11 July 21
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11 July 21
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Cybersecurity comes down to which side has access to more information about the other and can utilize it best
his week, shares in China’s giant ride-hailing app Didi crashed by more than 20%. A few days before, Didi had raised $4.4bn in a massive IPO in New York – the biggest initial public offering by a Chinese company since Alibaba’s debut in 2014.
The proximate cause of Didi’s crash was an announcement by China’s Cyberspace Administration that it suspected Didi of illegally collecting and using personal information. Pending an investigation, it had ordered Didi to stop registering new users and removed Didi’s app from China’s app stores.
China’s state-owned Global Times noted in an editorial Monday that Didi has the “most detailed personal travel information” of users among all large technology firms, and that the company posed a potential risk for individuals because it could conduct big data analysis of users’ habits and behavior.
But since when does Beijing worry about the privacy of Chinese citizens? China’s government does everything in its power to spy on them.
More likely, the massive IPO in New York sparked anxiety in Beijing that the United States might gain access to huge amounts of personal information about where Chinese people live, work and travel – data that might threaten China’s national security.
On Wednesday, China’s antitrust regulator fined several internet companies, including Didi, for allegedly violating the country’s anti-monopoly law.
The emerging cold war between Beijing and Washington is less about traditional arms than about data – gathering, aggregating, analyzing and making maximum use of it to outmaneuver the other side. Cybersecurity comes down to which side has access to more information about the other and can use it best.
This week China also announced it would increase regulation of overseas-listed tech companies, monitoring what kind of information they send and receive across the nation’s borders. The official rationale: ensuring Chinese customers are safe from cybercrime and leaks of personal information. The probable reason: national security.
Politicians in Washington are almost as nervous as politicians in Beijing about outflows of information to the other side.
Senator Marco Rubio told the Financial Times it was “reckless and irresponsible” for the New York stock exchange to allow Didi to sell shares. His avowed concern? Protecting retired Americans.
“Even if the stock rebounds, American investors still have no insight into the company’s financial strength because the Chinese Communist party block US regulators from reviewing the books,” huffed Rubio. “That puts the investments of American retirees at risk and funnels desperately needed US dollars into Beijing.”
Please. If Rubio and other US lawmakers were genuinely intent on protecting American investors, Rubio and his colleagues would try to restrict how much American savings flow into China through US pension funds, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
Yet Chinese companies now constitute the largest share of major emerging market indexes guiding where American savings move around the globe. And despite the escalating geopolitical tensions, China’s allocation has grown dramatically over the last few years. Global bond indexes have even added Chinese government bonds to their portfolios.
US portfolio investment in Chinese companies and government securities together could total more than $1tn by the end of 2021.
US lawmakers’ real concern about Didi and other big Chinese high-tech firms gaining financial footholds in the US is that they might collect boatloads of data about the US, and yet they’re answerable to the Chinese government – in other words, the mirror image of Beijing’s concern.
Beijing’s and Washington’s data security concerns are understandable. Yet as a practical matter, the two economies are intertwined. Officially, the Chinese economy is still state-run and communist. Unofficially, its hi-tech chieftains are as capitalist – and have grown almost as rich – as their American counterparts.
Entrepreneurs and financial wizards in both China and the United States well understand that the two nations together constitute the biggest market in the world. They’ll continue to do everything they can to make money in this giant market, regardless of the increasing techno-nationalism of their respective politicians.
This means the most interesting conflict ahead isn’t between China and the US as such. It’s between business elites in both nations who are seeking big profits, and the political elites in both nations who want to protect their countries, and in so doing, their own centers of power.
Haitian citizens ask for asylum in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tabarre, Haiti, on Saturday. (photo: Valerie Baeriswyl/AFP/Getty Images)
Pentagon officials noted that the request was broad and did not specify the number or types of forces needed.
Thus far, administration officials have expressed caution about any deployment to Haiti, reflecting the fast pace of events since attackers killed President Jovenel Moïse in his home on Wednesday, but also a broader shift in American attitudes toward military interventions as the 20-year war in Afghanistan winds down.
