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Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Has you grocery bill been higher lately? Here's one reason why:
Monday, December 27, 2021
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?
THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2010 AND IDENTIFIES THE ISSUES.....
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?
Why creeping consolidation is crushing American livelihoods.
If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
Many people blame the great real estate bubble of recent years. The idea here is that once a bubble pops it can destroy more real-world business activity—and jobs—than it creates as it expands. There is some truth to this. But it doesn’t explain why, even when the real estate bubble was at its most inflated, so few jobs were created compared to the tech-stock bubble of the late ’90s. Between 2000 and 2007 American businesses created only seven million jobs, before the great recession destroyed more than that. In the ’90s prior to the dot-com bust, they created more than twenty-two million jobs.
Others point to the diffusion of new technologies that reduce the number of workers needed to produce and sell manufactured products like cars and services like airline reservations. But throughout economic history, even as new technologies like the assembly line and the personal computer destroyed large numbers of jobs, they also empowered people to create new and different ones, often in greater numbers. Yet others blame foreign competition and offshoring, and point to all the jobs lost to China, India, or Mexico. Here, too, there is some truth. But U.S. governments have been liberalizing our trade laws for decades; although this has radically changed the type of jobs available to American workers—shifting vast chunks of the U.S. manufacturing sector overseas, for instance—there is little evidence that this has resulted in any lasting decline in the number of jobs in America.
Moreover, recent Labor Department statistics show that the loss of jobs here at home, be it the result of sudden economic crashes or technological progress or trade liberalization, does not appear to be our main problem at all. Though few people realize it, the rate of job destruction in the private sector is now 20 percent lower than it was in the late ’90s, when managers at America’s corporations embraced outsourcing and downsizing with an often manic intensity. Rather, the lack of net job growth over the last decade is due mainly to the creation of fewer new jobs. As recent Labor Department statistics show, even during the peak years of the housing boom, job creation by existing businesses was 14 percent lower than it was in the late ’90s.
The problem of weak job creation certainly can’t be due to increased business taxes and regulation, since both were slashed during the Bush years. Nor can the explanation be insufficient consumer demand; throughout most of the last decade, consumers and the federal government engaged in a consumption binge of world-historical proportions.
Other, more plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in things like basic R&D, so the pipeline of technological innovation on which new jobs depend began to run dry in the 2000s. Another is that a basic shift in competitiveness has taken place—that countries like India, with educated but relatively low-cost workforces, have become more natural homes for jobs-producing sectors like IT.
But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.
Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions—in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007—transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.
It is now widely accepted among scholars that small businesses are responsible for most of the net job creation in the United States. It is also widely agreed that small businesses tend to be more inventive, producing more patents per employee, for example, than do larger firms. Less well established is what role concentration plays in suppressing new business formation and the expansion of existing businesses, along with the jobs and innovation that go with such growth. Evidence is growing, however, that the radical, wide-ranging consolidation of recent years has reduced job creation at both big and small firms simultaneously. At one extreme, ever more dominant Goliaths increasingly lack any real incentive to create new jobs; after all, many can increase their earnings merely by using their power to charge customers more or pay suppliers less. At the other extreme, the people who run our small enterprises enjoy fewer opportunities than in the past to grow their businesses. The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit.
Over the next few years, we can use our government to do many things to promote the creation of new and better jobs in America. But even the most aggressive stimulus packages and tax cutting will do little to restore the sort of open market competition that, over the years, has proven to be such an important impetus to the creation of wealth, well-being, and work. Consolidation is certainly not the only factor at play. But any policymaker who is really serious about creating new jobs in America would be unwise to continue to ignore our new monopolies.
Even so, most Americans still believe that our economy remains the most wide open, competitive, and vibrant market system the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, the stories we have told ourselves about competition in America over the past quarter century are simply no longer true.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is to take a quick walk around a typical grocery or big-box store, and look more closely at what has taken place in these citadels of consumer choice in the generation since we stopped enforcing our antitrust laws.
The first proof is found in the store itself. If you are stocking up on basic goods, there’s a good chance you are wandering the aisles of a Wal-Mart. After all, the company is legendarily dominant in retail, controlling, for instance, 25 percent of groceries sales in some states and 40 percent of DVD sales nationwide.
But at least the plethora of different brands vying for your attention on the store shelves suggests a healthy, competitive marketplace, right? Well, let’s take a closer look.
In the health aisle, the vast array of toothpaste options on display is mostly the work of two companies: Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble, which split nearly 70 percent of the U.S. market and control even such seemingly independent brands as Tom’s of Maine. And in many stores the competition between most brands is mostly choreographed anyway. Under a system known as “category management,” retailers like Wal-Mart and their largest suppliers openly cooperate in determining everything from price to product placement.
Over in the cold case we find an even greater array of beer options, designed to satisfy almost any taste. We can choose among the old standbys like Budweiser, Coors, and Miller Lite. Or from a cornucopia of smaller brands, imports and specialty brews like Stella Artois, Redbridge, Rolling Rock, Beck’s, Blue Moon, and Stone Mill Pale Ale. But all these brands—indeed more than 80 percent of all beers in America—are controlled by two companies, Anheuser-Busch Inbev and MillerCoors.
Need milk? In many parts of the country, the choices you see in the Wal-Mart dairy section are almost entirely an illusion. In many stores, for instance, you can pick among jugs labeled with the names PET Dairy, Mayfield, or Horizon. But don’t waste too much time deciding: all three brands are owned by Dean Foods, the nation’s largest dairy processor, and Wal-Mart’s own Great Value brand containers are sometimes filled by Dean as well. Indeed, around 70 percent of milk sold in New England—and up to 80 percent of milk peddled in some other parts of the country—comes from Dean plants. Besides dominating the retail dairy market, Dean has been accused of collaborating with Dairy Farmers of America, another giant company that buys milk from independent farmers and provides it to Dean for processing and distribution, to drive down the price farmers are paid while inflating its own profits.
The food on offer outside of the refrigerator aisle isn’t much better. The boxes on the shelves are largely filled with the corn-derived products that are the basic building block of most modern processed food; about 80 percent of all the corn seed in America and 95 percent of soybean seeds contain patented genes produced by a single company: Monsanto. And things are just as bad farther down the ingredients list—take an additive like ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), produced by a Chinese cartel that holds more than 85 percent of the U.S. market.
