14 December 21
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The Biden White House purports to be worried about corruption — just not the kind now dominating American politics, in which every new policy includes gigantic giveaways to corporations.
These were the key findings of the first-ever “United States Strategy on Countering Corruption,” coordinated by President Joe Biden’s National Security Council. But the strategy paper noticeably avoided mention of a particular form of corruption: corporate capture, where companies and their financial interests completely dominate the policymaking process.
The Biden administration, as it turns out, is a perfect example of this: every policy solution they propose involves some sort of corporate giveaway. This is the kind of institutionalized and legalized bribery that’s almost never discussed — the corruption that’s responsible for high health care costs and poor health care outcomes in the United States, and that has made it effectively impossible for lawmakers to rationally respond to the COVID-19 pandemic here and around the globe.
As if to drive the problem home, within hours of releasing their corruption report, the Biden White House was flailing on TV trying to defend an overly complex COVID testing plan that will keep Americans paying inflated retail prices for at-home tests with the hope that their health insurer will agree to reimburse them at some later point. This plan is wildly impractical, but it would be a boon for the same testing manufacturer that just so happened to start paying Biden’s former top aide shortly after Biden was elected president.
The proposed strategy is just the latest example of the Biden administration’s preferred approach for dealing with virtually every health care problem: funnel it through health insurance corporations that bankroll Washington politicians. The situation will continue to drive health care disparities and pad profits in a health care sector that helped finance Biden’s presidential campaign.
Then there’s the issue of containing the pandemic. The fastest way to stop the spread of COVID and prevent new strains from emerging is to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible. But the United States and other wealthier countries with powerful pharmaceutical lobbies are hoarding vaccines and continuing to block countries like South Africa and India from manufacturing their own vaccines, choosing to protect private profits instead.
“Should We Just Send One to Every American?”
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki touted the administration’s widely panned COVID testing plan built around private health insurance — rather than simply providing at-home tests to all Americans.
Under the Biden plan, people will be able to purchase tests from a retailer and then apply for reimbursement from their private insurers. That means that people will have to pay higher retail prices up front, and try to get their private health insurer to agree to pay for the COVID testing kits down the road.
Americans who are uninsured or on Medicare or Medicaid would be able to get free tests at community sites and rural clinics, officials wrote.
When Mara Liasson of NPR asked why the Biden administration wouldn’t just make tests free and “have them available everywhere,” Psaki openly scoffed at the suggestion, asking: “Should we just send one to every American?” Psaki continued: “ Then what happens if you — if every American has one test. How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”
While at-home rapid COVID tests are free or very cheap in many countries, and some states like Colorado and New Hampshire have already started programs to send free tests to people who want them, the Biden administration cannot even imagine policy working this way — there are corporate interests to think of and involve, first.
One company that stands to benefit from this convoluted testing regime is Abbott Laboratories, which hired Biden’s former legislative affairs director Sudafi Henry shortly after the 2020 election. Abbott executives and employees donated $174,000 to Biden’s presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.
Abbott has dominated the at-home test market in the United States, in large part because the Biden administration has failed to quickly approve other rapid tests. As ProPublica reported last month, the first two at-home tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration were made by Abbott and Quidel Corporation, two companies where the regulator leading the approval efforts previously worked.
Customers can generally purchase a two-pack of Abbott tests at chain pharmacies for $23.99 or $11.99 per test. Meanwhile, in Europe, a ten-pack of the same Abbott tests sells for $44.40, or about $4.40 apiece.
The Biden administration believes that having Americans with private insurance go buy these tests for nearly three times what Europeans are paying, and then request reimbursement from their insurer, represents the epitome of convenience.
Psaki said Monday that under this scenario, “150 million Americans will be able to get free tests.”
The Private Insurance Presidency
This bureaucratic nightmare of a testing plan may be a sign that the US government is experiencing a bit of difficulty responding to the ongoing public health crisis. It’s also the latest policy solution from the Biden administration centered around private health insurance, an industry that helped finance his campaign as well as his 2021 inaugural committee.
Instead of creating a promised public health insurance option or expanding Medicare, Biden and Democrats have pushed to put more Americans on expensive private health insurance plans with subsidized premiums.
Democrats similarly decided the best way to help poorer residents in GOP-led states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage is to allow those people to sign up for heavily subsidized private health insurance plans.
Those efforts are likely to be a windfall for health insurers that have seen huge profits throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It will also be lucrative for hospitals and doctors, who get paid more by private health insurance plans than by the government.
Definitionally speaking, preserving, and propping up a health care system based around private health insurance — instead of establishing a universal, single-payer program — means allowing for different tiers of coverage. It also allows for the continued existence of a significant and durable health care under-class: 28 million Americans were uninsured last year.
If the Biden administration was concerned about everyone having quality health care — or about disparities in care — they would not be working to put more people on private insurance. But that’s exactly what they and Democrats have done.
While providing premium subsidies will surely help people, private health insurers regularly deny claims, create barriers to care, and put people through hell for profit. One potentially relevant example: some health insurers are currently requiring documentation of a doctor ordering a COVID test before they agree to pay for it. Why make people deal with these vultures?
Some big insurers are already expressing confusion about how the Biden reimbursement policy is supposed to work. “Spokespeople for major health insurers including Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield say their companies are awaiting guidance and will work with the administration on implementation,” Politico recently reported.
