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That is not to make any excuses whatsoever for Manchin, who betrayed his party and its leader Sunday when he announced (on Fox News, no less) that he “cannot vote to continue with” the legislation. As recently as last week, Manchin had pledged to keep working with Biden to modify the nearly $2 trillion bill, which provides much-needed aid to families and fights climate change, among other initiatives.
Manchin’s back must be sore from moving the goal posts so often. His latest complaint seems to be that the bill wouldn’t be fully paid for if all its social spending were extended for a full 10 years. That wouldn’t be a problem, however, if Manchin hadn’t objected to the modest tax increases on corporations and wealthy individuals that Biden previously proposed.
The White House issued an excoriating statement, noting that Manchin had hand-delivered his proposal for a reshaped Build Back Better bill to Biden last Tuesday and had “promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach … common ground.” Press secretary Jen Psaki called Manchin’s Fox News statement “a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.”
Other Democrats were less restrained. Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a centrist who represents a swing district, called Manchin’s diktat “unacceptable.” Progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), reminded everyone they had been warning all along that Manchin would pull the rug out from under the legislation.
But the star of The Joe Manchin Show is hardly the only obstacle. Each one of the 50 Republicans in the Senate is equally responsible for the fact that Build Back Better has not reached Biden’s desk.
If Democrats had a bigger majority, they couldn’t be held hostage by Manchin or by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — or by any other Democratic senator who might want to derail the bill. It is actually remarkable that Biden and the Democrats, working with zero margin for error, have been able to accomplish so much this year, including confirmation of 40 federal judges, the most for any first-year president since Ronald Reagan.
I doubt Manchin will switch parties and become a Republican, since he would instantly revert to being a bit player with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) running the show as majority leader. Manchin could conceivably become an independent and continue to caucus with the Democrats, but that wouldn’t materially change the situation.
In the short term, Biden and the Democrats have two options. They could bring one or more Republicans over to their side on Build Back Better, which seems unlikely, given that the GOP has decayed into a cult of personality at the altar of former president Donald Trump, in thrall to his whims and hallucinations. Or they could spend a few days venting their justified anger at Manchin and then get back to negotiating with him, on whatever his terms might be on any given day.
There are, after all, items in the Build Back Better package that Manchin desperately needs. For example, the bill extends at current rates the special excise tax that funds the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which pays benefits to coal miners disabled by the disease. Absent congressional action, the tax will be cut by more than half on Dec. 31. I wonder how Manchin will explain that to West Virginia voters.
Longer term, if Democrats don’t want to shrink their ambitions to suit Manchin, they need to win a bigger majority in the Senate — and keep their slim majority in the House. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this is not impossible. But it won’t be easy.
Progressive Democrats are going to have to continue being patient and pragmatic, as they have been all year. Moderate Democrats and Biden are going to have to put even more pressure on Manchin and Sinema, not just to support much-needed social spending but also to pass voting rights legislation that protects our democracy, even if it means finding a way around the Senate filibuster.
Democrats across the spectrum are going to have to stop talking so much about what they can’t or won’t do — and instead talk about what they have already done. And if necessary, galling as it might be, they may have to settle for a pared-down Build Back Better package that funds fewer programs over a longer span.
Democrats are doing much; Republicans are doing nothing. That’s the message to take into the midterms.
Donald Trump. (photo: unknown)
“Persistent political interference in the pandemic response contributed to one of the worst failures of leadership in American history,” the House report read
Most of the documents cited in the committee’s report have already been made public, including ones that show how the administration played down the importance of testing and even prevented public officials from holding briefings to educate the public on the highly contagious disease. New information released Friday, however, further illustrates how public health officials were put in difficult positions by the administration.
In May 2020, for instance, the administration shelved the Centers for Disease Control’s mask guidance for churchgoers, reportedly because the White House feared a backlash from Trump’s religious supporters. In response, the deputy director for infectious diseases at the CDC wrote in an email that he was “very troubled … that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do.”
Dr. Deborah Birx also lamented the influence of “fringe groups” who peddled the dangerous idea of herd immunity.
“These are people who believe that all the curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant — they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” the administration’s Covid-19 response coordinator wrote to Marc Short, then-chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, in Aug. 2020.