Biden administration officials, while sympathetic to the humanitarian misery unfolding some 700 miles south of Florida, and mindful of a potential mass exodus of Haitian refugees like one that occurred in the 1990s, nevertheless show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited American force into the midst of politically-based civil strife and disorder.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
. . . The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.—“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne
eorge Floyd is dead while I write this story. If I had written these words a little more than a year ago, G.F. alive. In a year, he will not be alive, whether I write or don’t write this story about him. Except perhaps alive in the way stories live, or alive as people say people are alive in stories. People saying that as if they do not understand: dead once, dead forever. As if they don’t know that once is all the time a person ever gets to be alive. As if they don’t know that G.F. doesn’t hear, doesn’t desire mourning, clamor, and cries. As if they do not comprehend that their millions of bodies piled up or kneeling in prayer or prostrate in the street next to G.F. all weigh less than this sheet of paper on which I scribble, and that the commotion, agitation, exercise of their millions upon millions of hearts and minds will not summon a single breath of air when G.F. needs it.
I will not pretend to bring G.F. to life. Nor pretend to bring life to him. G.F. gone for good. Won’t return. No place for G.F. except the past. And the past is not even past, a wise man once declared. Same abyss behind and in front of us is what the wisecracker writer signifying, I believe, and, if I truly believe what he believed, where would I situate G.F. if presented with an opportunity to put him somewhere alive? Not here. Not here in this story where I know better.
Better to forget G.F. Better to let go, or simply leave G.F. alone, thank you, than attempt to invent the point of view of a person not here, not where I am, a person who somehow possesses the power to see G.F. breathing, moving around, to hear G.F.’s thoughts. A person also able to observe me here, myself performing this grief, this terror and anger, this attempt to console myself and define and control and locate myself, establish myself as one who is offering a story about G.F., a true story confirming my suffering, my connection to him, a story about who he is, who I am, a story about myself, as if I am not here where I am and he is not where he is. As if the two of us not permanently separate as life from death. As dreams from objects dreamed.
Better to acknowledge impenetrable darkness surrounding G.F. and me, black darkness blinding me when I pretend I can speak with the authority of a being I imagine whose perspective absolutely reliable. Why write as if I can access the power such an angelic being might possess. As if I am able to employ that power to see, to enter G.F. Power to convince myself, or anybody who might be paying attention or reading or simply curious, that my feelings for G.F., my performance, my outrage, my rituals of claiming and disclaiming an unbreakable relationship to him are authentic. Serve some useful purpose. That my eyes, words reliable, convincing as words, eyes of that imaginary observer I proposed a few sentences ago. Why call upon some sort of supernatural observer to bear witness. Attempt to own that point of view. Imitating it to move closer to G.F. Move outside myself.
I find each move unsatisfactory. A kind of presumption. Wishful thinking at best. Guilt and avoidance at worst. Pretending not to be here where I am, here with many millions of others upset over G.F., people who watch online, who march, throng avenues and streets, behind mikes, on TV, in front of TVs, assuming they may be rightfully, righteously blamed, perhaps, but also hoping to be spared, forgiven. Given another chance. Here in this place where I am, too. Whether or not I pretend I can inhabit some impossibly different space. A place elsewhere in which I am neither exactly dead nor alive, where I am suspended, invisible, yet able to observe myself and observe G.F. as neither living nor dead. Despite absolute darkness, to observe G.F. here, to observe myself here, despite or because we are not present here, but elsewhere, nowhere in fact, or wherever anybody chooses to imagine or not imagine she or he might be. Wherever I’m pretending I am.
For example, pretending not to breathe. A cop knee (I know him—know the motherfucker’s name) pressing down on the neck. Choking, suffocating me. How long. How long. Hands cuffed behind back. Cop body sits on my body pressing it down in a city street. Many shoes, boots shuffling too close to eyes. Wonder if they will stomp my eyes. Wonder what street. What city. Wonder how long dead while wondering.
How long. How long. How to make it real. Not to bid a victim, loved or unloved, adieu. Not to say farewell. Not leave-taking, not goody, good, goodbye. But return to scene of crime. Recount each blow like a senator on the Senate floor who produces cinema verité for his colleagues—pounding rostrum POW-POW-POW-POW-POW—fifty-six times in eighty-one seconds—like cop fists, cop feet striking Rodney King’s body fifty-six hard, loud times—for eighty-one seconds—ignite cities. Like the four hundred blows—les quatre cents coups, as the French saying goes—dirty tricks delivered blow after blow in a black-and-white movie for viewers to silently regard—four hundred uncountable blows beating a boy to his knees. Different strokes for different folks in different countries. Same pain always. Whose. Whose blows. In whose language did the recorder hear Truffaut saying: I demand that a film either express the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in anything in between.