The administration isn’t planning to issue the guidance on the testing plan until January 15. That’s more than a month from now, which of course undercuts the entire purpose of their COVID testing policy: “to provide additional protection to Americans and fight the Omicron and Delta variants, while keeping our economy growing.”
At least the Biden administration still has some time to change course and prove that they can respond effectively to a public health crisis — but that might involve countering corporate capture.
Mark Meadows. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
ALSO SEE: Newly Revealed Text Messages to Meadows Undercut GOP Whitewashing
of the Capitol Insurrection
"A small group of people have gotten a lot of attention because of their defiance," Committee Chair Bennie Thompson said at a committee meeting to consider the move. "But many others have taken a different path and provided important information about January 6 and the context in which the riot occurred. Anyone who wants to cooperate with our investigation can do so. Nearly everyone has."
Meadows had earlier cooperated in part with the committee, handing over some email and text message records, but he failed to sit for a deposition last week and refused to turn over a slew of other documents, citing former President Donald Trump's claims of privilege.
The panel's vice chair, Congresswoman Liz Cheney said in her opening remarks that the contempt vote was mainly related to Meadows' "refusal to testify about text messages and other communications that he admits are not privileged." She noted that although he didn't claim privilege based on this material, he was still refusing to testify about it.
Cheney then read aloud some of the texts that Meadows received in what she referred to as the "187 minutes" when Trump "refused to act when action by our president was required, essential." There were text messages from Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., and Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — all imploring the president to act. The White House, she said, "knew exactly what was happening here at the Capitol." They knew because all those messages were being sent by "members of Congress, the press and others" to Mark Meadows while the attack was happening.
According to Cheney, Trump Jr. "texted again and again, urging action by the president: 'We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.'"
She read the Fox News hosts' quotes:
"Quote, 'Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,'" Laura Ingraham wrote.
"'Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,'" Brian Kilmeade texted.
"'Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol,'" Sean Hannity urged.
There were other texts, too, that appeared to have been written by people in the Capitol during the assault.
"'We are under siege up here at the Capitol,'" said one. Another read, "'They have breached the Capitol.'"
A third text, said Cheney: "'Mark, protesters are literally storming the Capitol. Breaking windows on doors. Rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?'"
"A fourth: 'There's an armed standoff at the House Chamber door.'"
"And another, from someone inside the Capitol, 'We are all helpless.'"
Cheney said that "dozens of texts," including some from Trump administration officials, urged Trump to act.
"Quote, 'POTUS has to come out firmly and tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed,'" Cheney said. "In another, 'Mark, he needs to stop this. Now.'
"A third, in all caps, 'TELL THEM TO GO HOME.' A fourth, and I quote, 'POTUS needs to calm this [sh*t] down.'"
She said that as the violence went on, she took note of another text exchange between Trump Jr. and Meadows:
"'He's got to condemn this [sh*t] ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,' Donald Trump, Jr. texted.
"Meadows responded, quote, 'I'm pushing it hard. I agree.'
"Still," Cheney said, "President Trump did not immediately act." She called the texts "evidence" of his "supreme dereliction of duty."
The nine-person, Democrat-run committee recommended that the House of Representatives find Meadows in contempt of Congress, as they did in October with Steve Bannon, who had not cooperated at all.
Meadows appeared on Fox News on Monday night and said he found the vote "disappointing but not surprising."
Representative Pete Aguilar, who is on the committee, said Monday night that the contempt vote will likely be brought before the full House for a vote on Tuesday.
If the Democratic-controlled House votes to find him in contempt of Congress — as they did with Bannon — the case would then be turned over to the Justice Department. If the Justice Department charges him, he could face up to a year in jail if found guilty.
"History will record that in a critical moment in our democracy, most people were on the side of finding the truth, of providing accountability, of strengthening our system for future generations," Thompson said before the committee's vote. "And history will also record, in this critical moment, that some people were not."
Meadows' attorney, George Terwilliger, argued in a letter to the committee on Monday that a contempt referral for Meadows "would be contrary to law, manifestly unjust, unwise, and unfair." He wrote that the contempt of Congress statute was never intended to apply to "good-faith" assertions of executive privilege, and that prosecuting a senior presidential aide would be "unwise" because it could damage the institution of the presidency.
But the committee's contempt report dismisses the privilege argument on the grounds that the sitting president, President Biden, has not exerted privilege over the records in question. They also noted that several of the documents Meadows already turned over would be in violation of the privilege claims if they were legitimate.
Among the documents Meadows gave the committee was a PowerPoint presentation prepared by an outside adviser entitled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference … Options for JAN 6," which was initially intended to be distributed to members of Congress, Thompson noted in a letter to Terwilliger last week.
Meadows also wrote in a January 5 email that the National Guard would be present in Washington the following day "to protect pro Trump people," according to the contempt report.
The contempt report also described a January 5 email in which Meadows said the National Guard would be present in Washington the following day "to protect pro Trump people." The committee wrote that Meadows said many more Guardsmen would be on standby, but it did not offer other details about the exchange.
The committee also attached to the report a transcript of the questions they would have asked Meadows had he shown up. The transcript cited text messages between Meadows and a senator in which they discussed then Vice President Mike Pence's "power to reject electors" thereby potentially changing the outcome of the election. In one of the texts, Meadows "recounts a direct communication with President Trump who, according to Mr. Meadows in his text messages, quote, 'thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,' end quote."
