Monday, December 21, 2020

 

As Congressional Leaders Strike Relief Deal, AOC Slams Democrats for Trying to 'Lock Their Left Flank in the Basement'

Ocasio-Cortez said that while Republicans "leverage their right flank to gain policy concessions and generate enthusiasm," Democrats shut progressives out.


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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is seen during a hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on August 24, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday voiced frustration with what she characterized as Democratic leaders' efforts to shut progressives out of key policy negotiations, a message that came as the details of a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package began to slowly trickle out just ahead of an expected vote.

"One major difference between GOP and Dems is that [Republicans] leverage their right flank to gain policy concessions and generate enthusiasm, while Dems lock their left flank in the basement [because] they think that will make Republicans be nicer to them," the New York Democrat tweeted, referencing Republican leaders' decision to rally around Sen. Pat Toomey's (R-Pa.) last-minute push to curtail the Federal Reserve's emergency lending powers in the relief bill.

Toomey's original provision—which Democrats slammed as an effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration—was narrowed significantly in negotiations late Saturday, but the Pennsylvania Republican said Sunday that he is "very pleased" with the outcome.

Under the compromise agreement, according to the Wall Street Journal, "$429 billion previously provided to the Treasury Department to backstop losses in Fed lending programs would be revoked, and the Fed wouldn't be able to replicate identical emergency lending programs next year without congressional approval. But the agreement wouldn't prevent the Fed from starting other similar programs."

As negotiations over much-needed coronavirus relief accelerated rapidly over the past week, Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives publicly aired their outrage at the exclusion of key priorities and the overall inadequacy of the package, which will ultimately be much smaller than even the pared-back version of the HEROES Act that the House passed in October. The total size of that package was around $2.2 trillion.

The relief legislation that's expected to be unveiled and potentially passed Sunday includes $600 direct payments to many Americans and a $300 weekly boost to unemployment benefits—both significantly smaller than what Democratic leaders have supported in the past. Progressive lawmakers have pushed for direct payments of at least $1,200 per adult—a proposal supported by 88% of likely voters—and an unemployment boost of $600 a week.

The final package is also expected to include billions of dollars for vaccine distribution, rental assistance, and nutrition aid. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced on the Senate floor Sunday evening that congressional leaders have reached an agreement on the legislation, but bill text has yet to be made public.

"We can finally report what our nation has needed to hear for a very long time: More help is on the way," said McConnell, who stood in the way of additional relief for months.

While noting that progressives did succeed in getting direct payments back on the negotiating table after they were excluded from an earlier bipartisan proposal, Ocasio-Cortez warned Friday that a one-time check of $600 is "not enough."

"We want $1,200 at least. And Republicans are fighting it back down to $600, which is really unfortunate," said the New York Democrat. "We need to really make sure that we hold the Republican Party accountable for cutting people's stimulus checks in half."

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also criticized the size of the direct payments, saying in an interview Sunday that "the truth of the matter is $600 will not even cover a month's rent."

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) expressed alarm that, with a potential vote just hours away, she still has not seen any legislative text.

"Still not a peep on language. It will probably be another multi-billion-dollar bill, without real debate, floor amendments, introduced and passed probably within hours," Omar tweeted. "No time for the public input or objections. What a complete nightmarish example of representative democracy."

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Omar said it is "really quite shameful that we find ourselves negotiating a deal with such a small amount of money when we know just how devastated the American people are across our country.

"Think about it: in March, we were able to send $1,200 checks to people and give them $600 in unemployment insurance benefits," Omar said. "And now we're talking about possibly sending a one-time check, eight months later, of $600 and reducing that unemployment benefit to $300."

Republican leaders and members of the Trump administration, meanwhile, are reportedly satisfied with the success they've had in pulling Democratic leaders down from their initial demand for a multi-trillion-dollar relief package, which economists say is necessary to bring the U.S. economy out of deep recession and provide adequate help to desperate Americans.

While the final package is not expected to include any form of liability shield for businesses—a Republican priority—it will also exclude additional direct aid to crisis-ravaged state and local governments.

