Biden Administration Cancels Two Trump-Approved Minnesota Mining Leases

An outdoor enthusiast takes a picture by one of the hundreds of fresh water lakes that make up the Boundary Waters in September of 2019 in the northern woods of Minnesota.

ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN / CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Sharon Zhang, 

Truthout

January 27, 2022

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it has cancelled two mining leases near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, a move that will likely kill the project opposed by environmental activists and Indigenous groups.

The project, proposed by Chilean mining giant Antofagasta, was revived by President Donald Trump when he took office and reinstated the leases, slashing environmental regulations that would have prevented the mine from being built. However, the Department of the Interior recently found that those leases were issued improperly.

“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans. We must be consistent in how we apply lease terms to ensure that no lessee receives special treatment,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a statement. “After a careful legal review, we found the leases were improperly renewed in violation of applicable statutes and regulations, and we are taking action to cancel them.”

The agency said that the Trump administration hadn’t followed simple procedural steps and that the revival of the project had violated Interior Department regulations. Now that the leases have been cancelled, the project is likely dead.

The lease cancellation follows the Biden administration’s announcement last year that it would be pausing all mining activity in northern Minnesota in order to review environmental impacts.

Environmental advocates celebrated Wednesday’s news. “Today is a major win for Boundary Waters protection,” Becky Rom, chair of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, said in a statement. “This action by the Biden administration re-establishes the long-standing legal consensus of five presidential administrations and marks a return of the rule of law. It also allows for science-based decision-making on where risky mining is inappropriate.”

Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of Antofagasta which would have operated the project, had spent nearly $1 million lobbying for the copper and nickel mines when Trump took office. Billionaire Andrónico Luksic, whose family controls the conglomerate, had also rented a house to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in hopes of buying favor with the presidential family.

Advocates said that the leasing flew in the face of evidence that the mining would have resulted in polluting heavy metal runoff that would have flowed directly into the Boundary Waters, causing irreparable damage.

The Boundary Waters are incredibly significant to Indigenous communities in northern Minnesota. In their opposition to the mining project, Ojibwe tribes have noted that the Boundary Waters have been used by Chippewa people for centuries and are still used by Indigenous people today to harvest fish and Manoomin, or wild rice.

The over one million acre wilderness area is also home to 230 species of wildlife that would have been threatened by the mine.

Twin Metals has spent years lobbying politicians to support the plan, claiming that it would benefit the state economically. But environmental advocates contend that any jobs created by the mines would be completely offset by the harm that the mines would do to the area.

The Boundary Waters is the most heavily visited wilderness area in the U.S., supporting over 17,000 jobs in the area and driving nearly $1 billion in economic activity. A 2020 study on the area by Harvard University economists found that any potential positive impacts of the mine would be negated by long-term detriments to the recreation and tourism industry in the area.

 Congress Hears Testimony on Meat Sector Concentration

This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Trina McClendon, and was originally published here.

A congressional committee heard testimony both for and against measures to break up concentration in meat and poultry processing as a way to deal with rising retail prices.

Some of the most dramatic testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law came from Trina McClendon, a poultry farmer from Mississippi. She talked about how Sanderson Farms, with whom she and her husband had a 15-year contract, tried to impose a 9% pay cut in August, after the announcement of its proposed merger with the Wayne Farms unit of Continental Grain Co., in partnership with Cargill. They and other local farmers fought Sanderson and it dropped the pay cut for now.

McClendon said that the Sanderson contract is “one-sided” and leaves them with all the costs of running the poultry operation, along with a debt of $1.4 million.

“I’m asking you to stop this buyout and send a clear and concise message to Sanderson Farms, Cargill and Continental Grain that the consolidation of our fabulous industry is detrimental to continue the practice of a free and fair market economy,” McClendon said in remarks quoted by Progressive Farmer/DTN. She urged a moratorium on big mergers in the food and agribusiness in general.

Other witnesses, however, downplayed or discounted the role of concentration in the meat and poultry market.

Geoffrey Manne, founder and president of the International Center for Law and Economics, said other factors were to blame for food price inflation, including increased demand caused by fiscal stimulus programs, “supply and demand shocks,” and an increase in the money supply. “What is not a plausible explanation is increased concentration and the exercise of market power in the food supply chain,” Manne said.

Death of a Sales Barn: How Corporations Took Over Our Food System

A new report explains how a handful of agribusiness firms came to dominate U.S. agriculture, how they’re ruining rural America, and how we might stop them.

ZOE PHARO JANUARY 26, 2022

GETTY IMAGES

Joe Maxwell, a fourth-generation hog farmer in Mexico, Missouri, used to sell his pigs at the Mexico sales barn, which held livestock auctions almost every day of the week. Today, the barn only hosts a sale once a week. Maxwell remembers the decline this way: ​“When we got ready to sell our pigs, there got to be fewer and fewer people wanting to buy,” he says, ​“until there was just about one.”

