. The Chamber has vowed to reward opponents and punish supporters of this legislation by making it a “key vote” it uses to score members of Congress.
In addition to lobbying directly and providing campaign contributions, special interests often seek to shape legislative outcomes by ghostwriting public comments or newspaper letters seemingly from constituents or influential figures.
United Airlines lobbyists ghostwrote a letter seeking to build support for curtailing competition from foreign airlines. Comcast’s consultants ghostwrote community letters in support of its bid to acquire Time Warner Cable. Lobbyists for the health care industry more recently were caught ghostwriting opinion columns denouncing the Medicare for All health insurance system.
But the identity of the business coalition financing the push to build popular opposition to the FAIR Act is still shrouded in secrecy.
In his email to the attorneys, Drew Johnson identified himself as a “senior scholar” for the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative-leaning think tank.
But David Ridenour, the president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, denied any affiliation with this specific campaign against the FAIR Act in an email to The Intercept. “Your email inquiry was forwarded to me and as the CEO and the only employee empowered by our board to authorize expenditures, I can tell you with complete certainty that the National Center for Public Policy Research is not offering attorneys $2,000 to help fight the FAIR Act. This is not our effort. While Drew Johnson is a senior scholar with the National Center, he does not work for us exclusively,” wrote Ridenour.
Johnson told The Intercept that he was in fact contacting attorneys on behalf of his spouse, who owns a small public relations firm.
“I helped her find voices for a FAIR Act project,” he wrote in an email. “I will not disclose her clients, but I can say unequivocally that the Chamber is NOT a client and neither of us have had any discussions with anyone at the Chamber about the FAIR Act. Also, no think tank I work with has anything to do with the project. This is my wife’s project and I was just helping her out.”
The email was followed by an email from Sarah Johnson, who said her firm, Spotlight Liberty, was tapped to build opposition to the FAIR Act.
“I will be happy to share client information as soon as the trial lawyers funding the lobbying and media effort in support of the FAIR Act disclose all of the lobbying firms, PR companies and media outlets they are working with,” wrote Sarah Johnson, who accused The Intercept of obtaining her husband’s “poorly worded email” from the “trial lawyers lobby.” (The Intercept received the email from a source who is not a lobbyist or paid by any advocacy group.)
It was surprising that the Johnsons had reached out to a group email list used by consumer attorneys for help seeking to oppose the FAIR Act, the source said. Consumer attorneys are typically inclined to oppose binding arbitration agreements.
A large part of the federal government's response to Covid-19 was to provide relief in specific essentials like food and housing. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
The lesson from the past year: Poverty is a policy choice.
A big part of the US’s response to Covid-19 was strengthening the existing safety net, or providing relief specific to particular types of spending, like food or housing. Food stamp/SNAP benefits were raised. Evictions were barred nationwide for over a year.
But the core of the response was an unprecedentedly large and inclusive set of stimulus checks directly shoveling money to most Americans. In three rounds — March and December 2020 and March 2021 — most adult Americans got $3,200 each, and most American children got $2,500. Then, starting in July 2021, most American children started getting $250 every month, with young kids getting $300 a month.
These are broad-based policies with only quite wealthy Americans excluded from benefits. The first round of stimulus payments, for instance, were available to 93 percent of Americans, with only the richest 7 percent left out. But unlike stimulus checks passed during the 2001 and 2008 downturns, the 2020-2021 checks were universal at the bottom of the income scale. They had no work requirement or requirement that recipients paid federal taxes in the past.
That means that the stimulus checks should have had a profound effect on poverty this past year or so — and that’s exactly what researchers are finding.
In March, researchers at Columbia led by Zachary Parolin estimated that as a result of President Joe Biden’s stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, the US poverty rate would fall to 8.5 percent, the lowest figure on record and well below 2018’s figure of 12.8 percent. This past month, researchers at the Urban Institute, using a slightly different means of measuring poverty, found that 2021 poverty will be around 7.7 percent, almost a halving relative to 2018’s rate of 13.9 percent per their methodology. (Official US Census poverty statistics for 2020 have not yet been released.)
The Columbia authors find that if you compare 2021 to every year for which the census does have data, from 1967 to 2019, and use a consistent poverty line, 2021 is projected to have the lowest poverty rate on record.
