16 January 22
A Moment to Honor Those Who Sustain RSN
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15 January 22
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Adam Serwer | The Culture War Has Warped the Supreme Court's Judgment
Adam Serwer, The Atlantic
Serwer writes: "Yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration's mandate, which compelled companies with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested regularly."
Yesterday’s decision hinges on a new and alarming embrace of the right-wing crusade against vaccination.
If you read the legal language in the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which authorizes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to act in an emergency capacity when workers face “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards,” and when “such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger,” you might think that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate stood a good chance of surviving the Supreme Court’s review.
But if you watched Fox News at all over the past year, you would have guessed that it was doomed.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s mandate, which compelled companies with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested regularly. (The Court narrowly allowed a similar requirement for health-care workers to remain in place.) The majority’s reasoning is that because the hazard of COVID-19 is present outside the workplace, OSHA exceeded the authority it has to regulate workplace safety.
“COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather,” the unsigned opinion reads. “That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.”
This is laughable logic. OSHA regulates many, many hazards that are also present outside the workplace. The fact that you can die in a fire in your apartment is not an argument against regulating fire hazards in factories or offices. The mandate applied to firms whose employees have to work indoors, because that’s how the virus spreads. Moreover, unlike attending a sporting event as a spectator, people have to go to work, unless they’re lucky enough to be, say, a Supreme Court justice, in which case you can work remotely.
The majority’s answer to this obvious rebuttal, which gets closer to the motivation behind the decision, is that a vaccine “cannot be undone at the end of the workday.” Similarly, a concurring opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch portrays vaccination as “a medical procedure that affects [people’s] lives outside the workplace.” In their dissent from the decision upholding the mandate for health-care workers, Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Samuel Alito insisted that “these cases are not about the efficacy or importance of COVID-19 vaccines,” while describing the vaccine-or-test requirement as forcing health-care workers to “undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo”—as though having to get a shot is a greater imposition on people who have chosen to work in health care than the imposition of not getting a shot would be on the patients who would be exposed to a potentially fatal infection they do not want and cannot undo. (Never mind that the OSHA rule allowed for those who didn’t want to get vaccinated to simply get tested regularly.)
These are melodramatic and overwrought ways to describe vaccination, which involves getting a shot and moving on with your life. Infants react to getting vaccinated with greater dignity and composure. But this is of a piece with the cultural and political shift that has taken place over the past year, in which prominent conservative figures and media outlets have chosen to undermine the federal government’s public-health response to the pandemic by attacking vaccines as dangerous and portraying vaccine mandates as tyrannical.
It is to be expected that a conservative-dominated Court would be hostile to federal regulation of business. And it makes sense that the justices would also express their opposition in federalist terms, arguing that the states can do what the federal government can’t. But the decision in the employer-mandate case, and the dissent from the four conservative justices in the health-care case, hinges on a new and alarming embrace of the right-wing culture war against vaccination, a deeply regrettable cost of conservative political strategy and political-identity formation.
Fox News, day in and day out, has discouraged its audience from getting vaccinated and promoted anti-vaccine propaganda, even as it maintains a strict testing and vaccination regimen for its own staff. The right-wing network has not just attacked mandates as tyranny, but suggested that the vaccines will kill those who get them, challenged the efficacy of the vaccines, and argued that they are making the pandemic worse. The network’s hosts have compared vaccine requirements to Jim Crow segregation and South African apartheid, historical events they consider crimes against humanity in this particular context but in any other would argue weren’t that bad, happened a long time ago, and you should really get over it. It was arguably inevitable that the justices would echo their cultural milieu—in which a COVID vaccine is like a mark of Cain that stains the soul forever—in their decision.
The conservative wing of the Court wants to have it both ways: insisting they are not questioning the safety or efficacy of vaccination, while issuing decisions that are entirely premised on the right’s newfound and quasi-religious conception of them as traumatic and metaphysically significant—a necessity for the mandates to be seen as oppressive. This is little more than culture war dressed up in the language of constitutionalism.