As I read, I learn more about goodbyes, farewells to the dead, about narrative art, about protests, protesters, protestations, learn that the singer Esther Phillips, née Jones, born colored on December 23, 1935, in Galveston, Texas—two days later and you could call her an Xmas present—learn she recorded “No Headstone on My Grave,” a Charlie Rich song, in 1962, eleven years before G.F. was born, with all his live years ahead of him before he’s on his stomach on hard concrete or asphalt of a Minneapolis street begging for more breath, more life than he’s going to get. Wondering how he hears, of all things, a blues/church-voiced woman singing words he can’t quite make out, words gone quick as they come, quick as they go, but slow, too, and sad words, no doubt, very gotdamn sad brushing past, he whiffs thick sad on them, sad in a voice sad as blues and church, sad, slow, quick as a very last breath nobody ever hears anyway neck squeezed in a vise or not. . . . Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t / Don’t put no headstone on my grave / All my life I’ve been a slave. . . . Just put me down and let me be / Free from all this misery. . . . Tell my mother not to cry. . . . Tell her that I’m finally free. . . . Don’t put no headstone. . . . Words passing, dangling, no place to go like the man seen dangling from a rope ain’t going no place else but there where he sways in that old South story old people tell and some soul long ago snapped photos, scared the shit out him, but ain’t him, ain’t me, is it exactly that she sings to, sings for. Timing all wrong, and, anyway, another country, bro, and besides the wench dead (August 7, 1984). And we outlive King, too, don’t we—drowned (June 17, 2012) in his own swimming pool.
People opposing the Texas Republican-led effort to pass new voting restrictions gather at the State Capitol before testifying to state lawmakers who began committee hearings on election integrity bills on July 10 in Austin. (photo: Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images)
ervis Rogers was so intent on casting a ballot in last year’s presidential primary that he waited six hours to vote, catching the attention of a CNN news crew when he became the last person to do so at his Houston polling place.
Rogers, now 62, debated leaving, he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera as he exited a polling center at Texas Southern University after midnight on March 4. “But I said to myself, ‘Nah. Don’t do that.’ It was set up for me to walk away, but I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ ”
More than a year later, Rogers was arrested on charges that he voted in last year’s Democratic primary while on parole. Under Texas law, it is illegal for a felon to “knowingly” vote while still serving a sentence, including parole. Doing so is a second-degree felony, punishable with a minimum of two years and a maximum of 20 years in prison. In at least 20 states, Rogers’s alleged vote would not be a crime.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ordered the arrest, defended the charges on social media Friday night, tweeting, “Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law . . . I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”
But Rogers’s lawyers and civil rights advocates argue that Rogers was not aware that he was ineligible to vote, meaning he should not be charged with “knowingly” committing fraud. His willingness to stand in line for six hours and submit to a cable-news interview proves it, they said.
“He’s really devastated,” said Andre Segura, the legal director for the ACLU of Texas and one of Rogers’s lawyers. “He does not want to go back to jail.”
Critics also questioned the timing of Rogers’s arrest last Wednesday, a day before the Texas Legislature convened for a special session to consider new voting restrictions that Democrats blocked in May. The legislation — one of the most far-reaching election proposals in the country — would, among other things, enact new criminal penalties for mistakes such as errors on mail ballots.
“What [Republicans] are doing is trying to signal to their primary voters that they are as far to the right wing of their party as they could possibly be,” said Chris Hollins, a former elections clerk in Harris county, home of Houston. “And they’re doing this not because they care about people but because they care about themselves and their own political aspirations.”
In Austin on Saturday, several Democratic lawmakers accused Republicans, including Paxton, of intentionally targeting minorities.
“You know, this guy thought he could vote,” said state Sen. Borris Miles of Houston, who held up a printed photo of Rogers in a Senate committee hearing on the legislation. “He was under the belief in his mind that he really could. Served his time, got a nice job, nice family, now, thought he could vote, just thought he was doing his civic duty.”
Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican sponsor of the Senate bill, denied that the measure would restrict voting. “We’re always refining and trying to improve the process,” he said. “Unfortunately, this one has become bitterly partisan.”