"I couldn't be more pleased where we landed this," Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin reportedly said during a GOP conference call on Sunday.

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COVID-19, the Climate Crisis, and Mutual Aid

Mutual aid is not only about addressing the crisis at hand but also about undoing the injustices of colonialism and imperialism.'

by Tina Gerhardt
Published on Monday, December 21, 2020
by The Progressive


Disaster relief workers. (Photo: Creative Commons)


After COVID-19 struck in spring 2020, the absence of a concerted federal response prompted people across the country to begin self-organizing everything from food distribution to sewing squads to shelter. That work continues today, drawing on a long tradition.

In the wake of disasters, most people respond with altruism, creativity, generosity, and a cooperative spirit.

“Mutual aid,” a concept coined by the Russian naturalist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, refers to the principles of cooperation, and of people joining together to help each other. It ran counter to the then-hegemonic Darwinian theories emphasizing competition and survival of the fittest. Kropotkin did not deny the role of competition, but he argued that the cooperative spirit has gone under-examined.

Kropotkin traced the role of mutual aid in various communities over stretches of history and geography, including among Indigenous communities, so-called free cities in Europe, guilds, labor unions and poor people, and he flagged one key factor that undermined these relationships: privatization.

Reciprocity forms the bedrock of Indigenous worldviews. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, writes of the “web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. . . . Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual.”

Indigenous cosmologies in Central America are similarly informed. In mid-November, Hurricane Iota struck regions of eastern Nicaragua and Honduras that Hurricane Eta had just hit two weeks prior. In Eric Holthaus’s newsletter The Phoenix, he writes, “Since Hurricane Eta, Indigenous people along the Nicaragua coast have resorted to a traditional form of mutual aid called ‘pana pana,’ where neighbors give what they have to those in greater need.”

Mutual aid manifests itself most intensely during crises. “This is when the structures of the state and of capitalist markets not only fail to address the emergency situation but they often show their complicity in making it worse,” writes Massimo de Angelis, in the introduction to Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the COVID-19 Crisis. He says it amounts to a collective cry from society that “I want to evolve but my evolution depends on you.”

In her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit examines how people rise up to help one another through crises, such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, 9/11, and hurricane Katrina. She found that in the wake of disasters, most people respond with altruism, creativity, generosity, and a cooperative spirit.

Mutual aid is not only about addressing the crisis at hand but also about undoing the injustices of colonialism and imperialism and, using an intersectional framework, working to ensure racial, gender, economic, health, and environmental justice.

Just this week, E&E reported that “the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] is proposing to slash disaster aid to states by making it substantially harder for them to qualify for assistance after extreme weather events like floods, wildfires and storms.”




After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, while federal, state, and local agencies left people stranded without shelter or food, groups including the Common Ground Collective worked to provide housing, clothing, health care, and legal services to those in need. The organization was cofounded by former Black Panther Malik Rahim, drawing in part on the Black Panthers ten-point program, which offered free breakfast programs and free health care and legal clinics, and advocated principles of mutual aid.

Amid the pandemic, communities have sprung into action. With the economic fallout and lack of federal “survival checks” (as U.S. Representative-Elect Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, refers to them instead of “stimulus checks”), people are not only calling for an extension to the federal eviction moratorium, which expires at the end of 2020, but also taking action to keep people housed. In NYC, Mutual Aid NYC sprung into action. A multi-racial network of people and groups, it aims to share food, material and other resources “to support each other interdependently.”

In the Bay Area, The People’s Breakfast Program, initially founded in 2017 to distribute food to the unhoused, is now also working to address issues related to COVID-19, such as distributing masks and hand sanitizer. The South Berkeley Mutual Aid Project organizes food and supply deliveries to those who are unhoused; food deliveries to households; mask-making; and individualized assistance, such as grocery shopping for seniors and immunocompromised folks. Free Fridges and Free Pantries, also referred to as Freedges, have also sprung up in the East Bay and in San Francisco. Stocked with produce, these fridges provide fresh fruits and vegetables to local communities. Local radio station KPFA has an entire list of mutual aid and COVID-19 resources, updated regularly.