This shift was evident during the oral argument, when the justices who signed on to Gorsuch’s concurrence raised soft anti-vaccination talking points. Although technically the argument was about whether to stay the mandates while the legal challenges against them proceed, the arguments were focused on whether the mandates themselves were lawful. When it came to the employer mandate, the Republican-appointed justices were profoundly skeptical. And not just skeptical of federal power to regulate business, but skeptical of the vaccines themselves, even when they were strenuously claiming not to be.
Thomas questioned whether “vaccinations are efficacious in preventing some degree of infection to others,” and asked, “Is a vaccine the only way to treat COVID?” Although the Omicron variant has shown itself able to break through vaccination, it is not the only variant in circulation, and the vaccines remain effective against all variants in preventing many deaths and hospitalizations.
Gorsuch compared COVID to the flu, and asked why OSHA had not mandated flu vaccines, even though the flu is nowhere near as lethal as COVID.
Alito prefaced a question suggesting that the vaccines were unsafe by insisting that he was not suggesting the vaccines were unsafe. “I don’t want to be misunderstood in making this point, because I’m not saying the vaccines are unsafe,” Alito said to Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “Has OSHA ever imposed any other safety regulation that imposes some extra risk, some different risk, on the employee, so that if you have to wear a hard hat on the job, wearing a hard hat has some adverse health consequences? Can you think of anything else that’s like this?”
As the justice knows, the mandate contains religious and medical exemptions, and so the purpose of the question was to raise doubts about the safety of the vaccines themselves, despite his extensive disclaimer.
The justices’ reasoning follows the path set by the rest of their political coalition. Their academic pedigrees and social status do not insulate them from adjusting their views to fit those of the community they have chosen. Anti-vaccination sentiment was once more evenly distributed between parties and ideologies; imagining that an anti-vaccination ideology could have taken hold of the left is easy; if it had, this dispute might look very different.
The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write in Democracy for Realists that when voters with strong political identities “consider new issues or circumstances, they often do so not in order to challenge and revise their fundamental commitments, but in order to bolster those commitments by constructing preferences or beliefs consistent with them. They sound like they are thinking, and they feel like they are thinking. We all do.”
Surely the sophisticated legal minds who make up the Supreme Court are resistant to this sort of crude rationalization. The truth is the reverse. As Achen and Bartels write, “political rationalization is often most powerful among people who are well-informed and politically engaged, since their fundamental political commitments tend to be most consistent and strongly held.” (In fairness, this is probably as true of opinion journalists as it is of Supreme Court justices.)
Conservatives were often vocally pro-vaccination in the past, when anti-vaccine sentiment was vaguely associated with people the comedian Jon Stewart once mocked as “science-denying affluent California liberals.” With “affluent California liberals” as a symbol of the anti-vaccination movement, conservative culture-war instincts trended in a more constructive direction. Indeed, a 2015 measles outbreak at Disneyland illustrated the importance of mass vaccination to obtain herd immunity and suppress disease.
Many conservatives at the time made precisely that point. “If you think about the childhood illnesses that once permanently debilitated people like my grandfather, who contracted childhood polio—and you think today that measles, rubella, polio have been eradicated from the U.S. and much of the world—why would we go backwards?” Senator Ted Cruz asked in 2015. “In a feat that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to breathe life into nearly vanquished childhood diseases,” the conservative pundit Rich Lowry had lamented presciently a year earlier. “Nothing good can come from undoing one of the miracles of medical progress.”
The logic of vaccine mandates, too, was well accepted on the right. “Some say the decision to vaccinate or not should be the parents’ choice,” the conservative writer Thomas Sowell argued in 2015. “That would be fine if their child would live isolated from other children. But that is impossible.” Many articles from 2015 were bitterly angry at the suggestion that conservatives were anti-vaccine, and blamed media bias for it. There were certainly disagreements over federal authority to mandate vaccines, but those differences of opinion were less significant, because immunization remained a thoroughly bipartisan cause, and Republicans had not embraced anti-vaxxers as a constituency. Today, Republican elected officials have begun opposing such mandates even on the state level.