Enacting voter restrictions in the name of improving election security has become a nationwide rallying cry for Republicans, who have pushed measures to limit voting in dozens of state legislatures. There is no evidence that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but he has regularly championed his tough stance on voting fraud.
Paxton is under investigation himself. Last month, the State Bar of Texas announced it would examine whether Paxton’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania amounted to “professional misconduct.”
At issue is a lawsuit Paxton filed seeking to invalidate those states’ electoral college votes — which delivered President Biden his victory. The Supreme Court dismissed the case within hours of its filing in December.
Paxton was unrepentant about the investigation, tweeting last month: “I will NEVER stop fighting to protect your votes.”
The attorney general is also under state investigation, accused of felony securities fraud for allegedly persuading investors to buy technology stocks without disclosing his own financial interest. He has called the charges politically motivated.
Some critics of Rogers’s arrest said Paxton intentionally targeted a Black voter to create a chilling effect for other Texans of color, who make up a disproportionate share of felons and might choose not to vote rather than risk arrest if they are unsure of their eligibility.
Critics also blamed Republican lawmakers for refusing to reform the voter registration system so that an ineligible voter like Rogers can’t be allowed to register. “They want a bunch of people to be in a state of confusion about their eligibility — including eligible voters,” Hollins said. “And if you’re in that state of confusion, they want you to stay home.”
Rogers was charged in Montgomery County, north of Houston, under a Texas law that allows criminal charges to be brought in adjacent counties to where the alleged crime occurred. Critics called it “forum-shopping,” noting that Paxton has a history of bringing charges in adjacent counties that are more conservative and more likely to have juries, grand juries and judges sympathetic to his cases.
In one instance last year, he sought to indict a Democratic election official in Harris County on charges that he had obstructed a poll watcher. But even in more conservative Montgomery County, where Paxton sought the indictment, a grand jury determined there was insufficient evidence.
Rodney Ellis, a Harris County commissioner, said the attorney general’s office didn’t inform anyone in his jurisdiction of Rogers’s impending arrest.
Paxton has been an outspoken crusader against voter fraud in Texas for years, garnering national headlines in 2019 when he falsely claimed that roughly 100,000 noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Texas and more than half had cast ballots.
President Donald Trump amplified the news at the time, tweeting the numbers were “just the tip of the iceberg!”
It became quickly clear, however, that the vast majority of those counted were naturalized citizens who had been flagged incorrectly because of outdated state motor vehicle records.
Paxton has also touted his record of seeking fraud convictions — but he has little to show for it. According to the ACLU, the vast majority of defendants have wound up in prosecution diversion programs.
Segura, one of Rogers’s lawyers, said he remains optimistic that Rogers’s lack of awareness that he may have voted improperly will lead to his exoneration.
Rogers was released on bail Saturday evening.
Segura is also one of the lawyers for Crystal Mason, the Fort Worth mom convicted of illegally voting in 2016 while on supervised release for a federal conviction for tax fraud.
Mason was sentenced to five years but was released on parole. Her case is before a Texas appeals court on several questions, including whether Mason should have been convicted given the evidence that she didn’t know she was ineligible to vote and whether she even voted illegally given that she cast a provisional ballot that was discarded after officials discovered she was not registered.
As a result of her prosecution, Mason nearly lost her home to foreclosure, and her son lost his football scholarship to college. She initially declared that she would never vote again. But she has since become an outspoken advocate for voting rights after concluding that this is what Texas Republicans want — for voters of color like her to be afraid to vote.
“It was to make an example out of me,” she told the ACLU. “It was cruel. [They] actually know that I had no intention of doing anything wrong at all.”
A vaccine. (photo: Artyom Geodakyan/Tass)
Right-wing media is melting down over President Biden’s push to … inoculate people against a virus that has killed more than 600,000 Americans
rian Kilmeade employed some interesting logic on Friday to criticize President Biden’s push to get more Americans vaccinated.
“They’re going to knock on your door, they’re going to demand that you take it, and they’re going to give you a third shot,” the Fox & Friends host said. “It’s unbelievable how offensive this administration is getting with a pandemic that is clearly on the run. We’re doing better than any other country. Almost 60-70 percent of this country has taken two shots, and yet this administration is panicking and infiltrating our lives.”
