Living On The Great Lakes -- A Dream Threatened By Climate Change

On a fall night in 2019, Eric Brandt was awoken by the sound of steel rods cracking inside concrete.
November 07, 2021

Photo: TYT

Chicago (AFP) – On a fall night in 2019, Eric Brandt was awoken by the sound of steel rods cracking inside concrete.

"I heard the pings. I know the sound because I used to drill rebar into the top of coal mines," Brandt explained. "I couldn't even imagine what was happening out there."

But Brandt, a 69-year-old former mine worker, was nowhere near a coal mine. He was in bed in his condominium on the shore of Lake Michigan, on the South Side of Chicago.

Brandt, now a writer, recalled that it was the second major storm that he lived through in four years at his building.

This time, crashing waves broke a cement wall in half, and the water washed away a beach adjacent to his 12-story building.

"They called it a 50-year storm, but it was the second in two years," Brandt said, standing by a new shoreline of giant rocks put down by the US Army Corps of Engineers to protect against further erosion -- a problem that has increased dramatically for the Great Lakes over the last decade.

The five lakes that make up the Great Lakes, which account for more than 20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply, have always risen and fallen over the decades.

But climate change has now made the extremes much stronger than before, according to Drew Gronewold, a hydrologist at the University of Michigan.



The five lakes that make up the Great Lakes have always risen and fallen over the decades, but climate change has now made the extremes much stronger than before, according to Drew Gronewold, a hydrologist at the University of Michigan KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI AFP

"You have precipitation coming in and evaporation going out," Gronewold said.

"The analogy we use now is a game of tug-of-war. If both teams are equally strong, the rope doesn't move. What happens if they are both getting stronger, and one slips -- the rope swings much more quickly than it otherwise would."
Adapting to new extremes

The coast of Lake Michigan, the third-largest Great Lake by surface area, is a mix of dune bluffs, sandy beaches, rugged rocks, marshland, big midwestern cities and small tourist towns.

Experts say the Great Lakes should be considered as one body of water.

"It's important to realize that they are connected. If one lake is going up, they probably all are," Gronewold said.

In 2014, water levels were at record lows and caused alarm in the shipping industry.

Since then, the lakes have risen sharply, reaching highs in the last two years and threatening buildings, beaches and nearby structures.

They have since dipped slightly, but all the Great Lakes remain above the long-term average.

"We've seen this huge increase over the last seven years. Lake levels have come down a bit since last year, but it was a huge swing and was larger than anything we saw over the last 100 years," said Tomas Hook, director of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University.


Concrete barriers and rocks to prevent erosion are placed outside a high-rise apartment building next to Lake Michigan KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI AFP

Todd Rosenthal, a 56-year-old theater set designer who has lived on Chicago's Lake Michigan shoreline for two decades, says a major 2019 storm "like the wrath of God" tossed cement barriers around and sent water through the walls and windows in his second-story unit.

He and several neighbors then installed hurricane doors and shutters -- which he says is just part of the cost of living on the lake.

"You never can tell. We’ve had times when the lake has been pristine and calm, and within five minutes you could see whitecaps,” Rosenthal said.

His building, 20 miles (30 kilometers) north from Brandt's, also lost a protective cement wall and had adjacent beaches washed away by storms in the last two years -- the sand now replaced with large, protective rocks.

"Some people moved out of the building because they couldn't take the constant pounding,” Rosenthal said.
Forced out?

That could also be the future for Jera Slaughter, a 71-year-old retired Amtrak worker on a fixed budget who has lived in the same building as Brandt for 44 years.

Aaron Packman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, stands on a pier next to a shoreline that was once a dog beach now closed due to erosion on Lake Michigan KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI AFP

She fears extra costs will drive out her and her neighbors.

Since 2019, residents at the 12-story, 70-unit building on Chicago's South Shore have spent $450,000 on damage repairs -- and have little money left for routine maintenance and preventative measures.

"We love this building, but at some point we won't be able to afford it,” Slaughter said.

“We take it moment by moment because we don't know what this year is going to bring."

Aaron Packman, the director of Northwestern University's Center for Water Research, can offer little comfort.

"One of the issues, especially with Lake Michigan, is that we're seeing the effect of climate change with more intense storms, more flooding, and there's a lot of uncertainty with what will happen with the Great Lakes in the future," said Packman.

"The future is going to be different, and in some sense worse. We can and must change our response to be much more effective than it's been in the past," he said.

© 2021 AFP

Algerian farmer's olive oil wins global recognition

Hakim Alileche inspects a dripping batch of his prize-winning organic olive oil at the press (AFP/Ryad KRAMDI)

Abdellah CHEBALLAH
Sat, November 6, 2021

Hakim Alileche left a successful career in graphic design and moved to the Algerian countryside to produce "magic potion" -- organic olive oil that has won him international recognition.

The 48-year-old says he chose the Ain Oussera plateau for its cheap land and water supply.

His oil won first prize at the Dubai Olive Oil Competition in the Extra Virgin Early Harvest category in February 2021 and in May he won silver at the Japan Olive Oil Prize.

"These honours really reassured us because it means we were right," he said.

The farm of some 40 hectares (100 acres) has over 15,000 olive trees, and so far 9,000 have started producing.

"I started planting them bit by bit from 2005. I like farming and I've been fond of olive trees since I was little," he said.

"In Algeria, it's a sacred tree."

Producing organic olive oil "puts me right into this mood of respect and protection for the planet," he said.

He has visited several other producing countries -- Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, France and Italy to learn about production methods.

"These trees have never had any chemical treatment and I will do everything to make it stay that way," he said, clasping a goblet of oil freshly extracted from his modern Italian press.

"It's really food and medicine," he said, taking a sip of the fragrant liquid before heading out to supervise workers harvesting olives in the orchard.

A worker scrapes olives by hand from the branches to avoid damaging the trees

 (AFP/Ryad KRAMDI)

- 'Very high quality' -

As with every year since entering into production, Alileche is picking his olives early, in a country where the harvest doesn't start until mid-November.

"An early harvest allows you to get all the benefits of the olives, all the natural antioxidants," he said.

The olives are scraped off the branches by hand to avoid damaging the trees, and fall on a tarpaulin on the ground to then be scooped into crates and hauled off to the press.

"Crushing them the same day avoids the olives oxidising," Alileche said.

Picked this early, the olives give a meagre amount of oil -- just eight litres per 100 kilogrammes (14 pints per 220 pounds). That compares to 18 litres for fully mature fruits.

Alileche stands in his grove during harvest -- the trees have never been treated chemically, he says

"Our oil is a very high quality that we want to get certified in Europe" as organic, Alileche said.