How about pet food? There sure seems to be a bewildering array of options. But if you paid close attention to coverage of the massive pet food recall of 2007, you will remember that five of the top six independent brands—including those marketed by Colgate-Palmolive, Mars, and Procter & Gamble—relied on a single contract manufacturer, Menu Foods, as did seventeen of the top twenty food retailers in the United States that sell “private-label” wet pet foods under their store brands, including Safeway, Kroger, and Wal-Mart. The Menu Foods recall covered products that had been retailed under a phenomenal 150 different product names.
Heading out to the parking lot should give us some respite from all of this—surely the vehicles here reflect a last bastion of American-style competition, no? After all, more than a dozen big carmakers sell hundreds of different models in America. But it’s a funny kind of competition, one that’s not nearly as competitive as it looks. To begin with, more than two-thirds of the iron ore used to make the steel in all those cars is likely provided by just three firms (two of which are trying to merge). And it doesn’t stop there. A decade ago, all the big carmakers were for the most part vertically integrated, and they kept their supply systems largely separate from one another. Today, however, the outsourcing revolution, combined with monopolization within the supply base, means the big companies increasingly rely on the same outside suppliers—even the same factories—for components like piston rings and windshield-wiper blades and door handles. Ever wonder why Toyota came out so strongly in favor of a bailout for General Motors last year? One reason is they knew if that giant fell suddenly, it would knock over many of the suppliers that they themselves—as well as Nissan and Honda—depend on to make their own cars.
And don’t fool yourself that this process of monopolization affects only America’s working classes. What’s happened to down-market retail has happened to department stores as well. Think Macy’s competes with Bloomingdale’s? Think again. Both are units of a holding company called Macy’s Inc., which, under its old name, Federated, spent the last two decades rolling up control of such department store brand names as Marshall Field’s, Hecht’s, Broadway, and Bon Marché. A generation ago, even most midsized cities in America could boast of multiple independent department stores. Today a single company controls roughly 800 outlets, in a chain that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The way corporate consolidation destroys jobs is clear enough, too—it dominates the headlines whenever a big merger is announced. Consider two recent deals in the drug industry. The first came in January 2009 when Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, announced plans for a $68 billion takeover of Wyeth. The second came in March 2009, when executives at number two Merck said they planned to spend $41.1 billion to buy Schering-Plough. Managers all but bragged of the number of workers who would be rendered “redundant” by the deal—the first killed off 19,000 jobs, the second 16,000.
Nevertheless, America’s problem in recent years hasn’t been job destruction, it’s been a fall-off in job creation. Consolidation causes problems here, too, in a variety of ways. First, it can reduce the impetus of big firms to invest in innovation, a chief source of new jobs. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously theorized that monopolists would invest their outsized profits into new R&D to enable themselves to innovate and thus stay ahead of potential rivals—an argument that defenders of consolidation have long relied on. But numerous empirical studies in recent years have found the opposite to be true: competition is a greater spur to innovation than monopoly is. In one widely cited study, for instance, Philippe Aghion of Harvard University and Peter Howitt of Brown University looked at British manufacturing firms from 1968 to 1997, when the UK’s economy was integrating with Europe and hence subject to the EU’s antitrust policies. They found that on balance these firms became more innovative—as measured by patent applications and R&D spending—as they were forced to compete more directly with their continental rivals.
The opposite trend took place in some of America’s biggest industrial firms in the years after 1981, when the Reagan administration all but abandoned antitrust enforcement. Many of the most successful U.S. companies adopted a winner-take-all approach to their industries that allowed them to shortchange innovation and productive expansion. Prior to 1981, for instance, General Electric invested heavily in R&D in many fields, seeking to compete in as many markets as possible; after 1981 it pulled back its resources, focusing instead on gathering sufficient power to govern the pace of technological change.
Consolidation in the retail sector can also inhibit job growth. As behemoth retailers garner ever more power over the sale of some product or service, they also gain an ever greater ability to strip away the profits that once would have made their way into the hands of their suppliers. The money that the managers and workers at these smaller companies would have used to expand their business, or upgrade their machinery and skills, is instead transferred to the bottom lines of dominant retailers and traders and thence to shareholders. Or it may be simply destroyed through pricing wars. A good example is the pre-Christmas book battle between Amazon and Wal-Mart, in which the two giant conglomerates pushed down the prices of hardcover best sellers to lure buyers into their stores and Web sites. In many cases, the two companies actually sold the books for less than they bought them, treating them as “loss leaders” and expecting to recoup the loss through the sale of other, more expensive products. Although consumers welcomed the opportunity to pay $9.99 for the latest Stephen King novel priced elsewhere above $30, the move caused a near panic among publishers. Even though the low prices may have resulted in the sale of more books, the longer-term effect is to radically lower what consumers will expect to pay for books, which will in turn reduce the funds available to publishers to develop and edit future prospects.
Another way that monopolization can inhibit the creation of new jobs is the practice of entrenched corporations using their power to buy up, and sometimes stash away, new technologies, rather than building them themselves. Prior to the 1980s, if a company wanted to enter a new area of business, it would typically have had to open a new division, hire talent, and invest in R&D in order to compete with existing companies in that area. Now it can simply buy them. There is a whole business model based on this idea, sometimes called “innovation through acquisition.” The model is often associated with the Internet technology company Cisco, which, starting in the early ’90s and continuing apace afterward, gobbled up more than 100 smaller companies. Other tech titans, including Oracle, have in recent years adopted much the same basic approach. Even Google, many people’s notion of an enlightened, innovative corporate Goliath, has acquired many of its game-changing technologies—such as Google Earth, Google Analytics, and Google Docs—from smaller start-ups that Google bought out. As the falloff in IPOs over the last decade seems to confirm, one practical result of all this is that fewer and fewer entrepreneurs at start-up companies even attempt any longer to build their firms into ventures able to produce not merely new products but new jobs and new competition into established companies. Instead, increasingly their goal, once they have proven that a viable business can be built around a particular technology, is simply to sell out to one of the behemoths.
Finally, dominant firms can hurt job growth by using their power to hamper the ability of start-ups and smaller rivals to bring new products to market. Google has been accused of doing this by placing its own services—maps, price comparisons—at the top of its search results while pushing competitors in those services farther down, where they are less likely to be seen—or in some cases off Google entirely. Google, however, is a Boy Scout compared to the bullying behavior of Intel, which over the years has leveraged its 90 percent share of the computer microchip market to impede its only real rival, Advanced Micro Devices, a company renowned for its innovative products. Intel has abused its power so flagrantly, in fact, that it has attracted an antitrust suit from New York State and been slapped with hefty fines or reprimands by antitrust regulators in South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. The EU alone is demanding a record $1.5 billion from the firm.
