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18 October 21
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The senator raised more than $1.1 million in the third quarter. About 90 percent of it came from outside her home state.
Sinema has emerged as a key player in those negotiations, with the reconciliation bill needing support from all 50 Democratic senators. But Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have made it clear they will not support the original $3.5 trillion price tag for the bill, and Sinema has also objected to including far-reaching prescription drug pricing proposals, certain proposed tax increases and other party priorities.
As those objections have been registered, Sinema’s Senate campaign has cashed checks from industries facing potential losses or other disruptions. She received $27,800 from PACs of pharmaceutical companies from July through September — up from $5,000 in the three months prior, according to her campaign finance filings.
Sinema’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The pharmaceutical industry has spent millions of dollars on ads and lobbying to fight new rules and regulations that would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for the government — and consequential losses for the industry’s bottom line.
Her individual donors also included a who’s who of powerful people in the pharmaceutical industry. Top donors included the pharma giant Gilead’s CEO, Daniel O’Day, who gave $5,000 this past quarter. Another $2,900 came in from Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks. The executive chair of Merck’s board, Kenneth C. Frazier, also gave $2,900, as did the chair and CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb, Giovanni Caforio. The CEO of Genentech, Alexander Hardy, gave $2,500. Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s executive vice president for policy and research Jennifer Bryant, senior vice president for federal advocacy Anne Esposito, and executive vice president for public affairs Debra DeShong each gave $1,000.
Little of the $1.1 million Sinema raised came from her constituents. Nearly 90 percent of Sinema’s cash from individual contributors came from outside Arizona.
Sinema is not up for reelection until 2024. But her campaign account has been a landing spot for donors nonetheless. Sinema never raised more than $700,000 in a quarter during the last Congress, but she has now topped $1 million twice in the last two quarters of 2021.
Manchin — who, like Sinema, is not up for reelection in 2024 — also had his most prolific fundraising quarter in recent years. His campaign brought in about $1.6 million during the three month period. And like Sinema, very little of that came from individual constituents in his home state.
Manchin, who has pushed back against the administration’s climate change agenda, cashed in on donations from energy and gas companies, including $2,500 from the PAC for ConocoPhillips, $5,000 from a PAC for Pioneer Natural Resources, and $2,500 from a PAC for The National Stripper Well Association. Willie Chiang, the CEO of Plains All American Pipeline, gave $5,000 to Manchin, as did Joe Gorder, the CEO of Valero Energy. Michael K. Grimm, CEO of Rising Star Petroleum, gave $2,500, and employees of ConocoPhillips, including the company’s CEO Ryan Lance, gave a total of $18,700.
Meanwhile, PACs for the financial services industry — another sector facing potential new regulation in Congress — gave more than $50,000 to Sinema, according to her campaign filing. Goldman Sachs president John Waldron made a maximum donation of $5,800. Two senior managing directors at Blackstone — Giovanni Cutaia and Eli Nagler — collectively gave $5,700, and a managing director of government relations there, Alex Katz, donated $1,000.
The Winklevoss twins, the American investors who battled with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and gained wider fame from the movie “The Social Network,” both maxed out to Sinema this quarter. The brothers are involved in cryptocurrency, a field that falls under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, on which Sinema sits.
Other donations trickled in to Sinema from top D.C. lobbyists. Those include Steven Elmendorf, partner and co-founder of the firm Subject Matter, who represents the likes of Goldman Sachs and Pfizer (and gave $1,000), and Arshi Siddiqui, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who used to work for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (and gave $2,400). Thomas Daschle, a former Democratic senator-turned lobbyist, gave $2,900, and two in-house lobbyists at Comcast — Leo Muñoz and Mitch Rose — gave $500 each.
Those with interest in the battle over potential tobacco and nicotine taxes from Congress were generous, too. John Hoel, an in-house lobbyist for Altria Client Services, a major tobacco company, gave $500. The Cigar Association of America’s PAC donated $1,000. Additionally, a PAC for the National Association of Truckstop Operators, a group with ties to big tobacco companies which has fought the potential taxes, gave Sinema $5,000.
Sinema’s role in negotiating down President Joe Biden’s agenda has brought her ire from the party’s progressive activists. Recently, groups of protesters followed her into the bathroom and traveled to the Boston Marathon race — which Sinema did not run — to advocate for the Biden administration’s spending plans.
Ahmaud Arbery's aunt, Theawanza Brooks, stands in front of her home in Brunswick, Ga. 'Nobody has the decision to make as far as being the judge, jury and executioner,' she says. (photo: Nicole Buchanan/NPR)
"It was right here," says Theawanza Brooks, Arbery's aunt. "This is where he last laid to rest."
She's standing on a street corner in the Satilla Shores subdivision just outside Brunswick. It's a neighborhood tucked between waterways on the Georgia coast. Towering trees form a canopy over mostly brick ranch-style homes. A sign in one front yard declares "We Run With Ahmaud."