He has labelled his oil Dahbia, the name of both his mother and his wife.

The production process "respects the entire ecological system: no pollution, no fertilisers".

The oil's free acidity -- a measure of quality whereby the lower the figure, the better the oil -- is 0.16 percent, just a fifth of the 0.8 percent limit for Extra Virgin oil.

"At the mill, we don't touch the olives much," he said. "We wash them, press them and finally bottle the oil."

An employee shows a handful of olives at the press ahead of oil production, which Alileche says "respects the entire ecological system" 

That breaks with more traditional practices, he added.

"Before, people wouldn't wash the olives and they would sit exposed for long periods in bags in the open air, which changed the taste of the oil."

Alileche's farm benefits from a drip irrigation system, but he fears that climate change could threaten his livelihood, bringing both drought and early summer hailstorms.

"A quarter of an hour of hail and it's all gone," he said. "You'd have to wait five years for the olive tree to recover."

abh/fka/ezz/par/dwo/oho

Organic farmers find fertile ground in North Africa

Out of 250 categories of organic products grown in Tunisia, around 60 are exported

 (AFP/FETHI BELAID)

Kaouther Larbi and Françoise Kadri with AFP bureaus in Rabat and Algeria
Sat, November 6, 2021, 

Proudly displaying her freshly picked pomegranates, Tunisian farmer Sarah Shili says going organic is "the future of farming" -- and as demand surges in North Africa and beyond, the sector is blooming.

Shili runs Domaine Elixir Bio, a 94-hectare (230-acre) farm near Tunis that produces organic-certified vegetable, fruit and cereal crops in a way she said "respects nature".

The farm's revenues have surged thanks to strong demand and the growth of online sales, multiplying five times in as many years to hit 100,000 euros in 2020.

That is despite the higher price of organic products in a middle-income country where many people's wallets have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and years of economic crisis.

Indeed, with export demand also on the rise, Shili says the main challenges are on the supply side.

"We lack water, like all farmers, and to get organic seeds and plants we have to do everything ourselves," she told AFP.

Despite the challenges, the sector has surged in Tunisia since the turn of the millennium.

In 2001, just 16,000 hectares were dedicated to organic farming -- a figure that has multiplied 20-fold over two decades.

The number of producers and venders has grown at a similar pace to some 8,000, said Samia Maamer, in charge of organic products at the agriculture ministry.

Maamer said the sector has helped diversify the country's economy and now makes up 13 percent of food exports.

- 'Tunisia's favourable climate' -

Out of 250 categories of organic products grown in Tunisia, around 60 are exported -- mainly olive oil but also dates, aromatic and medicinal plants as well as some vegetables and fruit.

Despite its small size, Tunisia ranks 30th in the world and first in Africa in terms of area certified for organic farming.

Maamer said that apart from its chronic water shortages, "the climate in Tunisia is very favourable" to the trade.

She added that only five percent of the country's two million hectares of olive groves had been treated with pesticides, meaning the remainder could potentially win organic certification.

"It's a sector with ongoing and growing international demand," said Maamer.

And due to the coronavirus pandemic, people began increasingly looking for organic products "because... they don't contain (artificial) chemicals", she added.

While there is strong demand in the US and Europe for bio products, they are also gaining attention among 25-30 year-old Tunisians "who are well-informed" about their benefits, she added.

As the market grows, Tunisia hopes that by 2030 the sector will contribute to help develop tourism, renewables and handicrafts, she said.

- Morocco, Algeria trail behind -

Bio farming is also on the rise in Morocco, where the area of farmland certified for organic production has more than doubled since 2011 to reach over 10,300 hectares.

However, "that's far behind the potential of a farming country like Morocco," said Reda Tahiri, who heads a union for organic farmers.

The majority of the country's olive, citrus and almond groves are in the southern area around Marrakech and near the capital Rabat in the north-west.

But given the country's 300,000 hectares of aromatic and medicinal plants and the iconic argan tree, there is potential for going organic.

Moroccan authorities are trying to develop the sector with the Green Morocco Plan, which helps farmers cover the costs of getting certified.

For exports to the European Union to be labelled as organic, they must be inspected once a year by an EU-licenced certification agency.

Tahiri said certification for export to European or North American markets can cost up to 1,000 euros ($1,115) per hectare annually.

"So the total cost of production is higher than in conventional agriculture, but without the producer getting any guarantees of higher prices for the products," he said.

As well as state help on these costs, Tahiri says that for the organics market to develop, "we need to raise awareness among consumers and ensure better profit margins for producers".

Morocco's agriculture ministry said it has prioritised organic agriculture and is hoping to reach 100,000 hectares of certified farmland by 2030, with 900,000 tonnes of produce per year -- two-thirds of it for export.

By comparison, Algeria is trailing.

The semi-official economics and development think tank CREAD said that in 2013 just 1,200 hectares were being farmed organically.

Although there are no recent statistics, in the past few years some shops have been offering customers organic vegetable boxes delivered straight from small producers.

kl-ko-abh-fka-isb/par/hkb/oho

Moderate Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger says Americans didn't elect Biden to be FDR

THEY DIDN'T ELECT FDR TO BE FDR EITHER THEN

John L. Dorman

Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin


Rep. Spanberger told The New York Times that voters didn't elect President Biden to govern like FDR.

The congresswoman said that voters sent Biden to the White House "to be normal and stop the chaos."

Biden responded on Saturday, calling Spanberger "a friend" and saying he mold his own presidency.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said earlier this week that "nobody" elected President Joe Biden to pursue sweeping legislation similar to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's transformative New Deal, but because they wanted someone "normal" in the White House who would "stop the chaos," according to The New York Times.

Spanberger, a moderate Democrat first elected to the House in 2018 in a Republican-leaning congressional district anchored in suburban Richmond, pointed to sentiments among swing voters across the country – the kinds of voters who had voted for Republicans for years but propelled Democrats to a House majority during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Looking at electoral losses in her backyard, with a painful defeat for Democrats in the Virginia gubernatorial race between Republican Glenn Youngkin and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, alongside losses in the state House of Delegates, the congresswoman said that the party must assure voters that they're focused on kitchen-table issues.

"We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we're not willing to say, 'Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don't have enough workers in our work force,'" she told The Times. "We gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate."

The congresswoman said that many Americans saw Biden as a level-headed leader who could turn the page from the tumult of the Trump years, but didn't necessarily vote to give Democrats a mandate to pass their spending priorities.

"Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos," she told The Times, pointing to the party's narrow 221-213 House majority and its razor-thin Senate majority.

