03 October 21
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Ryan Grim | How Rep. Josh Gottheimer Got Outmatched by the Congressional Progressive Caucus
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "The journey of the Congressional Progressive Caucus from punchline to counterpuncher involved decades in the wilderness, followed by a rapid consolidation of power that took Congress by surprise this week."
The progressive flex was a long time coming.
Late Friday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., released a statement expressing dismay that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had once again delayed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and accusing a “far left faction” of endangering President Joe Biden’s agenda. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus had threatened to withhold their votes for the infrastructure bill if it wasn’t preceded by a larger reconciliation bill, a plan that had been in place since the summer.
“We were elected to achieve reasonable, commonsense solutions for the American people — not to obstruct from the far wings,” Gottheimer wrote.
Never mind the fact that Gottheimer himself led a small group of House members to obstruct the larger reconciliation spending bill, which contains many key priorities of the Biden administration’s agenda. And that Biden traveled to the Capitol and, in a private meeting with Democrats, endorsed the progressive strategy to pass both bills at the same time — and encouraged both wings to find a number they agreed on and move forward.
At the end of August, Gottheimer and a gang of eight other House members used their leverage to force Pelosi to schedule a vote on the infrastructure bill that had already passed the Senate with a bipartisan majority. The group of conservative Democrats hoped to cleave it off from the broader reconciliation package, which includes steep tax hikes on the rich and robust social spending.
But come Friday, Gottheimer was the lone name on the statement after, according to Politico’s Heather Caygle, no one else from his “unbreakable nine” would sign on. Later that evening, a Republican representative said one angry Democrat called Pelosi a “fucking liar” for not putting the bill on the floor, and there was little question about the identity of that angry Democrat.
The goal of Gottheimer’s group had been to pass the infrastructure bill and then train their fire on the bigger bill. Free the hostage, then blow up the insurgents. Their demand went against the grain of the Democrats’ two-track strategy, but Pelosi conceded by giving them a date for the infrastructure floor vote: September 27.
Gottheimer and some of his allies then huddled with the dark-money group No Labels, which finances their campaigns and was instrumental in organizing the opposition. “You should feel so proud, I can’t explain to you, this is the culmination of all your work. This would not have happened but for what you built,” Gottheimer told them, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The Intercept. “It just wouldn’t have happened — hard stop. You should just feel so proud. This is your win as much as it is my win.”
Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., former chair of the right-wing Blue Dog Coalition, celebrated that the victory would let them focus next on fighting the reconciliation package, which he told the group he opposed. “Let’s deal with the reconciliation later. Let’s pass that infrastructure package right now, and don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have at this point,” Schrader said.
But House progressives quickly responded, vowing to block the bill — to hold the line — if it came to the floor without the broader spending bill. Gottheimer remained confident over the next several weeks, saying privately that he was sure the progressives would fold. On September 27, it was clear that there weren’t enough votes to pass the bill, and Pelosi pulled it from the floor, rescheduling it for a September 30 showdown.
On CNN Thursday, Gottheimer gave the bill a “1,000 percent” chance of being passed that day. He never got close, and the bill was pulled again, leaving Gottheimer to meekly argue that the House had not been technically adjourned. Friday would still be the same “legislative day,” he tweeted, and negotiations were ongoing and he was grabbing Red Bull and Gatorade and — hey, where’s everybody going?
So Gottheimer, notoriously abusive to his revolving door of staff, had nobody around to advise that his Red Bull-fueled statement might backfire.
The journey of the Congressional Progressive Caucus from punchline to counterpuncher involved decades in the wilderness, followed by a rapid consolidation of power that took Congress by surprise this week.
The roots stretch back to the 2009 and 2010 fight over the Affordable Care Act, when an outmatched CPC was forced to swallow a bill that fell short of red lines they had drawn. More than 50 members of the caucus had signed a letter vowing not to support any health care reform bill that didn’t include a “robust public option,” but all of them did just that in the end.
Two things were clear: The House and Senate needed Democrats who were more progressive, and those progressives needed to be better organized. A few new organizations popped up in an effort to bring that into being. One called itself the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, or PCCC — its abbreviation a troll of the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which it was designed to counterbalance. Separately, then-bloggers Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald organized a political action committee to back progressive challengers in primaries.
After the midterm wipeout of 2010, many electoral fights took place with little media coverage. Two of the first progressive battles of the new era came in 2012, when a coalition of groups, including the PCCC, intervened in open primaries for House seats in San Diego and New Mexico.
In San Diego, progressives backed Lori Saldaña over right-wing businessperson Scott Peters. In New Mexico, they were for Eric Griego against the conservative Michelle Lujan Grisham. They lost both narrowly, and the losses have reverberated. Earlier this month, Peters cast one of three votes against a committee measure to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. Lujan Grisham is now governor of New Mexico, where she battles progressives from her statewide perch.