Kilmeade is correct in noting that the U.S. has done a good job tamping down Covid-19, and even that the virus is now “on the run.” The reason for this is simple: People are getting vaccinated. A recent Associated Press analysis of government data found that 98.9 percent of Covid-related hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated. Same goes for 99.2 percent of Covid-related deaths. This is a reason to keep vaccinating people, not to stop vaccinating people, especially as the highly contagious Delta variant is spreading around the world.
Kilmeade doesn’t seem to get it. “The focus of this administration on vaccination is mind-boggling,” he said on the same show a day earlier, neglecting to mention the Delta variant, neglecting to mention infection rates could go up in the fall, and neglecting to mention that this “focus” on inoculating people against a deadly virus is why life in America has regained some sense of normalcy while other developed nations are still stifled with restrictions.
Kilmeade’s morning musings are only a small example of the vaccine hysteria that has exploded across right-wing media since Biden gave an address on Tuesday calling for a “community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oft times door-to-door, literally knocking on doors” campaign to get people vaccinated. The speech was pretty innocuous, but conservatives are seizing on the door-knocking image as an example of, as former White House doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) so eloquently put it on Friday, “socialist communist Marxist” overreach. Conservatives are now not only questioning the vaccine, they’re pushing full-blown anti-vaccination propaganda.
Matthew Gertz of Media Matters compiled a sampling of what the watchdog has noticed on Fox News, including a guest telling Laura Ingraham that “no one under the age of 30” should be vaccinated. Meanwhile, Ingraham’s chyron described “THE LEFT’S CONSTANT COVID POWER GRAB.”
It’s unclear how vaccinating people against a virus that has now killed more than 600,000 Americans and 4 million people worldwide constitutes some sort of Democratic power play, but that doesn’t even matter. The idea is displayed in all caps for Ingraham’s viewers to absorb in all its incoherence, and absorb it they have. According to an ABC/Washington Post poll released over Fourth of July, 93 percent of Democrats have either been vaccinated or plan to get vaccinated, compared to only 49 percent of Republicans.
The QAnon contingent in Congress isn’t helping matters. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted this week that Biden is sending “Needle Nazis” to her district, referring to the vaccine as the “experimental vaccine.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) wrote that “no one cares about the Delta variant” and that “all voters are over Covid.” As Phillip Bump of The Washington Post points out, Greene’s district in Georgia is one of the least vaccinated in the nation. So is Boebert’s in Colorado. In fact, according to a Harvard analysis, of the 50 least-vaccinated congressional districts in America, 46 are represented by Republicans.
The right’s campaign to keep people unvaccinated is starting to extend beyond Fox News chyrons and tweets. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have for weeks been attacking the state’s health commissioner for “peer pressuring” teenagers about getting vaccinated. The Tennesseean reported on Thursday that the the state’s Health Department has now “instructed its county-level employees to halt vaccination events focused on adolescents and stop online outreach to teens” as a result of the pressure from elected officials.
The Tennessee Department of Health’s reversal — which has included the deletion of some pro-vaccine Twitter and Facebook posts — is especially concerning considering how quickly the Delta variant could spread. “This variant is simply more transmissible,” Dr. David Aronoff, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told the paper. “If it gets into populations that are not vaccinated, it will sneak into and through and across those groups more quickly than the original virus, which already did a pretty good job of spreading on its own.”
“Those groups” are plentiful in Tennessee, which ranks seventh-lowest in the nation in percentage of the population to have received at least one shot, according to The New York Times. States that voted for Trump in November occupy 21 of the bottom 22 slots on the list. Fox News is more hell-bent than ever on keeping it that way.
Did Dylan Start Rap? Listen to this 1965 effort and decide. (photo: Image, cover album)
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying
So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked
An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it
Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
A crop duster. (photo: DC Report)
n his first day in office, President Joe Biden promised to review dozens of Trump-era rollbacks of environmental policies. In the executive order, Biden pledged “to limit exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides.”
But months into the new presidency, the Biden administration has chosen to defend some of the Trump administration’s decisions on pesticides
These include:
- The Trump administration’s five-year registration of dicamba, despite Biden administration officials declaring in an Inspector General report that there was undue political influence in past dicamba decisions.