In the predominantly working class city of Tacoma in Washington State, the Tacoma Mutual Aid Collective was established to respond to COVID-19. The group, as Shane Burley reports, “formed quickly from people who wanted to create a strong system for supporting those most affected, and immediately started doing grocery and prescription pick-ups and deliveries for people who could not risk going out in public.”

In many areas on the West coast, the housing crisis has been exacerbated by wildfires. More than five million acres have burned, destroying or damaging many homes and taking lives.

Given the 45 percent uptick in hunger from 2019 to 2020, people are also working to self-organize food distribution. Together with other organizations, Fire Igniting the Spirit works to ensure food security for Indigenous communities, distributing food and supplies among five tribes in Oregon and Washington. Just last weekend, the effort reached more than one thousand families. The fact that COVID-19 relief funds from the Department of Treasury to tribes expire at the end of the year has intensified mutual aid.

During emergencies, disaster capitalism, whereby neoliberalism swoops in to privatize and profit precisely at moments of crisis, well-delineated in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007), is the flip side of the coin to mutual aid, well-argued in Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell or Hope in the Dark (2004).

In light of COVID-19, we are all facing unique challenges, but each one of us has different resources and skills we can contribute. What this moment offers, as any crisis does, is an opportunity to engage the needs of our neighbors and communities.

After all, a society will be measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members.


Tina Gerhardt is an environmental journalist who covers climate change, UN climate negotiations and energy policy. Her work has been published by Common Dreams, Grist, The Nation, The Progressive, Sierra and the Washington Monthly.

© 2020 The Progressive
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As 2020 Ends, It’s Time for News Outlets to Declare a "Climate Emergency"

Let 2021 be the year that we declare, in accordance with science, that humanity is facing a climate emergency—an emergency we promise to illuminate and, we hope, help humanity overcome.


by
 Published on
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
by
Covering Climate Now

News organizations have big megaphones, and in 2020 we used them well to help steer our societies through a terrible pandemic. (Photo: Takver/flickr/cc)

“I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their own countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” So said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres in his speech to the Climate Ambition Summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Guterres’s appeal seemed aimed at leaders of national governments; the Secretary General noted that “thirty-eight countries have already” made such declarations [among them, such big emitters as the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada]. But it’s time for media leaders to declare a State of Climate Emergency as well.

Journalists and news executives in charge of newspapers, TV and radio programs, and social media platforms seen and heard by billions of people around the world exercise a profound influence over how the public thinks and feels about the defining problem of our time — and what, if anything, governments, businesses, and other powerful actors end up doing about it. Shouldn’t news organizations be telling the unvarnished truth about the climate problem and, not least, its solutions?

Words can set the stage for deeds, both by clarifying what is at stake and by providing a standard for holding leaders to account.

Among major news organizations, only The Guardian thus far has made the kind of climate emergency declaration the UN Secretary General urges. On October 16, 2019, the newspaper issued a statement from Katharine Viner, its editor in chief, promising “to provide journalism that shows leadership, urgency, authority, and gives the climate emergency the sustained attention and prominence it deserves.” A month later, the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” its word of the year for 2019, partly in recognition of the hundreds of cities, towns and countries that had declared such emergencies. Yet news organizations have held back.

Some of my media colleagues will, I know, feel uneasy about taking such a step, fearing that this would cross the line between journalism and advocacy. That is a serious, understandable concern. After all, activists from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement have all repeatedly invoked the “climate emergency” as a rallying cry to demand a rapid decarbonization of the world’s economies.

But here is a companion fact that too many newsrooms seem unaware of, or, worse, ignore: it’s not just activists who talk about a “climate emergency.” As this column has mentioned more than once, more than eleven thousand leading scientists have expressly chosen the phrase “climate emergency” to describe the situation currently facing our civilization. Skeptical journalists should bear in mind that scientists tend to be data-driven, rationally inclined individuals who generally shun emotionally charged words. Scientists are embracing the phrase “climate emergency” now because the physical realities have become so extreme, the time remaining to fix the problem so limited, and the necessary reforms so difficult that no other word suffices. Humanity must slash emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to avoid utter catastrophe, UN scientists have warned, which will require transforming the world’s energy, agriculture, finance, and other key sectors at a pace and scale “unprecedented” in history.