Arbery, a former high school athlete, lived about 2 miles from here, just across U.S. Route 17. Brooks says this was one of his regular running paths because he could stay off the highway.
"There he goes right now. Running down the street"
But some residents had grown suspicious of Arbery after repeatedly spotting him entering a new home construction site. They suspected him of recent break-ins, although police had not linked him to any.
On the day of the shooting, defendant Travis McMichael calls 911 to report there's a guy in a house under construction. "There he goes right now," he says on the recording. "Running down the street."
The dispatcher says she'll send police but asks, "I just need to know what he was doing wrong?"
Arbery was unarmed, but Travis McMichael had a shotgun.
A second 911 call was made by Travis' father, Gregory McMichael, also a defendant.
"There's a Black male running down the street," he says. Then he yells "Stop! Dammit stop! Travis!"
Seconds later you hear three shotgun blasts.
Theawanza Brooks says she often imagines what that moment must have been like for her nephew, trapped with no one to help him. Now she's bracing herself to hear defendants argue in court that this all happened because they suspected him in neighborhood thefts — that it was a legal citizen's arrest gone tragically awry because Arbery fought back.
"Even if you steal something, nobody has the decision to make as far as being the judge, jury and executioner," says Brooks.
Judge, jury and executioner
At trial, Travis McMichael, 35, Gregory McMichael, 65, and another neighbor, William Bryan, 52, will face state charges including murder, false imprisonment and aggravated assault. They've separately been charged with federal hate crimes. That trial is scheduled for February 2022.
Arbery's shooting has drawn intense national scrutiny, happening around the same time that racial justice protests were erupting in response to police killings.
There were serious questions about how Glynn County officials originally handled the case. Nothing happened until cellphone video of the killing, recorded by defendant Bryan, was released months later.
The former district attorney, Jackie Johnson, now faces charges that she tried to shield the McMichaels from prosecution. The elder McMichael had worked as an investigator in the DA's office and was a former police officer. His son had been in the Coast Guard. Several judges and prosecutors recused themselves from the case. Superior Court Judge Timothy Wamsley from Savannah will preside over the trial.
It took nearly three months before arrests were made, after mounting public pressure and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation taking the case from Glynn County police.
Bodycam video from the scene showed police treating Travis McMichael with great care and deference as he stood — literally with blood on his hands — while Arbery lay in the street.
"They were given a courtesy that the normal citizen would not have received," says Pastor John Perry, who was president of the local NAACP when Arbery was killed.
"Particularly in the Black community, if you were found to have killed someone," he says, "you're getting handcuffed and you're getting booked."
Perry is running for mayor of Brunswick in the aftermath of Arbery's killing. He's part of a crowded field of candidates that reflects a wider political awakening.
He says this case is a prime example of why many Black citizens see the justice system as tainted.
Relationships of privilege
"Some people call it the good old boy system. I call it relationships of privilege," says Perry. "You have people who ascend to places of power and they have established relationships, and those established relationships are looked out for in a way that other people are not looked for."
Perry and others, including federal prosecutors, say Arbery's killing was racially motivated — that he was profiled as a Black man running through a predominantly white neighborhood.
Defense lawyers will reject that argument at trial, according to attorney Robert Rubin, who represents the gunman, Travis McMichael.
"There's a man in the neighborhood who doesn't belong in the neighborhood. Not because he's Black," Rubin says. "He doesn't belong there because he's at least trespassing in a house he doesn't belong in."
Rubin argues that suspicion amounts to probable cause under Georgia's citizen's arrest law at the time, and that the McMichaels were simply trying to detain Arbery until police got there. But when Arbery resisted, he says, Travis McMichael acted in self-defense.
"They're literally locked together — Mr. Arbery has one hand on the gun and one hand he's punching Travis in the head," says Rubin. "Travis knows 'if I lose possession of this gun, I'm dead.' And so he fires the gun. Mr. Arbery does not stop coming at him, and eventually he kills Mr. Arbery."
The struggle was captured on cellphone video by the third suspect — William Bryan, who goes by the name Roddie.
"Without Roddie Bryan there would be no case," says his lawyer Kevin Gough.
Bryan was in the second pickup truck chasing Arbery. Gough says his client had nothing to do with the shooting and has cooperated fully with the investigation.
"Roddie Bryant did nothing on the day in question that any patriotic American wouldn't have done," argues Gough. "He saw an individual that he didn't know running by, followed by a motor vehicle that he did, in a community that was on edge."
He says it's wrong to cast this case in light of the nation's broader struggle for equal justice.
"It feels like these folks are being pursued, punished, prosecuted, however you describe it, in a sense or a way of atoning for the sins of law enforcement real or perceived in the administration of Justice," Gough says.
Many do see this trial in the context of other prominent racial justice cases that have had a mixed bag of verdicts — Ahmaud Arbery as yet another name on a list that includes Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
And historically the hundreds who came before, says Bobby Henderson, co-founder of A Better Glynn, a grassroots group formed last year in response to Arbery's killing.