Now Cruz complains about Big Bird encouraging children to get vaccinated while Lowry writes rageful op-eds attacking “the idiocy of covid-vaccine mandates for kids.” In 2015, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted a photo of himself getting a booster shot to rebut liberal media bias; in 2021, the career ophthalmologist announced that he was refusing to get the COVID vaccine. As Lowry observed in 2015, anti-vaxxers tend to be “doggedly impervious to evidence.”
The idea that vaccination is unsafe or ineffective, and that vaccine mandates are a harbinger of state tyranny, is now a part of conservative political identity, which makes the right-wing justices see the OSHA mandate as unlawful no matter what the law actually says. As Justice Elena Kagan put it during the oral argument, “I don’t know about that kind of doctrine in the OSH Act or any place else in administrative law, that because you can say that, you know, somebody would prefer not to be regulated, the agency loses its power.”
That, unfortunately, gets to the heart of the matter. But because the text of the OSH Act is so clear, the conservative justices, typically so insistent on strict textual interpretation, had to get philosophical. Because what they know, as good Fox News–watching conservatives, is that they don’t like the mandate. They understand that their fellow conservatives would prefer not to be regulated in this way. And therefore the mandate must be unlawful.
With all the sophistication of a bong rip in a dorm room, the majority writes, “It is telling that OSHA, in its half century of existence, has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind—addressing a threat that is untethered, in any causal sense, from the workplace.” Setting aside the false notion that regulating workplaces where COVID spreads easily is “untethered” from the workplace, was there, in that half century, a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed nearly a million Americans? The majority’s slippery slope is bulldozed flat by its own argument; the fact that OSHA has never before issued such a regulation is itself a reflection of the unique circumstances of the moment.
Perhaps you might say that the Democratic appointees are similarly arbitrary in their reasoning. I’m not arguing that the liberal justices possess divine infallibility. They simply don’t have a 6–3 majority on the Court, and the country is therefore not subject to their whims. The Court is a site of political combat, and its composition and rulings reflect that reality, not the illusion of impartiality that the justices and their advocates insist on putting forth as a way to defend the legitimacy of the Court’s right-wing majority. As these decisions show, the Court’s future hinges less on the text of federal law and the Constitution than on the capricious process by which conservatives define what it means to be one of them, where even something as miraculous and benign as immunization can become a culture-war battlefield.
One of the stranger elements of the Trump administration was that the president would spend much of his day watching Fox News and issue executive orders or policies based simply on his reaction to what he saw. Understanding why and what the president was doing required knowledge of Fox News’ daily programming. It seemed like a comical absurdity: the most powerful nation in the world being run by a guy screaming at his television from the couch. And yet, it’s not clear that the honorable justices of the Supreme Court are all that different.
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Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Taking On Starbucks, Inspired by Bernie Sanders
Noam Scheiber, The New York Times
Scheiber writes: "Maggie Carter, a Starbucks barista in Knoxville, Tenn., is a warm and reassuring presence who says she is keen to 'go the extra mile' for customers."
The liberal workers the company has long attracted are expanding a union campaign to other cities after a landmark victory in Buffalo.
Maggie Carter, a Starbucks barista in Knoxville, Tenn., is a warm and reassuring presence who says she is keen to “go the extra mile” for customers.
She may also be a nightmare for Starbucks executives.
As a union organizing campaign that began in Buffalo and produced the company’s only two unionized U.S. stores spreads to other cities, it is being driven by workers like Ms. Carter: young, well educated, politically liberal.
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A U.S. census taker. (photo: Census.gov)
Trump Officials Interfered With the 2020 Census Beyond Cutting It Short, Email Shows
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR
Lo Wang writes: "Former President Donald Trump's administration alarmed career civil servants at the Census Bureau by not only ending the 2020 national head count early, but also pressuring them to alter plans for protecting people's privacy and producing accurate data, a newly released email shows."