But, thanks in significant part to the organizing around Griego’s campaign, which evolved into a statewide effort, Deb Haaland ran for Lujan Grisham’s vacant seat and won as a progressive. When Haaland was elevated to secretary of the interior earlier this year, the primary campaign for her seat wasn’t left versus center or left versus right but rather who was the most progressive. Even in a race dominated by party insiders, it went to Melanie Stansbury, a progressive state legislator.
This week, the newly sworn-in Stansbury publicly vowed that she would hold the line with the progressive caucus and block the bipartisan bill unless both moved together. Adding rank-and-file members like Stansbury to the caucus’s public list was in some ways more valuable than compiling a list of the usual suspects, showing Pelosi that the opposition wasn’t just deep, but it was also broad.
Throughout the 2010s, the Democrats’ ability to raise small dollars gradually expanded, driven forward by Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign in 2012 and then Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016. Though Sanders fell short, he showed that there was a major base of support for his democratic socialist agenda, in terms of both people and money. That same year, Pramila Jayapal, an anti-war organizer from Washington state whose inspiration to enter electoral politics was Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., was elected to the House.
She and Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin set about transforming the progressive caucus from what former co-Chair Raúl Grijalva had described as a “Noam Chomsky book reading club” into a cohesive unit capable of wielding influence. The caucus set an internal agenda but didn’t have any requirements for joining. In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset New York Rep. Joe Crowley, her suggestion of a “sub-caucus” that could be more nimble as a bloc was seen internally as both a hopeful sign and something of a challenge. If the caucus didn’t get itself organized, it would be supplanted by something else.
During the next Congress, progressives withheld their votes in committee in a fight to strengthen H.R. 3, the bill that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Donald Trump was president, so little that the House did was going to become law, but it was a preseason win of sorts that showed the tactic could work. Ahead of this Congress, the CPC tightened its ideological requirements for membership and shifted to a single chair to become more nimble. In early 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer used CPC intransigence to persuade Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., not to push too hard for deep cuts to unemployment benefits, telling him that progressives would take the American Rescue Plan down in the House if he did. At the same time, Jayapal shied away from a showdown over the $15 minimum wage after only 42 Democrats voted to override the parliamentarian.
Over the summer, the number of progressives willing to hold the line on the infrastructure bill continued growing, particularly as the holdout senators refused to even lay out what they were for and against. But it wasn’t a certainty until this week that the progressive bloc could hold strong.
Ocasio-Cortez said she doesn’t blame Gottheimer for miscalculating. “Honestly, I see why he was so certain, CPC never stood up like this until this week,” she told The Intercept. “Until this week, the most we could scrounge together for a showdown was like 14 members.”
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Tony and Cherie Blair bought a £6.5 million office in Marylebone by acquiring a British Virgin Islands offshore company. (photo: WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Pandora Papers: Biggest Ever Leak of Offshore Data Exposes Financial Secrets of Rich and Powerful
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The secret deals and hidden assets of some of the world's richest and most powerful people have been revealed in the biggest trove of leaked offshore data in history."
Millions of documents reveal offshore deals and assets of more than 100 billionaires, 30 world leaders and 300 public officials
The secret deals and hidden assets of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people have been revealed in the biggest trove of leaked offshore data in history.
Branded the Pandora papers, the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
They expose the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers and heads of state. They also shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries.
The files include disclosures about major donors to the Conservative party, raising difficult questions for Boris Johnson as his party meets for its annual conference.
More than 100 billionaires feature in the leaked data, as well as celebrities, rock stars and business leaders. Many use shell companies to hold luxury items such as property and yachts, as well as incognito bank accounts. There is even art ranging from looted Cambodian antiquities to paintings by Picasso and murals by Banksy.
The Pandora papers reveal the inner workings of what is a shadow financial world, providing a rare window into the hidden operations of a global offshore economy that enables some of the world’s richest people to hide their wealth and in some cases pay little or no tax.
There are emails, memos, incorporation records, share certificates, compliance reports and complex diagrams showing labyrinthine corporate structures. Often, they allow the true owners of opaque shell companies to be identified for the first time.
The files were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington. It shared access to the leaked data with select media partners including the Guardian, BBC Panorama, Le Monde and the Washington Post. More than 600 journalists have sifted through the files as part of a massive global investigation.
The Pandora papers represent the latest – and largest in terms of data volume – in a series of major leaks of financial data that have convulsed the offshore world since 2013.
Setting up or benefiting from offshore entities is not itself illegal, and in some cases people may have legitimate reasons, such as security, for doing so. But the secrecy offered by tax havens has at times proven attractive to tax evaders, fraudsters and money launderers, some of whom are exposed in the files.