We witnessed a lynching
"Here we are in the South and we witnessed a lynching," says Henderson. "How far are we from 1892? That's what's on the line."
Standing on the steps of the historic Glynn County Courthouse, Henderson says for too long, places like this did not afford justice to people like him. He sees this case as a test of whether that has changed.
"Can we sustain any of this momentum toward true equity, equality and justice?" he asks. "Or are we just stuck in a cycle of some people get it and some people don't at all? It depends. The American Constitution should not be a parchment of 'it depends.'"
For Henderson, the case is also personal. His son worked with Ahmaud Arbery at a fast food restaurant when they were teenagers.
"It took a lot from me emotionally," he says. "You're pulling together all of these components. You understand what's happening nationally, where people are seeing what is happening to Black and brown people. You're reliving Trayvon Martin once again."
His group has worked to organize people and voters and has lobbied for policy changes and investigations. And in the past year, the needle has moved. The district attorney who failed to prosecute Arbery's killing was voted out of office and is now facing charges for her handling of the case. The Georgia legislature repealed the state's citizen's arrest law and passed new hate crimes legislation. And Glynn County has a new police chief — the first Black man to lead the department. Henderson says those are steps toward a more inclusive government.
"We think that that is a direct reflection on the amount of work that we've done to get the people to realize their own power," he says. "And where they can utilize their power in order to create their own good."
Ahmaud Arbery's aunt, Theawanza Brooks, recognizes the change that has come in her nephew's name.
"A difference has been made since his death," she says. "We learned that when we come together collectively as a community, things change. And I think that this tragedy has opened up the eyes of a lot of people."
Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell gestures during a news conference at the Pentagon in 1993 in Washington. (photo: Marcy Nighswander/AP)
Powell has called the misleading information he repeated in lead up to 2003 Iraq war a permanent ‘blot’ on his record.
Powell, a four star general who last held public office in 2005, died on Monday, the family said in a statement on Facebook. He was 84.
“He was fully vaccinated. We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment. We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” the Powell family said.
Known as a moderate and pragmatist, Powell was instrumental in shaping the foreign policy of Republican presidential administrations for decades.
He served as National Security Adviser to former President Ronald Reagan from 1987 to 1989 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former President George HW Bush and former President Bill Clinton from 1989 to 1993.
When he was confirmed as former President George W Bush’s Secretary of State in 2001, he became the first Black person in US history to fill the role.
At the time, he also became the highest ranking Black official in US history, later equalled by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and surpassed by former President Barack Obama.
Iraq war controversy
While initially opposing the military operation, Powell has been accused of misleading the public in the lead up to US invasion of Iraq in 2003 as he sought to build international support.
In a controversial presentation on February 5, 2003 to the United Nations Security Council, Powell made the Bush administration’s case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein constituted an imminent danger to the world because of the country’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Powell admitted later that the presentation was rife with inaccuracies and twisted intelligence provided by others in the Bush administration, telling Al Jazeera it represented “a blot” that will “always be a part of my record”.
In a statement on Monday, George W Bush
He had previously considered a bid to become the first Black president in 1996 but his wife Alma’s worries about his safety helped him decide otherwise.
In 2008, he broke with his party to endorse then-candidate Obama, a Democrat.
Union workers participate in a strike against Kellogg Co. on Monday, Oct. 11, 2021 at the Kellogg plant on Porter Street in Battle Creek, Mich. Union workers walked out last Tuesday after Kellogg's five-year master contract with the BCTGM International Union expired. (photo: Alyssa Keown/Battle Creek Enquirer/AP)
The labor activism runs the gamut of American industry, powered by the same grievances about wages, benefits and quality of life driving the Great Resignation
Instead, he voted to go on strike.
While Americans are leaving their jobs at staggering rates — a record 4.3 million quit in August alone — hundreds of thousands of workers with similar grievances about wages, benefits and quality of life are, like Reyes, choosing to dig in and fight. Last week, 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike, while unions representing 31,000 Kaiser employees authorized walkouts. Some 60,000 Hollywood production workers reached a deal Saturday night, averting a strike hours before a negotiation deadline.
All told, there have been strikes against 178 employers this year, according to a tracker by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which records only large work stoppages, has documented 12 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers so far this year. That’s considerably higher than 2020, when the pandemic took hold, but in line with significant strike activity recorded in 2019 and 2018.
The trend, union officials and economists say, is an offshoot of the phenomenon known as the Great Resignation, which has thinned the nation’s labor pool and slowed the economic recovery. Workers are now harder to replace, especially while many companies are scrambling to meet heightened demand for their products and manage hobbled supply chains. That has given unions new leverage, and made striking less risky.
In interviews, workers and labor leaders said union members are angry with employers for failing to raise pay to match new profits and are disappointed by the lack of high-quality jobs. They also are frustrated that wage growth is not keeping pace with inflation. Although the average U.S. worker’s hourly pay was up 4 percent in September compared with a year ago, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, inflation grew 5.4 percent over the same period.