Former President Donald Trump's administration alarmed career civil servants at the Census Bureau by not only ending the 2020 national head count early, but also pressuring them to alter plans for protecting people's privacy and producing accurate data, a newly released email shows.
Trump's political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an "unusually" high level of "engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses," according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau's deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants.
At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College.
Despite the 14th Amendment's requirement to include the "whole number of persons in each state," Trump wanted to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census counts used to reallocate each state's share of congressional seats and electoral votes.
While the former president's unprecedented push did not reach its ultimate goal, it wreaked havoc at the federal government's largest statistical agency, which was also contending with the coronavirus pandemic upending most of its plans for the once-a-decade tally. The delays stemming from COVID-19 forced the bureau to conclude that it could no longer meet the legal reporting deadline for the first set of results and needed more time.
The administration's last-minute decision to cut the counting short sparked public outcries, including a federal lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
But its interference in other areas related to the 2020 census largely flew under most radars. The newly released email — first reported by The New York Times and obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School through an ongoing public records lawsuit — details the wide scope of its attempts to buck the bureau's experts and tamper with the count.
According to the document, the agency's career civil servants saw when to end counting as a "policy decision that political leadership should make."
But the methodologies and procedures for filling in data gaps, reviewing the counts for errors and protecting the confidentiality of people's information should strictly stay in the lane of civil servants at "an independent statistical agency," the email says.
Trump officials — including Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary — however, "expressed interest" in many technical areas, including exactly how the bureau could produce a state-by-state count of unauthorized immigrants and citizenship data that could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.
The email suggests that the bureau's civil servants were planning to discuss their concerns with Ross through the end of 2020.
The bureau's public information office did not immediately respond to NPR's questions about whether those discussions took place.
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Republican state Sen. Rob McColley presents a new congressional district map, drawn by the Senate Republican Caucus. (photo: Andy Chow/Ohio Public Radio)
'Incomprehensible' Bias: Ohio Supreme Court Rejects GOP Attempt to Rig Electoral Map
William Vaillancourt, Rolling Stone
Vaillancourt writes: "The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that a GOP-drawn congressional map of the Buckeye state is flagrantly unconstitutional because it unfairly favors Republicans over Democrats."
“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” Justice Michael Donnelly wrote in the court’s 4-3 opinion
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that a GOP-drawn congressional map of the Buckeye state is flagrantly unconstitutional because it unfairly favors Republicans over Democrats.
“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” Justice Michael Donnelly wrote in the court’s 4-3 opinion.
Ohio Republicans have held a comfortable majority in the state delegation for the past decade or so. Yet their margins of victory have been growing smaller, leading to redistricting efforts that divide heavily-Democratic populations.
In 2011, for instance, Cincinnati’s Hamilton County was cut in two, with each half being absorbed by whiter, more rural districts. GOP lawmakers would have cut it into three parts had lawsuits from Democrats and voting rights groups not been successful Friday. More broadly, the map that Republicans approved would have handed them a 12-3 majority, while they currently hold 12 seats to Democrats’ 4. (Ohio will lose one congressional seat due to its decline in population.)
Critics argued the map violated a 2018 constitutional amendment banning partisan gerrymandering, and the court agreed.
“The General Assembly produced a plan that is infused with undue partisan bias and that is incomprehensibly more extremely biased than the 2011 plan that it replaced,” Donnelly wrote. It was so skewed, he noted, that it “defies correction on a simple district-by-district basis.”
Accordingly, the state legislature must now submit a new map within 30 days. If it can’t come up with a solution, the job goes to the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission, five of whom are Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, who approved the gerrymandered map.
The partisan redistricting scheme also found an ally in DeWine’s son, who was one of the three judges in the court’s minority.
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A woman in Afghanistan. (photo: Kate Holt/InterAction)
Afghanistan in Freefall: Deadly US Sanctions Blamed for Shocking Humanitarian Crisis
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian crisis, we look at how more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban."
As Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian crisis, we look at how more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban. The U.S.'s attempts to block support for the new de facto government have prevented vital funding from flowing to the nation's civil servants, particularly in education and the health sector. Dr. Paul Spiegel says conditions in the hospitals he visited in Kabul as part of a World Health Organization emergency team are rapidly deteriorating, and he describes the lack of heat and basic amenities as winter descended. “There’s been a drought. There’s food insecurity. And all of this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to lack of the U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field,” says Spiegel. “What we see now is that it’s not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
This week the United Nations launched a nearly $5 billion aid appeal for international donors to Afghanistan. U.N. Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said, without immediate assistance, a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms in Afghanistan.
MARTIN GRIFFITHS: A million children potentially suffering severe acute malnutrition. A million children. Figures are so hard to grasp when they’re this kind of size, but a million children in Afghanistan at risk of that kind of malnutrition, if these things don’t happen, is a shocking one.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Congressional Progressive Caucus is demanding the Biden administration lift economic sanctions imposed after the Taliban overran Afghanistan in August. The caucus tweeted, if the current U.S. economic policy toward Afghanistan continues, quote, “there could be more civilian deaths this year than there were in 20 years of war.”
For more, we’re joined in Oslo, Norway, by Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. And in Baltimore, Maryland, we’re joined by Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. He returned last month from a five-week visit to Afghanistan as a consultant for the World Health Organization; his Washington Post opinion piece headlined “Hospitals are collapsing in Afghanistan. At this rate sanctions will kill more people than the Taliban.”
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Spiegel, let’s begin with you. You just recently returned from Afghanistan. Explain exactly what’s happening there and how that relates to U.S. sanctions.
DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Thank — excuse me. Thank you, Amy.
What is happening is there’s a country in freefall, economic freefall, which is affecting all aspects of their lives, and particularly on the health situation. All salaries stopped being paid on August 15th, when the Taliban took over the country. And while there has been some now salaries being paid for basic healthcare, the hospitals are not being — the salaries are not being paid. Healthcare workers are still coming, but there’s no medicines, no — no medicines, no heat. And what we’re seeing are people can’t even afford to get to the hospitals, even if there were medicines to be had.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk specifically about the West’s approach to the Taliban right now.
DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Right. We call — we were told to call them the de facto authorities. And what has happened in the West is that they have very hard-hitting sanctions that do not allow any funds to go to the de facto authorities, but in a very broad way. And it means that government-run hospitals cannot receive money. Government-run schools cannot receive money. Ministries of health, for technocrats, they’re not able to receive money. And so you have a healthcare system — particularly the higher levels, because there are some differences in the lower levels — that are not receiving funds whatsoever. Yet these are civil servants, just like in the U.S. and other areas, that are required to be able to ensure that healthcare services, educational services are running. And everything is falling down. And it’s not just the sanctions, but it’s also a huge issue in terms of the banking system, the central bank and a massive liquidity problem. So, even when I was there and we were paying polio workers and measles workers to try to get vaccines, there was insufficient money in the country to actually pay these people to do their jobs.
AMY GOODMAN: So, in terms of the population, the U.N. reports Afghanistan’s population, nearly 23 million people, are facing extreme hunger. At least a million children are at risk of dying of starvation?
DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yes, yes. And I would add that it’s not — the crisis is already happening. It’s not as if we can stave off or we can prevent this from happening. What we need to be able to do is minimize the incredibly negative effects that we’re seeing. There’s been a drought. There’s food insecurity. And all this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to the lack of U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field, particularly anyone related to the de facto authorities, because of the very strong U.S. sanctions.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Jan Egeland into this conversation, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. You have been to Afghanistan scores of times since, what, back to 1996, when you were deputy foreign minister of Norway in Afghanistan. Can you talk about how the situation today compares and what you think needs to happen?
JAN EGELAND: Well, there hasn’t been this kind of a dramatic collapse in the economy of Afghanistan within months ever before, I think. What happened, really, in August, when the Taliban took over and the NATO countries went for the door, was that they left behind 40 million civilians, the same 40 million civilians whom they had defended with a trillion-dollar military campaign over the last 20 years. Those were left behind, the same women and children, the same doctors and nurses and teachers and so on.