To understand just how disadvantaged small innovative companies are in markets dominated by behemoths, consider the plight of Retractable Technologies, Inc., of Little Elm, Texas. The company manufactures a type of “safety syringe” invented by its founder, an engineer named Thomas Shaw. The device uses a spring to pull the needle into the body of the syringe once the plunger is fully depressed. This helps to prevent the sort of “needlestick” injuries that every year result in some 6,000 health workers being infected by diseases such as hepatitis and HIV. Since starting the company in 1994, Shaw has carved out a modest market niche, selling his lifesaving product to nursing homes, doctors’ offices, federal prisons, VA hospitals, and international health organizations for distribution in the Third World. But he’s not been able to break into the mainstream U.S. hospital market. The reason, he says, is that a company called Becton Dickinson & Co. controls some 90 percent of syringe sales in America and enjoys enough power over hospital supply purchasing groups to all but block adoption of Shaw’s device. In 1998, Shaw sued, charging restraint of trade, and in 2004 won what looked like a stunning victory: Becton Dickinson agreed to settle for $100 million, and the purchasing groups promised to change their business practices. But according to executives at Retractable Technologies, things have only gotten worse. “We probably have less of our products in hospitals today than we did ten years ago,” says Shaw, who just won a patent-infringement case against Becton Dickinson and is pursuing another antitrust suit against the company. “I have spent what should have been the most creative, productive years of my life sitting in depositions. By the time I’m done fighting, my patents will have expired.”
A few years back, Bess Weatherman, the managing director of the health care division of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, spelled out the effect of such monopoly power on investments in new health care technologies. In a Senate hearing, Weatherman testified that “companies subject to, or potentially subject to, anti-competitive practices … will not be funded by venture capital. As a result, many of their innovations will die, even if they offer a dramatic improvement over an existing solution.”
The modern era of antitrust enforcement began in 1935, when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional. In the aftermath of that decision, populists in Congress and the administration moved swiftly to take the New Deal in a radically different direction. Unlike the corporatists, the populists believed that the central goal of government in the political economy should be to protect the individual citizen and society as a whole from the consolidation of power by the few. Antitrust laws were integral to this notion. In the immediate aftermath of the NIRA decision, Congress passed laws like the Robinson-Patman Anti-Price Discrimination Act and the Miller-Tydings Fair Trade Act, which restricted the power that big retailers could bring to bear on smaller rivals and on producers. By 1937, Roosevelt officials were shaping a “second” New Deal centered largely around the engineering of competition among large companies.
Populists have often been charged with being naive romantics who pine for a lost agrarian utopia. Yet in practice, most New Deal–era populists were perfectly at ease with concentration of power; they simply wanted the government to create at least some competition wherever possible and to regulate monopoly in those cases—like the provision of water or natural gas—where competition truly seemed wasteful. Indeed, many of the populists were strong proponents of industrial efficiency; they just didn’t believe that unregulated industrial monopoly ever was more efficient than competition among at least a few industrial firms. Under the direction of Thurmond Arnold, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice set out to engineer rivalries within large industries wherever possible. In the late 1930s, for example, the government brought an antitrust suit against Alcoa, which had commanded a monopoly over aluminum production. As the suit dragged on through the ’40s, the government sped up the process by selling aluminum plants built with public money during World War II to Alcoa’s would-be competitors, Kaiser and Reynolds.
The result of the second New Deal was an economy in which competition was regulated in three basic ways. “Natural” monopolies like water or gas service were left in place, and regulated or controlled directly by government. Heavy industry was allowed to concentrate operations to a large degree, but individual firms were made subject to antitrust law and forced to compete with one another. And in sectors of the economy where efficiencies of concentration were far harder to prove—retail, restaurants, services, farming—the government protected open markets.
One result was a remarkably democratic distribution of political economic power out to citizens and communities across America. Another was an astounding burst of innovation. As the industrial historian David Hounshell has documented, the new competition among large corporations led companies like DuPont and General Electric to ramp up their R&D activities and fashion the resulting technologies into marketable products. Smaller firms, meanwhile, were carefully protected from Goliaths, enabling entrepreneurs to develop not merely ideas but often entire companies to bring the ideas to market.
Antitrust enforcers weren’t content simply to prevent giant firms from closing off markets. In dozens of cases between 1945 and 1981, antitrust officials forced large companies like AT&T, RCA, IBM, GE, and Xerox to make available, for free, the technologies they had developed in-house or gathered through acquisition. Over the thirty-seven years this policy was in place, American entrepreneurs gained access to tens of thousands of ideas—some patented, some not—including the technologies at the heart of the semiconductor. The effect was transformative. In Inventing the Electronic Century, the industrial historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. argued that the explosive growth of Silicon Valley in subsequent decades was largely set in motion by these policies and the “middle-level bureaucrats” in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division who enforced them in the field.
In his 1962 collection of essays, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman argued against any application of antitrust law aside from breaking up labor unions and guilds like the American Medical Association that threatened to encumber the work of the capitalists. In his book, Friedman also developed a more palatable term for laissez faire: “free market.” Another leader of this movement, future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, focused on rehabilitating the efficiency argument that monopolists like Rockefeller and Morgan had once employed to justify their near- total domination of their industries.
The Chicago School thinkers—so named because many of its members taught at the University of Chicago—found their champion in Ronald Reagan, who brought their theories with him into the White House in 1981. Almost as soon as Reagan’s team took power, they made clear that one of their very first targets would be the antitrust laws. William F. Baxter, the head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division under Reagan, announced his intentions to “pursue an antitrust policy based on efficiency considerations.” The declaration was met by a strong bipartisan outcry in Congress, but the Reagan team skillfully reframed their ideas in terms that fit the policy mood of the era. The administration borrowed a page from Chicago School legal scholar Robert Bork, who in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox had made the case for the old efficiency argument in language adopted from the then-flourishing consumer movement. The reason to promote efficiency, Bork wrote, was to increase the “welfare” of the consumer. The basic argument was as simple as it was subversive: given that consumers benefit from lower prices, and given that greater scale and scope gives managers the power to drive down prices, we should embrace concentration rather than resist it.