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is,’” the statement signed by the eleven thousand-plus scientists begins.

Don’t we journalists have the very same moral obligation?

We certainly acted like it while covering the coronavirus this year. Despite staff cuts that required many journalists to work what used to be two or three separate newsroom jobs, news outlets heroically embraced the challenge of informing audiences about what was happening during the pandemic, why, and how people could protect themselves and others. The media also held political leaders to account, with most US-based outlets (aside from Fox News and other cheerleaders for Donald Trump) spotlighting unfounded or dangerous assertions by the president and other purveyors of misinformation. No one who followed most coverage of the pandemic was left in doubt that our societies were facing, to recall the climate scientists’ statement, “a catastrophic threat,” and this outcome was because journalists did not shrink from “telling it like it is.”

Now, we journalists must bring that same sense of professional dedication to covering the climate emergency. As Guterres pointed out, the earth “is headed for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than 3 degrees [Celsius] this century.” Such an increase, science makes clear, would be a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people and civilization as we know it. Saying so is no more partisan than saying coronavirus is highly contagious and threatens to kill millions but can be contained if people wear masks and physically distance.

Climate journalism has come a long way in 2020. If 2019 was the year when the mainstream media, especially in the US, at last abandoned the “climate silence” that had blunted public understanding and political action for so long, 2020 has been the year when politicians and newsrooms alike began treating climate as a top-tier issue that demanded serious attention. For the first time, climate change was discussed at length during the US presidential and vice-presidential debates; it was even raised during the Senate run-off debates in Georgia. There were still shortcomings: for example, coverage of last summer’s hurricanes often did not mention that climate change helps drive extreme weather. But those errors were later rectified as coverage of the California wildfires generally did make the climate connection.

Coverage of the Secretary General’s appeal for declarations of a climate emergency, however, illustrates that there is still far to go. Although Reuters ran an article that headlined Guterres’s statement, and the Associated Press referenced it in one sentence, many of the world’s biggest news organizations did not even report it, much less headline it. In the US, neither the New York Times, the Washington Post, nor the leading commercial TV networks said a word.

The coming months will be a pivotal time in the climate emergency. In Washington, the question will be whether the incoming Biden administration can implement reforms matching the scope and severity of the emergency, and whether Republicans continue to obstruct progress and thereby knowingly condemn young people to a future hell on earth. Globally, the UN summit in November will decide whether the world’s governments do not merely pledge in words to reach “net zero” emissions by mid-century but also take actions to do so.

Declaring a climate emergency is only words as well of course, but politics is often a dance between words and deeds. Words can set the stage for deeds, both by clarifying what is at stake and by providing a standard for holding leaders to account. News organizations have big megaphones, and in 2020 we used them well to help steer our societies through a terrible pandemic. Let 2021 be the year that we declare, in accordance with science, that humanity is facing a climate emergency -- an emergency we promise to illuminate and, we hope, help humanity overcome.

Mark Hertsgaard

Mark Hertsgaard is the environmental correspondent and investigative editor at large at The Nation and a co-founder of Covering Climate Now. He has covered climate change since 1989, reporting from 25 countries and much of the US in his books "Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future" (1999) and "HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth" (2012),  as well as for various outlets. Follow him on his website: markhertsgaard.com and on Twitter: @markhertsgaard

 


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'It Never Had to Be Like This': 300,000 Dead in US From Covid-19 Under Donald J. Trump


"It is equal to a 9/11 attack every day for more than 100 days."


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A medical staff member closes the zipper of a body bag that contains a deceased Covid-19 patient in the intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center on November 25, 2020 in Houston. (Photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images)

On the same day the first American received a coronavirus vaccine, the U.S. pandemic death toll surpassed 300,000 on Monday, another grim milestone that comes less than four weeks after the number of Covid-19 deaths in the country reached 250,000.

The Associated Press put the staggering statistics into context: "The number of dead rivals the population of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. It is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5 1/2 months. It is more than five times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. It is equal to a 9/11 attack every day for more than 100 days."