Democratic leadership plans to bring the contempt resolution to the floor for consideration by the full House as soon as Tuesday.
The House select committee, created by Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this year, is investigating the January 6 attack, when thousands of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol as Congress counted the electoral votes, a largely ceremonial final step affirming President Biden's victory. Lawmakers were sent fleeing amid the riot, which led to the deaths of five people and the arrests of hundreds more. Trump, who encouraged his supporters to "walk over" to the Capitol during the Stop the Steal rally, was impeached by the House one week later for inciting the riot but was later acquitted by the Senate.
People inspect the damage at the Ahmadi family's house in Kabul. (photo: Bernat Armangue/AP)
Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby on Monday confirmed reports that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III approved a series of recommendations following an investigation into the deadly incident in August. Those did not include disciplinary action for the military service members involved in what officials have called a "tragic mistake."
"The secretary's not approving or calling for additional accountability measures," Kirby told reporters during a briefing.
"I do not anticipate there being issues of personal accountability to be had with respect to the August 29th airstrike," he added.
Investigations led by Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who leads U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Richard D. Clarke, the head of the Special Operations Command, resulted in a series of recommendations for procedural changes and process improvements "that need to occur and will occur," Kirby said. "But in this particular case," he explained, "there was not a strong enough case to be made for personal accountability" and no one was found criminally negligent.
An investigation by the Air Force's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, found the deadly mistake was the result of "confirmation bias." Military officials were looking for a white Toyota Corolla, and when such a vehicle showed up at a suspected Islamic State location, they believed it contained a bomb. Instead, it was an aid worker loading his car with a lap top computer. The Pentagon is working to provide condolence payments and bring surviving family members to the U.S.
How the strike went wrong
The counterterror strike in Afghanistan came in the final days of the chaotic U.S. and NATO pullout from the country.
The Pentagon initially claimed the counterterror strike had killed an Islamic extremist who was plotting an imminent attack. It was just days after 13 U.S. service members were killed outside of the Kabul airport by suicide bomber. At the time, officials said, intelligence information indicated a white Toyota was carrying a car bomb. Officials surveilled the car and its driver as he made several suspicious stops near the airport, placing what looked like gas canisters in the car. In all, they watched for approximately eight hours before striking it with a 20-pound Hellfire missile from a drone.
But, the man in the car was not an extremist terrorist. He was Zemari Ahmadi, an aid worker with a group called Nutrition and Education International, who had been transporting water. The explosion of the car, parked in a courtyard of a home, killed Ahmadi, as well as seven children and two other adults.
But before any of those details were uncovered, Gen. Mark Milley justified the bombing, saying, "the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike."
Pentagon admits mistake after news reports show a very different narrative
It wasn't until The New York Times uncovered video footage that challenged the Pentagon's narrative that officials admitted the strike had been a mistake.
"What we saw here was a breakdown in process and execution and procedural events. Not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership," Kirby said Monday.
The decision should not be interpreted as a sign that the department is "turning a blind eye," to the killing of civilians, Kirby expanded. "It's just that you have to look at [the counterterrorism strike] in time and space."
He added: "You have to look at this particular strike and not draw broader, wider conclusions about accountability and high standards of conduct based on this one outcome."
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
That enterprise could have taken a hit under a key part of President Biden’s climate agenda, a $150 billion plan to push coal plants toward cleaner energy. One lawmaker, though, played a central role in killing that proposal: Manchin, who has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from the family coal company while using his role as a Democratic swing vote in a 50-50 Senate to dictate Biden’s policies.
When pressed about whether he has a conflict of interest, Manchin bristles. “I have been in a blind trust for 20 years. I have no idea what they’re doing,” the senator told reporters in September, referring to his family’s coal firm. “You got a problem?”
But contrary to his public statements, documents filed by the senator show the blind trust is much too small to account for all his reported earnings from the coal company, as of his latest financial disclosure report, which covers 2020 and was filed in May.
Manchin’s latest financial disclosure report says that the West Virginia family coal business that he helped found and run, Enersystems, paid him $492,000 in interest, dividends and other income in 2020, and that his share of the firm is worth between $1 million and $5 million. He signed a sworn statement saying he is aware of these earnings, underscoring that he is not blind to them.
By contrast, Manchin set up a blind trust with $350,000 in cash in 2012. In his latest financial disclosure report, the senator reported that the Joseph Manchin III Qualified Blind Trust earned no more than $15,000 last year and is worth between $500,000 and $1 million. By design, it is not possible to know precisely what’s in the blind trust. But the financial disclosure records show that it doesn’t include all of Manchin’s income from Enersystems.
If Manchin’s coal interests are not in a blind trust, ethics experts said, it calls into question the impartiality of a senator who in October forced Biden to drop the plan in his Build Back Better bill to phase out the same kinds of coal plants that are key to his family company’s profitability.
The senator’s effort to dismiss questions about his coal interests by declaring he has a blind trust is “misleading and at worst it’s just not true,” said Don Fox, a former general counsel and acting director of the Office of Government Ethics in the Obama administration, who examined Manchin’s financial records at The Washington Post’s request. He cited the vast difference between Manchin’s reported income from the trust and his family’s coal business.
“The question I would ask him would be, when he says it’s in a blind trust, ‘Well, your public financial disclosure report that you sign and swear is true does not have Enersystems in the blind trust,’ ” Fox said. “And if the blind trust is truly blind, how do you know what’s in it?”