Other wealthy individuals and companies stash their assets offshore to avoid paying tax elsewhere, a legal activity estimated to cost governments billions in lost revenues.
After more than 18 months analysing the data in the public interest, the Guardian and other media outlets will publish their findings over the coming days, beginning with revelations about the offshore financial affairs of some of the most powerful political leaders in the world
They include the ruler of Jordan, King Abdullah II, who, leaked documents reveal, has amassed a secret $100m property empire spanning Malibu, Washington and London. The king of Jordan declined to answer specific questions but said there would be nothing improper about him owning properties via offshore companies. Jordan appeared to have blocked the ICIJ website on Sunday, hours before the Pandora papers launched.
The files also show that Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family has traded close to £400m of UK property in recent years. One of their properties was sold to the Queen’s crown estate, which is now looking into how it came to pay £67m to a company that operated as a front for the family that runs a country routinely accused of corruption. The Aliyevs declined to comment.
The Pandora papers also threaten to cause political upsets for two European Union leaders. The prime minister of the Czech republic, Andrej Babiš, who is up for election this week, is facing questions over why he used an offshore investment company to acquire a $22m chateau in the south of France. He too declined to comment.
And in Cyprus, itself a controversial offshore centre, the president, Nicos Anastasiades, may be asked to explain why a law firm he founded was accused of hiding the assets of a controversial Russian billionaire behind fake company owners. The firm denies any wrongdoing, while the Cypriot president says he ceased having an active role in its affairs after becoming leader of the opposition in 1997.
Not everyone named in the Pandora papers is accused of wrongdoing. The leaked files reveals that Tony and Cherie Blair saved £312,000 in property taxes when they purchased a London building partially owned by the family of a prominent Bahraini minister.
The former prime minister and his wife bought the £6.5m office in Marylebone by acquiring a British Virgin Islands (BVI) offshore company. While the move was not illegal, and there is no evidence the Blairs proactively sought to avoid property taxes, the deal highlights a loophole that has enabled wealthy property owners not to pay a tax that is commonplace for ordinary Britons.
The leaked records vividly illustrate the central coordinating role London plays in the murky offshore world. The UK capital is home to wealth managers, law firms, company formation agents and accountants. All exist to serve their ultra-rich clients. Many are foreign-born tycoons who enjoy “non-domicile” status, which means they pay no tax on their overseas assets.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was elected in 2019 on a pledge to clean up his country’s notoriously corrupt and oligarch-influenced economy, is also named in the leak. During the campaign, Zelenskiy transferred his 25% stake in an offshore company to a close friend who now works as the president’s top adviser, the files suggest. Zelenskiy declined to comment and it is unclear if he remains a beneficiary.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom the US suspects of having a secret fortune, does not appear in the files by name. But numerous close associates do, including his best friend from childhood – the late Petr Kolbin – whom critics have called a “wallet” for Putin’s own wealth, and a woman the Russian leader was allegedly once romantically involved with. None responded to invitations to comment.
The Pandora papers also place a revealing spotlight on the offshore system itself. In a development likely to prove embarrassing for the US president, Joe Biden, who has pledged to lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system, the US emerges from the leak as a leading tax haven. The files suggest the state of South Dakota, in particular, is sheltering billions of dollars in wealth linked to individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes.
The offshore trail also stretches from Africa to Latin America to Asia, and is likely to pose difficult questions for politicians across the world. In Pakistan, Moonis Elahi, a prominent minister in prime minister Imran Khan’s government, contacted an offshore provider in Singapore about investing $33.7m.
In Kenya, the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has portrayed himself as an enemy of corruption. In 2018, Kenyatta, he told the BBC: “Every public servant’s assets must be declared publicly so that people can question and ask: what is legitimate?”
He will come under pressure to explain why he and his close relatives amassed more than $30m of offshore wealth, including property in London. Kenyatta did not respond to enquiries about whether his family wealth was declared to relevant authorities in Kenya.
The Pandora papers also reveal some of the unseen repercussions of previous offshore leaks, which spurred modest reforms in some parts of the world, such as the BVI, which now keeps a record of the real owners of companies registered there. However, the newly leaked data shows money shifting around offshore destinations, as wealthy clients and their advisers adjust to new realities.
Some clients of Mossack Fonseca, the now defunct law firm at the heart of the 2016 Panama papers disclosures, simply transferred their companies to rival providers such as another global trust and corporate administrator with a major office in London, whose data is in the new trove of leaked files.
Asked why he was migrating the new company, one customer wrote bluntly: “Business decision to exit following the Panama papers.” Another agent said the industry had always “adapted” to external pressure.