“The strikes are sending a signal, no doubt about it, that employers ignore workers at their peril,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I think this wave of strikes is actually going to inspire more workers to stand up and speak out and put that line in the sand and say, ‘We deserve better.’ ”
Not all work stoppages have been successful. More than 1,000 Alabama miners have been on strike at Warrior Met Coal since April. That same month, 14 oil workers staged a walkout against United Metro Energy in New York; eight have since been fired, according to the local Teamsters branch. And roughly 1,400 workers at Kellogg Co. cereal factories in four states are entering their third week on the picket line.
Still, the labor movement has drawn support from the White House. President Biden made a public statement supporting the Amazon union drive in Alabama — a rare move by a sitting president. And his constant calls to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour have delighted labor leaders.
In Fontana, Calif., Reyes is hopeful. As a covid-19 patient who spent a month in the same Kaiser hospital where he works, he has a unique perspective on pandemic-related staffing shortages.
“I think I got the best care that I could have gotten at Kaiser,” he said. “Now it’s time to pay back the nurses that took care of me” by striking for additional resources.
The strike drives in 2021 run the gamut of American industry: Nurses and health workers in California and Oregon; oil workers in New York; cereal factory workers in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee; television and film production crews in Hollywood; and more.
The surge in strike activity has yielded mixed results, economists say. Though work stoppages this summer at Nabisco and Frito-Lay helped secure higher raises and new vacation allowances for workers, employers have not made meaningful increases in their workforces or compensation structures.
Both sides acknowledge the benefit of retaining workers. Management more often would rather deal with a brief strike than absorb higher costs associated with turnover and training new staff. For the employee, a new job isn’t necessarily a better one.
“There’s a cost to searching and a cost to leaving your current employer,” said William M. Rodgers III, director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “And maybe some of the desire to strike is predicated out of a level of loyalty that these people have been with this company for a good duration.”
Unions increasingly are seeking changes in the workplace and corporate culture. Some strike drives are pushing for better safeguards against sexual harassment and coronavirus safety protocols, including one at El Milagro, a Chicago-based tortilla manufacturer. Workers at a West Virginia producer of industrial pump parts went on strike Oct. 1 seeking better seniority rights.
Some are attempting to claw back perks that vanished years ago during economic downturns. Striking John Deere workers contend that the company’s massive profit during the pandemic — earnings nearly doubled to a record $1.79 billion last quarter — should be reflected in their compensation, particularly retirement benefits.
More than 60,000 members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents Hollywood production workers, had planned to strike Monday unless they reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The two sides arrived at a tentative agreement Saturday night that guarantees workers meal breaks, weekends and breaks between shifts, plus significant raises.
“They do have to change the way they do business,” IATSE President Matthew D. Loeb said, “to avoid a strike, to have good morale and to have safe, healthy employees.”
A spokesman for the television and film producers alliance did not respond to a request for comment.
Labor leaders have defined wage demands as a new frontier for workers’ rights. Unions helped deliver the 40-hour workweek, they note, and the coronavirus crisis has reinforced the need to secure living wages and safer workplaces.
“Especially during the pandemic, where people have worked overtime, they’ve sacrificed. They want to be acknowledged and appreciated,” Shuler said.
Workers took notice when their companies publicly praised them as heroic and essential in the early days of pandemic, labor leaders and experts say, and it made them angry.
Many saw a disconnect between the accolades and the realities of their jobs, and now interpret “essential” more broadly: They’re not only crucial to helping put food on families’ tables or treating patients, they’re essential to very companies they serve — and can inflict pain by shutting down or slowing operations.
“A strike is really the last resort. That’s labor’s power, a worker’s power is to withhold their labor,” said Kim Cordova, president of the Colorado branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. “A company can function without a CEO, but they can’t function without the workers to actually go do the work.”
The movement also illustrates how workers are reassessing expectations. Kaiser Permanente hospitals already faced a worker shortage before covid-19, said Reyes, a member of the United Nurses Associations of California.
Then came the crush of coronavirus patients; Reyes was one of them.
He spent a month in the hospital where he worked — including 11 days intubated. When he was discharged, he begged his doctor to allow him to go back to work, eager to help his colleagues handle the new workload. He took videos of himself doing physical therapy and sent them to his doctor every day to prove he was well enough to return.
“My promise was, I’m going to get better fast,” he said. “I want to get back to work quick. I want to fight covid with the same people who fought covid for me. I want to care for our patients with them.”
Yet, a year later, he voted to strike. He says Kaiser’s planned two-tier wage and benefits proposal that would put new employees at the lower end would make it harder to hire nurses. He’s also worried the company will seek more cutbacks in the future.
Arlene Peasnall, Kaiser’s senior vice president of human resources, said in an emailed statement that the company is proposing the new pay scale because its labor costs are “unsustainable.”
Because Kaiser negotiates with a national alliance of unions, wages are not regionally adjusted, she said, meaning health workers in some areas earn well above market averages.