So, what we’ve seen — and I have 1,400 colleagues on the ground. Norwegian Refugee Council has 1,400 relief workers on the ground. What we see now is that it’s not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions. It’s that there is no banking at all and that the teachers and nurses and doctors and so on are not being paid because their salaries are sitting in Washington, and it’s with the World Bank. And the U.S. and all of the other members of the World Bank are not releasing this money. So, a lot of things has to happen tomorrow, unless we will see epic loss of life.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for a suspension of rules blocking the use of international funding in Afghanistan. Some $9.5 billion in Afghan central bank reserves remain blocked outside the country, mainly here in the United States, in response to Taliban rule since August. Guterres addressed the Taliban also.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: As I appeal to the international community to step up support for the people of Afghanistan, I make an equally urgent plea to the Taliban leadership to recognize and protect fundamental human rights, and, in particular, the rights of women and girls. Across Afghanistan, women and girls are missing from offices and classrooms. A generation of girls is seeing its hopes and dreams shattered. Women scientists, lawyers and teachers are locked out, wasting skills and talents that will benefit the entire country and, indeed, the world. No country can thrive while denying the rights of all of its population.
AMY GOODMAN: To be clear, he was calling for the lifting of the blocking, of the sanctions against Afghanistan. Jan Egeland, if you can talk about the Taliban and also the U.S. approach?
JAN EGELAND: Well, number one, I mean, the Taliban, we need to actively engage on all levels, so that there is gender equality in Afghanistan commensurate with that of other Islamic countries. We are doing that. I met with the Taliban top leadership at the end of September. This was only a few weeks after they took over. I brought up the need for our female staff to have the same freedom of movement as the male colleagues have. No male guardian should ever be needed to accompany that. And I got a yes and a yes in my meetings in Kabul, and then we have negotiated with the 14 provinces where we operate the same. We have started with schools for girls and female teachers now in all the 14 provinces, but we have not yet gotten the secondary and tertiary education. And we need to fight for that, really. But it would be the ultimate insult to these girls and their mothers if they have to starve and freeze to death before we are getting through to all of the local Taliban commanders on all of these issues.
So, that’s the message also to the U.S. We’ve never held money back from starving people because there has been discrimination from the authorities. I constantly hear the phrase “not a penny, not a cent to the Taliban.” I agree with that. It’s not the Taliban that are receiving this funding. It’s going through international organizations, the United Nations, the international nongovernmental organizations, the local nongovernmental organizations, NRC, my own organization, directly to the people. We have full operational freedom at the moment.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get Dr. Paul Spiegel’s response to State Department spokesperson Ned Price describing the U.S. as “the world’s humanitarian leader for the Afghan people.” At this point, would you agree?
DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yes. They are providing a tremendous amount of money still to Afghanistan. The problem is that we’re talking hundreds of millions when billions are needed. And the issue is, in my view, is that it needs to be twofold. There needs to be sufficient liquidity in the system. And it gets — when you get into the details, it’s complicated, because the afghani, the currency, there isn’t sufficient supply, so it needs to be — there needs to be printed more money, actually, coming into the country. My concern is that that’s going to take far too long. It needs to be done very, very quickly.
But on top of that, I would say, in terms of you can — the U.S. can still provide humanitarian assistance. It needs to be significantly more. And as Jan Egeland said, it’s not a black-and-white situation. You need to be able to — it’s no good to ensure that women have equal rights, but they’re dead. And it is such a severe situation right now that the priority of humanity must take over, while ensuring that there are sufficient safeguards that money is not going to the Taliban, the Taliban leadership. But right now the communication of where the money can go is unclear. And there is such unclarity that many organizations, most organizations, are very anxious to provide money to civil servants, to hospitals, to government-run schools. And that has to change immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: So Dr. Spiegel, your response to the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanding the Biden administration lift economic sanctions imposed after the Taliban took over, the congressional caucus tweeting, if the current U.S. economic policy toward Afghanistan continues, quote, “there could be more civilian deaths this year than there were in 20 years of war”? What has been the Biden response to the progressives?