Some leaked files appear to show some in the industry seeking to circumvent new privacy regulations. One Swiss lawyer refused to email the names of his high-value customers to a service provider in the BVI, following new legislation. Instead, he sent them by airmail, with strict instructions they should not be processed in any “electronic way”. The identity of another beneficial owner was shared via WhatsApp.
“The purpose of this way to proceed is to enable you to comply with BVI rules,” the lawyer wrote. Referring to Mossack Fonseca, the lawyer added: “You are obliged to keep secrecy for our clients and to not make feasible at all a second ‘Panama papers’ story that happened to one of your competitors.”
Gerard Ryle, the director of the ICIJ, said leading politicians who organised their finances in tax havens had a stake in the status quo, and were likely to be an obstacle to reform of the offshore economy. “When you have world leaders, when you have politicians, when you have public officials, all using the secrecy and all using this world, then I don’t think we’re going to see an end to it.”
He expected the Pandora papers to have a greater impact than previous leaks, not least because they were arriving in the middle of a pandemic that had exacerbated inequalities and forced governments to borrow unprecedented amounts to be shouldered by ordinary taxpayers. “This is the Panama papers on steroids,” Ryle said. “It’s broader, richer and has more detail.”
At least $11.3tn in wealth is held offshore, according to a 2020 study by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “This is money that is being lost to treasuries around the world and money that could be used to recover from Covid,” Ryle said. “We’re losing out because some people are gaining. It’s as simple as that. It’s a very simple transaction that’s going on here.”
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Union protest against labor conditions at Amazon. (photo: Al Seib/LA Times/Getty Images)
Can the Teamsters Organize Amazon?
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
Jones writes: "This month the Teamsters will begin voting on a post-Hoffa future, selecting between two leadership slates that agree on one issue above all: the need to organize Amazon."
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Demonstrators march in Washington DC. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)
"I Am Not a Baby-Making Machine": Thousands March for Abortion Rights in Protest of Texas's New Law
Stephanie K. Baer, BuzzFeed News
Baer writes: "Thousands took to the streets in cities across the country Saturday to demand that lawmakers and judges protect people's rights and access to abortion as the nation's highest court prepares to hear its biggest reproductive rights case in decades."
In Washington DC, demonstrators marched to the Supreme Court. Justices will hear arguments on a major challenge to Roe v. Wade in December.
Thousands took to the streets in cities across the country Saturday to demand that lawmakers and judges protect people's rights and access to abortion as the nation's highest court prepares to hear its biggest reproductive rights case in decades.
It was the first Women's March of the Biden administration, and it came a month after the Supreme Court took no action to block Texas's six-week abortion ban from taking effect, halting the vast majority of abortions in the state. Texas is the first state to have an early-term abortion ban take effect in the decades since Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
Now, the Supreme Court, which begins its new term on Monday, is set to hear arguments in December regarding a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In that case, justices will revisit a key tenet of reproductive rights: that states cannot ban abortions before a fetus is viable — typically around week 24 at the earliest. A ruling in favor of Mississippi would embolden other Republican-led states to impose sweeping abortion bans at earlier phases of pregnancy.
In Washington DC on Saturday, demonstrators marched to the Supreme Court, chanting "My body, my choice." During speeches, activists repeatedly referenced the Texas law, SB 8, which bans nearly all abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected — typically around the sixth week of pregnancy when many people don't even know they're pregnant. The law is unusual in that it relies on private individuals rather than the government to enforce the ban, raising the question of whether Texas has found a way to structure an early-term abortion ban to avoid a constitutional challenge.
Speaking to the crowd gathered in DC's Freedom Plaza, Texan Anna described the hoops she had to jump through to get an abortion when she was 17. Texas is one of many states that require minors to obtain parental consent to get an abortion. But Anna’s parents were out of the country, so she had to get permission from a judge to end her pregnancy.
"Do you know what I wanted to say to the judge? I am not a baby-making machine and I should be able to decide if and when I become pregnant," Anna said to cheers.
She ultimately got an abortion after six weeks due to the delays caused by the requirement, said Anna, a policy intern at Deeds Not Words, an Austin-based women's empowerment organization. But if SB 8 had been in effect, she wouldn't have been able to get it.
"No one should have to go to a judge for permission to have an abortion," Anna said. "No one should worry about being sued for helping their friend and no one should stand in my way when I want birth control, Plan B, or abortion."
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Protesters gather to push back against coronavirus vaccine mandates in New York City last month. (photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Many Are Searching for Vaccine Mandate Loopholes. These Are the People Trying to Stop Them.
Ashley Fetters Maloy, The Washington Post
Maloy writes: "Now that the FDA has fully approved the Pfizer coronavirus shot, vaccination has swiftly become a requirement for companies, universities and even the military. Meanwhile, just over 1 in 10 Americans 'definitely' does not plan to get vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in September."