On Friday, after months of intraparty disagreements, the House passed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill in a 228-206 vote, with 13 Republicans crossing over to support the legislation and six progressive Democrats voting in opposition.

The bill now heads to Biden's desk, where he will sign it into law during an official ceremony in the coming days.

The party will then shift to passing the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill, known as the Build Back Better Act, composed of a social-spending blueprint that includes funding for universal pre-K for six years, childcare subsidies, and an expansion of Medicare to cover hearing aids, among other items

On Saturday, Biden was asked about Spanberger's comments, which elicited a smile from the commander-in-chief, who called her "a friend."

The president relayed that the congresswoman told him that she has a photo of FDR in her office.

He then stressed that he was his own man, working on his own terms.

"I don't intend to be anybody but Joe Biden," he said. "That's who I am. And what I'm trying to do is do the things that I ran on to do."sed that he was his own man, working on his own terms.

Opinion: Biden is on to something important

Opinion by Julian Zelizer, CNN Political Analyst 

President Joe Biden scored a major victory on Friday night. For months, negotiations between different factions of the Democratic Party have threatened to tank his domestic agenda. But after the President stepped up the pressure and urged lawmakers to "vote now," the House passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill with bipartisan support, sending it to Biden's desk for his signature.

  

© Alex Brandon/AP President Joe Biden speaks about the bipartisan infrastructure bill in the State Dinning Room of the White House, Saturday, Nov. 6, 2021, in Washington.

House Democrats also moved forward with the larger spending package to strengthen the social safety net and fund environmental programs, with a tentative deadline to pass the legislation by mid-November.

The deal took place after a difficult week. Democrats have been scrambling for answers after the party suffered several resounding election losses, from the gubernatorial race in Virginia to local contests on Long Island. Many Democrats, convinced they know exactly what went wrong, claim the party moved too far to the left. "Nobody elected [Biden] to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and to stop the chaos," said Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

But Biden has chosen a more ambitious path. As a veteran legislator, he still believes when voters yearned for competence and normality in November 2020, it didn't just mean they wanted a President who avoided Twitter and refrained from firing White House staff in dramatic, made for television announcements. He understood Americans wanted a President who could actually tackle the nation's biggest problems.

And Biden is on to something important.

Competence means governance and problem-solving. It means getting things done, so voters can see tangible results. The New Deal was successful not because it offered voters some grand ideological vision of society, but because President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the problems Americans faced by providing public jobs, electrifying rural areas, building roads and bridges and creating unemployment insurance and Social Security.

In 1965, voters were excited about President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare not because it shifted the debate over the American safety net, but because older Americans could afford the health care they needed.

Part of what has made President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act more popular over time is voters gradually experienced firsthand the benefits it provided.

Biden also enjoyed high approval ratings early in his presidency in part due to the vaccine rollout and the American Rescue Plan, which provided financial support to families across the country.

Our political standards have fallen so far we have forgotten what competence actually looks like. When Spanberger argues Americans voted for Biden because they wanted him to be "normal," she underestimates what the American electorate wants and needs. What made Biden so attractive to Americans was he came to office with decades of experience. In fact, he entered the White House as one of the most seasoned politicians since George H.W. Bush. In the aftermath of the tumultuous Trump presidency, Biden seemed like the kind of person who could get things done and rely on the help of experts and political veterans who knew how to move the needle on public policy.

To be sure, President Biden would do well to spend his time wrestling over his rhetoric in the months ahead. Should the President stick to his guns, continuing to offer a robust Rooseveltian defense of New Deal liberalism? Or should he take a page from former President Bill Clinton, who in 1996 famously proclaimed in his State of the Union Address the "era of big government is over"?

Ultimately, Biden needs to ensure the reconciliation bill passes. And even then, he should continue to focus on the core issues that concern average Americans and make legislative, as well as executive progress on issues like stabilizing the economy. Though October's job report was promising, inflation and snags in the supply chain remain key issues to address. The more the President can ameliorate these problems through the levers of policy, the more his numbers will likely improve.

Addressing other perennial issues, such as drug costs, childcare, family leave policy and climate change will only boost his standing.

Despite some Democrats denouncing progressive policies in response to the party's election losses this week, Biden should continue to work in tandem with Democratic leaders to make progress on these issues, rather than getting mired in a conversation about procedural issues or costs. Any success at addressing these longstanding problems would be good for Biden, good for the party and a huge benefit for the American people.

And, finally, the pandemic remains front and center. Over the past few months, the administration has made significant progress with vaccines. By shifting to a more proactive approach with vaccine mandates, we have seen big jumps in the number of Americans receiving the jab. The more the administration can do to reach unvaccinated populations in the US, control the spread of the virus at home and work with allies to boost supplies of the vaccine in other parts of the world, the better the prospects are for an economic rebound.

Passing the infrastructure bill counts as a significant victory for Biden. But there is still the reconciliation package -- and plenty more to be done beyond that. If the Democrats cannot offer tangible progress on the economy, the pandemic and popular social policies like paid family leave, they will likely be looking at Republican congressional majorities in 2023 and a very competitive presidential election the year after. But if they keep problem-solving, the party can beat the odds and pave the way for a much brighter future

Right-Wingers Demand “Right” to Choose — But Only for Vaccines, Not Abortion

A crowd of protesters against COVID-19 vaccine mandates stands outside the headquarters of City Light, Seattle's public utility, on October 18, 2021.

TOBY SCOTT / SOPA IMAGES / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

BYChris Walker, 

Truthout

PUBLISHED November 5, 2021

It’s been less than 24 hours since the Biden administration announced the deadline for companies to require their workers to be vaccinated against coronavirus or present weekly negative tests, but lawsuits have already been filed against the measure, with more likely to follow.

These lawsuits claim to be defending bodily autonomy — but they’re being filed by the same Republican-controlled states where this defense has been ignored in the fight for abortion rights.

The Biden rule, which will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), requires employers at companies with more than 100 employees on their payrolls to have their workers provide proof of vaccination. If a worker does not wish to be vaccinated, they must provide evidence of a negative COVID test each week at their own expense. Companies and workers have until January 4 to comply with the new rule.

Several states under Republican control have already filed lawsuits against the White House, including a joint suit by Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio — and at least 20 other states are planning to sue the Biden administration over the vaccine rule.

Some companies have also filed lawsuits. Tankcraft Corp. and Plasticraft Corp., a company based out of southeastern Wisconsin, has filed a challenge to the rule directly to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, alleging that it violates the company’s and their workers’ autonomies.

“OSHA does not know how to run our companies. We do,” the company’s secretary and treasurer, Steve Fettig, said in a statement.