Considering that the US endured a pandemic and economic shock in 2020, these numbers are remarkable.
That’s the big news, and it’s good. It’s important, though, to dig a little deeper into what these studies are projecting — and what it could mean for future policymaking. Much of the credit for lower poverty in their models goes to the stimulus checks. And while the Biden administration hopes to keep the $250/$300 per month checks to parents going, the periodic rounds of stimulus payments during the height of the pandemic were meant to be temporary emergency measures.
That means that, absent further government action, poverty could be set to increase again in 2022.
The good news is that Americans learned a key lesson during the pandemic: Poverty is a policy choice, and it can be easily reduced through increased government support.
The bad news is that the government, particularly swing senators hesitant about spending too much money, might see that choice, and make the wrong one.
How we measure poverty, briefly explained
The convergence of research finding that poverty took a major hit is a big deal. One thing that’s important to understand is that measuring poverty is actually trickier than it might seem. How exactly do you measure it? What counts as poor? And are the metrics researchers set really showing the thing they want to capture?
Take, for instance, the official poverty measure that the government uses. This was developed by the Social Security Administration’s Mollie Orshansky in 1963. Orshanksy defined the income cutoff for poverty as three times the “subsistence food budget” for a family of a given size. That subsistence food budget, in turn, was derived from an “Economy Food Plan” developed by the USDA in 1961, based on data from the 1955 Household Consumption Survey.
In other words, the way we measure poverty in 2021 is based on an analysis from 1963 using data from 1955.
The official measure has other problems. The way it defines income leaves out in-kind benefits like food stamps or housing assistance. More relevant to this round of studies of poverty in 2020, the official measure only counts pre-tax income, meaning refundable credits like the child tax credit and the 2020-2021 stimulus payments (which were technically structured as tax credits) don’t count for poverty purposes.
The upshot? The official poverty measure shouldn’t move at all in response to the stimulus checks, or the strengthened child tax credit, or increased food stamp benefits. Even though all those measures make life materially easier for people in poverty, the official measure ignores them. It’s just another way in which the official measure is outdated, and highlights how limited this picture of poverty in America is.
That’s why these new studies are so important. Combined, they really start to give us an accurate picture of poverty in the current stimulus era.
What the new poverty studies say
Because the methods used in each study are so different, it’s striking that they reached a very similar conclusion: Poverty in 2021 will be much lower than it was in 2018, and it will be lower largely because of anti-poverty programs.
The Columbia researchers estimated that the December 2020 relief bill (which reintroduced supplemental unemployment checks and sent out $600 checks) reduced poverty in 2021 from 13.6 percent to 12.3 percent; the Biden stimulus, including $1,400 checks, additional unemployment support, and the enhanced child tax credit, cut it further to 8.5 percent. Without these interventions, poverty would’ve been higher than in 2018, not lower.
Meanwhile, the Urban Institute team broke down the anti-poverty effects program by program. The stimulus checks alone lifted some 12.4 million people from poverty this year, their research finds. Food stamps, including Covid-related improvements, removed another 7.9 million people from poverty, while unemployment insurance (both the base program and Covid-19 bonuses) lifted another 6.7 million people out.
Another Columbia project, for which Parolin is also the lead researcher, uses a different dataset to attempt to estimate poverty every month during the pandemic. This is a slightly different project than estimating annual poverty; for instance, it implies that for people who got the $1,400 checks in March 2021, the checks reduced poverty that month, but did nothing for poverty in April. But this data still underscores how important Covid-specific policies like those have been for reducing poverty. Without relief measures, poverty rates would be much higher throughout much of the pandemic, as a trend line comparison shows.
At the University of Chicago, Bruce Meyer and other policy researchers have their own monthly poverty measure that works slightly differently. Like the Columbia measure, it uses data from the monthly Current Population Survey — a census study that asks some 60,000 households every month about their income and other life conditions — to estimate the current poverty rate. It uses the official poverty measure threshold for income, but it includes sources of income the official measure excludes, in particular tax credits like the stimulus checks.
Their measure showed poverty falling substantially with the first round of stimulus checks in 2020. In February 2020, the last pre-pandemic month, poverty was 10.7 percent per their measure; in May, it bottomed out at 9.1 percent. But they then saw poverty steadily increase for the rest of the year, even continuing after the Biden stimulus, with June’s rate estimated at 11 percent, higher than before the pandemic.