Normally, Matt Troup’s job as chief executive and president of a hospital group is to make sure all his care centers are functioning optimally, day to day and year to year. But ever since Conway Regional Health System instituted a coronavirus vaccination mandate for its employees, he’s been devoting a chunk of his workday to something new: figuring out who the holdouts are and enduring torrents of backlash.
The vast majority of the Conway, Ark., hospital group’s 1,800 employees were voluntarily vaccinated earlier this year. But Troup also got 45 requests for religious exemptions and had to disentangle the genuine conscientious objectors from those looking for a proverbial fig leaf.
“It has been ugly, ugly, ugly,” Troup says. “I’ve been compared to Hitler, been called a moron.”
Now that the FDA has fully approved the Pfizer coronavirus shot, vaccination has swiftly become a requirement for companies, universities and even the military. Meanwhile, just over 1 in 10 Americans “definitely” does not plan to get vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in September. The clashes are inevitable: When faced with the choice between getting vaccinated and giving up their jobs or enrollments, many Americans have sought loopholes or ways to claim exemptions they don’t in good faith qualify for. People such as Troup have wound up with the unenviable job of stopping them — which can be awkward and logistically nightmarish, and it can get confrontational fast.
Almost all of Troup’s applicants for religious exemptions objected to taking a vaccine developed using fetal cell lines (whose origins can be traced back to cells from electively aborted fetuses several decades ago). So Troup and his team devised a strategy: Those employees would have to sign an agreement not to take any other medical treatments developed using fetal cell lines. Among the 28 medications on the list: Tylenol. Motrin. Preparation H. Claritin. Benadryl. Tums.
He hoped that would force the exemption-seekers to confront just how selectively they’d applied their argument. A few applicants signed the form, no questions asked. Others, of course, pushed back.
Troup has had conversations with people seeking the exemption. Some have sighed and eventually rolled up their sleeves; others have drawn a distinction between fetal cell lines being used in development of a medication versus being used in testing.
Mostly, though, he finds that what’s being described as a sincerely held religious objection is actually a sincerely held fear of the vaccines. He says that one applicant “told me, ‘Matt, if I sign this, you’re asking me to lie.’ ”
“I very gently and politely asked, ‘Well, you know, tell me: What medicines on that list … do you think were not developed with fetal cells or tested on fetal cells?’ ” Troup recalls. “The response was this diatribe about how evil the vaccine was, how much harm it causes, how data and reports are being covered up. Which told me that it really wasn’t about fetal cells at all. It’s all about a vaccine hesitancy.”
“I have learned to be careful. I’ve learned compassion throughout this exercise, maybe in a bigger way than I ever have,” Troup adds. “We have to give people some space and we have to respect people’s concern, because this individual, they were really afraid.”
Indeed, there are limits to how much the vaccination loophole police can do without creating a hostile environment or flirting with discrimination. Ann, for example — a human resources manager for a small restaurant group in California, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid unwanted attention for her company — harbors a few doubts about the sincerity of one employee’s request for a religious exemption. But “part of the role is to make sure that people with divergent backgrounds and beliefs all have space,” Ann says. The employee received a “temporary exemption” and agreed to get tested weekly.
Mark Owczarski is the associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, where 134 students were recently “disenrolled” for not complying with a vaccination mandate. In an interview, however, Owczarski clarified that although about 96 percent of students are vaccinated, Virginia Tech gave religious or medical exemptions to every student who asked for one on the condition that they would agree to be tested weekly.
“Do we then ask people to go through that process [of submitting their vaccinatio documentation or their exemption request] and then elect to question whether they really mean it, or whether their card is real, or whether they really have a doctor who signed that, or whether that doctor is, you know, their next-door neighbor?”
They do not — because the university’s priority is curbing the spread of covid-19, Owczarski says, not “ferreting out scammers.” By the university’s logic, making students feel that they can safely admit to being unvaccinated and opt for weekly testing serves that end better than creating an environment that makes them feel pressured to, say, upload fake vaccination cards. (Virginia Tech also recently began requiring indoor mask-wearing for everyone.)
Indeed, whether to get a coronavirus vaccination can often be a question of identity. “For some people, vaccinating means sort of giving up their credentials as a good conservative and all of their conservative friends and family members. We tend to live in social networks that have this ‘birds of a feather flock together’ feature,” says Gretchen Chapman, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon. In an employment context, “depending on how much you love your job and depend on your job, you might think that fitting in with your social group is more important.”