“We respect our employees’ fundamental right to make their own private, difficult medical choices,” Fettig said.

Those arguments are hypocritical, particularly when juxtaposed with the current debate on abortion rights in the United States. Despite Fettig’s supposed commitment to the “fundamental right” to make “private, difficult medical choices,” Fettig is chair of the board of directors of the MacIver Institute in Wisconsin, a right-wing organization that has advocated for anti-abortion legislation in the state.

In Texas, a state that is also challenging the Biden administration over the OSHA vaccine rule, abortion access been severely curtailed by a restrictive law banning the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy — so early on in the pregnancy that many people don’t even realize they’re pregnant.

When announcing the lawsuit against the Biden administration on Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that the “new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of federal power.”

Of course, when it comes to the Texas abortion ban, Paxton has no qualms about the government intruding in people’s lives. Although the courts have long maintained the constitutional right to abortion, Paxton dismissed that idea in filings to the Supreme Court last month.

“The idea that the Constitution requires States to permit a woman to abort her unborn child is unsupported by any constitutional text, history or tradition,” Paxton claimed, disregarding five decades of precedent and case law.

The Texas abortion bill was signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Greg Abbott (R); last month, the governor signed an executive order forbidding any public or private sector entity from abiding with a vaccine mandate. Although federal rules and laws supersede this order, many have criticized Abbott for his inconsistency — especially because abortion affects only the individual who is undergoing the procedure, whereas actions related to the pandemic, like choosing to get vaccinated or wear a mask, can have an enormous impact on the health and wellbeing of others.

“They say it infringes upon their freedom if the government mandates that they wear their masks or if the government mandates they get a vaccine,” noted state Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). “I don’t know what country they come from because the one that I grew up in, I couldn’t go to school until I got what I call my shots. We had to have vaccinations to go to school when I was a little girl. So it’s always been that way.”

“We got hypocrites [in Texas],” Crockett continued.

Cindy Banyai, a Florida candidate for Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, expressed a similar sentiment on Twitter on Thursday afternoon.

“If you think a vaccine mandate from OSHA is unconstitutional, you should see what states are trying to do with abortion and voting,” she said.

In a number of interviews on Thursday, Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh defended the Biden administration’s new vaccine rule, calling it “unfortunate” that so many states were planning lawsuits just hours after the deadline was announced.

OSHA has “a 50-year history of making these rules work,” Walsh said on PBS’s “NewsHour”, adding that both employers and the Biden administration are in “uncharted territory” when it comes to dealing with the pandemic.

Walsh also noted that the new rule is not a mandate because it still gives workers the choice to do what they want with their bodies.

“It was a well-written rule and put together. A lot of thought went into it,” Walsh said, adding that the administration is “confident” that the rule will stand up to judicial scrutiny.

People Worldwide Name US as a Major Threat to World Peace. Here’s Why.

Iranians burn a U.S. flag during a demonstration against American "crimes" in Tehran on January 3, 2020, following the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Major General Qassim Suleimani in a U.S. strike on his convoy at Baghdad international airport.

ATTA KENARE / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY C.J. Polychroniou, 

Truthout

PUBLISHEDNovember 6, 2021

How is it that people across the globe have come to agree that the United States is now one of the primary threats to world peace and democracy?

Having leveled two Japanese cities with atomic bombs and established itself as the world’s top superpower following the collapse of the international order in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. quickly became intoxicated by its newfound military superiority.

The U.S. soon went on to introduce a doctrine that positioned itself as the world’s police, drop more bombs in the Korean and Vietnamese wars than there had been dropped in the whole course of World War II, and orchestrate military coups against democratically elected governments throughout Latin America. It ended up in turn supporting brutal dictatorships and establishing more foreign military bases than any other nation or empire in history all over the globe.

All this occurred within the first 30 or so years after the end of World War II. By the time the 21st century came around, the U.S. was the only military and economic superpower in the world. Yet, that did not put an end to U.S. imperial ambitions. A “global war on terrorism” was initiated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the U.S. ending up by 2013 being seen by people around the world as “the greatest threat to world peace.”

What are the roots of U.S. imperialism? What has been the impact of imperial expansion and wars on democracy at home? Is the U.S. empire in retreat? In this interview, scholar and activist Khury Petersen-Smith, who is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, discusses how U.S. imperialism has undermined democracy, both home and abroad, with the wars abroad even being tied to police brutality at home.

C.J. Polychroniou: The U.S. has a long history of war-on-terror campaigns going all the way back to the spread of anarchism in late 19th century. During the Cold War era, communists were routinely labelled as “terrorists,” and the first systematic war on terror unfolded during the Reagan administration. Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration renewed the war on terror by implementing a series of far-reaching policy initiatives, many of which, incidentally, went unnoticed by the public but also continued during the Obama and Trump administrations, respectively, which subverted democracy and the rule of law. Can you elaborate about the impact of war-on-terror policies in the dismantling of U.S. democracy?

Khury Petersen-Smith: It’s true: The tactics and beliefs that the U.S. has deployed in the war on terror have deep roots that stretch well before our current time. I would argue that the U.S. has never been a democracy, and that a key reason is its basically permanent state of war, which began with its founding. New England settlers, for example, waged a war of counterinsurgency against Indigenous peoples here who resisted colonization in King Philip’s War. The settlers besieged Indigenous nations, considering communities of adults and children to be “enemies” and punishing them with incredible violence. This was in the 1670s.I would argue that the U.S. has never been a democracy, and that a key reason is its basically permanent state of war, which began with its founding.

In a different U.S. counterinsurgency, in the Philippines in the early 20th century, American soldiers used “the water cure,” a torture tactic comparable to the “waterboarding” that the U.S. has used in the war on terror. This was one feature of a horrific war of scorched earth that the U.S. waged as Filipino revolutionaries fought for an independent country after Spanish colonization. The U.S. killed tens of thousands of Filipino fighters, and hundreds of thousands — up to a million — civilians. There was also a staggering amount of death due to secondary violence, such as starvation and cholera outbreaks, and due to the U.S. declaration that civilians were fair game to target (as seen in the infamous Balangiga Massacre). It was during that episode in 1901 on the island of Samar, when an American general ordered troops to kill everyone over the age of 10. The designation of whole populations as the “enemy” — and therefore targets for violence — has echoes that reverberate in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and other places where the U.S. has fought the war on terror.

This is to say that there are different chapters in the history of U.S. empire, but there is a throughline of justifying military violence and the denial of human rights in defense of U.S. power and “the American way of life.” This history of wars informs those of the present.