Manchin declined an interview request. The Post sent his spokeswoman, Sam Runyon, a list of detailed questions and a copy of the document establishing the blind trust. She did not directly respond to queries about the blind trust and conflict of interest.
Instead, she emailed a statement that said in full: “Senator Manchin is in full compliance with Senate ethics and financial disclosure rules. He continues to work to find a path forward on important climate legislation that maintains American leadership in energy innovation and critical energy reliability, as exemplified by the many provisions to address climate change in the Energy Act of 2020 and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.”
It is legal for Manchin to make millions of dollars from his coal interests even as he chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and legislates on matters affecting the industry. That is because members of Congress are not required to divest their assets to avoid a potential industry conflict.
Senate rules prohibit members from using their position to pass legislation in which “the principal purpose” is to benefit themselves or family members. There is no evidence Manchin has taken action solely to benefit himself or the family company, though critics say that by killing the clean electricity provision in Biden’s agenda, he is helping all coal-related companies — potentially including Enersystems.
Congressional rules are more lenient than, for example, those governing many top executive branch officials, whose assets would be reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics for potential conflicts of interest, making them subject to a requirement to divest, recuse or seek a waiver.
Craig Holman, an ethics expert at Public Citizen, said that regardless of the congressional rules, Manchin’s declaration in the trust that he wants to “avoid any conflict of interest, or any appearance of such a conflict” is undercut by his simultaneous earnings from a coal business and his work against climate policies.
“It is a very blatant conflict of interest,” Holman said, citing the senator’s financial disclosures. “Manchin is not only very wealthy, but most of his assets and wealth are invested in a single industry, coal.”
Holman said Manchin’s financial position is one of the most conflicted of any member of Congress he has studied because so much of the senator’s financial stake is in the coal industry while he is playing a key role on climate policies. Nonetheless, he said, “what Manchin is doing is not illegal. The conflict of interest code for Congress is just way too weak.”
Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), who sought for months to convince Manchin to support the plan to transition power companies to cleaner forms of energy, said the West Virginia senator ultimately balked. Manchin’s opposition effectively killed one of the most far-reaching climate policies in the bill, outraging environmentalists and leading to an increased focus on his family’s coal business and his own earnings.
“After working on the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which I think is the strongest and best way of getting the utility sector to net-zero emissions as quickly as possible, Sen. Manchin ultimately said he just couldn’t get there,” Smith said in an interview. “And I think that was a mistake — I think the [program] would have been a powerful tool to get the emissions reductions we need, while keeping utility rates low.”
She stressed that she is still having “good conversations” with Manchin and is negotiating on other parts of the bill affecting climate change, but she has “no expectation that any kind of clean electricity plan will be included.”
Manchin could further scale back Biden’s climate change efforts. The senator has also objected to a measure in the Build Back Better bill designed to reduce emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, and a tax credit for electric cars. He has not yet announced his support for the Democrats’ spending bill.
Questions about a conflict between Manchin’s coal interests and his government service go back decades, a review by The Post found.
Manchin helped found and became president of Enersystems, a coal brokerage firm, in 1988. One of its customers since 1993 has been a power plant in Grant Town, W.Va., that uses waste coal to produce energy.
In the mid-1990s, when Manchin was a state senator, he backed legislation that gave plants such as the one in Grant Town a property tax break. When a group of local citizens complained that Manchin had a conflict of interest, he responded that he had avoided any ethical problem by giving the break to all similar projects.
Had the bill only benefited the Grant Town plant, Manchin said at the time, “I would have excused myself from voting,” according to a contemporaneous account in the Charleston Gazette. But by backing a broad measure, Manchin said ethics officials told him it was allowed, notwithstanding the benefit for Grant Town.
After Manchin was elected West Virginia’s secretary of state in 2000, he gave control of Enersystems to his son Joseph Manchin IV, who still runs it. The younger Manchin did not respond to a request for comment.
After Manchin was elected governor in 2005, he said he put his company shares in a blind trust. He reported receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from his coal business on a state financial disclosure form in 2009 and 2010, and told the news service Greenwire in 2011 that his holdings had “absolutely not” affected his policies, adding, “I have been in a blind trust for a long time.”
In his successful 2010 bid for the U.S. Senate, Manchin ran an ad that showed him shooting at President Barack Obama’s proposed legislation to address climate change “because it’s bad for West Virginia.” Between 2011 and 2020, Manchin earned $4.8 million from Enersystems, according to a tally by the Center for Responsive Politics. His net worth as of 2020 was between $4.4 million and $12.8 million, the center said.
Enersystems is a private company based in Fairmont, W.Va., near Manchin’s hometown of Farmington. Public records show that the business is among those that benefit from federal programs to clean up long-shuttered coal mines, where mountains of mining debris, known as waste coal, have been piled and abandoned. The company sells the waste coal to the only power plant in the state that still burns it: the Grant Town Power Plant, an 80-megawatt electricity-generating facility in Manchin’s home county of Marion.
Compared with ordinary coal plants, power plants that burn waste coal, or what the industry calls “gob,” are dirtier and don’t generate as much electricity. The Grant Town plant emits more greenhouse gases and the main components of acid rain — nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide — into the air per megawatt-hour of electricity produced than any other power plant in West Virginia, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent data. Only a handful of waste-coal-burning plants still operate nationally. They are such heavy polluters that the Trump administration created a separate category for them, weakening the air pollution standards they had to meet.