DR. PAUL SPIEGEL: Yeah. I would nuance the idea of saying lifting sanctions versus ensuring there are sufficient humanitarian exceptions, as we’ve seen in Venezuela and as we’ve seen in Yemen, amongst other countries. So, whether it is completely stopping the sanctions — I think that’s a political decision. But regardless whether it’s stopped, there can be very clear humanitarian exemptions to be able to ensure the money, or at least the — yeah, the money flows, and the people are able to undertake their interventions.
Since I returned — I returned around mid-December — the Biden administration has made clear some of the humanitarian exemptions. And I’ve spoken to the field, and what they’ve said is there is more clarity, but it hasn’t yet trickled down to — let’s say, to the field and to the operations, number one. But there needs to be even, I would say, more clarity than the Biden administration has provided since — in December, particularly to ensure that funding can go to some of the technocrats in the ministries, because even if funding can go to the United Nations and the nongovernmental organizations, the ministries themselves are functioning, are the glue of how authorities and others respond to humanitarian emergencies. And, for example, when I was there, there were six concurrent disease outbreaks, yet the surveillance system is hardly functioning. And so, if you want to know about what is happening in COVID, for example, with COVID in that country, the disease system is not being funded, and it’s extremely difficult to know what is happening and prepare accordingly.
AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, two quick final questions. One is: Is the Norwegian Refugee Council, your organization, pushing Norway and all of Europe to open its doors wider for Afghan refugees? But also, you’ve spoken to the head of the World Bank. You’ve spoken to the U.N. secretary-general. What have been their responses? And what are your demands to them?
JAN EGELAND: I wrote to the World Bank President Malpass and Secretary-General Guterres when I came back from Afghanistan in the beginning of October. And the question was: Can you please release the World Bank health money, which is sitting there, for the doctors and teachers and so on, that I met, the public sector people, and through U.N. trust funds? So, the U.N. is really funneling the salaries. And the answer back from the secretary-general was, “Yes, I can. We can, the U.N.” And some trust funds have been set up, and some of the public sector work has already been provided with some donor money. And the World Bank said, “Well, we’ll do it as soon as our member states say yes.” And it’s still not there.
And it’s the U.S. that has to be the leader. The U.S. is the leader in the international financial institutions, like the World Bank. The U.S. also has to tell the risk-averse global banking system that they can start again to transfer money and set up banking on both sides. We cannot transfer our Norwegian aid money to Kabul at the moment. We have to truck stuff over from Pakistan and Iran, and thereby contributing to the downward spiral in the Afghan economy. It’s not rocket science to do these things. It has to happen tomorrow. Actually, next week we’re meeting virtually with the U.S. Treasury. And we’ll be very clear: Please, go ahead and give the green lights to all of these places.
And are we asking Europeans, including Norwegians, to open our doors for Afghans who may flee? Yes. Unfortunately, Europe is specializing in a European championship of barbed wire erection at the moment, a little bit like it was with the U.S. under the previous administration, so I’m not too optimistic. My own country has now declared that there will be a sizable quota for quota refugees. When I was in Iran, the Afghans there told me, “All of our relatives in Afghanistan have given up. They’re wandering towards the border to Iran. They’ll come here, and many want to go to Europe.” I think it will be a desperate situation. And one thing that has to happen now is that we have to recreate hope in Afghanistan. If not, millions will leave, and they will meet barbed wire all the way as they flee.
AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Next up, as the nation heads into the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, attempts by Democrats to pass major new voting rights legislation appear to have been stalled. We’ll look at a stunning new documentary titled Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Lara Downes performing “Troubled Water” by Margaret Bonds. Bonds was one of the first Black composers to gain recognition in the United States.
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Haitian migrants demonstrate in front of the facilities of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid. (photo: Juan Manuel Blanco/Shutterstock)
Police Clash With Haitian Asylum Seekers in Mexico City
teleSUR
Excerpt: "For the third consecutive day, dozens of Haitian migrants on Thursday went to the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) in Mexico City to request that the authorities grant them a humanitarian visa."