That’s a striking finding, especially when you consider that the Columbia researchers also saw poverty increase in April and May after falling when stimulus checks began to go out in March. But the data from Meyer and his colleagues doesn’t account for some sources of financial support, like food stamps, which might partially explain why it finds higher poverty than other sources.
What the fall in poverty tells us
Poverty measurement is incredibly tricky, as the nuances above hopefully make clear. But the basic math of measuring poverty is rather simple. First, you pick a dollar amount. Then you find out how many people’s incomes fall below that dollar amount. Choosing what amount to use, and how to define income, is hard, but the basic concept requires nothing more than arithmetic.
This also implies that reducing poverty is pretty simple: Just put more money in people’s hands. That won’t necessarily be enough if, like the official poverty measure, your metric entirely ignores money the government gives out through tax credits. But by any normal poverty measure, handing out cash should reduce poverty.
This past year was a huge vindication of that insight. Years of research had suggested that cash programs don’t necessarily have the big downside their critics always highlight: discouraging work. If handing out cash led people to work dramatically fewer hours or to quit their jobs, then cash payments wouldn’t cut poverty by as much as they initially seem to.
Luckily, cash doesn’t seem to discourage work to that degree. In 2019, a group of economists and sociologists specializing in child poverty put together a major report for the National Academy of Sciences, and their estimate based on the research literature was that a cash benefit of $3,000 per year for all but the richest children would reduce work effort by about 1.15 hours a week on average — a fairly trivial amount that barely changes the antipoverty impact of such a program.
The effects of stimulus checks to adults, like those pursued in the past year, are surely different, but the evidence generally suggests that work disincentive effects of cash are small. University of Pennsylvania economist Ioana Marinescu, in a wide-ranging review of the effects of cash programs, concluded, “Our fear that people will quit their jobs en masse if provided with cash for free is false and misguided.”
All of which suggests that using cash to reduce poverty might really just be an arithmetic problem: give people enough money to escape poverty and they’ll escape poverty.
The US has been sending out a lot of cash during the pandemic. But that’s almost certainly coming to an end. The enhanced child tax credit is a policy many Democrats want to make permanent, or at least (as the Biden administration has proposed) extend for several more years. But the $1,200 and $600 and $1,400 stimulus checks were emergency measures, as were the $300/$600 weekly unemployment supplements.
All that implies that in 2022, when those measures are gone, poverty is likely to shoot back up again, even in a strong economy with robust job growth.
That doesn’t have to be the case. A permanent poverty reduction agenda could make sure we don’t only fight poverty in extreme conditions like pandemics.
The US could, for instance, boost unemployment benefits on a permanent basis, and implement triggers to increase benefits during downturns. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden is working on a plan for this currently, and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) has a detailed outline of proposals along these lines as well.
We could also adopt a guaranteed income for adults to approximate the effect of the stimulus checks, as a permanent policy. Just as one example, a team at Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, led by Naomi Zewde, have developed a proposal for a guaranteed income set at the national poverty line (currently $12,500) for adults, with $4,500 per year per child in extra benefits for families with kids.
Another, more modest, option would be to turn the standard deduction into a refundable tax credit. A single person could get monthly checks totaling, say, $2,761 per year — the same benefit someone in the 22 percent tax bracket gets from the standard deduction right now. That would make doing taxes simpler while reducing poverty.
But the broader point is not that we need any specific guaranteed income plan. The point is that poverty is a policy choice. The federal government can literally make the poverty rate whatever it likes. It could continue reducing poverty year after year, even after Covid-19 is over. It just needs to make that choice.
American soldiers in western Afghanistan in 2006. There are now about 14,000 in the country. (photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
he suicide bomber arrived at Bagram air base in a Toyota Corolla late in the morning on Feb. 27, 2007. He maneuvered past the Afghan police at the first checkpoint and continued a quarter-mile down the road toward the main gate. There, the bomber approached a second checkpoint, this one staffed by U.S. soldiers. Amid mud puddles and a jumble of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, he triggered his vest of explosives.