“Affordability is a real issue in health care, which was highlighted once again during the pandemic,” she said. “… We are trying to be available to more people, and we cannot do that if we are too expensive.”
In New York, Andre Soleyn, a striking oil terminal operator with Union Metro Energy, said he and co-workers considered looking for other jobs before walking out in April. Other businesses in the industry pay higher starting salaries, he said, up to $8 an hour more than what his co-workers make on average, according to the local Teamsters branch. But getting a new job, especially with such a specific skill set, is more difficult than it sounds, he said. Other employers nearby have unionized workforces, so their retention rates are higher and jobs are harder to come by. Starting at a new company means potentially taking a more junior position and more difficult shift schedules.
There’s also a sense of camaraderie, Soleyn said, among the striking workers. Eight strike organizers, union officials said, were fired from their jobs when they walked out. The Teamsters filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board over their terminations. United Metro Energy, its parent company Red Apple Group and owner John Catsimatidis did not respond to requests for comment.
“I felt shellshocked in the beginning,” Soleyn said, “but then when I sat down for a little bit and thought about it, I realized they were trying to attack me, because they knew I was one of the guys that was spearheading it and trying to make this place a better place to work. That gave me more resolve that I am on the right track, I am doing something right.”
At Kellogg’s cereal factory in Omaha, employees worked forced overtime during the pandemic to keep up with voracious consumer demand, said Dan Osborn, a mechanic at the plant for 18 years and president of the local Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union branch.
Workers say they are responsible for the $1.8 billion in operating profit the company made in the past four quarters. They worked the hours during a pandemic in the expectation, Osborn said, that Kellogg would not demand more concession during contract negotiations. Instead, the company pitched a new two-tiered wage and benefits system and refused their requests for raises, he said.
Kellogg spokesperson Kris Bahner said in a statement that under the company’s six-year proposal, employees “would achieve a wage rate of about $35.00/hour” and the new contract would “not only maintain these industry-leading pay and benefits, but offer significant increases in wages, benefits and retirement.”
The company brought in contract labor to restart the Omaha plant last Monday. Osborn said his family and those of other strikers expect they could go weeks without a paycheck.
His wife is searching for another job. He sold one of the family’s cars and is preparing to sell off his childhood baseball card collection. His 13-year-old daughter takes dance lessons, he said. She came up to him one night after dinner and told him that she couldn’t bear to give them up.
“It makes me want to cry a little bit,” he said. “I told her, ‘No matter what, you’re going to be able to dance.’ ”
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) board an elevator after a private meeting between the two of them on Capitol Hill on September 30, 2021, in Washington, DC. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP/Getty Images)
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is among the moderate Democrats who have pushed to prevent the well-off and wealthy from receiving benefits like universal pre-K or free community college, as lawmakers try to get the $3.5 trillion bill closer to $2 trillion. “I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving to an entitlement mentality,” Manchin said in late September.
But this call for means testing, policy parlance for limiting eligibility for social programs based on income, overlooks a few problems, experts say. Means-tested benefits can actually be more expensive to provide, harder to sell politically, and less effective than universal social programs, and they can place both a social stigma and discouraging bureaucratic requirements on Americans in need.
Means testing have also long been associated with a moral argument that some segments of the population are deserving of government benefits, while others are not. This idea undercuts the belief that a social safety net is intended to help support those broadly in need, and shifts the burden onto individuals to prove that they’re worthy of getting basic help.
“From an effectiveness standpoint, we have a lot of evidence that more universal programs are better for a host of reasons including for helping very low-income people,” says Shawn Fremstad, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “It has to do with not being so burdensome, not having so much paperwork to do. There’s also a way in which more universal programs are less divisive politically.”
Despite how popular programs like Social Security and Medicare can be once implemented, getting new, nearly universal programs passed is an uphill political battle, to say the least. Republicans — and more moderate Democrats — have historically viewed universal programs as excessive.
In the end, opponents of more means testing emphasize that the fight for more universal programs is as much about simplifying access to social services as it is about building solidarity and reframing how we think about social spending.
“We can choose to strengthen the bond Americans have to one another by proposing universal social insurance benefits that broadly benefit all Americans, or we can pursue complicated methods of means testing that the wealthy and powerful will use to divide us with false narratives about ‘makers’ and ‘takers,’” leaders in the Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday.
What could be means-tested in the reconciliation bill
The actual contents of the reconciliation bill are still in flux, but a few programs have already been suggested for additional means testing. Some policies like the expanded child tax credit include phaseouts by income to begin with.
The bill’s free community college program, universal pre-K, and an electric vehicle tax credit are all possible provisions that could be capped further, according to a Reuters report. Here’s a rundown of some of the measures that could be tied to income:
- The expansion of the child tax credit: There’s already a means test for the expanded child tax credit — the full amount is only accessible to couples with an adjusted gross income of $150,000 or less, or single heads of household with an adjusted gross income of $112,500 or less. Families that qualify receive an annual benefit of $3,600 for every child under age 6, and $3,000 for each child between the ages of 6 and 17. Those who make more are able to access an additional credit, too, though it gets reduced as people’s income levels get higher.