They were peacefully protesting in order to obtain some document that would allow them to get a job and rent a house on their own.
For the third consecutive day, dozens of Haitian migrants on Thursday went to the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) in Mexico City to request that the authorities grant them a humanitarian visa.
Since Tuesday, the COMAR headquarters had been guarded by police officers, who tried to evict the Haitians who were peacefully protesting in order to obtain some document that would allow them to get a job and rent a house on their own.
“We have spent up to six months here without documents. We have to pay rent and support children and older adults. Other immigrants do have documents. Haitians don't. We need to know why,” said Raquel, as reported by local outlet Diario Contraste.
Asylum seekers demonstrations have also occurred in other Mexican cities. For example, in Monterrey, a city located near the border with the United States, hundreds of Haitians have been protesting since December to get help from federal officials.
“The country's immigration authorities, however, have not resolved their cases. They cannot access formal employment, which has generated demonstrations and partial blockades,” the Colegio de la Frontera Norte reported.
In Mexico City, many undocumented Haitians who have no income survive in migrant shelters where charities offer them food and teach them Spanish.
This happens, for example, at Casa Tochan, a shelter created for Central American migrants that has welcomed over 100 Haitians of all ages in the last year.
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The Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge was located near a recent Louisiana pipeline spill. (photo: Bob Sacha/Getty Images)
Thousands of Animals Killed After 300,000 Gallons of Diesel Spills From Louisiana Pipeline
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "Thousands of animals have died after a pipeline spilled more than 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel into a Louisiana wetlands."
Thousands of animals have died after a pipeline spilled more than 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel into a Louisiana wetlands.
The oil spill was discovered December 27 east of New Orleans and came from a 16-inch diameter pipeline operated by Collins Pipeline Co. that had significantly corroded, officials said Wednesday. In fact, an October 2020 inspection revealed corrosion along 22 inches of pipe at the spill site, but repairs were delayed and fuel continued to flow through the pipe.
“It’s especially maddening to learn that Collins Pipeline’s initial analysis deemed the pipe in such poor condition that it warranted an immediate repair,” Bill Caram of the Pipeline Safety Trust told the AP.
The initial inspection more than a year ago revealed that the pipe had lost 75 percent of its metal near the worst parts of the corrosion. This would have required immediate repairs, but a second inspection concluded the damage was not bad enough to require repairs under federal law.
This delay has had serious consequences for wildlife and the surrounding environment. The spill occurred near a levee along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal between Chalmette and Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, Nola.com reported. Most of the diesel spilled into two ponds or “borrow pits,” the AP reported, while some contaminated soil in an environmentally vulnerable area.
This led to the deaths of 2,300 fish, 39 snakes, 32 birds, some eels and a blue crab, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said. In total, more than 200 animals besides fish were killed.
Further, almost 130 other animals were impacted and captured to help them recover. This included 12 turtles, 20 snakes and 72 alligators, Nola.com reported.
“We weren’t expecting to find so many alligators in that one area,” Wildlife and Fisheries’ oil spill response coordinator Laura Carver told Nola.com. “Thankfully they’re pretty sturdy animals.”
Impacted birds were not so lucky. Of the nearly two-dozen birds captured for treatment, only two survived.
Collins Pipeline Co. is owned by PBF Energy Inc., which is one the largest independent petroleum refineries in the U.S., according to The Hill. PBF Energy said that it was waiting on federal approval to repair the pipeline when the spill took place. The federal government finally ordered the pipeline shut down until repairs were completed on December 30.
The cause of the spill was “likely localized corrosion and metal loss,” federal officials said, as The Hill reported.
The company has since repaired the line, and operations started again last Saturday, the AP reported.
“Although we continue to remediate and monitor the area, on-water recovery operations have been completed,” PBF Vice President Michael Karlovich told the AP in an email.
Overall, Collins Pipeline Co. has faced six enforcement cases from the federal government since 2007.
The full extent of the damage caused by the oil spill is not yet known, according to The Hill.
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