At the same time, Brian Walter, who lost his 80-year old father to the disease, told NPR that "the numbers do not reflect that these were people. Everyone lost was a father or a mother, they had kids, they had family, they left people behind."

According to the Covid-19 Tracking Project, the U.S. is now averaging nearly 2,430 deaths per day.

Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told AP that "to think now we can just absorb in our country 3,000 deaths a day as though it were just business as usual, it just represents a moral failing."

Despite constituting just over 4% of the global population, the U.S. is home to nearly 19% of the more than 1.6 million Covid-19 deaths that have occurred worldwide. The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the American population was called "a catastrophic failure" of leadership to be blamed on President Donald Trump, who baselessly claimed in February that the virus was on the verge of disappearing. 

"There's no need for that many to have died," David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the New York Times. "We chose, as a country, to take our foot off the gas pedal. We chose to, and that's the tragedy."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, progressives have argued that the catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S.—while made worse by Trump and non-cooperative individuals—is better understood as the product of several decades of "free-market" ideology and associated policies that exacerbated inequalities and hampered an effective governmental response to the disaster as it unfolded. 

Although Monday's coronavirus vaccine rollout represents good news in the fight against the pandemic, physician and public health expert Ashish Jha of Brown University lamented that the worst is yet to come. As a result of "infections that have already happened or will this week... we will pass 400,000 deaths... in January."

He said that "vaccines will help," but if we are serious about meeting the challenge of preventing the Covid-19 death toll from reaching 500,000, "we can [and] must do more" to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 

"Actions taken collectively can really change the course of what is happening," Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts, told the Times. "One reason this is hard to predict is to some extent the power is in our hands."

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In Its Waning Days, Trump Administration Could Further Imperil Animals, Environment

The damage done under Trump must be expeditiously reversed under the incoming administration, including any regulations rammed through in these final weeks.

by Cathy Liss


When it comes to our nation’s beloved wild horses, the Trump administration has called for accelerated mass roundups to remove these animals from their natural habitats on public lands to placate ranchers, who view them as competition for grazing. (Photo By Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

As a year marked by constant chaos draws to a close, all of us have been forced to confront the stark reality that the fate of humanity is inextricably intertwined with the well-being of the natural world.

The Trump administration has pushed for environmental decimation and biodiversity loss through more than 100 regulatory rollbacks primarily intended to benefit industry special interests.

A rapidly changing climate continues to bring severe storms, fires and droughts. A burgeoning wildlife trade, as well as mining, oil and gas exploration, logging, and land grabs for agriculture is destroying wildlife habitat at an unprecedented rate and has brought us even closer to wild animals and the pathogens they harbor, such as COVID-19. This is a critical moment to enact bold and innovative policies; the ramifications for humanity will only become more catastrophic if we continue to exploit the natural world in such an unsustainable manner.

Against this dire backdrop, the Trump administration has pushed for environmental decimation and biodiversity loss through more than 100 regulatory rollbacks primarily intended to benefit industry special interests. And with one month left in his term, the president shows no signs of reversing course.

Over the last four years, this administration has radically weakened two bedrock laws, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, which protect species facing extinction and require federal agencies to evaluate the environmental effects of their actions. After denying federal protections to 70 species, the Department of the Interior proposed a rule this year that would redefine the word “habitat” to limit the government’s ability to conserve species that may require habitat restoration or whose historic range has shifted as a result of climate change. Another rule finalized last week grants economic considerations outsized weight in government decisions about whether to protect habitat that is vital to species recovery.

Additionally, the Interior Department has proposed a rule change that flouts the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act by allowing companies to escape legal responsibility for actions that kill millions of migratory birds each year. The final rule, which is open for public comment through Dec. 28, permits activities that are not intended to harm birds yet directly affects them, such as filling in wetlands and discharging toxic water into ponds.

The administration has also attempted to greenlight oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with an insufficient environmental review and a rushed regulatory process, posing unacceptable risks to approximately 900 polar bears left in the Arctic, to other species and to the environment. Under the proposal, companies would be permitted to use seismic testing, which disturbs polar bears in their dens and disrupts wildlife behavior patterns, such as migration, nursing and feeding. If the administration continues to steamroll this process, leases will likely be finalized before Inauguration Day, leaving President-elect Biden with limited options for recourse.