The report also delved into the management of pandemic relief programs, finding some of them were susceptible to fraud. The Farmers-to-Families Food Box Program, it notes, was “used as a partisan tool to secure political advantages” for Trump himself. Under this program, the administration handed out hefty contracts to unqualified distributors with red flags in their applications, partly because USDA personnel didn’t even bother to contact the references listed on their applications. In fact, the recipient of one early contract simply wrote: “I don’t have any.”
The report’s key points include how the Trump White House “instructed CDC career scientists to destroy evidence of political interference,” “pressured the Food and Drug Administration to authorize ineffective coronavirus treatments,” “neglected the pandemic response to focus on the 2020 election and the ‘Big Lie,'” and “used personal email accounts to conduct official business.”
All in all, the report concluded, the Trump administration’s series of actions during this critical time amounted to “one of the worst failures of leadership in American history.”
Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. (photo: Al Drago/NYT)
Over the weekend, the Democrat pulled his support from the sweeping social spending and climate package that has come to embody President Biden's domestic agenda, after months of public negotiations and revisions to the bill.
Ken Ward Jr., a ProPublica reporter and co-founder of Mountain State Spotlight, explained on Morning Edition that the politics at play weren't actually that complicated for Manchin. Listen to the full conversation.
He calls West Virginia a "deep red state," where voters are "on the alert for anything they can point to as him being in league with the Democrats." Plus there's the coal industry, which his own family has close ties to today (although Ward notes that his family also knows the negative side, as his uncle died in a mine disaster decades ago).
"One of the things that's kind of maddening is that the kind of investments that this would make in the clean energy transition are things that West Virginia desperately needs right now as the coal industry continues a really cyclical decline in our state," Ward says.
Others are taking note of this as well. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which represents West Virginia coal miners, has urged Manchin to revisit his opposition to the package.
The union published a statement on Monday, outlining several provisions that it argues would have meaningfully helped its members and their communities. Those include:
- Language that would extend the current fee paid by coal companies to fund benefits for Black Lung victims. The union says that fee will be cut in half, shifting the burden from companies to taxpayers.
- Language that would provide tax incentives to encourage manufacturers to build facilities in the coalfields that would employ thousands of miners who have lost their jobs. The union says while it's ready to supply the workforce, those jobs are now at risk.
- Language that would — for what the union says is the first time — penalize "outlaw employers" that prohibit workers from forming a union on the job. Without this kind of provision, the union says "there is no path forward for millions of workers to exercise their rights at work."
“For those and other reasons, we are disappointed that the bill will not pass," the statement says. "We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families, and their communities."
Notably, the statement opens by describing the "long and friendly" relationship the group has had with the senator (in fact, the union named him an honorary member last year). And it closes by reiterating support for the timely passage of voting rights legislation, urging Manchin and all senators to "do whatever it takes to accomplish that."
"Anti-democracy legislators and their allies are working every day to roll back the right to vote in America," it adds. "Failure by the Senate to stand up to that is unacceptable and a dereliction of their duty to the Constitution.”
Without Manchin or any Republicans on board, Build Back Better appears doomed in the evenly-divided Senate.
Still, Democrats plan to bring the bill to a vote early next year. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a letter to Senate Democrats on Monday saying that "the Senate will, in fact, consider the Build Back Better Act, very early in the new year so that every Member of this body has the opportunity to make their position known on the Senate floor, not just on television."
As NPR's Brian Naylor put it: "The reference to television was a not-so-veiled jab at Manchin, who announced he would vote no on the measure during an interview on Fox News Sunday."
Patricia Larcara, a longtime resident of Porter Ranch, attends a meeting held by state regulators on the Aliso Canyon gas storage field in 2017. (photo: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
SoCalGas hired Boots … Coots, a well-control company owned by the Houston oil services giant Halliburton, to get the blowout under control. The company tried and failed six times to kill the faulty well. The leak lasted nearly four months.
What went wrong? Many things — one of which was the Halliburton subsidiary's failure to use computer modeling to design most of its attempts to kill the well, according to an independent analysis ordered by state officials. Rather than stop the leak, "each kill attempt caused additional damage to the wellhead and well site," the analysis by Blade Energy Partners found.
But Boots … Coots recently began saying that it actually did run models — they just can't be examined by investigators because the only copies were on a single computer that got stolen from an employee's truck in a Best Buy parking lot.
Those claims, which have not previously been reported, could help SoCalGas avoid some of the financial liability it might otherwise face for the Aliso Canyon leak. Monopoly utilities are responsible for the work of their contractors, meaning if Boots … Coots did, in fact, conduct modeling, that's one less potential mistake for which gas company shareholders could face penalties.