“Burning waste coal, like burning trash, turns pollution on the ground into pollution in the air,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA officials. The environmental benefits of clearing waste coal from mining sites are questionable, he added. Although removing the piles of gob can reduce acid runoff, the process of burning it creates an enormous amount of ash that can release toxins into streams or groundwater.
The Manchin family doesn’t own or operate the Grant Town plant, which is run by American Bituminous Power Partners, a limited partnership registered in Delaware. But records of coal transactions from last year suggest the power plant is Enersystems’ primary customer. It is the only publicly recorded buyer of Enersystems’ waste coal.
In response to written questions from The Post, American Bituminous Power Partners Executive Director Ken Niemann said the Grant Town plant “is in full compliance with all its state and federal air emissions controls and limitations.”
As the economics of burning coal have become less favorable, the Grant Town plant has come close to shutting down at least twice. In 2006, when Manchin was governor, the state’s Public Service Commission rescued the plant by approving rate increases, which the utility passed on to customers. The commission’s chair at the time was a Manchin appointee.
Those higher prices were supposed to be temporary until 2017. But by 2015, the power plant’s owners were back before the commission, claiming financial difficulties. The commissioners sided with the plant, and the higher rates became permanent.
The Grant Town plant faced a new threat this year: Democrats’ plans to rapidly shift the electricity sector away from coal and toward cleaner sources of energy. The clean electricity program would have rewarded utilities for purchasing more electricity from wind, solar and other emissions-free sources — and penalized those that did not.
If the program had become law, the power company that buys electricity from the Grant Town plant would have faced growing financial pressure to shift away from coal power, increasing the odds that Grant Town would eventually close, said James Van Nostrand, director of West Virginia University law school’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development.
The clean electricity program “would have helped us out a lot,” Van Nostrand said. West Virginia’s embrace of coal power over less expensive alternatives like gas, wind and solar has contributed to a decade of rising electricity bills. According to Van Nostrand’s analysis, between 2010 and 2019 West Virginians’ electricity costs increased about five times more than the national average.
“By definition, if the federal government is going to help us transition to cheaper, cleaner electricity, then our electricity bills would either go down or wouldn’t go up as fast as they are now,” he said.
In 2019, Manchin co-authored an op-ed with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in The Post that said: “There is no question that climate change is real or that human activities are driving much of it. We are seeing the impacts in our home states.” They said they were working to find “pragmatic policies that can draw strong and enduring support” and pinned much of their hope on what they called “the next scientific breakthrough” for “game-changing technology.” They opposed what they called “drastic, unattainable measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”
Manchin’s role as the potentially decisive vote in the Senate and his opposition to efforts at abandoning the filibuster have given him outsize power, which he’s used in part to reduce the Build Back Better bill from more than $3 trillion to $1.75 trillion.
Manchin has argued that the clean electricity plan he insisted on removing from the bill is unnecessary because coal companies are already moving toward other energy sources. “The only thing they want us to do is pay $150 billion for what’s already happening,” Manchin told reporters in October in explaining his opposition to the measure. “We’ve transitioned.”
The legislation that passed the House last month still contains $555 billion in tax credits, grants and other efforts to lower planet-warming greenhouse gases, which would be the largest clean energy investment in U.S. history. The bill’s tax incentives would make it easier to install solar panels, build wind turbines and retrofit buildings with energy-saving upgrades. Electric vehicles would become less expensive, reducing a barrier that has prevented many Americans from purchasing them.
Around the time Manchin helped kill the clean electricity provision, he was asked during a walk with reporters on Capitol Hill about whether he has a conflict of interest and was pressed on the fact that his son runs the family coal company. Manchin responded, “I’m very proud of my son. He does a good job. You’d do best to change the subject now.”
Manchin’s critics said that while the senator was not violating any law, he is violating the premise of his promise to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, manager of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, said the best way to prevent such a conflict of interest would be to require members of Congress to divest most investments. If such a policy were adopted, Manchin would be required to liquidate his shares in the coal company and put the assets in a blind trust, and authorize a trustee to invest the money in any way deemed appropriate, and without his knowledge.
“Under the current framework, you are not required to divest anything,” he said. “I think there should be someone in Congress who introduces a bill that says, ‘Look, if you become a member of Congress, you have to divest basically everything except for a widely diversified mutual fund.’ ”
But Hedtler-Gaudette said he has not found a single member of Congress willing to sponsor such legislation. As a result, he hopes Manchin’s case will prompt legislators to consider requiring divestment of any asset — not just publicly traded stock — that could be perceived as a conflict of interest.
“If you don’t like it, that’s fine,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “There isn’t anyone who requires you to be a member of Congress.”
A worker at an Amazon warehouse. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/Getty Images)
After six workers died, workers complained of little tornado preparation and pushed back against rules saying they can’t use phones at work.
Workers at two neighboring Amazon facilities in Edwardsville, just outside St. Louis, who were also in the path of the tornadoes overnight Friday said they have had little training in preparing for tornadoes and bristled at a company policy that multiple sources have said the company is trying to bring back Jan. 1, which would ban workers from having cellphones at work.
Two employees who work at nearby facilities said they had been given very little tornado-specific training and were expected to work through tornado warnings.