Loophole-hunting, of course, has become endemic to institutions that mandate vaccination — and naturally, authorities have caught on. In the U.S. Army, for example, applicants for religious exemptions to its Dec. 15 vaccination deadline will have to talk to a licensed health care provider and sit for an interview with a chaplain, who must then, according to a paper drafted by the Army’s health-care operations directorate and obtained by the Army Times, “provide a memorandum that summarizes this interview and addresses the religious basis and sincerity of the Soldier’s request.” Other authorities have avoided playing whack-a-mole with individual cases by going straight to the source: In Connecticut, health authorities suspended the license of a retired doctor who was mailing out signed forms that alleged an allergy to ingredients in the vaccines to virtually anyone who wanted one.
Every week, San Diego attorney Dolan Williams gets at least one phone call from a complete stranger who sounds angry or even desperate. Williams isn’t sure how they get his number — most likely they’re frantically Googling attorneys and calling the first one with a prominently listed phone number, he says — but they all call with the same question. If my employer says I have to get the coronavirus vaccine to keep my job, do I really have to do it?
The calls often come on Friday afternoons, after employers have sent out companywide memos about vaccination requirements. Nurses frequently ask how they can circumvent hospital-system mandates. Workers from tech and communication companies ask whether being Catholic or Christian is enough to qualify for a religious exemption. One man kept him on the phone for 45 minutes to tell him in detail about a new church he had started with his mother — then sent a two-page doctrine that outlined why it was against coronavirus vaccination.
Williams, whose wife has lost multiple relatives to covid-19, did his best to stay professional. “I just said, like, ‘All you can do is present this to your employer. They’re probably going to tell you that they still can’t accommodate you.’”
“I was impressed,” Williams adds with a laugh. “Saddened, but impressed.”
Many of his cold-callers, he adds, are people who have dug their heels in after their concerns have been dismissed one too many times. So Williams makes a point to listen politely while they express their fears. “I at least try to just give them the respect of talking to them,” Williams says. “That’s a lot of times what I realize that they’re missing: people just respecting their opinion.”
Ultimately, the calls give him hope about the effectiveness of vaccination mandates. Once he’s broken the news that an employer can in fact deny employment to a person who’s unvaccinated, he says, most of them head into the weekend sounding as if they understand they have a big decision to make. “I haven’t heard anybody call me back and say, ‘Yeah, I got out of it.’ Or ‘I decided to quit,’ ” he says. “I’m pretty sure what’s happening is they’re keeping their jobs and getting the vaccine.”
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A protestor calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Prison on January 11, 2016, in front of the White House. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Will the United States Officially Acknowledge That It Had a Secret Torture Site in Poland?
Raymond Bonner, ProPublica
Bonner writes: "One of the longest-held prisoners in the U.S. global war on terror is finally getting a day in court. Sort of."
Abu Zubaydah has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay for 15 years. He’s asking the Supreme Court to allow his lawyers to depose the two men who oversaw his torture.
One of the longest-held prisoners in the U.S. global war on terror is finally getting a day in court. Sort of. The prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who has never been charged with a crime, has been waiting 14 years for a federal judge to rule on his habeas corpus petition that challenges the legality of his detention. But next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a separate case: Zubaydah’s request that he be permitted to take testimony from the two CIA contractors who oversaw his torture.
The Trump administration intervened to block public disclosure about how Zubaydah was treated while in U.S. custody, or even where he was held, and the Biden administration is continuing the fight. In its Supreme Court briefs, the administration has cited an array of arguments against allowing the two men to be deposed, citing everything from the state secrets privilege, which shields highly sensitive government information from being revealed in civil litigation, to the plot of the Oscar-winning thriller “Argo.”
Zubaydah’s case has reached the Supreme Court circuitously, beginning with an investigation in Poland five years ago into whether any of its government officials were complicit in Zubaydah’s detention and torture. The United States has refused to cooperate with the Polish prosecutors, citing national security concerns.
The Polish investigators asked for help from Zubaydah’s lawyer, who in turn sought to take the depositions of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Paid more than $80 million, they were the principal architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” — the agency’s euphemism for waterboarding prisoners, slamming them against walls, forcing them into a coffin-sized box, depriving them of sleep for days at a time and other forms of torture. Zubaydah was the first prisoner on whom Mitchell and Jessen tested their techniques, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2014.
After the CIA seized Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002 and secretly took him to a black site in Thailand, Bush administration officials asserted that he was al-Qaida’s third-highest-ranking leader. The government has since acknowledged that he was not a senior terrorist leader and that he had no known connection to the 9/11 attacks. He had been in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly a decade and had suffered a serious head injury while fighting against the Soviet-backed government. Intelligence officials concluded he was more of a facilitator, providing false passports, housing and other arrangements for men, some potential terrorists, who moved between the two countries.