- The 11th-hour Trump approval of aldicarb, a highly toxic pesticide banned in more than a hundred countries by international treaty because of its harm to humans. The C. District Court recently ruled the EPA violated the law in approving it.
- The expanded use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor, which has been previously banned by courts because of its link to killing bees.
- And the Trump administration’s approval of flea and tick collars containing tetrachlorvinphos, which the Obama-era EPA linked to brain damage in children.
Another stark example is the endangered species assessment of malathion (pronounced mal-uh-thigh-on), a toxic pesticide widely used on crops and to deter mosquitoes.
In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a draft biological opinion that assessed the harm malathion would have on plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. That assessment, which took years of work by the nation’s wildlife experts, found the continued use of malathion would “jeopardize the continued existence” of 1,284 endangered species, more than four of out five protected species.
However, after learning about the findings but before they were made public, then-Deputy Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt — who was later named U.S. Secretary of the Interior — intervened to block the report’s release and changed the methodology behind the document, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
Using the new methodology, the agency came up with a new biological opinion: Malathion is likely to “jeopardize the continued existence” of 78 endangered species — an extremely high number compared to previous agency findings but much less significant than the original.
The determination with the decreased number of endangered species was recently published by the Biden administration. It’s a demonstration of the potential long-ranging impact the Trump administration might have on how the federal government interprets the Endangered Species Act, often considered the nation’s strongest environmental protection law.
“This is (the Biden Administration) perpetuating (Bernhardt’s) radical anti-ESA agenda,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. The center sued the federal government to develop the biological opinion, after what it said were decades of inaction on endangered species by federal regulators.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the pesticide decisions.
Laury Marshall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an emailed statement that the draft biological opinion for malathion “is a big step forward in our continued understanding of the impacts of malathion use on listed species and critical habitats.
“It will help EPA meet its obligations under the Endangered Species Act and reflects thorough analysis by wildlife experts,” she continued. “Our dedicated experts have ensured the utmost scientific integrity guided their methodology and scientific process.”
An Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson reiterated Biden’s executive order, saying the new administration has a “renewed commitment to protecting human health and the environment” but still defended each of the decisions regarding the three pesticides.
The Trump-era decision on dicamba that the Biden administration is defending was “supported by the agency’s career scientists, and includes measures that are protective of the environment,” the spokesperson said. (The decision that was the subject of the Inspector General did not have staff support, the spokesperson said.)
Also, the decision to register the bee-killing sulfoxaflor was “backed by substantial data,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump administration had close ties with the pesticide industry. Dow Chemical, the maker of malathion, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee in 2017 and subsequently asked the Trump administration to shelve the endangered species assessments.
Trump also nominated Aurelia Skipwith, a former Monsanto employee, to be the director of the FWS, which oversees endangered species.
Recently, the service announced that it would restore six major rules the Trump administration changed to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
But, with malathion, the Biden administration used the Trump-era methodology, publishing the findings in a recent draft biological opinion. The administration recently took public comment on the decision and will later issue a final decision.
“There’s nothing in here that indicates we’re in a new administration that believes in following science and the law,” Burd said.
Pesticides Feds Supposed to Review
Under a 2014 lawsuit settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity, the EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service must start issuing nationwide opinions on how three widely-used toxic chemicals affect the nation’s 1,600 or so endangered species: malathion, chlorpyrifos and diazinon.
All three are organophosphate pesticides, which were used as nerve agents during World War II. For decades, they were the most widely used insecticides in the U.S. However, their usage has decreased in recent decades because of their risks to human health.
The agencies were supposed to finalize the biological opinions by 2017, and were on schedule to do so before Bernhardt intervened. A 2017 presentation about the draft report findings said that chlorpyrifos put 1,399 species in peril, malathion put 1,284 species in peril and diazinon put 175 species in peril.
The Biden administration released the malathion opinion in April and has not yet signaled when it will release the diazinon and chlorpyrifos reports. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ordered the EPA to ban or limit use of chlorpyrifos because of the risk it poses to children’s brain development, after more than a decade of lawsuits.
The new guidelines that Bernhardt helped outline changed what the federal agency is supposed to consider when making determinations on pesticides. The agency is supposed to consider “actual use” of the pesticide, meaning where and when it is sprayed. It’s not supposed to consider “allowed use,” which is what the label says the pesticide can be used for.