Manchin has said he’d like to lower the income caps on the expanded child tax credit even further, though he has yet to propose a number. “I have got people that are making combined 200 and 300 and more, up to 400 [thousand], saying they’re getting checks,” he’s previously griped.
- Expansion of Medicare coverage for dental, vision, and hearing: In the existing proposal, additional Medicare coverage for dental, vision, and hearing needs would be available to all seniors in the program regardless of income. Some industry groups and centrist lawmakers have argued that these benefits should be limited to lower-income individuals, making no more than 300 percent of the federal poverty line, or $39,000 a year.
“There are those who can’t afford this right now, let’s focus it on them,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) told Bloomberg regarding dental coverage. “It’s less costly to the taxpayer and it gives help to the people who really need it.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has countered by noting that many older adults in the middle class are also struggling to cover such expenses.
- Free community college: Democrats’ current proposal would provide two years of free community college to anyone who’s interested, but the White House and others, including Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), have suggested that this benefit could be limited based on income.
There are other existing higher education programs that are means-tested, like Pell grants, which are only available to students who can demonstrate need based on their family’s annual contribution to tuition.
- Universal pre-K: Democrats’ universal early education push would guarantee funding for all 3- and 4-year-olds to access prekindergarten. But this, too, might get limited based on income.
- Universal child care: The current proposal includes subsidies for child care that guarantee no household spends more than 7 percent of its annual income on child care costs. Any spending over that 7 percent threshold would be covered by the program, a provision that effectively ensures that wealthier households won’t receive as much aid as lower-income ones.
Previously, some more centrist lawmakers had proposed that these subsidies should only be available to families that make 150 percent or less of their region’s median income.
Means testing makes it harder to access programs
There are some serious costs associated with means testing. Though they’re usually framed as ways of curbing government spending, means-tested benefits are often more expensive to provide, on average, than universal benefits, simply because of the administrative support needed to vet and process applicants.
And then there’s the burden means testing puts on those in need. Take the applications for SNAP, or food aid, for example. The most complicated state programs require individuals to meet a specific income threshold and complete certain asset tests. Individuals need to show that they don’t currently make more than 130 percent of the poverty line, or $16,744 for an individual, and have assets worth more than $2,500 (a requirement that varies based on age). According to mRelief, a nonprofit that assists SNAP recipients, the average applicant needs to either fill out a 17-page form or participate in a 90-minute interview, in addition to providing as many as 10 documents about their assets. Even the prospect of this can push people away.
“One hundred percent of the poverty line, 200 percent of the poverty line — that’s not how people think. I always have to go back to a chart to figure it out,” says Ellen Vollinger, a legal director at the Food Resource and Action Center, about how people determine eligibility. “They think, sure, we only want it to go to this cohort of people. But they forget there are large amounts of people who can’t cope with this.”
Progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have cited “bureaucracy, red tape, [and] waste” as key reasons means testing can be problematic, and that’s been borne out in the research as well.
According to Georgetown University political scientists Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan, the administrative costs for programs like SNAP, the family assistance program known as TANF, and the Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children can range from 15 to 40 cents of each dollar of benefits distributed in the programs. That includes money used to interview people, check the documentation they provide, and ensure that their claims of need are valid.
In other words, even though the intention of means testing is to help people most in need, imposing strict qualification requirements can actually make it tougher for individuals who are eligible to get past the application process.
As Matt Bruenig writes for the People’s Policy Project, a progressive think tank, these administrative barriers have hurt uptake rates of programs like SNAP and Medicaid, none of which fully serve all the people who qualify for them:
The overall participation rate of the food stamp program is 85 percent and is only 75 percent for the working poor who likely have a harder time proving their eligibility to the welfare office. The participation rate of Medicaid is 94 percent for children, 80 percent for parents, and around 75 percent for childless adults. The participation rate of the Earned Income Tax Credit (and also presumably the Child Tax Credit) is 78 percent. The low participation in the EITC cuts the poverty-reducing effect of the program by around 33 percent, according to the Census Bureau, meaning that mainstream estimates of the EITC’s impact (e.g. those produced by CBPP) overstate the effectiveness of the program by at least 50 percent.
Additionally, researchers have found that means testing stigmatizes people who are eligible for these programs, further reducing participation in them and fomenting biases toward low-income people.
Conversely, universal programs including Social Security and Medicare have much higher uptake rates of 97 percent and 96 percent among older adults, though they aren’t without their own administrative hurdles. Filing claims for Social Security benefits or enrolling in Medicare can be extremely confusing and time-consuming as well.
Finally, there’s the political argument. Programs that apply to a broader swath of people tend to have much greater political buy-in — think Medicare, for example. “In the same way that we’re not here to try to pit programs against each other, we’re also not here to pit people against each other,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told reporters on Tuesday.