The death of the small-town sales barn, not to mention other local businesses, illustrates the dramatic changes that have consumed U.S. agriculture in recent decades. These changes have transformed farming from a decentralized model largely in the public arena — with local livestock auction houses and publicly-funded agricultural research — to a highly-concentrated model in the private arena — in which seeds, research, and equipment software are seen as intellectual property and guarded by dominant agribusiness firms.

As of 2020, 2 million farmers and 21 million food and farm workers stand on one side of the U.S. food system while 325 million eaters stand on the other. In between them are a handful of multinational companies — Tyson, JBS, Bayer, to name some of the biggest — who manage nearly every step of how food gets from producer to consumer.

But if this concentrated, corporatized food system seems inevitable or inescapable, it isn’t. In a new report, titled ​“Bigger Is Not Better: The High Cost of Agribusiness Consolidation,” the international human-rights federation ActionAid explains how we got here and details the nearly 70 years of policy decisions that created our industrial food system.

Read the report here.


Today’s consolidation, according to the report, can be traced back to the post-World War II period, when politicians worked to dismantle the New Deal Agriculture framework. This included programs like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Roosevelt’s economic recovery program, which paid farmers to limit their crop production. The legacy of the New Deal model is complicated — it discriminated against Black farmers and encouraged mechanization and consolidation — but it did set up generations of farmers for success.

In the 1950s, inspired by technological innovation, business groups worked to address the ​“inefficiencies of farming,” and according to the report, they saw the primary problem as an excess of labor — in other words, too many farmers. These groups aimed to replace a third of family farms, which numbered in the millions, with a few larger farms, capable of producing commodities with less labor and more technology. As Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, famously put it, ​“get big or get out.”

A series of federal farm bills brought more acres into production and lowered price floors (the lowest legal price that can be paid for a good) which allowed agribusiness companies to pay less for farm goods than they cost farmers to produce. As farmers scrambled to make up for lost revenue and increase their volume, federal enforcement of antitrust laws, which prevent unlawful mergers and business practices and encourage competition among buyers, declined under both the Carter and Reagan administrations.

In 1996, the U.S. Farm Bill, known as the ​“Freedom to Farm Act” (or, to many farmers, as the ​“Freedom to Fail Act”) put the nail in the coffin of small holders. This law ended the last vestiges of supply management, once the dominant farm policy in the United States.

Supply management, says Gary Hoskey in a video by ActionAid, can be described as ​“don’t raise more than what can be consumed.” Its necessary components are a floor price for commodities based on the cost of production, a commodity reserve that fluctuates depending on crop success, and conservation programs that take agricultural land out of production — allowing farmers to remain in production during long periods of low prices.
These corporations have cleverly styled themselves as the “farm lobby.” The Farm Bureau, for example, claims to be "the voice of agriculture,” but its real business is selling insurance through FBL Financial Group.
Instead, the new farm bill further entrenched industrial farming practices by encouraging farmers to plant chemical- and machinery-dependent monocrops like corn and soybeans. Around this time, meatpacking companies began investing in hog confinement and moving to vertical integration. According to the report, their model was that of Don Tyson, the former president of Tyson Foods, in which his company owned all parts of the supply chain except the riskiest: the farm.

These days, the largest food retailers are getting into livestock and dairy markets themselves, cutting out farmers altogether. For example, in 2019, Costco opened its own, fully vertically-integrated meatpacking plant in Nebraska to produce its $4.99 rotisserie chickens. As firms grow, according to the report, they prefer to source from fewer companies in their supply chain, as this simplifies ordering, transport, and other processes.

Even cooperatives, ​“farmer-run organizations formed to give farmers a better shot against big corporations,” the report says, ​“now too often look like corporations themselves.” Many now own processing facilities as well, making them both the buyer and seller, which undercuts farmers in the same way as vertically-integrated companies. In the late 2000s, farmers filed two class action lawsuits against Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, but settled out of court.

As processors have concentrated, sales have shifted from open cash markets — like sales barns — to contract arrangements between processor and grower. ​“While contracts can guarantee a secure future price for a farmer,” the report notes, ​“the reality is that the buyer generally sets the terms, which can be extremely restrictive for and unfavorable to the farmer.” For livestock, for example, the company supplies specific feed, medicine, and other inputs.

As a result of these forces, farms these days are fewer and bigger, and mid-sized farms have been the hardest hit. A quick measure that economists use to see whether a market is freely competitive or subject to manipulation is to look at the percentage controlled by the top four firms. When four companies control over 40%, the market is considered uncompetitive, and over 70% indicates a monopoly. Today, the top four companies control 85% of the beef market, 85% of the corn seed market, and 90% of grain trade. Meanwhile, 20% of farms control nearly 70% of U.S. farmland.