In the biological opinion, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it had difficulty ascertaining “actual use” data in many cases. The service argued the method created a more accurate picture of the “real-world” effects of malathion, but Burd said it allows the agency to pick and choose the effects the pesticide will have.
Under even more settlements, the Fish and Wildlife Service is supposed to continue to release endangered species assessments for pesticides in coming years, including for glyphosate and atrazine, the two most commonly sprayed herbicides in the U.S.
An EPA analysis released in 2020 found that glyphosate likely harms nearly all endangered species.
Last year, Syngenta, the maker of atrazine, voluntarily canceled the use of the herbicide in Hawaii and other U.S. territories because of the risks posed to endangered species.
EPA Defends Other Actions
Another pesticide decision the Biden administration has defended concerns dicamba, a widely used herbicide that has skyrocketed in use in recent years after Monsanto released genetically engineered soybean and cotton seeds that could withstand being sprayed by the herbicide.
Last year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the registration for the volatile weed killer, after finding that the EPA had underestimated and ignored risks posed by the weedkiller, which has been blamed for millions of acres of damage to crops and natural areas. A recent EPA Inspector General report found that senior Trump administration officials exerted improper political influence in approving the herbicide in 2018.
In the months after the Ninth Circuit decision, the EPA assigned 50 employees to restore the registration.
The final decision, which revealed that dicamba damage was worse than previously known, was announced at a press conference with the American Farm Bureau Federation just days before the presidential election in the swing state of Georgia.
The Biden administration has expressed its support for the five-year registration.
Another example is aldicarb, one of just 36 pesticides classified as “extremely hazardous” by the World Health Organization.
In 2010, the EPA and Bayer cancelled the use of the pesticide because of the risks it poses to infants and young children. But earlier this year, the EPA under the Trump administration approved its use Jan. 12 on Florida citrus trees.
The Biden administration defended the approval in federal court, after the Florida Department of Agriculture stepped in and said it would not permit the pesticide’s use because of the EPA’s lack of analysis. In early June, a federal court vacated the EPA’s approval.
The EPA under Biden has also continued to defend the use of sulfoxaflor, a pesticide that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals banned in 2015 because of its potential to harm native bees.
In 2016, the EPA issued a more limited use of the pesticide, but the Trump administration expanded those uses in 2019. The Center for Biological Diversity filed another lawsuit challenging that expansion.
A Possible Template
The malathion biological opinion is considered to be the template for how these assessments will be conducted.
Jacob Malcom, director of the Center for Conservation Innovation for the Defenders of Wildlife, has studied the Fish and Wildlife Service’s consultations and authored a 2015 study that found the agency rarely makes jeopardy calls — when the agency determines an action could threaten the continued existence of a species, which is prohibited by the Endangered Species Act.
However, Malcom said that pesticide consultations are different from most agency biological opinions. Consultations are more wide-ranging because pesticides are approved all across the country, whereas most agency actions that warrant biological opinions are highly localized.
Malcom said the Fish and Wildlife Service has spent years working out the process for how to do pesticide consultations, and the agency lacks funding to be able to perform the comprehensive efforts required for pesticides.
The 2018 Farm Bill created an interagency working group that included the EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies that was tasked with improving the consultation process on pesticides.
Despite the effort, Malcom said the malathion biological evaluation is lacking.
“If they go through and finalize this biological opinion, I can’t imagine they’re not going to get sued,” he said. “It’s really hard to imagine they’re on solid ground with this interpretation.”
Malcom said it’s possible it was strategic for the service to release the document now to solicit public input on “this cockamamie idea of how you do analysis.”
“Not to make excuses or anything, but the wheels of bureaucracy turn very slowly,” he said. “They may have a good reason to believe that putting this out and opening it up to public comment could get them back to what is needed.”
But flaws in the draft biological opinion show the Biden administration was fine releasing an incomplete document, said Burd, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The document does not have any information on how much incidental take — when an endangered species is harmed by an otherwise lawful action — will happen. The assessment also does not go into detail on steps to mitigate the harm to the 78 species that may no longer exist because of malathion, Burd said.
“What are we commenting on here? Nothing. We’re commenting on the analysis,” Burd said. “They don’t include a single thing about how they’re going to protect species in this document.”
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