But a state agency has questioned whether modeling really was conducted — and if so, if it really was stolen.
California's Public Advocates Office argued in a recent regulatory filing that it needs to better understand "how all evidence of the well kill modeling ... could be retained on only one laptop and then 'lost' on December 26, 2015, with no admission of this loss for years, and with no effort made to recover or re-create the information in the immediate aftermath of the theft."
SoCalGas should be ordered to explain "what [it] knew about the allegedly stolen laptop, and whether [it] made any attempts to recover the evidence of the transient modeling that [it] claims was performed," the consumer watchdog wrote.
The Public Advocates Office also questioned whether the Halliburton subsidiary "may have intentionally destroyed the well kill modeling evidence," and if so, "whether it was done with SoCalGas’ expectation, knowledge or even endorsement."
The consumer watchdog didn't offer evidence to back up that speculation. But it pointed out that Halliburton pleaded guilty to destroying evidence after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The company admitted it destroyed computer models that may have led to heightened scrutiny of its cement work on the offshore rig before the 2010 disaster.
"SoCalGas knew or should have known of Halliburton’s documented criminal history of destroying evidence," the Public Advocates Office wrote — especially because Debra Reed-Klages, who was chief executive of SoCalGas parent company Sempra Energy during the Aliso Canyon leak, was also a member of Halliburton's board of directors at the time.
Halliburton spokesperson Emily Mir largely declined to answer questions from The Times, saying in an email that although Boots … Coots "complies with lawful legal process, it does not comment on pending legal proceedings."
Mir also said Deepwater Horizon "has nothing to do with the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, and any suggestion relating one to the other is wholly inaccurate and misleading."
SoCalGas described the wrangling over the missing modeling as a procedural dispute typical of the California Public Utilities Commission, which is investigating the Aliso Canyon leak. The Public Advocates Office is an independent arm of that commission.
“It is not unusual for disagreements between parties to arise during proceedings, and the Aliso Canyon Order Instituting Investigation is no exception," gas company spokesperson Christine Detz said in an email. “SoCalGas continues to engage in good faith, including responding to timely data requests, and we look forward to the ultimate resolution of this matter."
The Public Utilities Commission still hasn't decided whether to fine or otherwise penalize SoCalGas for the Aliso Canyon blowout, six years after the fact. It was the worst methane leak in U.S. history. More than 100,000 tons of the heat-trapping gas escaped the underground storage field, along with cancer-causing benzene, oil residue and other potentially harmful chemicals.
Thousands of families in the northwest San Fernando Valley fled their homes. Many residents of L.A.'s Porter Ranch neighborhood say the full extent of the damage to their health is still far from clear, and they won't feel safe until Aliso Canyon is shut down.
SoCalGas argues the storage field is crucial for meeting local energy demand, including home heating in the winter. The company has fought California's efforts to phase out fossil fuels, which threaten its business as the nation's largest natural gas utility.
When the Public Utilities Commission voted last month to raise the limit on gas storage at Aliso Canyon, frustrated climate activists said it's long past time for Gov. Gavin Newsom to live up to his climate promises and start phasing out fossil fuels.
“Is Newsom giving the green light to do all this stuff? Does he even have a clue?” asked Alexandra Nagy, California director of the environmental group Food … Water Watch. "He makes these grand sweeping statements. And here we are again."
The stolen laptop
State officials in 2016 chose Blade Energy Partners, a Texas consulting firm, to investigate the Aliso Canyon leak.
Blade blamed the blowout on a faulty well casing that ruptured due to corrosion caused by contact with groundwater. The firm found that SoCalGas “did not conduct detailed follow-up inspections or analyses after previous leaks” and “lacked any form of risk assessment focused on well integrity management,” according to a Public Utilities Commission summary of its findings.
Blade also concluded that the first five kill attempts conducted by Boots … Coots — which involved pumping fluid into the ruptured well to try to stop gas from flowing out — "failed because the kill fluids used were not dense enough."
That failure could have been avoided if the Halliburton subsidiary had used models to design its kill attempts, Blade suggested.
Kill modeling involves taking the best available data — including how quickly gas is flowing out and the physical condition of the well — and plugging it into a computer program, then simulating what parameters are most likely to stop the leak. Well-control companies can alter how much kill fluid they pump into a well, the density of the fluid and how quickly they pump.