“We have never had any tornado drills, nor had we sheltered in place for any of the warnings we’ve had in the past,” said a woman who has worked for the past two years at STL8, another Amazon facility about 66 miles west of Edwardsville, and is not authorized to speak publicly. She added that during two previous tornado warnings during her overnight shift, she was expected to continue working even when the company sounded alarms.
Workers across Amazon facilities also pushed back against a policy that Amazon is bringing back barring phones at work. For years, Amazon has banned workers from carrying their phones in warehouse facilities. The company relaxed the policy during the coronavirus pandemic and then started to reinstate it at warehouses across the country, Bloomberg reported.
Asked about Bloomberg’s reporting and an understanding among workers that the ban would be reinstated Jan. 1, Alisa Carroll, a company spokeswoman, declined to answer directly.
“Employees and drivers are allowed to have their cell phones with them,” she said by email.
A second worker, who also was not authorized to speak publicly and who works at STL4, the building diagonally across the street from the damaged facility, said in a written message that one of her closest co-workers was grateful that she had a phone with her. If she had not had her phone, she would not have known to run to shelter.
“We live in the midwest. Tornado watches and warnings happen ALL THE TIME. Most days we barely bat an eye at storm watches, and we are accustomed to taking shelter in a moment’s notice at warnings,” she wrote. “But you can’t take shelter if you don’t get the warning.”
Workers said having phones with them was a lifeline overnight Friday. Rob Elmore, 38, a seasonal process assistant at the facility diagonally across the street from the center that was hit by the tornado, said he was able to stay in touch with his family through the tornadoes.
John Felton, Amazon’s senior vice president of global delivery services, said at a news conference Monday that “all procedures were followed correctly.”
But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, said Monday that it had opened an investigation into the collapse of the DLI4 building in Edwardsville where the six workers died.
“OSHA has had compliance officers at the complex since Saturday, December 11 to provide assistance,” wrote Scott Allen, the regional director of public affairs for the Labor Department. “OSHA has six months to complete its investigation, issue citations and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and or health regulations are found.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at the news conference Monday that local officials have started “to determine if there were any structural issues” at the distribution center. He said his administration has asked Amazon whether it followed best practices in terms of safety procedures at the warehouse.
The collapse has only stirred the anger of Amazon workers across the country who have been trying to unionize. Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who leads the Amazon Labor Union, an independent effort to organize warehouse staff members, said in a statement that the collapse shows that workers need a labor union.
“The needless deaths were a reminder of Amazon keeping shifts going during other disasters, such as at the Staten Island facility during Hurricane Ida,” he said.
A riot police officer shoots toward protesters at Bolivar Square during a national strike in Bogotá, Colombia. (photo: Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images)
Protesters against police brutality were met with more police brutality
“It was a police massacre,” wrote Carlos Negret, a former ombudsman of the South American country who led the investigation, in the scathing and lengthy report published on Monday. “A decisive political and operational leadership, based on rights, was needed at national and local levels to avoid this happening.”
Protests swept Bogotá and the suburb of Soacha in September last year, after footage went viral that showed police officers pinning down and tasering a father of two who had been detained for breaking Covid restrictions. “Please, no more!,” he can be heard begging in the clip. He died shortly later from injuries sustained in custody.
The incident was compared to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, footage of which also went viral and triggered widespread protests.
Ordoñez’s death prompted protests which were met by a violent response by police officers who used “less-lethal” rounds, billy clubs and teargas while protesters set dozens of police kiosks ablaze across the city. Alongside 14 protesters killed – 11 of whom were killed by police – hundreds of demonstrators and officers were injured.
Most of the deaths occurred in poorer neighbourhoods of the city, leading investigators to conclude in Monday’s report that “there exists a criminalization of poverty by the state forces, which unleashed authoritarian and illegal actions against residents of certain social sectors.”
“The most representative and generalized practice during these days of protest was the illicit use of force on the part of members of the national police,” the report found. “This investigation concludes that the national police openly abandoned the principles of proportionality.”
The investigation was carried out at the request of Bogotá’s mayor, Claudia López, and was supported by the UN development program.
“Who should assume political responsibility?” asked López in a response included in the report. “Me, to begin with, but also the police and president [Iván Duque].”
At the time of the protests, López called on Duque to calm the police, who answer to the defense ministry. The president had painted protesters as “urban terrorists”, borrowing talking points from the country’s decades-long civil war against leftist insurgents.
Alejandro Lanz, co-director of Temblores, a local police violence watchdog, said the report showed systemic failures in the justice system which have allowed responsible police officers to escape prosecution and punishment.
“The most worrying thing is that the vast majority of police officers involved in the massacre still patrol the streets of our city,” said Lanz. “It’s surprising that only four police officers have been charged, and only one of them has been deprived of their liberty, and that is just under house arrest.”
“It’s extremely alarming to see the difference in how the attorney generals’ office and the justice system behaves in cases when the police are the presumed perpetrators, and when it is people that have participated in protests,” Lanz went on to say.
Protests in Colombia continue to be met by police violence. In April this year, the police response to nationwide anti-poverty demonstrations was similarly brutal, with at least 20 people killed by police officers in the ensuing months of unrest, according to Human Rights Watch.
“The response of the state was characterised by an excessive and disproportionate use of force, in many cases, including lethal force,” Inter American Commission on Human Rights president Antonia Urrejola said during a press conference in July.