Beginning in Reagan’s first term, antitrust enforcement all but ended. Throughout the 1980s, the opponents of antitrust sometimes buttressed their arguments by stoking fears about the supposed dangers posed to American manufacturers by their Japanese rivals. But for the most part such arguments proved unnecessary, as the government had already largely retired from the field, leaving corporations largely to their own devices. By the time Reagan left office, laissez faire had become conventional wisdom. The Clinton administration was more activist, cracking down on price-fixing schemes and bringing a high-profile antitrust action against Microsoft. But for the most part it accepted the new corporate consolidation guidelines that the Reagan team had devised. Waves of mergers and acquisitions came and went with few calls to reexamine our thinking about antitrust. In no small part this was because the economy as a whole seemed to be performing quite well; not only did prices for many goods fall, but for a short while toward the end of the Clinton years there was actually a shortage of workers in America. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the United States was in the midst of the longest period of sustained economic growth in its history.
But as we’ve seen, the great burst of business activity in the 1980s and ’90s was to a significant extent the result of actions taken by the federal government during previous decades of anti-trust enforcement. Indeed, many of the companies we most associate with the ’90s tech boom—Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Genentech—were actually founded in the 1970s, went public in the ’80s, and eventually grew big enough to force establishment behemoths like IBM to revolutionize their management philosophies and business models in order to compete. It is this dynamic—of radically innovative start-ups growing in size and eventually challenging the status quo—that drives most jobs creation. And it was precisely this dynamic that the pro-consolidation policies launched in the Reagan years would eventually upset. By the time the 2000s rolled around, industry after industry had been consolidated; the “innovation by acquisition” trend was in high gear; antitrust enforcement was reaching a new low in George W. Bush’s administration; and a plethora of global capital, unable to find enough attractive growing companies to invest in, started flowing into subprime mortgages and other financial exotica. The rest, as they say, is history.
That, at least, is one possible explanation for why the American jobs machine seems to have failed in the last decade. As we’ve noted, there are others as well, having to do with changes in technology and international trade. These other theories are open to debate, but at least they’re beingdebated. What isn’t getting talked about is the role industry consolidation might be playing in all this. That needs to change.
When we get serious about this task, we will find that an entire political economic model lies ready for our use—the one shaped largely by the populists in Congress and the Roosevelt administration during the second New Deal. Before we can make use of this ready-made system for distributing power and opportunity, however, we will first have to break up the intellectual monopoly that has been forged over so much political economic policymaking in Washington today. The generation of political economists who understood the theory and practice of antitrust as devised by the late New Dealers are mostly retired or dead, and the academic economists who today dominate most discussions either have little understanding of the political nature of antimonopoly law or are openly hostile.
That’s why our first step must be to repopulate our discussions of political economics with the voices of the people who actually make our economy go. After all, real entrepreneurs and real scientists and real executives and real bankers and real farmers and real software engineers and real venture capitalists tend to understand quite well how real power is used against them. Just as it is they who know better than anyone else what freedoms they require to go about the task of putting their fellow Americans back to work.
Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman
Barry C. Lynn directs the Open Markets Program at New America and is the author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. Phillip Longman is the policy director of the Open Markets Program and a senior editor at Washington Monthly. The following persons contributed to this package: Marcellus Andrews, Kevin Carty, Leah Douglas, Teddy Downey, Brian S. Feldman, Thomas Frank, Donald Kettl, Lina Khan, K. Sabeel Rahman, Jeffrey Rosen, Matt Stoller and Zephyr Teachout.
Saturday, July 10, 2021
RSN: Charles Pierce | Because of May Edwards, We Understand Where the Crooked Money Goes
10 July 21
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Yet her most important revelations as a whistleblower have fallen by the wayside, even in the criminal case the United States government has lodged against her.
n 2017, BuzzFeed News, under the byline of Jason Leopold, published the first in a series of blockbuster reports based on documents Leopold had obtained from FinCen, the office of the Department of the Treasury tasked with investigating financial crimes. This stories, and the ones that came after it, were invaluable in explaining to the country how widespread was the Russian ratfcking surrounding the 2016 Trump campaign and that year’s presidential election. It was as consequential a leak from a government source as we’d seen since the Pentagon Papers, but it didn’t have the same impact, largely because it got lost in all the other mischief the administration* was about.
On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a fascinating profile of Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, the whistleblower who gave Leopold the documents. The story was occasioned by the fact that Edwards is likely on her way to federal prison for six months.
She explained how she had tried to go through proper whistleblower channels when she witnessed corruption within the Treasury Department and did not hide that she had also gone to the press. “I could not stand by aimlessly,” she said, “as this would have been a violation of my oath of office, which is also a federal crime.”
The piece dips into the question of why some whistleblowers are celebrated the way Daniel Ellsberg has been, however belatedly, for handing over the Pentagon Papers, while some, like Edwards, get obscurity and jail sentences. The story posits that Edwards’ initial revelations were immediately drowned out by Robert Mueller’s announcement that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was the subject of the first FinCen leaks, was being charged with crimes related to his political work, including money-laundering.
More interesting, though, is the question the Post raises about why Edwards never was charged with leaking documents that led to the most devastating and wide-ranging revelations of all. Almost two years ago, a BuzzFeed reporter approached the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an organization that’s been bulldogging international financial crimes for years. The ICIJ, beloved here in the shebeen, was responsible for the massive leaks that became known as The Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers, which showed vividly how various international tramps and thieves, many of them in various governments, shuffled and hid their money all over the world.
Their conversation would launch a team effort that would come to fruition in September 2020, with the publication of hundreds of stories involving 400 journalists in 88 countries. Branded “The FinCEN Files,” they would tell the tale of how some of the world’s biggest banks facilitate international money laundering and corruption around the world — and how the U.S. government stood back and watched it happened. By then, Edwards had been under arrest for nearly a year for her role in leaking information for what would prove to be much smaller stories. But “The FinCEN Files” was also based on documents she handed off to Leopold.
The speculative position is that Edwards got a pass on these revelations because the Biden administration found them to be beneficial to its efforts to get tough on financial crimes. Which, if true, would make the prosecution and sentencing of Edwards for her other, less consequential, leaks seem distressingly whimsical. It’s clear that we don’t really have a handle on whistleblowers these days. (Reality Winner, I suspect, would have some interesting things to say on this subject.) As in Edwards’ case, the government doesn’t even seem to have a coherent idea of what a whistleblower is. Nevertheless, because of May Edwards, we know a great deal more about the crooks embedded in most of the governments of the world. Speaking for myself, that conforms to my personal policy preferences.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
The order targets three industrial sectors where his administration believes consolidation has led to higher prices -- agriculture, technology and drugs.