Modeling "is necessary to properly plan a kill operation where early success in killing the well is of high importance," Blade wrote.
But as far as Blade knew, Boots … Coots didn't use models at Aliso Canyon. Blade told state officials that it raised the subject of modeling "many times" with SoCalGas during the several years it worked on its analysis, and requested a meeting with Boots … Coots to discuss their kill attempts. But that meeting never occurred, and SoCalGas never said anything about modeling.
"There was no evidence provided to Blade that kill modeling or other analytical approaches were undertaken," the firm said.
But in February 2020, four years after the blowout, a Boots … Coots employee said he had, in fact, used models at Aliso Canyon.
At a deposition in Houston, a lawyer representing gas leak victims asked Boots … Coots engineer Daniel Walzel whether he had conducted modeling to design the company's kill attempts. Walzel said he had, using the computer program Drillbench.
But when the lawyer asked where to find that modeling, Walzel replied, "I don't have it anymore." When he returned to Houston after finishing his work at Aliso Canyon in December 2015, Walzel said, his laptop was stolen out of his pickup truck.
"My whole computer bag. Passports, everything," he said, according to a transcript of the deposition.
Later in the deposition, another attorney pressed Walzel for more details on the missing modeling. "Did you ever at any point save it to a Boots … Coots server or a system or somewhere where it could be accessed by others?" the attorney asked.
"No," Walzel responded.
"So the modeling that you did was solely available, to your understanding, from your laptop?" the attorney asked.
"Yes, sir," he said.
A Houston police report dated Dec. 26, 2015, confirms Walzel's account of a laptop stolen from a pickup truck.
R. Rex Parris, one of the attorneys who helped win a $1.8-billion settlement from SoCalGas for blowout victims, said it's "absolutely absurd" that the only copies of the modeling would have been on a single laptop. He compared that claim to other examples he said he's seen of the gas company and its collaborators trying to hide their culpability.
"They did an incredible job trying to cover up evidence, but there was just too much evidence to cover up," Parris said.
Walzel, who no longer works at the Halliburton subsidiary, had answered questions about the company's Aliso Canyon well-kill efforts once before, in a 2018 session under oath with Public Utilities Commission lawyers. He did not mention modeling.
“I felt confident every time we pumped that we were going to kill the well," Walzel's co-worker James Kopecky said at the time.
Hundreds of alleged violations
The Public Utilities Commission's Aliso Canyon investigation is sort of like a court case, with the agency's Safety and Enforcement Division as prosecutor and SoCalGas as defendant. Administrative law judges rule on motions and will eventually recommend to the five commissioners — who are appointed by the governor — whether to fine SoCalGas, and if so how much.
The safety division has charged SoCalGas with hundreds of regulatory violations. One of those alleged violations, No. 79, blames SoCalGas for Boots' … Coots' repeated failure to kill the well "due to lack of proper modelling," citing the Blade report.
SoCalGas filed testimony last year to rebut the alleged violation, saying it first learned the details of Boots … Coots' well-kill modeling from Walzel's deposition. Although SoCalGas executives — including Bret Lane, who was CEO at the time — knew during the blowout that well-kill models were being used, they were "not aware during this period that Mr. Walzel’s modeling analysis specifically consisted of 'transient' modeling," which is more complex than other types of modeling, the company wrote.
The gas company cited the testimony of a well-control expert, William Abel, who wrote that although transient modeling "may be useful in certain instances, it is not well-accepted industry practice for all well control efforts." Out of more than 500 well kills he's participated in, Abel said, "I have never relied on transient kill modeling" for an effort like the one at Aliso Canyon.
But Rodger Schwecke, the gas company's chief infrastructure officer, said at a utilities commission hearing in May that transient modeling "is why you bring in an expert like Boots … Coots, because they have that capability to run that transient model."
Schwecke later reiterated the company line, saying he first learned about the transient modeling from Walzel's deposition.
The Public Advocates Office has tried to get Boots … Coots to answer more questions under oath, to no avail. The Halliburton subsidiary sought protection in a Texas court, where a judge ruled California's utilities commission can't compel its testimony.
It's also been nearly four years since the commission's Safety and Enforcement Division asked SoCalGas to provide copies of its communications with Boots … Coots, and a year since the safety division requested that the gas company and its lawyers be sanctioned for refusing to turn over some of those communications, saying they're protected by attorney-client privilege.