When it comes to our nation’s beloved wild horses, the Trump administration has called for accelerated mass roundups to remove these animals from their natural habitats on public lands to placate ranchers, who view them as competition for grazing. To “manage” wild horse populations, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — an agency under federal mandate to protect wild horses from harassment and death — continues to aggressively pursue an outdated, invasive, and unsafe surgical sterilization procedure that carries significant welfare risks.

The lame duck administration may also attempt a significant rollback of the protections afforded by the landmark 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Last summer, the BLM announced it was preparing a rule to “streamline” the agency’s authority to manage wild horses. While the agency has not yet released specifics, the rule would likely make it easier for the BLM to permanently remove horses via brutal helicopter roundups and to sell off wild horses to interested buyers at bargain bin prices. Although wild horses are explicitly protected from slaughter under language in annual congressional spending bills, they regularly slip through the cracks since there is no effective way to track their movements after they are sold. Lamentably, as the BLM’s acting director, William Perry Pendley, remarked, wild horses are viewed as an “existential threat” to be removed from the landscape.

An administration that ignores—and even accelerates—the tragic consequences of wildlife exploitation is a poor fit for this moment in history. The damage done under Trump must be expeditiously reversed under the incoming administration, including any regulations rammed through in these final weeks. However, simply rolling back the clock is not enough to protect disappearing wildlife. We are running out of time to alter our destructive behaviors. The Biden administration must act swiftly to address our planet’s ecological emergency, but we must all do our part by learning to coexist more responsibly with the natural world.



Cathy Liss is president of the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C.

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'Most Anti-Wildlife President in History' Puts Out Lame Duck Rule to Gut Species Protection

"Today's rule will have devastating consequences for some of America's most iconic species, including the grizzly bear, whooping cranes, and Pacific salmon."


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A grizzly bear saunters among the fall foliage in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

 (Photo: Ania Tuzel Photography/Flickr/cc) 

The Trump administration on Tuesday finalized a rule that wildlife advocates say will weaken the Endangered Species Act and severely limit the federal government's ability to protect habitat critical to the survival and recovery of imperiled species including grizzly bears and whooping cranes.

"President Trump has cemented his legacy as the most anti-wildlife president in history."
—Stephanie Kurose,
Center for Biological Diversity

Under the new rule adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the definition of "critical habitat" for an endangered species will be limited to places that could currently support such animals, not areas where they once lived and could be restored with the proper care and protections.

The rule change also fails to take into account areas that could accommodate species that will relocate due to the climate crisis.

As the Center for Biological Diversity explained when the change was announced in August:

The definition stems from a 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that said the service needed to define the term habitat in relation to the highly endangered dusky gopher frog. The frog survives in one ephemeral pond in Mississippi. Recognizing that to secure the frog would require recovering it in additional areas, the service designated an area in Louisiana that had the ephemeral ponds the frog requires. However, this area would need forest restoration to provide high-quality habitat.

Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, the landowner, and Pacific Legal Foundation, a private property advocacy group, challenged the designation, resulting in today's definition and the frog losing habitat protection in Louisiana.

"President [Donald] Trump has cemented his legacy as the most anti-wildlife president in history," Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement on Tuesday. "Today's rule will have devastating consequences for some of America's most iconic species, including the grizzly bear, whooping cranes, and Pacific salmon."

"Our most vulnerable species are barely clinging to survival after being forced from their homes into smaller and smaller spaces," Kurose added. "We can't expect them to ever recover if we don't protect the areas they once lived."

The new rule was widely condemned by conservationists when it was announced by the administration. Lara Levison, senior federal policy director at Oceana, warned the change "will make it even harder to save species from extinction."

"The ESA protects threatened and endangered species like sea turtles and the North Atlantic right whale, as well as the habitats they depend on, but the draft rule released today reduces these protections," she said. 