“The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” Biden said in a speech before signing the measure. He called himself a “proud capitalist” but said that he wants to “ensure our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism, it’s about capitalism working for people.”
He pinned blame for the rapid growth of U.S. corporations and their influence in society on Republican governments.
“Forty years ago we chose the wrong path, in my view,” he said, a date that would correspond with the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
“We are now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations acquire more and more power,” he said, and charged that the result has been slower economic growth and a declining standard of living. “I believe the experiment has failed.”
The order aims to “reverse these dangerous trends.” It directs more than a dozen federal agencies to begin 72 initiatives to strengthen competition, including with new regulations.
While large business lobbies in Washington criticized Biden’s approach, stocks took the news in stride as the benchmark S&P 500 reached another intraday high, rebounding from Thursday’s selloff. The Dow Jones Industrial and Nasdaq Composite indexes also rallied.
“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” Biden said. “It’s exploitation. For too many Americans that means accepting a bad deal for things they can’t go without.”
The Health and Human Services Department will be directed to come up with a plan within 45 days to counter high drug prices. The Agriculture Department is directed to make it easier for cow, pig and poultry farmers to sue slaughterhouses if they’re underpaid or suffer retaliation. And the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission are instructed to establish rules for internet providers and tech companies’ use of data.
“Robust competition is critical to preserving America’s role as the world’s leading economy,” Biden says in the order. “Yet over the last several decades, as industries have consolidated, competition has weakened in too many markets, denying Americans the benefits of an open economy and widening racial, income, and wealth inequality.”
Several cabinet members and top agency leaders were also invited to the signing event, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, FTC Chair Lina Khan and Acting FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel.
Business groups quickly lined up against the administration’s move.
“This executive order smacks of a ‘government knows best’ approach to managing the economy,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a statement. The initiative is “built on the flawed belief that our economy is over-concentrated, stagnant, and fails to generate private investment needed to spur innovation,” the chamber said.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that litigation against the new policies is possible, but that Biden believes he must “focus on what’s in the interest of American consumers.” When a “lack of competition” drives up prices and hurts workers, “he has a responsibility to act,” she said.
Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take groups of them into custody in June near McAllen, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
In May 2017, Border Patrol agents in Yuma, Ariz., began implementing a program known as the Criminal Consequence Initiative, which allowed for the prosecution of first-time border crossers, including parents who entered the United States with their children and were separated from them.
From July 1 to Dec. 31, 2017, 234 families were separated in Yuma, according to newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security, almost exactly the same number as were separated in a now well known pilot program in El Paso that year. Because the Yuma program began in May, and the existing data on family separations begins only in July, the number of separations there was likely higher than 234, a prospect the Biden administration is now investigating.
Some of the parents separated under the Yuma program still remain apart from their children four years later. Others are missing — lawyers and advocates have been unable to locate them since they were deported alone. The children separated in Yuma in 2017 were as young as 10 months old, according to government data.
The new information shows the difficulty of accounting for aspects of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, an ever-changing series of measures aimed at stopping migrants from crossing the border. Even the impact of family separation — perhaps the most scrutinized U.S. immigration policy of the last half-century — is not fully understood.
Though the formal period in which the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy was implemented spanned only April to June 2018, it’s now clear that separations began roughly a year before that along some stretches of the border. More than 5,600 families were separated between mid-2017 and mid-2018, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Biden administration is investigating whether more previously unregistered separations might have occurred earlier in Trump’s term.
The Yuma statistics were identified by the Biden administration as it attempts to reunify the migrant families separated under Trump. In that process, Biden officials have also learned that the geographic breadth of family separation was much greater than previously known.
Between 2017 and 2018, parents from at least 22 countries across five continents were separated from their children by U.S. immigration officials at the border. While the majority came from Central America, others came from as far away as the Congo, Kyrgyzstan and Hungary.
The family separation policy ended with a court order in June 2018. The federal government produced three different internal reports on its impacts, and Congress held multiple hearings. But the Yuma separations were not disclosed publicly until the release last month of a slim Department of Homeland Security report on the Biden administration’s efforts to reunify families.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is known to have conducted family separations in connection to the Zero-Tolerance Policy in the El Paso Border Patrol Sector from April 1 to December 31, 2017,” the department reported. But “the data suggest that a similar number of separations occurred in the Yuma Sector during this period.”
The department did not explain what happened in Yuma, but in interviews with government officials and lawyers and court transcripts and government documents, The Washington Post has come to understand details of the program. In several cases, Justice Department attorneys mentioned the Criminal Consequence Initiative in court as they prosecuted parents. In apprehension reports, Border Patrol agents used the program to justify separating parents.
Reached for comment, Customs and Border Protection said it could not confirm that the program led to separations.
“Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector carried out a prosecution initiative beginning in May 2017,” the agency said in a statement. “However, Border Patrol is unable to definitively link the Yuma Sector prosecution initiative to the 234 cases of in-scope family separations listed in the DHS Family Reunification Progress Report.”
The Criminal Consequence Initiative was applied in four Border Patrol sectors in the spring of 2017. The prosecution of first-time border crossers was a goal championed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The program prioritized repeat offenders and felons. But in 2017, roughly half of those apprehended in Yuma were part of family units, according to DHS data. It was often parents who were referred for prosecution under the program — and were separated from their children in the process.
The Trump administration apparently separated and prosecuted parents in Yuma daily throughout much of 2017. The effort appears to have flow under the radar in part because the Yuma sector is among the most remote along the border. For months before the program’s inception, Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot had been pushing for a program that would hold all undocumented border crossers in the sector accountable.
“Without aggressive prosecution by the U.S. attorney’s office of all those committing criminal acts as a result of breaching our border, the American people will continue to see a border that is an open opportunity for this criminal element to exploit,” Wilmot said in a February 2017 Congressional hearing.
In March 2017, then-Homeland Security secretary John Kelly told CNN that he was considering separating migrant families to deter their arrival at the border. The children, he said, “will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.”
After those comments prompted outrage, Kelly backtracked, telling members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Oversight Committee in April 2017 that families would remain together unless the “situation at the time requires it.”
But a month later, a surge in family separations sent a shock through Yuma’s federal courts.
“I remember it was pretty horrible. It was a very dramatic increase very quickly,” said Nora Nuñez, an attorney in the Yuma County Public Defender’s office, who defended many of the separated parents.