Political Promises to Farmers

In 2008, when Barack Obama campaigned on enforcement of antitrust rules and breaking up agribusiness power, the message resonated in rural areas and farming communities. During his campaign, Obama said he planned to ​“reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.”

"As president, Obama allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”

After he was elected, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a landmark, year-long investigation into the issue in 2010. Thousands of farmers testified and submitted public comments, the ActionAid report says, often at great risk to their livelihoods. However, the inquiry ended quietly: the release of a 24-page memo in which the federal government simply reiterated its ​“commitment to vigorous antitrust enforcement in the agricultural sector” but took no serious action.

In fact, in the decade since, agribusiness consolidation has only increased. According to ActionAid, the DOJ has since greenlighted many major agribusiness mergers, including those that shrank the ​“Big Six” seed and chemical companies down to the ​“Big Three” and those that further consolidated the meatpacking industry.

Democrats’ failure to address agribusiness consolidation, some argue, has real political consequences. Bill Hogseth, who lives in a rural Wisconsin county that went for Obama twice before swinging to Trump in 2016, put it this way in an essay for Politico: ​“Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system…. [T]hese moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have reason not to push policies distasteful to agribusiness. The largest multinational corporations — including Bayer, Smithfield, and grain dealer Archer Daniels Midland — spend millions in direct lobbying and political donations, according to the report.

These corporations have cleverly styled themselves as the ​“farm lobby” and have a great deal of influence in Washington, D.C. and state capitals, using farmers as a front to push their agenda. The Farm Bureau, for example, has state-level chapters in all 50 states and claims to be ​“the voice of agriculture,” but its real business is selling insurance through FBL Financial Group.

The Farm Bureau is not the only group claiming to represent family farmers while supporting big businesses. ActionAid reports that almost two dozen commodities have research and promotion boards funded by ​“checkoffs,” a mandatory tax collected from farmers, for every animal or pound of raw goods they sell. Though not explicitly political, these boards have financial connections with trade groups that lobby for specific state laws — for example, those that exempt concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and other large-scale operations from environmental regulations.

The Environmental Impact of Consolidation

The corporate consolidation of farming also has devastating environmental impacts, according to the report. Industrial livestock production, one of the most consolidated and technology-dependent parts of the food system, is responsible for 14.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is comparable to the entire global transportation sector.

“You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.”

Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and manure from CAFOs can also damage water and air quality. Four companies control 70% of the global agrochemical market, and the chemicals they manufacture are linked to water contamination and serious health effects — and are often banned in other countries. U.S. regulatory oversight generally depends on voluntary self-monitoring and manufacturer reporting, and decisions are driven by cost-benefit analyses that place a monetary value on health weighed against the financial benefits of chemical use.

With climate change making water and arable land even more scarce, investors and multinational corporations have identified farmland as a lucrative asset class and are buying up farmland around the world. For example, TIAA, the retirement fund manager with close to $1 trillion in assets, is now the world’s largest land investor, with holdings from Brazil to Illinois. The report says these farmland investments are often more subtle than traditional land grabs, in which a corporation or government simply seizes land from its original owner or steward without negotiation or payment, but raise many of the same ecological, legal and human rights concerns.

In addition to damaging the land, industrial agriculture is a major public health hazard. According to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, farming monocultures of genetically similar animals and plants, increasing deforestation and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria via the widespread use of antibiotics in CAFOs all make people more vulnerable to future epidemics. ​“You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases,” Wallace says in the report.

This system locks countries into the production of particular goods for export — in the United States, corn and soybeans — which undermines each country’s own food security and sovereignty. The report notes that a highly specialized and concentrated supply chain is vulnerable to shocks and bottlenecks. During the pandemic, for example, shuttering just three pork packing plants impacted 10% of the nation’s pork supply — hog prices plummeted and farmers had to euthanize their animals, while shoppers faced shortages.

In April 2020, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to reopen but did not mandate any worker protections. According to the report, by September 2020, more than 44,000 plant workers had tested positive for Covid-19 and at least 210 had died, with rural areas becoming some of the worst virus hot spots in the nation.

How We Can Really Feed the World

Farming in the United States, once dependent on diversification and complex ecosystem knowledge, is now highly mechanized and dependent on fossil-fuel based technology, ranging from chemical fertilizers and pesticides to genetically-modified seeds, GPS-guided precision agriculture techniques, and automated climate-controlled barns.
70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food.

Agribusiness frequently promotes these innovations and consolidation as the only way to feed the world, but this system still fails us: at least 720 million people, including 42 million in the United States, still go hungry, according to the report. And, despite the reach of consolidation, 70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food. The report puts it this way: ​“It is actually a network of localized and regionalized farmers and markets that most efficiently feeds the world, community by community.”