In September, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers sent a letter (pdf) to the Trump administration expressing their opposition to the rule change and their alarm at the "onslaught of environmental rollbacks that threaten the survival of our nation's wildlife." 

The Trump administration has been rushing to ram through as much deregulation as possible in the months—now weeks—before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Trump's "scorched earth" deregulation blitz involves everything from so-called "bomb trains" to biometrics to workers' rights, with environmental protections hit particularly hard. 

In late November, the U.S. Department of the Interior set the stage for modification of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a move the administration acknowledges will lead to an increase in the 500 million to one billion birds killed annually in the United States due to human activity. 

On Monday, the administration acknowledged that development and logging have destroyed 70% of the northern spotted owl's habitat and that the bird could go extinct without additional protection—while declining to reclassify its conservation status from "threatened" to "endangered." 

On Tuesday, the administration declined to add the monarch butterfly—90% of whose habitat has been destroyed—to the threatened species list. 

A coalition of state attorneys general is currently suing the Trump administration challenging what it says are illegal revised regulations regarding the National Environmental Policy Act and the ESA, alleging the government violated the latter by failing to consult with federal wildlife agencies to assess the effects on listed species when considering rule changes. 

"Time and time again, the Trump administration has demonstrated willful disregard for the preservation of our imperiled fish and wildlife," said California Attorney General Becerra, a member of the coalition, in November. "So it's hardly shocking that it failed to consult with federal wildlife agencies before finalizing this unlawful rule."

"But that doesn't mean we're going to let them break the law," added, Becerra—who last week was nominated to serve as secertary of health and human services in the incoming Biden administration.

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Pence, Who Backed Muslim Visa Ban, Gets Vaccine Invented by Muslim Immigrants

Pence also praised far right-wing evangelical leader John Hagee. Hagee has said that Muslim Americans are not real Americans.

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"Pence served for four years in the Trump administration, which initiated a

 visa ban against Muslims," writes Juan Cole. (Photo: CNBC/YouTube Screengrab)

Defeated Vice President Mike Pence got the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Friday.

Here is why he is a hypocrite.

Pence served for four years in the Trump administration, which initiated a visa ban against Muslims. Although he had in 2015 called any such ban “unconstitutional,” he folded when Trump insisted on it and proudly stood behind the Mad President when he signed the order.

Pence also praised far right-wing evangelical leader John Hagee. Hagee has said that Muslim Americans are not real Americans.

Pence has, further, improperly pressured USAID to route US foreign aid to the Middle East away from Muslims and to Christians instead.

Pence is a serial science denier. He says smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer. He has called the human-caused climate emergency “a myth.”

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine involves science and Muslim immigrants, so why is he getting it?

Pfizer partnered in developing the vaccine with a German firm, BioNTech, which was founded and is headed by the Turkish-German husband-wife team of Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci. BioNTech really developed the vaccine, though Pfizer is the one with the ability to mass-manufacture and distribute it.

The two are Turkish-German Muslims.

Türeci was born in Lastrup, Lower Saxony, in 1967 to an immigrant Turkish family. Her father was a physician working at a Catholic hospital. She jokes that she is the “Turkish Prussian.”

She is among the wealthiest 100 Germans.

Her husband, Ugur Sahin, was brought to Germany from İskenderun, Turkey, at the age of 4. His father worked in a Ford automobile plant. Ordinarily in the typical European education system, he would have been shunted off to a technical school, but he managed to get on an academic track, and excelled at chemistry. He was the archetypal nerd, working in the laboratory at college until all hours of the night, then bicycling back to his apartment.

He is now worth about $5 billion.

İskenderun was known as Alexandretta. It had been part of Syria but while France was occupying Syria after WW II, it had a special administrative position. France granted it and its district limited independence in 1937, and by 1939 it was incorporated through referendum into Turkey.

There are both Sunni and Alawi Shiite Muslims there.

Sahin and Türeci started Operation Light Speed to develop a vaccine against the novel coronavirus last January, and were the first to see their vaccine authorized.