In the 20th century, labeling various activities “terrorism” was one way of rationalizing the use of force. The U.S. did this especially with its allies in response to anti-colonial liberation movements. So the South African apartheid regime called anti-apartheid resistance “terrorism,” and the Israeli state did (and continues to do) the same to Palestinian resistance, however nonviolent. The U.S. has armed and defended these states, embracing and promoting the rhetoric of war against “terrorism.”

The flip side of “terrorism” — the blanket enemy against which all violence is justified — is “democracy” — the all-encompassing thing that the U.S. claims to defend in its foreign policy. But again, the 20th century saw the U.S. embrace, arm and wage war with and on behalf of anti-democratic, dictatorial forces on every continent. The decades of violence that the U.S. carried out and supported throughout Latin America in the latter part of the 20th century, in response to waves of popular resistance for social and economic justice, serve as a brutal chapter of examples.

All of these things helped constitute the foundation upon which the Bush administration launched the war on terror.

To answer your question more directly, military violence always requires dehumanization and the denial of rights — and this inevitably corrupts any notions of democracy. War, in fact, always involves an attack on democratic rights at large. When the U.S. launched the war on terror in 2001, the federal government simultaneously waged military campaigns abroad and passed legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act, issued legal guidelines and other practices that introduced new levels of surveillance, denial of due process, rationalization of torture and other attacks on civil liberties. These efforts especially targeted Muslims and people of South Asian, Central Asian, Southwest Asian and North African origin — all of whom were subject to being cast as “terrorists” or “suspected terrorists.”

It is worth noting that while Bush drew upon the deep roots of U.S. violence to launch the war on terror, there has been incredible continuity, escalation and expansion throughout it. Bush launched the drone war, for example, and President Barack Obama then wildly expanded and escalated it. President Donald Trump then escalated it further.

Have the war-on-terror policies also affected struggles for racial and migrant justice?

The war on terror has been devastating for racial and migrant justice. The Islamophobic domestic programs that the U.S. has carried out are racist. And once they were piloted against parts of the population, they could be expanded to others. This is how U.S. state violence works. Indeed, the mass policing, mass incarceration regime built up in the 1990s — which was supposedly directed at “fighting crime,” and the “war on drugs” — targeted Black people and Latinos in particular, building an infrastructure that was then deployed against Muslims and others in the war on terror. With policing vastly expanded in the name of the war on terror, its force came back to Black and Indigenous communities — as it always does in the United States.With policing vastly expanded in the name of the war on terror, its force came back to Black and Indigenous communities — as it always does in the United States.

It is important to acknowledge the new level of credibility and power that the police attained after 9/11 and in the war on terror. There was actually a powerful wave of anti-racist protest against the police in the 1990s — especially strong in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. In New York, thousands mobilized to demand justice for Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Patrick Dorismond, and others brutalized and killed by the New York City Police Department. The police were on the defensive. They seized upon the post-9/11 moment and the beginning of the war on terror to rehabilitate their image and attain new powers.

With this in mind, I wonder if the current moment of “racial reckoning” unfolding in the U.S. over these two years — brilliant and important as it is — could have actually happened 20 years ago. I think that anti-racist movements were on track to do it, and the war on terror set us back two decades. Consider all of the Black lives lost in that time.

And yes, the war on terror has been catastrophic for migrant justice. One of the early measures was the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which forced the registration of non-citizens from South and Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and North and East African countries. It was largely unopposed, setting the stage for more racist, targeted policies, like the Muslim ban. Before the war on terror, there was no Department of Homeland Security, no Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The U.S. government seized the opportunity of the war on terror to build on the long history of white supremacy in controlling migration and open a new chapter of border militarization, policing and surveillance of migrants, and deportation.

The United Nations condemned this past summer, for the 29th year in a row, the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Indeed, the U.S. is notorious around the world for violations of international law and has been widely perceived as the greatest threat to world peace. However, the influence of the U.S. in world affairs is sharply in decline and its so-called “soft’ power has all but evaporated. Are we living through the death of an empire?

I’m afraid that U.S. empire is far from death, or even dying.

From the perspective of humanity and the planet, the war on terror has been catastrophic in its levels of destruction and death. But from the perspective of the proponents of U.S. empire, those at its helm, it was a gamble. Bush administration officials were clear from the start that the invasion of Afghanistan was the opening of what they conceived of as a series of invasions and other military operations to demonstrate U.S. hegemony, and punish the minority of states located in the most strategic regions of the world that were not solidly in the American orbit. After invading Afghanistan, Bush declared the “Axis of Evil,” targeting Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The U.S. then invaded Iraq, implying that Iran and North Korea could be next. The idea was to project U.S. power and to disrupt and prevent the rise of potential rivals to it.

The U.S. lost the gamble. Not only did untold millions of people around the world suffer from the wars, but the U.S. also failed in its strategic objectives. The regional and world powers whose ascension the U.S. sought to curtail — especially Iran, Russia and China — emerged more powerful, while U.S. power was set back.

But the U.S. remains, far and away, the most powerful country in the world. And it will not surrender that status quietly. On the contrary, even as it continues and supports military operations as part of the war on terror, it is very openly preparing for confrontation with China. It is pursuing a belligerent path that is driving rivalry and militarization — a path toward conflict.

The story of the path the U.S. is pursuing regarding hostility toward China is another that reveals the subterranean, forward motion of empire that continues across presidential administrations. President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy first signaled that, “We are attentive to the possible renewal of old patterns of great power competition,” and identified China as one potential competitor. In 2006, the Bush administration gestured further toward identifying China as posing a problem for U.S. empire, saying, “Our strategy seeks to encourage China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge against other possibilities.”

When President Obama took office, the U.S. foreign policy establishment had clearly united behind the notion that China was an enemy to be isolated and whose rise was to be curtailed. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared “America’s Pacific Century” and argued for a winding down of American attention to Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new strategic focus on Asia and the Pacific. Obama launched the “Pivot to Asia,” which involved shifting military weapons and personnel to the region and building more facilities there, all aimed at addressing China’s ascension. President Trump, of course, brought anti-China hostility to a fever pitch, blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, openly using crude, racist language directed at China (but impacting Chinese American people and many other Asian Americans), and opening the door for Fox News personalities and officials like Sen. Tom Cotton to talk directly about the supposed “threat” that China poses and call for military action against it. That brings us to today, where there is near consensus between both parties that the U.S. should be gearing up in armed competition with China.

Unfortunately, empires do not simply die. This means that we — around the world, and especially those of us located in the United States — are called upon to resist, undermine and disrupt empire. We need to, across borders, envision a radically different world, and fight for it.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Technology Fetishism Reigns at COP26.