The blast killed 20 Afghan laborers who came to the base that day looking for work. It also claimed the lives of two Americans and a South Korean assigned to the international military coalition: Army Pfc. Daniel Zizumbo, a 27-year-old from Chicago; Geraldine Marquez, an American contractor for Lockheed Martin who had just celebrated her 31st birthday; and Staff Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, the first South Korean soldier to die in a foreign conflict since the Vietnam War.
Unharmed by the explosion was a VIP guest at Bagram who had been trying to keep a low profile - Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney had slipped into the war zone the day before on an unannounced trip to the region. Arriving on Air Force Two from Islamabad, Pakistan, he intended to spend only a few hours in Afghanistan to see President Hamid Karzai. But bad weather prevented him from reaching Kabul, so he spent the night at Bagram, an installation with personnel numbering 9,000 about 30 miles from the capital.
Within hours of the bombing, the Taliban called journalists to claim responsibility and to say Cheney was the target. U.S. military officials scoffed and accused the insurgents of spreading lies. The vice president, they said, was a mile away at the other end of the base and never in danger. They insisted the Taliban could not have planned an attack against Cheney on such short notice, especially given that his travel plans had changed at the last minute.
"The Taliban's claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd," Army Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters.
But the U.S. military officials were the ones hiding the truth.
In an Army oral-history interview, then-Capt. Shawn Dalrymple, a company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division who was responsible for security at Bagram, confirmed that word had leaked out about Cheney's presence. The suicide bomber, he added, saw a convoy of vehicles coming out of the front gate and blew himself up because he mistakenly thought Cheney was a passenger.
The bomber wasn't far off the mark. The vice president was supposed to depart for Kabul in a different convoy about 30 minutes later, according to Dalrymple, who had worked with the Secret Service to plan Cheney's movements.
"The insurgents knew this. It was all over the news no matter how much it was tried to keep secret," Dalrymple said. "They caught a convoy going out the gate with an up-armored sport-utility vehicle and thought it was him. . . . That opened up a lot of eyes into the fact that Bagram was not a safe place. There was a direct link with the insurgencies."
The 2007 episode marked an escalation in the war on two fronts. By targeting the vice president at the heavily fortified base at Bagram, the Taliban demonstrated an ability to inflict high-profile, mass-casualty attacks far from the insurgents' strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
And by lying about how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney, the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures after the 2001 invasion gradually hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.
This account is adapted from "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War," a Washington Post book that will be published Aug. 31 by Simon & Schuster. A narrative history of what went wrong in Afghanistan, the book is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played direct roles in the war, as well as thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades: They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift, culminating in President Biden's decision this year to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban more powerful than at any point since the 2001 invasion.
For the Bush administration and its NATO and Afghan allies, the months preceding Cheney's 2007 visit to Afghanistan had been an awful stretch. The number of suicide attacks had increased almost fivefold in 2006, and the number of roadside bombs doubled compared with the year before. The Taliban's cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan were fueling the problem.
Before his arrival at Bagram, Cheney met in Islamabad with Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, to urge him to crack down. The Pakistani strongman offered no help, saying his government had already "done the maximum."
Their public statements notwithstanding, U.S. military officials had been so worried the Taliban might target Cheney during the short dash between Bagram and Kabul that they originally set up a ruse.
The plan was to depart Bagram from a rarely used gate. Members of Cheney's traveling party would ride as decoys in the SUVs normally reserved for senior officials. The vice president would ride with Dalrymple, the young Army captain, in a lumbering military vehicle equipped with a machine gun. "You'd never expect him to ride in the gun truck," Dalrymple recalled.
That plan was scrapped after the suicide attack. Military officials decided it was too dangerous for Cheney to travel by road. He waited for the weather to clear and instead flew to Kabul to meet with Karzai. Cheney finally left Afghanistan that afternoon on a C-17 military aircraft without further incident.
At the same time that the U.S. military was struggling with the Taliban's resurgence, it was faring even worse with its much larger war in Iraq, where 150,000 U.S. troops were bogged down - about six times as many as the number deployed in Afghanistan. Given the calamity in Iraq, the Bush administration badly wanted to avoid the perception it was losing in Afghanistan as well.
Consequently, as the new year got underway, American commanders in Afghanistan expressed new levels of optimism in public that were so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.
"We are prevailing," Army Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin, the commander in charge of training the Afghan security forces, told reporters on Jan. 9, 2007. He added that the Afghan army and police "continue to show great progress each day."
Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, gave an even sunnier assessment a few weeks later. "We're winning," he said during a Jan. 27 news conference. Despite the surge in bombings the year before, he declared that U.S. and Afghan forces had made "great progress" and "defeated the Taliban and the terrorists that oppose this nation at every turn."
As for the insurgents, Freakley said the rebels "achieved none of their objectives" and were "quickly running out of time." He dismissed the increase in suicide attacks as a sign of the Taliban's "desperation."
Three days later, Karl Eikenberry, a three-star Army general, visited Berlin to shore up European public support for NATO forces. He said the allies were "postured well for success" in 2007 and suggested the Taliban was panicking.
"Our assessment is that they actually look at time working against them," Eikenberry added.
But the generals' chorus of happy talk defied a year-long stream of intelligence assessments that the insurgency had gained strength.
In February 2006, Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told officials in Washington in a classified diplomatic cable that a confident Taliban leader had warned, "You have all the clocks but we have all the time."
In private, the flood of suicide attacks and roadside bombs - insurgent tactics imported from Iraq - stoked fear among U.S. officials in Afghanistan of a potential "Tet Offensive in Kandahar," an unnamed Bush administration official told government interviewers, referring to the bloody 1968 military campaign by North Vietnamese forces that undermined public support for the Vietnam War.
"The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail," the official said. "Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005."
Neumann arrived in Kabul as the top U.S. diplomat in July 2005. The son of a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he had spent a pleasant summer there as a young newlywed in 1967, traveling cross-country, camping and riding horses and yaks during a time of peace.
When he returned 38 years later, Afghanistan had been continuously at war for a quarter century. Right away, he told his superiors in Washington it was obvious the violence was about to escalate further.
"By the fall of 2005, I had reported, in combination with General Eikenberry, that we were going to face a vastly increased insurgency in the next year, in 2006, and that it was going to get much bloodier, much worse," Neumann said in a diplomatic oral-history interview.
At first, many officials in Washington found it hard to believe the Taliban could present a strategic danger. Even some military leaders in the field underestimated the Taliban and thought that, while it might control pockets of rural territory, it posed no threat to the government in Kabul. "We thought the Taliban's capability was greatly reduced," then-Brig. Gen. Bernard Champoux, deputy commander of a U.S. military task force from 2004 to 2005, said in an Army oral-history interview.
Paul Toolan, a Special Forces captain who served in Helmand province in 2005, said senior U.S. officials mistakenly viewed the war as a peacekeeping and reconstruction mission. He tried to explain to anyone who would listen that the fighting had intensified and the Taliban had bolstered its firepower.
"If we don't do this right, we're going to allow these guys to keep us languishing here for a lot of years," Toolan cautioned in an Army oral-history interview.
But the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war. In a December 2005 interview with CNN, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said things were going so well that the Pentagon would soon bring home roughly 10 percent of its forces in Afghanistan.
"It's a direct result of the progress that's being made in the country," Rumsfeld declared.
Two months later, however, Rumsfeld's office and other officials in Washington received another classified warning from their ambassador in Kabul.
In a gloomy Feb. 21, 2006, cable, Neumann predicted that "violence will rise through the next several months," with more suicide bombings in Kabul and other major cities.
He blamed the Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan and warned that, if left unaddressed, they could "lead to the reemergence of the same strategic threat to the United States that prompted our . . . intervention over 4 years ago" - in other words, another 9/11.
In the dispatch, Neumann expressed fear that popular support would wane if expectations weren't managed. "I thought it was important to try to prepare the American public for that so that they wouldn't be surprised and see everything as a reverse," he said in his oral-history interview.
But the public heard no such straight talk. In a visit to Afghanistan shortly after the ambassador sent his cable, Bush did not mention the rising violence or the resurgent Taliban. Instead, he touted improvements such as the establishment of democracy, a free press and schools for girls.
"We're impressed by the progress your country is making," Bush told Karzai at a March 1 news conference.
Two weeks later, in a briefing with reporters from Bagram, Freakley denied that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were getting stronger. The violence was spiking, the general said, because the weather was getting warmer and his forces were going on the offensive.
"We're taking the fight to the enemy," the 10th Mountain Division commander said. "If you see an increase in violence here in the coming weeks and months, it's probably driven by offensive operations that the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police and coalition forces are taking."