“Suddenly, I was getting tons of them, often several a day,” she said. “My thought was that maybe it was a test run.”
That July, James F. Metcalf, a U.S. magistrate judge, ruled on an early separation case, a Guatemalan father named Rene Jimon who had been separated from his daughter.
In that hearing, Metcalf remarked that such cases were not uncommon in Yuma.
“I am concerned about the fact that you have this child, but you should be assured that you aren’t the first person in this situation,” Metcalf told Jimon, according to an audio recording of the trial. “The government has set up a process for situations like this and children are taken care of and provided a safe environment under these situations.”
In the Border Patrol’s apprehension paperwork, agents were clear after the program was implemented that parents would need to be separated so they could be prosecuted.
In one apprehension slip, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, an agent wrote that a Guatemalan mother who was prosecuted under the initiative in July 2017 “was separated from [her daughter] due to [her] presentation of a prosecution reinstatement.”
The geographical spread of the separated families has come as a surprise to those working on the reunification effort.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, they came not only from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but also Angola, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, the Congo, Ecuador, Hungary, India, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.
Officials say it is possible that some of those far-flung families have already been reunified. But because the Trump administration kept limited records, the only way to confirm whether families remain separated is often to contact the parents. Officials say they are hoping families that remain separated will contact them as the reunification programs gets more global attention.
“I hope that many of those families, as they hear that there is this opportunity, will come forward,” said Michelle Brané, the director of the DHS family reunification task force. “Our job is to create this sense of trust, to create a safe mechanism for people to do that.”
The ACLU, which was given access to government data through a court order, has catalogued cases that hint at the policy’s global impact.
In August of 2017, for example, a father from Tajikistan was separated from his 4-year-old daughter. In October of 2017, a mother from Romania was separated from her 6-year-old son. In April of 2018, three siblings from Nigeria — 12, 14 and 16 years old — were separated from their dad. In December 2017, a two year old boy from Brazil was separated from his father.
“We know from the documents provided in the litigation that families separated by the Trump administration came not just from Central America but all over the world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney on the ACLU’s family separation litigation. “Which will make the process of putting this all back together that much more difficult.”
Workers remove the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Market Street Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)
The small Virginia city said the equestrian statue of Gen Robert E Lee and a nearby statue of Gen Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson would be removed to storage. Designated public viewing areas for the removals had been established.
A crane was moved into place and workers were preparing as the sun came up first to hoist Lee away. Just after 8am local time, the statue of the man on his horse was hoisted slowly off its plinth.
Charlottesville’s mayor, Nikuyah Walker, gave a speech in front of public and media as the lifting equipment was moved into position.
“Taking down this statue is one small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and America grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain,” she said.
Lee led Confederate forces during the American civil war, which the Confederacy fought between 1861 and 1865 in an attempt to maintain slavery. Jackson rose to fame in the first years of the conflict before dying of pneumonia after being mistakenly shot by his own men.
The Jackson statue was erected in 1921 and Lee in 1924, nearly 60 years after the war ended in the total defeat of the Confederacy but was followed an era of official racial segregation across southern states.
The statues will be toppled more than five years after calls for their removal began to gain momentum. In 2016, Zyahna Bryant, then a 16-year-old high-school student, was given an assignment that asked her to describe something she could change. She started a petition to remove the statue of Lee.
In response, the city council set up a commission on race, memorials and public Spaces. In February 2017 the council voted for removal, angering white supremacist groups.
The Lee statue became a rallying point for such extremists, culminating in a “Unite the Right” rally in August that year. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists congregated in Charlottesville to defend the Lee statue and a counter-protester, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, was killed. A white supremacist was convicted of her murder.
Because of litigation and changes to a state law, the city was unable to act before holding public hearings and offering the statue to any museum, historical society or battlefield. This week, the city said it had received 10 such expressions of interest, “six out-of-state and four in-state that are all under review”.
Take ’Em Down CVille, a group that campaigns for racial justice, applauded news of the planned removal.
“The messages from the public were moving and powerful,” it said. “No one believes that removing the statues will end white supremacy but this is an important step – and one long past due.”
Preparations included the installation of fencing, the city said, adding that both statues would be stored in a secure location on city property until the council reaches a decision on their relocation.
The removal follows years of contention, community anguish and litigation. A long, winding legal fight coupled with changes in a state law that protected war memorials had held up the removal for years.
Saturday’s actions came almost four years after violence erupted at the infamous “Unite the Right” extremist rally. After a torchlit march and racist chanting, rightwingers including members of known white supremacy groups clashed violently with counter-protesters, culminating in Heyer, a peaceful counter-protester, being murdered when she was mown down by a car driven into a demonstration.
The crisis sparked a national debate over racial equity and the then president, Donald Trump, inflamed the conflict by insisting there was “blame on both sides” of the issue in Charlottesville over that bloody weekend.
Disability rights activists are among the biggest supporters of expanding Supplemental Security Income. (photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
The coming battle to expand Supplemental Security Income, explained.
n a couple of weeks, the US will start sending monthly checks to the vast majority of American parents. Most other rich countries have policies similar to this (known as a child allowance). If these expanded child tax credit (CTC) checks get to everyone who’s eligible, they could slash child poverty in America by about 40 percent.
But it could also be only the first of several improvements to America’s social-safety net. An array of powerful Democrats in Congress, as well as advocates for the elderly and people with disabilities (like AARP), have been championing another major change as part of this fall’s legislative push: boosting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits.
SSI is not one of the better-known safety net programs in the US. It was passed into law in 1972 after Richard Nixon tried and failed to get Congress to adopt his “guaranteed annual income” plan, essentially a kind of unconditional basic income that would have given the poorest households in America a guaranteed cash benefit.
That plan ran into conservative opposition, but its opponents acceded to two more modest proposals.
One was the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives working adults (especially those with children) a bigger tax break — and potentially a bigger refund — tied to how much they’ve worked.
The other was SSI, meant to help those the EITC didn’t capture: disabled, blind (a different category than “disabled” for legal purposes), and elder Americans living in poverty.
Many people in those categories qualify for Social Security payments because they’ve paid into the OASDI (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) program throughout their working lives via payroll tax.
But many other people — those under 18, or adults who are never able to work — don’t qualify for Social Security. Even many who do qualify for Social Security still earn a low-enough income to receive additional payments from SSI: About one-third of the 7.8 million SSI recipients are also on Social Security.
The point of SSI, in theory, is to make sure that no American who is permanently and totally disabled, blind, or over the age of 65 lives in poverty.