Hannes Swoboda wrote at Der Standard:

To my surprise, I recently read an extremely positive contribution by the conservative economist Hans-Werner Sinn about Turkish migrants. The article in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” was entitled “An admirable success for our Turkish immigrants”. To be concrete, it was about the founders and CEOs of the company BioNTech, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. We owe to them the development of a vaccine against the coronavirus. “The success of Şahin and Türeci could jumpstart the resurgence of the German pharmaceutical industry … It also proves the benefits that an aging society like Germany can achieve through immigration.”

Hans-Werner Sinn appears to be an honest conservative. Mike Pence, not so much.

Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of  "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008).  He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. 

© 2020 Juan Cole
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APPROPRIATE OUR KULTURE , PLEASE

Op-Ed: Everything is different this year, so why not add a ninth night to Hanukkah?


The ninth candle on the menorah is the shamash, or “helper” candle.
 In 2020, this candle deserves its own night to shine.
(Los Angeles Times)
By ERICA S. PERL
DEC. 10, 2020

Hanukkah, like so many other holidays, is poised to look a little different this year.

Usually my synagogue in Washington, D.C., invites congregants to bring their menorahs into the sanctuary for a huge communal candle-lighting. This festive fire hazard is not exactly made for Zoom. Meanwhile, the invitation for my neighbors’ annual latke fest has not arrived, which is no surprise. While inviting friends over to spin dreidels, sing songs and commiserate about this dumpster fire of a year is tempting, it also screams “superspreader.”

It’s understandable but more than a little depressing. It makes me want to rip December off the calendar. Enough, already! Forget Hanukkah — bring on 2021.

Instead, I have a counterintuitive proposal: This year, we should start a new tradition and extend Hanukkah from eight nights to nine. The reason? To honor the helpers.

There is a direct connection between Hanukkah and helping. A Hanukkah menorah, also known as a hanukkiah, has nine branches. Eight are for the candles representing the nights of the holiday, which celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple after it was defiled by King Antiochus’ soldiers and the miracle in the temple of a small amount of lamp oil burning for eight days when it should have lasted only one.

The ninth branch is reserved for a special candle, the shamash, or “helper.” The shamash is used to light the other candles: one on the first night and an additional one each subsequent evening until all nine burn on the eighth and final night.

But think about it: The shamash is so busy giving its light to others that it never gets its own night to shine. And isn’t 2020 the perfect year to start an annual Hanukkah tradition of honoring the people who, like the shamash, give of themselves to help others?

I can think of lots of those people this year, starting with the friends who delivered toilet paper (and tofu, of all things) when I couldn’t find these items in any store. The hospital staff who cared for my mom when she needed emergency surgery. The teachers who juggled and pivoted to keep my kids connected and learning. The online fitness instructors, doctors, nurses, therapists and DJs. (D-Nice’s Club Quarantine got me through the month of April.) The journalists, who kept reporting, no matter how many dragons they had to slay in the process. The mail carriers, delivery people, grocery store clerks, trash collectors and so many others who, without fanfare, helped in ways great and small.





LIFESTYLE
Eight crazy nights: Local Hanukkah activities you can enjoy from afar this year
Dec. 2, 2020

The best part is, it’s easy to do — if you’re Jewish, you probably finish the holiday with extra candles you can use. And if you’re not Jewish, this is a celebration that everyone can take part in. First, make a list of the helpers in your life, and invite friends and family members to do the same. Then, on the ninth night of Hanukkah (in 2020, it will be Dec. 18), light the shamash (or any candle as an honorary shamash, if you don’t have a menorah) in honor of the helpers on your list, and let them know.

You can go big — throw a virtual Shamash Night party! — or go small, sending cards, texts or emails. Either way, you are likely to make your honorees feel acknowledged and appreciated, which means you’re helping them, too.

Like the shamash, individual people have the power to brighten the lives of those around them. That’s why Hanukkah, especially in the year 2020, is the perfect time for all of us to show appreciation for those who help us, help others and help heal the world.

And if it means eating jelly donuts and potato pancakes for one more night — well, it’s been a rough year, so who’s going to argue with that?

Erica S. Perl is an author of books for children and young adults. The most recent is “The Ninth Night of Hanukkah.”
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