He added, "I'll tell you that progress in Afghanistan is steady and you can really see it."
In a Pentagon press briefing in May, Durbin, the commander in charge of training, presented a rosy report on the state of the Afghan security forces. He said they had been "effective at disrupting and destroying" their enemies and that the Afghan army had made "remarkable" progress in recruiting.
Durbin closed by inviting journalists to visit Afghanistan and judge for themselves how the Afghan security forces were performing. "I think if you do, you'll be as impressed as I am with their progress," he said.
Days later, someone did come see for himself. Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey was a hero of the Persian Gulf War. It had been a decade since he had been on active duty, but the U.S. military asked him to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan and conduct an independent assessment. The mission was not publicized.
McCaffrey interviewed about 50 high-ranking officials over the course of a week. In his nine-page report, he lauded U.S. commanders and highlighted several successes, but he didn't sugarcoat his verdict: The Taliban was nowhere near defeated, and the war was "deteriorating."
He judged the Taliban as well-trained, "very aggressive and smart in their tactics," as well as armed with "excellent weapons." Far from panicking or feeling the pressure of time, the insurgents would "soon adopt a strategy of 'waiting us out,' " he added.
In contrast, McCaffrey said that the Afghan army was "miserably under-resourced" and that its soldiers had little ammunition and shoddier weapons than the Taliban. He blasted the Afghan police as worthless: "They are in a disastrous condition: badly equipped, corrupt, incompetent, poorly led and trained, riddled by drug use."
Even under a best-case scenario, McCaffrey predicted, it would be 14 more years - until 2020 - before the Afghan security forces could operate without U.S. help.
The report was passed up the chain of command to Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming twenty-four months," McCaffrey warned. "The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming years - leaving NATO holding the bag - and the whole thing will again collapse into mayhem."
If McCaffrey's conclusions weren't sobering enough, Rumsfeld soon received another harsh dose of reality.
On Aug. 17, 2006, Marin Strmecki, a trusted civilian adviser to the defense secretary, delivered a 40-page classified report titled "Afghanistan at a Crossroads." Strmecki had made a separate fact-finding trip to the war zone after McCaffrey and arrived at many of the same conclusions.
But he cast stronger doubt on the reliability and viability of Washington's allies in Kabul. The Afghan government, he said, was crooked and feckless and had left a power vacuum in many parts of the country for the Taliban to exploit.
"It is not that the enemy is so strong but that the Afghan government is so weak," Strmecki reported.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul grappled with a fresh wave of internal pessimism. Neumann, the ambassador, sent another dour classified cable to Washington on Aug. 29. "We are not winning in Afghanistan," it declared.
Two weeks after the ambassador's warning, Eikenberry sat down for an interview with ABC News on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and offered the flip version for public consumption.
"We are winning," the general insisted, adding, "but I also say we have not yet won." Asked whether the United States could lose, Eikenberry responded, "Losing is not an option in Afghanistan."
If the generals had listened to their soldiers in the field, however, they might have shied away from such hubris.
Staff Sgt. John Bickford, a 26-year-old soldier from Lake Placid, N.Y., spent much of 2006 in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan. He was stationed with other 10th Mountain Division soldiers at Firebase Tillman, named after Pat Tillman, the National Football League player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and was later killed by friendly fire.
Bickford said the fighting was "about 10 times worse" than his first deployment to eastern Afghanistan three years earlier. His unit clashed with insurgents four or five times a week. The enemy massed as many as 200 fighters to try to overrun U.S. observation posts.
"We said that we defeated the Taliban, but they were always in Pakistan and regrouping and planning and now they're back stronger than they have ever been," he said in an Army oral-history interview. "Anytime that they did an assault or an ambush it was well-organized, and they knew what they were doing."
In August 2006, Bickford was leading a patrol in an armored Humvee when insurgents ambushed his convoy with rocket-propelled grenades. Shrapnel tore up Bickford's right thigh, calf, ankle and foot. His team fended off the assault, but his days as an infantryman were over.
Bickford spent three months recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. During his convalescence, he reflected on the rising threat posed by insurgents.
“These are very smart people, and they’re the enemy but they deserve tons of respect and they should never, never, never be underestimated,” he said.