Interestingly, some moderate House members have been inclined to back more universal versions of programs, like child care, because they want to ensure their constituents aren’t left out. “New Jersey already pays more than $10 billion in taxes than we receive in federal spending and I will not let another federal program pay less to New Jersey tax payers than it does to all other Americans,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a House Democrat in a battleground district previously told the New York Times.
A pitfall that universal programs are able to avoid, too, is choosing a cutoff that fails to adequately estimate need. For instance, the income threshold for SNAP is $28,550 for a family of three. Because of this cap, people who make slightly more money than the cutoff are left out of the program — even if they could also use this support.
Negotiations on the reconciliation bill will be about trade-offs
In the end, reducing the overall costs of the reconciliation bill will be about trade-offs. Progressive lawmakers thus far have not signaled an interest in further targeting any programs. Instead, they’ve pushed for fewer years of funding for social programs in the bill.
“If there are fewer dollars to spend, there are choices to be made,” Speaker Pelosi said in a press conference on Tuesday, adding that shortening the length of programs is a key mechanism that Democrats are eyeing. “Mostly we’d be cutting back on years and something like that.”
As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained in an MSNBC interview, the approach that lawmakers take is likely to vary by program. He signaled an openness to discussing the income cap for the expanded child tax credit, for example, but emphasized that additional restrictions on universal pre-K would be a much harder sell.
“It’s reasonable for certain things: If you’re saying that the earned income tax credit should go to working families and not the rich, I agree,” Khanna has said. “But if you’re saying that we shouldn’t have universal pre-K or universal community college, I say no. ... I’m glad that K-12 education isn’t means-tested in this country.”
Former Palestinian prisoner Nisreen Abu Kameel gives an interview to local media outside Damon prison following her release on Sunday. (photo: Al-Jarmaqnet)
Nisreen Abu Kameel, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has been refused entry into the Gaza Strip, where her seven children and husband of 20 years live
Nisreen Abu Kameel, 46, is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was born in Haifa but married a Palestinian man living in Gaza, with whom she has seven children.
After being detained for six years for alleged spying, Abu Kameel was released on Sunday from Damon prison.
That same day, she headed to the Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza, but was denied entry by Israeli authorities on the grounds that Israeli citizens are not authorised to enter the blockaded Palestinian territory.
She spent Sunday night at Erez in protest, Palestinian media outlets reported, while her family was waiting on the other side of the crossing.
"I've been married for 20 years in Gaza, and it's my right to return to my house and reunite with my husband and children," Abu Kameel told Al-Jazeera. "I waited days and counted down the hours to return to them."
Abu Kameel met her husband, 50-year-old Hazem Abu Kameel, before the Second Intifada that began in 2000, when he worked as a day labourer inside Israel.
Back then, the Gaza Strip was not yet under an extensive Israeli-led land, air and sea blockade, with Israeli settlements present in the area.
Nisreen was arrested by Israeli authorities in 2015, over accusations that she was spying on behalf of Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, and had photographed the Haifa port during her last visit to the city in 2014.
Nisreen and her family have rejected the accusations of espionage that led to her prison sentence.
Nisreen is now back in her hometown Haifa waiting to secure a permit to cross into Gaza Strip, which has been besieged since 2007.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the country's population, are the descendants of those who remained in historic Palestine when most Palestinians were expelled or fled during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, also known as the Nakba.
Currently, there are 36 Palestinian women held in Israeli prisons, according to prisoners' rights group Addameer.
The Dominican Republic has announced the slaughter of tens of thousands of pigs after detecting outbreaks of African Swine Fever in pig farms across the country. (photo: Ricardo Rojas/Reuters)
As America readies to protect its pork industry, the Dominican Republic has been accused of using an outbreak of African Swine Fever to wipe out smaller producers
Samples taken in the Dominican Republic tested positive for ASF in July and in neighbouring Haiti in September.
The virus does not affect humans or meat quality, but is an almost certain death sentence for pigs. The US pork industry – worth $23bn (£17bn) a year – is in a panic, Latin America is on alert, and pork producers in the Dominican Republic and Haiti are haunted by memories of the US-funded eradication of their entire pork population when ASF last hit more than 40 years ago.
Rigoberto Echavarría, a Dominican pig farmer, is devastated by the loss of his entire herd in August after staff sent by the Ministry of Agriculture followed an initial government directive to kill all pigs on small farms in affected hotspots and those within a 5km radius of the outbreak. The slaughter happened without prior testing for the virus.
Local reports say at least 1,000 pigs were killed that month in the province of Santiago Rodríguez, where Echavarría lives. But another farmer thinks the killings go beyond 10,000.
Social media accounts show local people throwing stones at a government vehicle loaded with dead pigs protected by armed members of the military.
Some small pork producers banded together to prevent the teams from reaching their farms.
But for Echavarría, it was too late. His farm is in the north-west of the Dominican Republic, 70km from the border with Haiti, where some suspect the disease entered the island. But, like many in his province, he believes his 130 pigs were healthy, and questions whether larger farms are being targeted by the government programme in the same way. He asks: “Can the pigs of my rich friend not also get sick?”