 It’ll Keep Us Burning Fossil Fuels.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) on November 2, 2021.

YURI MIKHAILENKOTASS VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Gareth Dale,

Truthout

November 6, 2021

The “problem with COP,” said a UN observer, is that “everyone has a business class mentality.” In the groupthink of political leaders and diplomats gathered at the Glasgow summit, above all those from the Global North, when addressing the climate crisis, a business approach must prevail. Efficiency measures and new technologies take the star role. Regulation should be “soft”: all promises and no sanctions. Virtually all industries should carry on expanding without restraint — and of the 35 stalls at COP26 that parade countries’ green credentials, only two mentioned the need to shut down fossil fuels. “The marketplace,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry assured journalists in Glasgow, will shut down the fossil fuel industries so there’s no pressing need for politics to intervene.

This mindset is increasingly at odds with the real world. The degree of hope vested in tech solutions is unrealistic. The market isn’t shutting down the fossil fuel sector at anything like the pace required, in Kerry’s USA and elsewhere. Pollution by the wealthy must be addressed head on: The richest 1% will soon be emitting 16% of global emissions. Alongside fossil fuels, some other industries (aviation, cattle, SUVs) simply must shrink. This can be achieved while avoiding the hairshirt, as the Cambridge University engineer Julian Allwood has shown, but it will require robust regulation.

The business class is dominating the COP26 agenda in more direct ways too. Global negotiations require the hosts to ooze credibility, yet this is running low in Glasgow. Details are emerging every day of the influence of climate deniers and the fossil-fuel lobby at the heart of Britain’s government.

Protester holds a sign featuring Boris Johnson’s face surrounded with the text “Bla Bla Bla While We Burn Burn Burn” during a COP26 demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.GARETH DALE

A striking example occurred on November 3. The summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had been relishing the limelight. But on that day he quit the stage and flew by private jet to London to dine with Charles Moore, his former boss from his days as a Daily Telegraph columnist. Moore, a notorious climate-change denier, is a close chum of Owen Paterson. Paterson, a Tory parliamentarian and former government minister, has been embroiled in a long-running corruption scandal, which was now dominating the headlines.

That same day, on Johnson’s instructions, Tory MPs voted to overturn the finding by Parliament’s standards committee that Paterson had acted corruptly — and to rip up the Parliament’s entire system for combating sleaze. It was an extraordinary move. Corruption had been proved: Paterson did receive a six-figure annual sum to lobby for private companies in Parliament, he did fail to declare this, and it is against parliamentary rules.

The Paterson story that day concerned his corrupt activities, but we should be aware that, of his other career highlights, hostility to environmentalism is high on the list. He has long been at the center of Britain’s climate-denial fraternity — which includes his own brother-in-law, Matt “King Coal” Ridley. Paterson claims that global heating could be a good thing for Britain; he pooh-poohs those who “get emotional” about such issues.

This was no mere yapping from the fringes. In the mid-2010s Paterson used his position as environment secretary to push for the expansion of fracking, among other environmental delinquencies.

This invites us to ask: Why would Johnson put his political capital in support of this tool of the fossil-fuel industry — not only risking that the Tories be seen once again as the party of sleaze, but also soiling his own green credentials?

The answer has much to do with the morphing of climate denial into climate delay and climate dereliction.

Johnson is the archetype. Prior to his premiership he was a proud climate sceptic, of a Malthusian stripe. He fed his Telegraph readers with scraps of climate mysticism, proposing that a mini ice age could be upon us “by 2035,” and throwing snide remarks at the renewables sector — wind turbines can “barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.”

Most memorable was his Telegraph column entitled “Forget global warming: global over-population is the issue.”

“The biggest single challenge facing the Earth,” Johnson argued, is not climate change but women’s unrestrained fertility. He tips his hat to his father, Stanley, a World Bank and EU technocrat and Malthusian zealot. Although both men are vocal exponents of controlling women’s fertility, Johnson Sr. fathered six children and Johnson Jr. has added at least half a dozen more to the global population. This is no ordinary hypocrisy. For Malthusians, different moral rules do and should apply to rich and poor. That’s what Malthus is all about; it’s what earned him his place on the conservative seat in the pantheon of classical political economy.

Upon entering 10 Downing Street, Johnson experienced a Damascene conversion, or so the story goes. “How Boris Johnson went from climate sceptic to eco-warrior” ran the typical headline. As any eco-warrior knows, the pressing task facing global capitalism is to quit its addiction to fossil fuels. On this count, how would the new eco-campaigning government fare? Would it, in the interests of a habitable planet, wage war on the combustion of oil and gas with the ferocity that its Thatcher-era predecessor had, in the interests of capitalist enrichment, waged war on the striking coal miners?

Not a bit of it. Johnson stuffed his cabinet with climate deniers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, opponents of renewable energy such as Andrea Leadsom, and supporters of the coal industry such as Priti Patel. His education minister, Nadhim Zahawi, trousers nearly £400,000 (roughly $540,000) per year from an oil firm. His health minister Sajid Javid, is a militant supporter of the fracking industry — and “a big fan” of the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand. Even Alok Sharma, appointed by Johnson as President of the COP26 summit, is on the fossil-fuel payroll. He pockets five-figure sums from at least two oil companies, and has repeatedly voted in parliament for fossil-fuel expansion.

Johnson’s conversion, then, was not to eco-warrior. Yet it did mark a shift. According to one of his aides, he was partly responding to “elite fashion” and to a changing electoral atmosphere. “Forget global warming!” doesn’t play well with voters. “We’re making things happen!” certainly does.

But the crucial staging post on Johnson’s journey from climate denial to climate delay came when he woke to the potential of green growth. Whereas for his earlier self, climate change posed a threat to the neoliberal “business as usual” that had served his class so well and must therefore be doubted or denied, Johnson 2.0 recognizes that essentially the same economic agenda could, with moderate adjustments, be marketed as a response to the climate crisis. The core green-growth message is that all systems — energy, travel, housing, etc. — can continue as normal and indefinitely even if, in some cases, new materials and technologies are required. The subtext is that fossil-fuel consumption need not be addressed directly; technologies will provide a short-circuit, a “technological fix.”

The surest test of whether a strategy can be classed as “eco-warrior” or “climate delay” is to ask whether it demonstrably reduces emissions in the next few years, or rests on future speculative promises. Three events last month shed light on the British government’s credentials in this regard.