“He wasn’t hatching plots and giving orders,” Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad when Zubaydah was being monitored and eventually seized, wrote in his book “88 Days to Kandahar.” “I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack.” However, in Washington, CIA officials were convinced that Zubaydah knew about plans to attack the United States, and Mitchell was determined to extract the information, according to declassified documents.
After being waterboarded 83 times in Thailand, Zubaydah had still not revealed any “actionable intelligence,” cables from Thailand to Langley reported. Later, interrogators would conclude he knew nothing about al-Qaida’s plans.
He did, however, send FBI agents on futile investigations as he tried to end the torture. At one point, interrogators in Thailand asked Zubaydah a hypothetical question: If you were going to carry out an attack in the United States, where would you do it? The Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, Zubaydah answered. This led New York City to impose security measures “not seen since the first months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” The New York Times reported.
In December 2002, when journalists began asking questions about a black site in Thailand, it was shut down, and Zubaydah was secretly transferred to Poland.
For years, the Polish government denied the existence of a CIA detention site. But after the 2014 Senate Intelligence report and after the European Court for Human Rights ruled in 2015 that it was “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Zubaydah had been held in Poland, Polish prosecutors began their investigation. Invoking a mutual legal assistance treaty, which commits each country to support the other’s criminal investigations, Warsaw asked Washington for assistance. Their request went unanswered.
Joseph Margulies, one of Zubaydah’s American lawyers, realized that the Polish investigation offered an opportunity to make public at least some of what had been done to his client at the black sites and might lead to his release. Invoking a federal law that allows an interested party to gather evidence in support of a foreign investigation, he asked a court to compel the depositions of Mitchell and Jessen. The Trump administration immediately intervened. It asserted the state secrets privilege to block the depositions, contending that the testimony would formally confirm or deny that the CIA operated a clandestine detention center in Poland.
As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit organization in London, put it in a brief recently filed with the Supreme Court in support of Zubaydah, “Study after study, report after report, emerging from the CIA, DOJ and SSCI, along with flight record after flight record, flight invoice after invoice, have confirmed, in graphic and granular detail, what the world already knows: that the CIA had black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.”
Even the former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski has acknowledged that the CIA had set up a black site in his country. “Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” he told Poland’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, in 2012. “The President and the Prime Minister agreed to the intelligence co-operation with the Americans, because this was what was required by national interest.”
None of this has slowed the U.S. government’s efforts to avoid acknowledging what is now accepted fact. In their briefs, government lawyers argue that the Polish site, if it ever existed, remains a state secret because the federal government has never officially admitted to its existence. They contend that all those public reports and statements could be part of a CIA disinformation campaign. The lawyers cite as evidence the book and movie “Argo,” which chronicles how the CIA rescued Americans hiding out in Iran by posing as a film crew. (As many commentators pointed out, the movie takes considerable liberties with the facts, adding, among other things, a chase through an airport that never occurred.)
The government’s Supreme Court brief relies primarily on United States v. Reynolds, a 1953 case regarding the crash of an Air Force B-29 near Waycross, Georgia. When the families of three civilian engineers killed in the crash sought a copy of the accident report and witness statements, the Air Force refused to turn over the documents, asserting that they contained classified information about a secret mission. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s claim and, for the first time, formally recognized the state secrets privilege.
Forty-seven years later, the Air Force declassified the documents. They contained no reference to a secret mission. “Instead, the report told a horror story of incompetence, bungling, and tragic error,” Garry Wills wrote in The New York Review of Books.
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Tree pruning and maintenance (photo: Westend61/Getty Images)
The Environmental Benefits of Proper Tree Maintenance
EcoWatch
Excerpt: "Most people know that trees are great for providing shade, clean air and natural beauty for our landscapes. What you might not know is that neglecting trees and avoiding regular pruning and maintenance can have an adverse effect on the environment."
Most people know that trees are great for providing shade, clean air and natural beauty for our landscapes. What you might not know is that neglecting trees and avoiding regular pruning and maintenance can have an adverse effect on the environment.
How Do Neglected Trees Affect the Environment?
Trees seem to grow happily and healthily without our intervention, so many people believe they don't require regular maintenance. Unfortunately, there are several adverse effects unmaintained trees can have on the environment. These include:
1. Diseased Trees Can Infect Nearby Trees
No matter where you live, there are a variety of tree diseases and tree pests that can wreak havoc on neglected trees. Some of the common issues that affect trees in most areas of the U.S. include anthracnose, leaf spots, powdery mildew, root rot, aphids, ash borers, Asian longhorn beetles and gypsy moths.
Diseases, fungi and insects are all more likely to attack and infect weakened and neglected trees. Not only are unmaintained trees at a higher risk of infestation and infection, but they can also spread the issue to other nearby trees. Fallen leaves, dropped sticks and even roots of an unhealthy tree can all spread an insect infestation or tree disease rapidly, potentially killing off many trees.