Speaking to the Guardian, an official said 73,000 pigs have been killed out of a pig population estimated at 1.8 million. The size of the farms affected has not been made public, but the numbers suggest the average farm had only 25 pigs.
Dr Rafael Nuñez Mieses, director of animal health at the Ministry of Agriculture, attributes the destruction of small farmers’ herds without prior testing for the virus to an initial “lack of equipment”. The strategy later changed.
A government veterinarian in the province of Santiago Rodríguez, who asked to speak anonymously, says: “If the testing equipment had arrived earlier, we would not have had to sacrifice so many pigs.” He adds: “This is an area of small farms.”
But an unpublished technical report obtained by the Guardian reveals that the directive to kill pigs on small farms without prior testing was part of a government plan to control ASF, backed by the International Regional Organization for Agricultural Health and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
The document says: “Within a radius of 5 to 10 km of each outbreak, following the guidelines outlined in the emergency plan, all back yard farms should be sacrificed (not the industrial ones), independently of whether they are free of infection.”
Dr Francisco Israel Brito, president of the Dominican Federation of Pork Producers, confirms this. “Initially there was a policy to eliminate the small producers in order to contain the illness,” he says. “But then it became clear that, even then, the larger farms couldn’t escape the virus since it was all over the country.
“And the government realised that it was going to be very costly, so they decided to focus on the hotspot areas instead.”
Farmers have been compensated for the killings at a market rate of 120 Dominican pesos/kg (US$ 2.13), but missteps from the Dominican government have not helped to ease farmers’ mistrust.
The international community has been on alert for ASF for years. The Dominican Republic hosted an international conference in Punta Cana in 2018 where ASF was on the agenda. Samples, which had been taken as early as April, were not tested for ASF until July, giving the virus plenty of time to spread.
The Dominican government was quick to point the finger at small farmers on the border in June. But an official report published later by the World Organisation for Animal Health says the country’s first outbreak was in April in the centre of the country, where the majority of industrial-scale pork farms are based.
In a recent report, the international NGO Grain claims the Dominican government is taking advantage of the pig pandemic to eliminate smaller farms, following a similar pattern to that which it reported in China as a result of the ASF variant that has been ravaging states in the former Soviet Union since 2007 and which spread to Asia in 2018.
The Dominican government’s rhetoric has fed the narrative that smaller producers operate illegally and lack the hygiene and nutrition standards to keep the disease at bay.
In Latin America, traspatio – or back yard – pigs are traditionally reared a few at a time for self-consumption, tied to a pole at the back of a modest dwelling where they guzzle food scraps. In 1978, ASF allegedly reached the Dominican Republic via pork leftovers from a flight from Europe fed to a back yard pig outside the airport.
The Dominican government classifies all 28,000 small and medium farms with varying hygiene and nutrition standards as back yard farms. But the small and medium farmers the Guardian spoke to did not feed their pigs on food scraps or let them roam on landfill sites. And they were aware of disease transmission risks.
“Nobody works on this farm except me and one employee. Nobody else visits my farm,” says Echavarría.
Nuñez Mieses acknowledges that “not more than 100 farms” in the whole country meet biosecurity protocols “as described in the manual”, adding: “This disease is an opportunity for the pork industry to organise itself.”
Dr Francisco Israel Brito, president of Fedoporc, the Dominican federation of pork producers, confirms that the government was initially “protecting” the 400 or so industrial farms that produce 70% of all Dominican pork.
But he also acknowledges that, much like the coronavirus, ASF does not discriminate, saying: “It affects the most humble and the most powerful alike.”
The US recently announced $500m in funding to support activities related to combating ASF in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but a US outbreak is not unthinkable. More than 2 million Dominicans live in the US and the Dominican Republic is a popular destination for American tourists. ASF travels well in cured meat in luggage as well as in uncooked pork scraps on boats and aeroplanes.
If the plan to contain the disease by focusing on small farmers fails in the Dominican Republic, then plan B, according to government sources who spoke to the Guardian, is to destroy the whole swine population, as in 1979, when a US-backed eradication took place, followed by one in Haiti in 1982. This would protect the US pork industry and generate a massive increase in the 27% of Dominican pork consumption that mainly comes from the US.
Paul G Rudenberg, a US veterinarian who was part of the USAID effort to introduce pigs from Iowa to Haiti in the mid 1980s, doubts an eradication effort would be politically viable today. He says: “It may have been necessary. But it wasn’t run in the manner that was conducive to the benefit of the small farmer. As a result, it wreaked social economic havoc on Haiti.”
A glimmer of hope lies in the recent development by the US of a potential candidate for a vaccine against ASF; 40 years later, it looks like Big Brother is again likely to call the shots.
As for the small and medium sized farmers in the Dominican Republic, more than anything, what they don’t want is for certain farmers to get preferential treatment due to their size or government contacts.
“As a pig farmer, I am never going to be in favour of eradication. But if they are going to slaughter some of them, they have to slaughter them all,” says Echavarría.
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