The first saw the campaign group Insulate Britain block ports and motorways to voice the demand that government should fund the insulation of all social housing by 2025, followed by the low-carbon retrofit of all homes by 2030. This plan offers an obvious ‘win win’: a jobs program that would upgrade skills; insulation of the draughty homes of poorer citizens, ending fuel poverty and saving thousands of lives; and the retrofitting of all homes to enable a successful transition from gas heating to electric heat pumps, thereby switching off one of Britain’s biggest fossil-fuel spigots. Any government of an “eco-warrior” disposition, or one that supported a social agenda of leveling up, would embrace it. Johnson’s sought to put the protestors behind bars.

Second, just as COP26 delegates were gathering in Glasgow and applying the finishing touches to their NDCs, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced his budget. It contained virtually no funding for buildings insulation, no significant green measures and some positively brown ones, notably the slashing of tax on domestic aviation — this in a small country crisscrossed by rail and coach networks.

Two COP26 protesters hold signs calling for serious climate policy in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.GARETH DALE

The third was the government’s Net Zero Strategy. Alongside electric vehicles, nuclear energy and offshore wind it emphasizes three technologies: carbon capture and storage (CCS), synthetic aviation fuel (SAF), and hydrogen (which receives 501 mentions in its 368 pages). These, the document claims, will be central to enabling Britain to reach net zero by 2050.

Without doubt, the Net Zero Strategy signals a transformation in energy policy and significant emissions reductions may well result. Equally striking, however, is that the keystone technologies are speculative. Hydrogen, SAF and CCS are proven, but they are currently tiny in scale, and many are failing. At present, Britain boasts no functioning CCS projects, no “green hydrogen” plants, and no SAF plants. Their success as pillars of the net-zero program would require a large-scale jump-start and subsequent roll-out, to include not only the construction of the plants themselves but of storage facilities and distribution networks, plus the adaptation of entire heating and transport systems (in the case of hydrogen) and the exploration of suitable aquifers (in the case of CCS). Typically, that sort of scale-up takes decades.A dominant strand within elite responses to the climate emergency in Britain, the U.S. and beyond sustains the technocratic myth that decarbonization must center on the deployment of new technologies.

Green hydrogen and SAF, moreover, require colossal energy inputs that will somehow have to be provided. Britain’s hydrogen strategy, published this August, places its heavy bets on blue hydrogen, with only small projects for its green cousin. Blue hydrogen should be renamed brownish-blue: It’s dubious and leaky, and it gambles on CCS succeeding at scale. The ulterior aim is to grant a new lease of life to the fossil fuel giants.

The complexity and scope of even one of these programs is enormous. Arguably, one could see Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority as an analog, though that would be to overlook the fact that its central technology, the dam, was built upon millennia of engineering trial and error: It faced no novel problems of scaling up. We should certainly refrain from likening them to missions of “targeted specificity,” such as the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. And yet this is precisely the comparison that John Kerry drew earlier this year. “Fifty per cent of the reductions we have to make to get to net-zero by 2050,” he proposed, “are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. … But look at what we did to push the creation of vaccines, look at what we did to go to the moon, look at what we did to invent the internet.” (If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah. The world is burning but the fire brigade will arrive. Half of the equipment they need doesn’t exist and they don’t know how to make it, but hey, they’ll find a way. If you’re troubled and need inspiration, gaze at the moon.)

COP26 demonstrator holds a sign that says

 “DEAR CAPITALISM, IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. JUST KIDDING IT’S YOU.” in London, U.K., on November 6, 2021.GARETH DALE

This mindset is pervasive, a dominant strand within elite responses to the climate emergency in Britain, the U.S. and beyond. Its consequences are troubling. It sustains the technocratic myth that decarbonization must center on the deployment of new technologies, with a downplaying of the potential roles for well-known technologies (such as buildings insulation) and for social-systemic change. It breeds complacency: We needn’t worry about burning oil and coal because the tech guys will catch and store the carbon; fuel for transportation can simply be switched from hydrocarbons to hydrogen; planes can fly on biofuels and batteries, and so on.

The leaders gathered at COP26, with the British government to the fore, remain in the thrall of technology fetishism. It’s a syndrome that in recent memory proved the undoing of what had been a supposedly successful COP gathering. I am referring to COP21 in Paris, which yielded the celebrated Paris Agreement. That concord of 2015 was based heavily on the COP delegates’ magical belief in a particular technology: Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). Since then, BECCS has been discredited and the Paris Agreement on which it was built has crumbled. The hosts of COP26 appear determined to learn nothing from that debacle. The true beacons at COP26 are the civil-society movements that have encircled the negotiations, applying pressure to those within and raising awareness without. As the summiteers disperse, so the task turns to building on that experience and holding lawmakers’ feet to the fire.

Pelosi and Biden Acquiesce to Party’s Right Wing With Infrastructure Bill Vote

House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer speak to reporters on their way to the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on November 5, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

DREW ANGERER / GETTY IMAGES

BY Kenny Stancil,

  Common Dream

November 6, 2021

The U.S. House on Friday night passed a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill but didn’t bring the Build Back Better Act to the floor — sending just one half of President Joe Biden’s two-pronged economic agenda to the White House, with only a pledge that conservative House Democrats will vote for the party’s broader social infrastructure and climate package at a later date.

That wasn’t the plan on Friday morning. When the day started, Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said they wanted House Democrats to pass both parts of the president’s legislative agenda: the Build Back Better Act (BBB), which would invest $1.75 trillion over 10 years to strengthen climate action and the welfare state; and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), a fossil fuel-friendly proposal to upgrade the nation’s roads, bridges, and ports that was approved by the U.S. Senate in August.

Due to the intransigence of a few right-wing House Democrats who made last-minute demands for additional fiscal information that could take weeks to obtain, and the acquiescence of Pelosi and Biden, a planned floor vote on BBB was shelved and reduced to a “rule for consideration,” which was approved in a party-line vote of 221-213. Prior to that, BIF passed by a tally of 228-206, with 13 House Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the measure.

Because it wasn’t accompanied by a real vote on BBB, six progressives — Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — voted against BIF.

“Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first,” Omar said in a statement, “risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”

For months, progressives have stressed — and Democratic leaders had agreed — that keeping both pieces of legislation linked and passing them in tandem was key to securing Biden’s entire agenda. Holding a floor vote on BIF and a mere procedural action on BBB, progressives argued Friday, was a betrayal of the two-track strategy that opens the door for right-wing party members who are content with the passage of BIF to further weaken, or completely abandon, the already heavily gutted BBB.