SoCalGas says it has withheld only a handful of emails, calling the safety division's demands "procedurally improper" and "frivolous." The commission hasn't ruled on the request for sanctions or ordered the company to turn over more communications.
The gas company tried and failed this year to have many of the alleged violations dismissed, arguing that the safety division "ignores the fact that SoCalGas was operating the Aliso Canyon facility in compliance with applicable law and consistent with any contemporaneous industry standards." The safety division "relies almost exclusively" on Blade's findings even though none of the firm's recommendations "were required by statute, regulations or industry standards at the time," the gas company wrote.
SoCalGas says it's the prosecution that won't turn over evidence, arguing the safety division has repeatedly withheld documents important to the company's defense. When administrative law judges ordered the safety division last month to turn over drafts of a staff report prepared during its investigation, the division replied that it had searched for the drafts but couldn't find them.
SoCalGas has also objected to the safety division's reliance on Blade, and questioned Blade's finding that Boots … Coots could have killed the well with better modeling. The gas company pointed to testimony from the safety division's star witness seeming to agree with a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study that found the well couldn't have been killed with normal procedures.
"It is one thing for Blade to employ transient modeling to hypothesize that Boots … Coots could have stopped the leak sooner. It is quite another to deem the same modeling was required by SoCalGas and its expert contractor while the unprecedented event was taking place and based on what SoCalGas knew at the time," the gas company wrote.
Will SoCalGas face penalties?
Boots … Coots tried one last time to stop the leak on Dec. 22, 2015, after Walzel left the Aliso Canyon site. The Halliburton subsidiary produced documents showing definitively that an employee in Houston did run computer models this time.
But this sixth and final attempt had to be halted prematurely for safety reasons, in part because earlier failed kills had damaged the well and the surrounding area, according to Blade. It might have succeeded otherwise, the consulting firm wrote.
SoCalGas ended up drilling a relief well, a more expensive solution that involved intercepting the damaged well deep below ground and pumping fluid and cement into it. Officials confirmed the leak was plugged on Feb. 18, 2016 — 118 days after it began.
The commission's safety division says SoCalGas shareholders should be required to pay for most of the failed kill attempts. Otherwise, SoCalGas could charge those costs to customers through higher bills. The safety division also wants shareholders to shoulder the costs of the relief well because it wouldn't have been needed if Boots … Coots' first kill attempt had succeeded.
Although SoCalGas wouldn't say how much money it spent trying to plug the well, corporate parent Sempra recently estimated that the leak would ultimately cost the company $3.2 billion, including the recent $1.8-billion civil settlement. Sempra cautioned that this number "may increase significantly" and that the estimate doesn't include potential government penalties.
Any penalties "could cause significant reputational damage," Sempra warned this year.
Last year, the Public Utilities Commission fined Pacific Gas … Electric a record $1.9 billion for sparking some of the worst wildfires in state history, including the Camp fire, which killed 85 people.
The commission is also studying what it would take to shut down Aliso Canyon and replace it with clean energy. But critics say the nearly 5-year-old study has dragged on far too long, despite Newsom once saying he wanted to “fast track” Aliso's closure.
The governor has significant sway over the commission, if he wants to use it — especially now, with two of the five seats changing hands. Newsom announced last month he would appoint Alice Reynolds, his energy advisor, as the commission's president. He'll have another appointment soon, with Martha Guzman Aceves leaving the agency to join the Biden administration.
Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon said in an email that the governor "believes strongly that we need to move to clean energy while also maintaining energy reliability" and has directed the commission to "identify long-term alternatives to Aliso."
The Legislature could weigh in too. State Sen. Henry Stern, a Democrat whose district includes Porter Ranch, says he'll introduce a bill next year aimed at closing Aliso Canyon by 2023. Although the details are still being worked out, Stern's plan would include investments in several clean energy options, including electric heat pumps to replace gas furnaces in homes and businesses.
Speaking to reporters and activists this month, Stern suggested the state needs to crack down on SoCalGas.
"Make no mistake, this is a powerful company in a powerful industry," he said. "But they can be held accountable."
Dennis Prager, nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host and writer, speaking at the Turning Point High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. (photo: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Prager University Foundation, the Ayn Rand Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform saw gains while on government aid in 2020, according to new research.