In practice, though, the program helps a lot but has yet to meet that goal.
How SSI has fallen short
In 2021, the maximum SSI benefit for an individual is $9,530.12 per year. The poverty line for a single person is $12,880 — meaning that SSI, at most, brings recipients up to less than three-quarters of the poverty line.
It gets worse, though. Let’s say you’re an SSI recipient married to another recipient, which makes you an “eligible couple.” You could both be retirees in your 70s, or disabled/blind people earlier in life.
You don’t get to add your benefit amounts together. Instead, you have to share a maximum benefit of $14,293.61, only 50 percent more than the individual benefit. The effect is a really dramatic marriage penalty: Two SSI recipients receive a large income boost if they get divorced, but those who marry take a big cut in benefits.
In late May 2020, Joe Biden announced his campaign’s disability policy platform, which included major expansions of SSI benefits. The plan set the maximum benefit at 100 percent of the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in benefits over the status quo. The proposal would also eliminate both the marriage penalty — letting couples keep their full benefits — and the complex “in-kind assistance” provisions that result in reduced SSI checks for some people who, say, live for free in a family member’s home.
There’s more. SSI is currently limited to people with assets of less than $2,000, or $3,000 for couples. That means many seniors who have even a small amount of retirement savings, as well as disabled people with nest eggs, aren’t eligible.
Biden would more than double the asset limit for individuals and nearly triple it for couples. I’d personally prefer getting rid of the asset test altogether, as it can encourage people to spend every bit of savings they have to qualify for the benefit; that said, raising it is an improvement.
Biden has recently faced a strong push from his allies in Congress to include these changes in the huge $6 trillion spending package Democrats plan to pass later this summer or in the fall.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a freshman congressman from New York, and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown are leading the charge, with figures including Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders and Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden on board.
The group in April sent a letter to Biden, signed by a total of 18 senators and 33 members of the House, urging him to make expanded SSI a priority.
Major parts of the Democratic coalition, like the AFL-CIO union federation, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, and the AARP, are on board. The changes have overwhelming public support — as have other recent programs designed to simply give people money, like the stimulus checks and the previously mentioned CTC checks.
And like the CTC checks, these changes could have a major impact on poverty in America. The Urban Institute estimates that the combination of SSI changes and other Social Security reforms Biden has proposed would lift 1.4 million elderly or disabled people out of poverty in 2021. While increasing SSI alone would do less, it would still be a significant step forward for the people impacted.
And if SSI improvements happen alongside the child checks, they’d cement Biden’s first term as a period that saw some of the biggest changes to the American social-safety net in decades.
Police officers guard a group of assassination suspects in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 8,2021. (photo: Jean Marc Herve Abelard/EPA/Shutterstock)
The deployment of U.S. forces would mark a major escalation of U.S. involvement, one that it's unclear President Joe Biden is interested in making.
The U.S. has agreed to send senior officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to Haiti to assist the government's investigation of the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, the White House announced Friday.
The assistance comes after two U.S. citizens were among the 17 men arrested by Haitian authorities for the head of state's shocking murder, which threatens to plunge Haiti further into chaos amid competing claims to power.
The political and security crises afflicting the Caribbean country are rivaled only by the coronavirus pandemic. Haiti is one of only a handful of countries in the world that has yet to distribute a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and that will once again be delayed because of the deep insecurity, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Seventeen suspects have been detained, according to interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph's office, including two Americans and 15 Colombians.
Four other suspects were killed by police in a shootout late Wednesday, according to Haitian officials. Leon Charles, chief of Haiti's National Police, said Thursday that eight other suspects were on the run, according to The Associated Press.
Four members of Moise's security detail are also wanted for questioning, according to Haitian government commissioner Bed-Ford Claude, including the head of his security detail.
It's unclear how the assailants were able to access the private presidential residence. The group said they were agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, according to Haitian Ambassador to the U.S. Bocchit Edmond, a claim that the Haitian and U.S. governments have denied. It may have gotten them past some security, although Edmond told ABC News it's "obvious" that the group of "international mercenaries," as he called them, had "some internal help," too.
One of the detained Americans has been identified as 35-year old James Solanges, according to Mathias Pierre, Haiti's elections minister, who declined to name the other American.
On a website for his charity, Solanges, a Florida resident, described himself as a "certified diplomatic agent" and said he previously worked as a bodyguard at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti -- claims that ABC News could not independently verify.
"We are certainly aware of the arrest of the two U.S. citizens who are in Haiti and continue to closely monitor the situation," State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said Friday, declining to comment further because of "privacy considerations" and referring questions to Haitian authorities leading the investigation.
The White House announced it would deploy senior officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to assess the situation and provide assistance to Haitian authorities.
The Haitian government had requested assistance from the FBI, saying it "can play a critical role in rendering justice," and called for sanctions on "all perpetrators who are directly responsible or aided and abetted in the execution of the assassination of the President," according to a letter from Edmond to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that was obtained by ABC News.
In addition, the government has asked for U.S. troops, according to Pierre, although it's unclear whether that request has been made through formal channels. The State Department declined to address a question about Pierre's comments during a press briefing Friday afternoon.
The U.S. is also being called upon to help calm the political turmoil, especially amid competing claims to power and the threat of gang violence erupting again on the streets.
Haiti's line of succession had already been blurred by its political turmoil. Political opponents argued Moise's five-year term ended in February, while he said the term ended in February 2022, five years after his 2017 inauguration -- a claim backed by the U.S. and United Nations.
But who is in charge is further confused because Moise selected Ariel Henry, a surgeon and former minister, to serve as his new interim prime minister just days before his assassination. While Henry has told some local media outlets that he is the rightful leader, the U.S. is backing Joseph in his claim of legitimacy.
Because "Claude Joseph was the incumbent in the position ... we continue to work with Claude Joseph as such," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Thursday, adding that U.S. officials have been in touch with him and Henry and urging calm.
Joseph and Blinken spoke by phone Wednesday night -- another boost of support -- and the U.S. has backed his messages of stability and his calls for free and fair elections and national dialogue.
The transfer of power to Joseph is not in line with Haiti's constitution, which says the president should be replaced by the head of the Supreme Court who is "invested temporarily with the duties of the president" by the National Assembly. But the country's chief justice died from COVID-19 just two weeks ago, and the legislature has been disbanded since January 2020 after the country failed to hold legislative elections in October 2019.