“We’re proud of the Squad for being courageous and standing up for what’s right tonight,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in a statement. “It’s bullshit that President Biden and Speaker Pelosi rammed through a bill written by a bunch of corporations but feel fine to hold off on passing Biden’s own agenda, a popular bill that would actually combat climate change and help working people.”

“To be clear, the BIF is not a climate bill and the stakes of the climate crisis are too high to delay reconciliation any longer, or worse, let it die along with our futures,” added Prakash.

Mary Small, national advocacy director at the Indivisible Project, said in a statement that Bowman, Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib “demonstrated enormous political courage in their continued fight to hold the line for passage of the Build Back Better Act.”

“They understand better than anyone what’s at stake with this game-changing package of investments in children and families and our climate,” Small added. “Their votes showed that, unlike the corporate Democrats dead-set on derailing the heart of President Biden’s agenda on behalf of their corporate donors, they know what it means to serve the people they represent.”

Even though analyses of spending and revenue conducted by the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House, and the Joint Committee on Taxation have found that BBB is paid for and may actually reduce deficits, a small group of conservative House Democrats on Friday insisted on seeing an official score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) before they would vote for BBB.

Given the razor-thin margins in Congress, Democrats can afford only three defections in the House and none in the Senate to pass BBB through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, it could take the CBO weeks to produce a score, and there is no guarantee that the holdouts will be satisfied with the results, which are notoriously arbitrary and unreliable, according to experts.

Ironically, the CBO determined earlier this year that the $550 billion BIF adds $256 billion to the deficit. BIF supporters’ lack of concern about such a finding prompted critics to suggest that Friday’s request for a CBO score by several right-wing House Democrats, including Reps. Ed Case (Hawaii), Jared Golden (Maine), Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), Kurt Schrader (Ore.), and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) was nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to tank the more ambitious portion of Biden’s agenda.

Although those lawmakers’ constituents support BBB by large margins, powerful corporate interests opposed to the legislation have carried out a massive lobbying blitz against the bill’s key provisions and showered obstructionist politicians with cash.

Following the CBO curveball, Pelosi proposed bringing BIF to the floor for a vote and passing a rule to set up a future vote on BBB. The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) originally rejected this plan, which deviated from the Democratic Party’s well-established strategy of enacting the two bills simultaneously.

CPC Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in a Friday afternoon statement that “if our six colleagues still want to wait for a CBO score, we would agree to give them that time—after which point we can vote on both bills together.” Roughly 20 CPC members reportedly told Jayapal during a closed-door meeting on Friday afternoon that they would vote against BIF if it was decoupled from BBB.

According to Manu Raju, chief congressional correspondent at CNN, progressives were left wondering: “Why is Pelosi putting the infrastructure bill on [the] floor and daring them to vote against it when there are 20 or so who won’t support it tonight? Why not put Build Back Better on [the] floor and dare 6 moderates to vote against it?”

Over the course of several hours, conservative House Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), and the CPC, led by Jayapal, worked out a deal, at the behest of Biden.

CPC member Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told The Hill that Biden was urging progressives to vote for BIF as well as the rule for consideration of BBB, “subject to some assurances and commitments that he was working to get.”

Those “assurances and commitments” came in the form of a statement from Case, Gottheimer, Murphy, Rice, and Schrader, which said: “We commit to voting for the Build Back Better Act, in its current form other than technical changes, as expeditiously as we receive fiscal information from the Congressional Budget Office—but in no event later than the week of November 15—consistent with the toplines for revenues and investments” projected by the White House.

The Intercept’s Ryan Grim argued that while “the focus is on progressives,” the few conservative lawmakers preventing both bills from passing on Friday were “doing it right in the open.”

Calling the corporate Democrats’ statement “foolishness,” former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said that if they are committed to voting for BBB “no later than November 15, they can do it now.”

Other critics also raised questions about conservative Democrats’ endgame.

“A statement of support for BBB that is contingent on the CBO score could be more of an escape hatch… than a commitment to vote for BBB,” warned Adam Jentleson, a former congressional staffer and current executive director of the Battle Born Collective, a progressive communications firm.

While progressives are being told to trust the obstructionists, who “have promised to vote for BBB when the CBO score comes in and says what everybody says it will say,” Grim noted, he questioned why those conservative Democrats are refusing to accept reputable budget estimates already provided by the White House and others.

“Progressives’ lack of trust in these few holdouts,” he added, “flows from the complete illogic of their public position, which raises questions about their actual position.”

Biden, for his part, said in a statement that he is “confident that during the week of November 15, the House will pass the Build Back Better Act.” But that still leaves the Senate, where the Democratic Party’s two biggest obstacles to social investments—right-wing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—are waiting, with less incentive to support BBB now that BIF has been approved.

In a statement, Tlaib warned that “passing BIF gives up our leverage to get Build Back Better through the House and Senate, and I fear that we are missing our once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the American people.”

Paul Williams, a fellow at the Jain Family Institute, noted that “the issue of course is that there’s no guarantee the CBO will even have scores out for BBB by Nov. 15—the day BIF becomes law even with no signature, and thus very slim chance it even gets to the Senate by that date, and zero chance Senate makes its changes and passes by then.”

“With BIF passed, one could easily imagine a scenario where Manchin just walks—he would have what he came to get, a bipartisan bill,” Williams added. “Of course Biden could use [the] threat of [a] veto to send BIF back to Congress, but he only has 10 days—Nov. 15—to do so before it becomes law with no action.”

Indivisible pointed out that “if the White House and Democratic leadership had spent more time today moving the corporate conservative Democrats hell-bent on standing in the way of these critical and massively popular proposals instead of forcing progressives to support a position that puts it all at risk, we might be in a different place.”

Ahead of the vote, Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, suggested that Democrats “include a deeming resolution in which they vote for the BIF but hold it at Pelosi’s desk until the House passes BBB,” but such language was not introduced.

“Progressives again negotiated in good faith and again reiterated their commitment to passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework alongside the Build Back Better Act,” said Indivisible. “The reason we’re not celebrating a major victory tonight sits squarely with the conservative Democrats who sabotaged progress at every turn. They reminded us again that they work for their corporate donors and not the people they represent. We won’t soon forget.”

“We are counting on President Biden to follow through on his commitment to deliver the votes needed for final passage in the House and Senate, and on [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer (D-N.Y.) to put the Build Back Better Act on the Senate floor as soon as it is received from the House.”

Sunrise Movement, meanwhile, put this fight into the context of the United States’ fraying democracy.

“Progressives have made enough compromises. Our movement has fought hard to defend the president’s popular agenda and do what’s best for working people and our democracy,” said Prakash. “If Democrats fail to deliver on their elected promises, they risk everything in 2022 and 2024.”