Chinook salmon in the Elwha River. (photo: Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times)
In western Washington’s Elwha River, the removal of two dams led to a resurgence of fish runs; could a similar scenario play out on the Snake River?
“It was not even 20 feet away,” he said. “A nice, big, fat silver female.”
For decades, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe called for the removal of two dams blocking the river and preventing several species of salmon and steelhead from reaching spawning grounds and they worked to make that vision a reality.
In 2012, the Elwha Dam came down. Two years later, Glines Canyon Dam was gone and the intrepid chinook spotted by Elofson pushed upstream just a day and a half later.
“We were high-fiving. It was pretty awesome to see. It was something my grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles wanted to see. I got to be their eyes, I guess.”
Members of the Nez Perce Tribe share a similar vision. They have led a decadeslong fight to breach the four lower Snake River dams and free the lower Snake River so its salmon, steelhead and lamprey can thrive.
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The Snake and Elwha rivers and their dams are very different. The Elwha is a short coastal stream surrounded by a temperate rainforest. It begins in Olympic National Park and gains speed and size as it races 45 miles north to meet the Salish Sea at the Strait of San Juan de Fuca.
“So a lot of it was never altered,” said George Pess, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Seattle. “There wasn’t road construction and timber harvest and all of that other kind of stuff that you have a lot of times in all of our watersheds.”
But the dams, built to power mills at nearby Port Angeles, lacked fish ladders and blocked salmon and steelhead from progressing more than a few miles upstream.
The Snake River is long. It starts in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, covers about 1,000 miles as it courses across the width and length of Idaho and traverses southeastern Washington before joining the Columbia River near the Tri-Cities. Much of the land it slithers through is arid, but its tributaries reach high into the forested mountains and snowy peaks of central Idaho and northeastern Oregon, where wild salmon and steelhead still spawn in cool-running streams.
The four Snake River dams in eastern Washington have fish ladders for upstream-bound adults and elaborate systems to pass juvenile fish downstream. Nonetheless, the dams are a hindrance to the fish, and wild runs of spring, summer and fall chinook; sockeye salmon; and steelhead have needed Endangered Species Act protection for the past 30 years.
The tribe, Oregon and several fishing and environmental groups, backed by strong science, say breaching the dams will unleash the productivity of higher-elevation Snake River tributaries — including the Salmon River and its middle and south forks, as well as the Imnaha, Grande Ronde, Clearwater, Selway and Lochsa rivers — to save the fish from extinction.
To prove it, they point downstream to yet another river, the undammed John Day in Oregon. It joins the Columbia River about 100 miles downstream from the mouth of the Snake River after flowing north out of the Strawberry, Elkhorn and Blue mountains.
The Snake and John Day are closer than they might appear. Some of their headwaters share the same mountains in northeastern Oregon. They are both long (though the Snake is much longer) and both support wild runs of chinook and steelhead.
But they differ in the number of dams fish must negotiate between the ocean and spawning grounds and in the quality of spawning and rearing habitat used by those fish.
John Day River salmon and steelhead must negotiate three dams — Bonneville, The Dalles and John Day — on the Columbia during their migrations to and from the ocean. Snake River fish must get past eight dams — four on the Columbia and four on the Snake.
The John Day, despite flowing through a sparsely populated region, has been significantly altered.
“In general, it’s been heavily impacted by humans in most of the area,” said Ian Tattam, a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife at La Grande. “There is widespread agriculture and timber and grazing, and the roads and the water diversions and associated paraphernalia that go along with those activities.”
As a result, the fish habitat is largely in much poorer shape compared to the habitat found in pristine Snake River tributaries like the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Imnaha and Selway rivers. Yet its salmon and steelhead are doing considerably better than those in the Snake River basin.
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Today the Tribune looks at the Elwha River and what has happened there since the dams were removed. Key topics include how the river dealt with the sudden animation of sediment trapped behind the dams and how salmon and steelhead and the river itself are responding.
Next week we will visit the John Day River, take a look at its habitat, and how its fish have fared.
Elwha
It’s been less than a decade since the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams came down. As hinted at by that first chinook spotted by Elofson, a member of the Lower Elwha Tribe and an employee of its fisheries department, dam removal has allowed salmon to occupy habitat that was inaccessible for more than a century.
Fish numbers, while subject to normal ups and downs shaped by ocean and weather conditions, have generally responded positively to the regained access.
“We went from the first couple of years and having 100,000, 125,000, 130,000 (spring chinook) smolts go out … to having 550,000 in one year. And we went from that to 1 million the next year,” said Robert Elofson, Mel’s brother and a fisheries department employee who served as a liaison with the National Park Service during the dam-removal process and lobbied Congress while legislation authorizing the project was up for consideration.
Coho and winter steelhead are holding their own and summer steelhead stormed back, surprising everyone. Pink and chum salmon have yet to make significant gains but fisheries managers are hopeful for a turnaround.
John McMillan, a fisheries scientist with Trout Unlimited’s Wild Steelhead Project, marvels at the way summer steelhead recolonized the river. The run went from just a few fish, to nearly 1,000. McMillan said it is likely the largest summer steelhead run on the coast of Washington.