Elections for the National Assembly and president have already been scheduled for late September, but many critics and political opposition leaders have said the country is not in position to hold them freely or fairly. It's unclear if Joseph will push to move ahead with them, or even be able to, but the State Department said Thursday those elections should go ahead as planned.
One major hurdle to holding those contests is the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to rage in Haiti. Cases last month were as high as they were one year prior, and the country has yet to receive any doses from COVAX, the international program to provide vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.
UNICEF was preparing to ship vaccines to Haiti as soon as this week, but because of the assassination and ensuing turmoil that no longer looks likely, a source familiar with the shipments told ABC News.
"Rising gang criminality and increased insecurity has hindered humanitarian operations in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince," UNICEF said in a statement Friday, adding it has "stepped up its efforts to use more sophisticated logistics and consider alternative routes to bring assistance more effectively to children in need."
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Michele Sison was able to return to the capital yesterday from Washington, where she was attending previously scheduled meetings -- a sign, perhaps, that the embassy has no plans to evacuate American personnel. Price declined to comment on security there, except to say the embassy is "constantly evaluating" the situation and would remain closed to the public through Monday.
Visitors gather to view Delicate Arch at Arches National Park in Utah. (photo: Claire Harbage/NPR)
The miles-long climb for a family photo beneath the 52-foot-tall behemoth at Arches National Park is worth it for Judy Lee and daughter Lindsey Cho. They're on a road trip through the Southwest from their home in Orange County, Calif.
"It's almost our turn, woo-hoo!" Cho says, while she and her mom take sips from their water bottles.
The anticipation is real. Delicate Arch in this soft morning light is awesome. Spin around though, and there's perhaps a less inspiring view: a line nearing 100 people deep, all waiting to take the exact same photo that makes it look to friends and family back home that they're here in solitude.
"I think people have been inside a lot for the past year, so they're eager to come out into nature as much as they can," Cho says.
She and her mom don't mind the crowds; even a two-hour, early-morning wait for the shuttles at their previous stop, Zion National Park, was a chance to visit and mingle after months of lockdowns.
"I miss doing that; you get to meet people from all over," Lee says.
Parks are fielding crowds, litter and human feces on the trails
The National Park Service no doubt appreciates this patience as it grapples with how to manage an explosion in visitation at parks from Utah to Maine since the pandemic. Arches has seen record visitation this summer, even without the dependable crowds of Europeans who would be here despite the blistering heat were it not for the pandemic. The last nine months have been the busiest at Arches since it became a national park about a half-century ago.
Indeed it's one pandemic trend that doesn't appear to be ending. Some parks — such as Glacier in Montana and Rocky Mountain in Colorado — have moved to timed entries at some locations.
There's renewed pressure on other popular parks such as Arches to take similar steps.
In Yellowstone, which reported its busiest May ever, photos on social media show milelong lines of idling cars and RVs at entrance gates. In perennially busy parks such as Yosemite and Zion, visitors and staff alike complain of an increase in litter, toilet paper and human feces on trails.
Parks such as Arches and nearby Canyonlands are also seeing an uptick in first-time visitors, some of whom don't seem to understand the parks' environmental protection mission or that wildlife is indeed wild, while others arrive ill-prepared for the harshness of nature.
"A lot of the first-time visitors are just not familiar with national parks and our mission to preserve these resources," says Angie Richman, chief of education, interpretation and visitor services at Arches and Canyonlands.
Most days by 8 a.m., Arches is forced to close its lone entrance gate because parking lots are already full and most trails are at capacity. Some days the gate can stay closed for up to five hours.
Do you have a reservation?
One early morning, Amy Hill of North Carolina was relieved to get in. She and her husband rose before dawn after guests at their hotel warned them to get there early or risk not seeing Arches at all. It was a bucket list stop on a tour where they also planned to visit the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde national parks.
"I think [it] would be better to have a reservation and know that you were going to be able to get in rather than getting here and not being able to get in at all," Hill says.
A reservation system was proposed a few years back, but then it was scrapped due to controversy that it might limit public access and hurt local tourist businesses.
But today Arches feels like it's at a breaking point. A timed entry or ticketing system is now back on the table, along with other ideas such as mandatory or voluntary shuttles and even a new road that some argue could help ease congestion through the park's remote canyons and stunning red rock formations.
Richman says the current daily closures were never meant to be a long-term solution.
"Initially it was intended to just happen on our busy holiday weekends, and prior to COVID that was the case," she says. "But since we've been so busy, we've now had to close almost every day since March."
More people are visiting national parks, but fewer are working at them
The overcrowding crisis comes at a time when national parks are struggling to fill positions — from interpretive park rangers to law enforcement, right down to the workers Richman can't find to staff the entry gates and collect fees.
The Park Service has been plagued by budget woes for years, and the agency hasn't had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director in more than four years. The Biden administration has yet to nominate anyone either.
In nearby Moab, help wanted signs are also posted along Main Street, including at the popular Back of Beyond Books. Owner Andy Nettell spent most of his career as a Park Service ranger.
"I don't think they've done a very good job of seeing the trends and meeting those trends," Nettell says. "How do we manage these millions of people? We can't just increase the size of the parking lots."
Business owners and elected officials in this famous adventure-tourism town are worried that long term, visitors might stop coming because services are limited and the natural beauty is getting trampled.
"Instead of marketing, hey, come to Moab, it's a blast, now we're marketing, come to Moab and when you do, know before you go," says Emily Niehaus, the town's mayor.
The mayor and City Council as well as the Grand County Commission have pressed the Park Service to get a timed entry system in place at Arches as early as Labor Day. Arches officials haven't yet committed to a time frame for releasing a longer term proposal to the public.
You have to race the clock even to get parking
Still, according to a range of interviews with business owners, local leaders and visitors, most everyone seemed to agree that the crowds that have built up over the years are seriously threatening the very thing national parks were set aside to protect.
"I think because more than ever with the pandemic, people are trying to get in here, and there's an influx that they should regulate it to a certain extent," Ollie Hays says.
She was visiting Arches with her husband and family as part of a summer road trip through the West from their home in Virginia. They got to the Windows Arch trailhead parking lot by 7 a.m. and barely got in.
"People are already parking kind of crazy," says Ricky Hays, Ollie's husband.
That morning she and her family suddenly found themselves pining for a previous stop they made a few days back in a wilderness area in Colorado. It was serene and mostly empty. Maybe it's time for Americans to spread out a bit, they said.
"There's so many things to be seen that are not national parks," Ollie Hays says.
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