Keystone XL pipe. (photo: NRDC)
The company behind the dead Keystone XL pipeline project has proposed digging up its remains.
ust two months after officially terminating the project, TC Energy is proposing plans to dredge up a stretch of the Keystone XL pipeline that runs over the US-Canada border.
The Canadian fossil fuel company, formerly known as TransCanada, laid out the beginnings of its plans for decommissioning the pipeline in court documents filed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana last week.
Part of those plans revolve around a 1.2-mile stretch of pipe running through a section of public land on which the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) granted it permits for construction. Now in the process of shutting down the 1,200-mile pipeline after President Joe Biden rescinded its permits the day he took office in January, the company is proposing digging part of the pipeline back up to hand the land back over to the federal government.
Per a status report for the District Court—part of a lawsuit that the Indigenous Environmental Network and the North Coast Rivers Alliance filed against the company and the Trump Administration in 2019—the fate of this stretch of TC’s pipe could go one of two ways.
By the end of this month, the oil company will propose a plan for digging up the buried pipeline and reclaiming the land surrounding it. Should BLM reject what it maps out, however, the company will abandon the pipeline in place, instead removing surrounding pump stations, which boost pipeline pressure by receiving and repumping oil back into it along various points in its path. In that event, the company would inject the pipeline with cement to render it “permanently unusable” from either end.
Proposed in 2008 as an extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline, which runs from Alberta to Texas, Keystone XL would’ve carried an estimated additional 830,000 barrels of oil, primarily from Canada’s tar sands,,through the US to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would’ve joined the existing line. It was hotly contested by environmentalists and nearby landowners and Indigenous communities as a needless extension of polluting infrastructure, carrying a fuel type that requires a high amount of processing, and thus contributes more greenhouse gas emissions. Regardless, construction began in 2020.
Segments of the pipeline are permitted by different regulatory bodies—some by state agencies and some by federal offices, like the Army Corps of Engineers, which gave it water-crossing permits. What resulted from this process was a “patchwork of infrastructure strung over almost that entire route,” National Geographic reported in February. By that point, there were already 90 miles of pipe in the ground, and 48,000 tons sitting in yards along Keystone XL's route, according to the magazine.
Now that the pipeline is dead, removing it could disturb the environment that surrounds it yet again. Pipeline construction is well-understood to fragment ecosystems, harm habitats and create noise pollution and day-to-day disturbances for nearby communities; removal likely inflicts many of these same burdens.
In some known instances of removing long-standing pipelines, where plants have regrown up around the pipe, excavating the infrastructure requires tearing down these newly-grown trees. Removing lines can also contribute to land subsidence or collapse.
Federal pipeline safety regulations require that owners abandoning pipelines empty all combustible materials from within it, sealing the pipe with cement and ensuring that it cannot be serviced in the future. Pipelines are known to erode and disturb the quality of surrounding soil, corrode and leach metals into nearby aquifers, disrupt the flow of rivers and otherwise pose safety hazards for humans and creatures if exposed. Improperly-sealed pipelines also run the risk of leaking.
To date, the US is home to an estimated 3 million miles of natural gas pipeline, some of which could be abandoned in coming years as renewables surge and demand for fossil fuels declines. This would be in keeping with the trajectory of abandoned oil and gas wells and mines, both of which emit greenhouse gases, leach toxins into nearby soil and waterways, and occupy land that could otherwise be used or restored.
In addition to digging up a portion of the pipeline, TC also plans to sell fragments to a pipe broker and return land leased for work camps along its route back to landowners, the status report says. Decommissioning the pipeline is estimated to cost $84 million in total, with $5 million devoted to cleaning the pipe and $17.5 million devoted to its excavation and removal. The pipeline was estimated to cost $8 billion to construct in total, part of which the Alberta government chipped in for in 2020.
“We value the strong relationships we’ve built through the development of this project and the experience we’ve gained,” TC Energy president and CEO François Poirier said in a June 9 statement on the pipeline’s decommissioning. When contacted for comment, a TC Energy spokesperson referred Motherboard to the June statement, adding that, “as a leading North American energy infrastructure provider, [the company’s] purpose and commitment is to deliver the energy people need and use every day in a safe, sustainable and responsible manner.”
With a necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy on the horizon, the question of what to do with the skeletal remains of polluting infrastructure will no doubt come with its own debate.
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