But last year, right-wing groups that have long opposed the concept of increased government spending on “handouts” were the recipients of more than $1.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans while seeing significant increases in contributions or net assets, according to new research from the government watchdog group Accountable.US. Last April, the Small Business Administration launched the $349 billion emergency loan program to help small businesses struggling at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
PPP loans to Prager University Foundation, the Ayn Rand Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform Foundation were all made public last summer. But recently released 990 forms for 2020 show that each groups saw significant increases in contributions or net revenue at the same time they received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidies.
“Right-wing groups that wave their finger at federal relief spending for local governments and working families never seem to mind when it benefits them,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement. “The same people who’ve made careers out of bashing government programs were among the first in line for taxpayer-funded assistance during the COVID-19 crisis — aid intended for struggling mom-and-pop businesses. Their hypocrisy is trumped only by their shamelessness. If these groups were serious about their own purported principles, they’d return that money to the taxpayers.”
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, not long before Prager University Foundation received a PPP loan, Dennis Prager was already at work downplaying the severity of the virus. Videos posted throughout the pandemic by the conservative video site PragerU, which Prager co-founded in 2011, alleged that there was an “orchestrated attack” against the experimental use of hydroxychloroquine, and that the death toll from Covid-19 has been inflated. The group’s YouTube page has 2.9 million subscribers, and it said its videos were viewed more than 1 billion times in 2019.
Prager University Foundation, which hosts PragerU, received more than $704,000 in PPP loans the same year that it saw a 55 percent, $12.3 million increase in contributions from 2019, and a $15 million increase in net worth over the same period. The nonprofit group, founded in 2009, has long criticized the concept of government spending and “handouts.” In October, PragerU published a video titled “The Bankrupting of America,” which criticized former President Donald Trump’s approval of “a massive increase in government spending” during the pandemic, as well as additional spending by President Joe Biden.
The Ayn Rand Institute received more than $713,000 in PPP loans last spring. The group’s mission is “to create a culture whose guiding principles are reason, rational self-interest, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism—a culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness.”
Last May, ARI posted a blog explaining why it was OK to accept government aid despite Rand’s well-known position against such programs. “The CARES Act has created a moral dilemma for those Americans who value freedom,” they wrote. “The pandemic has cost them their jobs, their savings, their businesses. And they blame a significant part of this loss on the government. But because they oppose government handouts, they worry that accepting CARES money would be a breach of integrity. At the Ayn Rand Institute, we are dedicated to philosophic principle. And because we are, we will take any relief money offered us. We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice.”
ARI reported $7.6 million in contributions last year, a 19 percent increase from 2019. The group reported $1.2 million in gains last year, up from losses of $790,000 in 2019.
Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, the nonprofit wing of Americans for Tax Reform, received more than $290,000 in PPP relief last spring. The group said the loan helped the company avoid layoffs, writing that it is “a legally and financially separate research and educational 501(c)3” that “was badly hurt by the government shutdown.” ATRF’s net assets increased last year by 36 percent or $4.6 million, cutting its 2019 deficit of $17.5 million to $12.9 million. Americans for Tax Reform and its foundation were founded in 1985 by Republican Grover Norquist at former President Ronald Reagan’s request, to oppose all tax increases.
Despite its stated aims, billions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans went to wealthy business owners and not the mom and pop shops they were designed to support. Several such small businesses were denied outright or received less money than they asked for. The PPP program was also accused of shutting out Black small business owners.
An Afghan girl sits beside relief supplies in Khost province, east Afghanistan, Nov. 9, 2021. (photo: Str/Xinhua)
The U.S.-led mission fled the Afghanistan front of their so-called "war on terror," leaving nothing but trash, extreme poverty and universal unemployment.
Economic activity has ground to a halt. Poverty is on the rise.
In the summer, the U.S.-led mission fled the Afghanistan front of their so-called "war on terror," leaving nothing but trash, extreme poverty and universal unemployment. As the Americans and associates hightailed it back where they came from, the government they had kept in power collapsed.
The Taliban took power on Aug. 15 and formed a caretaker government on Sept. 7.
INSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE
Unwelcome foreign forces had been completely ejected from the country by late August, ending a military presence that began impulsively in the wake of the catastrophic events of 9/11. The most obvious result of a campaign meant to bring stability to Central Asia is a country with a battered economy. This sorry state of affairs has reportedly been attained at a cost to Washington of around 2 trillion U.S. dollars.