2. Neglected Trees Don't Grow as Healthily
Even if your tree isn't diseased or pest-ridden, neglecting it can negatively affect the environment. Regular pruning is recommended for all trees, because it promotes healthy growth and limits competition between your tree's limbs. Failing to prune your tree can mean more resources are consumed without any benefit to the tree or the environment.
Pruned and well-maintained trees will contribute more clean air to the space around them, and they'll be less likely to be affected by disease or tree-destroying insects.
3. They Deplete the Soil of Nutrients
All trees pull nutrients from the soil to maintain growth, even if they're diseased, infested with pests or have overlapping and uncontrolled limbs that are competing for sunlight and resources.
A neglected tree will pull more nutrients from the soil because of the uninhibited growth of limbs, branches and leaves. You'll be depleting the soil of essential components for no added benefit to the environment. A well-maintained tree will always be a better use of the nutrients in your soil.
How Do Trees Benefit the Environment?
It's widely known that trees improve the air quality, provide us with much-needed oxygen and offer a habitat for beneficial wildlife. However, there are additional benefits even beyond these obvious ones.
Trees Clean Our Water Supply
Many cities throughout the U.S. rely on groundwater as a public water supply. Groundwater sources, including private wells, are most often refilled by runoff from precipitation. The root system of a healthy tree will naturally pull pollutants out of rainwater as it seeps through the ground and into our water sources. More trees generally mean cleaner, healthier water for bathing, cooking and drinking.
Trees Improve the Weather
Yes, really! Trees naturally reduce temperatures and moisture in the air, making the climate more comfortable. The more trees that appear in a city, the less likely sunlight and heat are to reflect off the ground and warm the air around us.
Additionally, trees provide shade for us, our cars and our homes. Shading from sunlight can drastically reduce how hot our immediate environment gets.
Trees Reduce Energy Costs
Finally, the shade provided by trees that keeps homes cooler in the summer can help reduce air conditioner usage and energy bills. Properties with more tree coverage will naturally pay less for cooling in the summer months. Reduced energy usage, of course, has a positive impact on the environment.
What Does Proper Tree Maintenance Look Like?
Proper tree maintenance isn't all that complicated, and the benefits you can enjoy when you maintain your trees far outweigh the cost and effort of the upkeep.
Most importantly, you should have regular pruning done at least once a year. Pruning will promote healthy limb and branch growth, help protect your trees from pests and tree diseases, and reduce the likelihood of dead or dying branches and limbs falling on your property.
Secondly, you should ensure your tree receives enough water each week, especially in the hotter summer months. The amount of water needed will depend on the size, age and species of the tree, but plan to water at least one to two times per week.
Thirdly, mulching around the base of your trees is an excellent way to promote healthy root growth and nutrient uptake. Mulch naturally holds water in the soil for the tree to drink, and it will eventually break down and replenish nutrients required for healthy growth.
Finally, keep an eye on your trees and contact an arborist for treatment if you notice any symptoms of pest infestation or disease.
5 Signs That a Tree Is Not Healthy
There are many ways a tree will indicate if it's unhealthy. Keep an eye out for the most common symptoms of tree issues listed below, and report to an arborist if you're unsure of the severity of the treatment protocol.
Holes or Cankers in the Trunk
The trunk of your tree should be free of large cavities or cankers, which can indicate a variety of pests or diseases. It could be that the trunk was physically damaged by landscaping equipment, a car or other machinery, leaving it more prone to disease and insect infestation.
Holes in a tree are also a sign that woodpeckers are feeding on tree pests like bark beetles. If you notice holes in the bark of your tree, it's possible that a pest like the bark beetle has begun an infestation. Bark beetles are especially prevalent on the West Coast, especially in California, where most infections require an arborist for tree removal.
Missing Bark
If your tree is missing sections of bark, it's very likely infected with a tree disease or fungus. Some tree-destroying pests can also cause the bark to decay and fall off, so reach out for a professional assessment if you're unsure of the cause.
Dead or Dying Branches
Healthy trees have leaves on all of their branches. If you notice leafless branches in the spring or summer, or limbs or sticks that appear dead, you might need a routine pruning or an assessment for disease.
Leaf Damage
Holes in leaves, misshapen leaves, early yellowing or browning, and premature leaf drop can all indicate an unhealthy tree. The reasons for leaf issues vary from leaf-eating insects to sap-suckers and fungal infections, so you might need an expert to diagnose the problem for you.
Wilting
Finally, an unhealthy tree will often show signs of wilting, including shriveled leaves and sagging branches. The causes of wilting are varied, from excessive heat and drought to diseases like oak wilt.
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