“What has been really exciting has not only been the increase in abundance we have seen in a lot of species, but we are starting to see new life histories arise that we didn’t see before the dams were out,” he said. “For example, summer steelhead have come back really strong, the bull trout have resumed migration back to the ocean and the king salmon are starting to produce remarkable numbers of naturally produced offspring.”
Muck and moonscapes
Despite the success so far, there were significant uncertainties. About 26 million cubic yards of mostly sand and silt were trapped behind the dams, three-quarters of which was above Glines Canyon. That changed the way the river and its floodplain interacted during the life of the dams and posed a problem for dam removal — where would it all go once the river was free?
“Sediment was the big question mark,” Pess said.
It’s a question many people have about the Snake River and the estimated 178 million cubic yards of sediment stored behind its dams.
Would the Elwha be so clogged with silt, sand and gravel that it would kill nearly everything? Would the emerald green and aqua blue pools fill with muck? Or would the sediment feed the floodplain during highwater pulses and allow the river to meander across the valley, splitting into side channels and create better habitat for fish? Would the sediment build up and create high banks? Or would it flush through the system and create a delta at the river’s mouth?
“The answer to all of this is yes,” Pess said. “It wasn’t any one thing. All of these things happened to some extent.”
The flow of sediment increased when the lower dam was removed. But the big pulses came after the removal of Glines Canyon and the movement of both fine sediments and larger bedload material. The effect on aquatic life, particularly the bugs that live between and under the rocks that make up the riverbed, was dramatic.
“That is where most of the productivity is happening in a stream system,” said Sarah Morley, another NOAA scientist, who studies these creatures.
In 2012, when the sediment started to accumulate in the lower river, Morley and her team recorded a 95 percent drop in aquatic insects.
“I didn’t expect it to be that extreme,” she said.
“In the lower river we saw virtually all invertebrates wiped out. But by 2015, once the sediment was mainly through the river, there was a very rapid rebound.”
Two years later, in 2017, everything, including numbers of invertebrates and the species composition, was back to normal.
During high-sediment periods, Morley said some fish seemed able to find alternative food, perhaps by feeding more on terrestrial insects that fell into the river.
“Even though there was so much less aquatic invertebrates available, they were still getting the same amount of energy in their diets.”
Within four or five years, the sediment levels returned to normal.
“So even though we had a lot of sediment in a short period of time, the river was able to integrate that sediment and do what a river does with sediment, and that is move it or store it or do whatever it needs to,” Pess said.
Some of it was deposited on the floodplain or stored in islands between braided channels and in sandbars. But the vast majority flushed through the system.
“Most of it just ended up in the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” Pess said.
And in that body of water, it created a delta and estuarine habitat for juvenile fish.
“If you and I were standing (at the mouth) in 2006 and we closed our eyes, we would hear the surf and the surf would be like BAM, BAM because it would be big boulders and cobbles,” Pess said. “If we were standing there in 2015 or even today, you would hear this swishing sound because it’s all finer sediment.
“Before fish were coming out straight into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the near shore was pretty minimal in terms of kelp forests or eel grass, but now we have a sandy beach with blind tidal channels.”
The Army Corps of Engineers predicts the lower Snake River would go through a similar process of significant negative short-term effects from sediment movement, followed by long-term benefits for fish.
Nature’s Band-Aids
McMillan, the Trout Unlimited scientist, snakes his way through a maze of willows and young cottonwood trees that reach high above his head. The 10-year-old vegetation is thick and tall — maybe 15 to 20 feet. But a decade early, McMillan would have been underwater at the same spot.
“This was all lake bed, which is pretty amazing to think, and now it’s all overgrown,” he said.
The area that sat behind the old Elwha Dam is lined with river rocks and gravel. The river, braided into multiple channels, rushes past. It’s a spot favored by chinook for spawning.
Further downstream, Mel Elofson stands on a bedrock cliff that was the anchor to the old Elwha Dam. In a downstream pool, a keen eye can see the dark shadows of adult chinook lurking as they stage before moving upstream.
He remembers what it looked like when the dam came down.
“It was like a moonscape once they drained all the water out. Not a single plant there. Now it’s totally revegetated.”
The scene is similar at the former site of Glines Canyon Dam and Lake Mills. What was once a reservoir is now a flowing river, with multiple channels. Alder trees, which Elofson calls nature’s Band-Aids, have repopulated the former lake bed.
Snake River
Although proposals to breach the four lower Snake River dams hinge almost entirely on reducing the direct and indirect mortality juvenile fish suffer during their downstream migration, McMillan sees an important secondary benefit. He believes breaching will restore the lower Snake River floodplain and create critical resting and rearing habitat for the fish.
Just like the scenario that played out on the Elwha, McMillan thinks a free-flowing lower Snake River will emerge with increased complexity. What is now a flat, canal-like body of water would evolve into a river with islands, side channels, riffles, pools and rapids. He said gravel bars connected to groundwater will create cold-water oases.
“What this should do is provide basically a pit stop, like a resting stop for these fish to park and have some food, experience a little bit cooler water if that is what they need, and then resume their migration downstream.”
Mel Elofson is a believer in the power of rivers and their salmon and steelhead to rebound if given the chance.
“It proves it works. It proves salmon can return and be resilient. They were totally resilient, just surviving that long, that many decades without being able to use their habitat.”
His brother Robert also believes in the commitment of Native Americans and their allies to affect long-term change.
“We weren’t going anywhere. We aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the Nez Perce for that matter.”
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