The war is not even over. While 300 Islamic State fighters have given up their arms in the eastern Nangarhar Province over the past couple of months, the hardline group has claimed responsibility for a series of bomb blasts across the country. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has downplayed the claims, saying the Emirate has little to fear from the group.
The caretaker administration found itself unable to pay civil service salaries. Largely dependent on foreign aid for the past 20 years, the state apparatus has been largely destroyed.
NOTHING ON THE TABLE
The majority of Afghans are facing acute food insecurity and are unable to feed themselves. The World Food Program (WFP) and other UN agencies estimate that more than 22 million of Afghanistan's 36 million people will go hungry to some degree this winter. Many will be unable to cope with genuine emergencies of hunger.
"Afghanistan is facing an avalanche of hunger and destitution the likes of which I have never seen in my twenty plus years with the World Food Program," said WFP country director Mary-Ellen McGroarty recently. The prices of basic goods including flour, cooking oil and sugar have almost doubled.
"Unfortunately, we no longer have enough money to buy anything. Everyone is suffocating in a stifling economic crisis caused by the change of regime," said Salim Khan, a Kabul resident.
NOTHING IN THE BANK
Following the U.S. military pullout in Afghanistan and the Taliban's takeover of the country in mid-August, Washington reportedly has frozen more than 9 billion U.S. dollars of Afghanistan's central bank, leaving the new rulers in the doldrums.
In mid-August, a bank run led to a ceiling on withdrawals of 200 U.S. dollars per week. Basic services are collapsing. Food and other life-saving aid is about to run out. Afghan Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has demanded Washington unblock his country's assets.
"America has paralyzed the banking system. That is why the banks can't give money to their customers. Restrictions on banking have led food-price rises over the past couple of months," said Sayed Mohammed, who failed to withdraw cash from his account that week.
"The high price of U.S. dollars has affected our business. People have no cash to buy things, the price of flour, rice and cooking oil is much higher now than a month ago. A couple of days one piece of bread cost 10 afghanis. Today I had to sell for 20. As the price of flour goes up following an increase in the exchange rate, we have no choice but to increase the price of our bread."
Elon Musk at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin, Germany, last September. (photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are dead set on expanding commercial space flight — even though a single person taking one of their carbon-spewing joy rides will produce more pollution in a few minutes than people belonging to 1/8th of the world population will in their entire lives.
The reasons for this are straightforward enough. The lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy, almost by definition, involve consumption habits and patterns of behavior that carry a much bigger carbon footprint. As the Financial Times’ Stefan Wagstyl succinctly put it this summer: “Almost everything the wealthy do involves higher emissions, from living in bigger houses to running larger cars and flying more often, especially by private jet. Eating meat comes into it, as does owning a swimming pool. Not to mention a holiday home. Or homes.”
It’s hard to imagine a starker illustration of carbon inequality than the recent phenomenon of recreational space flights, like those undertaken by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, or Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this year — flights whose ambition was clearly to mainstream the whole idea of commercial space travel so that it can eventually become a more common (and perhaps profitable) enterprise.
So, just how much carbon do such flights emit?
Dig into this year’s World Inequality Report and you’ll find the astonishing estimate that a single, eleven-minute space flight emits at least seventy-five metric tons of carbon per passenger (according to researchers, this is actually an extremely conservative estimate, and the figure may well be in the range of two hundred fifty to a thousand metric tons per passenger). For comparison, the report’s data shows that as many as 1 billion people emit less than a single metric ton per year — meaning that a single passenger on a short space flight produces more carbon pollution in a few minutes than people belonging to roughly one-eighth of the global population will throughout their entire lifetimes.
Were commercial space travel to successfully expand beyond brief, suborbital flights, to lengthier trips or even prolonged orbital stays, it’s both easy — and terrifying — to imagine how much more significant the carbon footprint would quickly become. As it stands, at least one company is currently boasting of its plans to build and launch a luxury space hotel before the decade’s end. If those plans succeed as currently written on paper, the so-named Voyager Station will house nearly three hundred guests and more than a hundred crew members, putting the pollution produced by private space travel on an entirely new scale.
It’s as yet unclear, of course, whether commercial space flight can actually represent a viable or profitable business model in the decades ahead. What is clear is that the ever-rising consumption habits of the extremely wealthy are already placing an unsustainable burden on the global climate — and that private space travel undertaken on a larger scale could effectively represent a death sentence for the planet.
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