Though agriculture has great potential to support ecosystems and benefit the environment — by raising fewer animals, using cover crops, rotationally grazing, saving seeds from year to year and using food waste as feed, to name a few regenerative methods — these practices are generally discouraged by the current agricultural regime. Instead, agribusiness has so far responded to climate change by proposing market-based mechanisms, like soil carbon markets and ​“green finance,” that, according to the report, do not protect against further consolidation.

To begin undoing the consolidated power block that is corporate agribusiness, the report has a few suggestions. First, an immediate moratorium on agribusiness mergers and on all mergers and acquisitions for agribusiness companies. Revisiting the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, last introduced in 2019 by Sen. Cory Booker, would be a start, and would allow time to develop new, stricter procedures for mergers and acquisitions.

Other helpful steps, according to the report, could include creating land trusts to provide land access to young and marginalized farmers, ensuring living wages for farmers and farmworkers, establishing incentives for conservation practices and developing a new federal farm program that guarantees farmers a fair price based on the costs of production. ActionAid adds that the USDA and EPA must enforce protections for farmers, workers and the environment, including stronger Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) rules.

A sustainable future for agriculture may not look like a return to the days of the sales barn but, as this report makes clear, it doesn’t look like corporate control, either. Instead, ActionAid’s report makes the case that we need to move towards a decentralized food system with re-localized economies, and quickly.


ZOE PHARO is a Chicago-based writer and In These Times editorial intern. She holds a degree in political science from Carleton College.

Americans’ trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows

By SETH BORENSTEIN and HANNAH FINGERHUT

January 26, 2022

1 of 4

A laboratory technician prepares COVID-19 patient samples for semi-automatic testing at Northwell Health Labs, March 11, 2020, in Lake Success, N.Y. Republicans' faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows. It’s the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans’ faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more, with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows.

It’s the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972.

That is unsurprising to more than a dozen scientists reached for comment by The Associated Press, but it concerns many of them.

“We are living at a time when people would rather put urine or cleaning chemicals in their body than scientifically vetted vaccines,” University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd told the AP in an email. “That is a clear convergence of fear, lack of critical thinking, confirmation bias and political tribalism.”

Science used to be something all Americans would get behind, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said.

“But we now see it falling prey to the great partisan divide,” he said. “The world of science should be a meeting house where right and left can agree on data. Instead, it’s becoming a sharp razor’s edge of conflict.”

Overall, 48% of Americans say they have “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community, the 2021 General Social Survey data shows. Sixty-four percent of Democrats say that, compared with roughly half as many Republicans, 34%. The gap was much smaller in 2018, when 51% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans had high confidence.

The poll also found a gap emerging on confidence in medicine, driven primarily by increasing confidence among Democrats. Forty-five percent of Democrats said they had a great deal of confidence in medicine, compared with 34% of Republicans.

The deepening polarization was not evident for other institutions asked about on the poll, according to Jennifer Benz, deputy director of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“It’s certainly plausible that this is a result of how politicized the pandemic became in the months between when it emerged and when the survey ran,” Benz said. “It is definitely a stark change for these particular trends on confidence in scientific leaders and leaders in medicine, to see this degree of polarization.”

The data suggest Republicans and Democrats are following the cues of their leaders, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

“We’ve seen so much criticism (and worse) leveled at medical experts since the beginning of the pandemic from the former president, other Republican leaders and the conservative media, and just the opposite from the current president, Democratic leaders, and the mainstream and liberal media,” Leiserowitz told the AP in an email.

Kelvin Droegemeier, former science adviser to President Donald Trump, said he thinks the pandemic increased the general public’s insight into how scientific research works but the ever-evolving science probably seemed chaotic at times and the urgency of the pandemic complicated policymaking.

“We hear ‘follow the science,’ but which results? The challenge lies in how to best use the scientific results, recognizing that what appears to be an ‘answer’ one day may be overturned, wholly or partly, another day,” Droegemeier told the AP in an email.

That messiness, sometimes weak communication and political philosophies play into the trust gap, said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, which was set up by President Abraham Lincoln to offer the federal government expert advice.

Scientists and policy makers tend to be conservative — not politically but in terms of being cautious and wary of risk — pushing safety, masks and vaccines while “Republicans as a group value individual liberty,” McNutt said.

“So no wonder that Republicans are less supportive of the scientifically conservative decisions in the face of uncertainty,” she told the AP in an email.

John Holdren, who was President Barack Obama’s science adviser, said he blames GOP leaders’ “nonstop denial and deception.”

The consequence of declining trust in the scientific community among Republicans is clear: AP-NORC polling shows Republicans continue to be less likely than Democrats to be vaccinated.

Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general science organization, said it’s clear that science has become a wedge issue for many politicians. Some have tied themselves to it, he said, and others have seen value in shooting at it “because it helps them politically.”

“It’s easy in the abstract to trust science,” Parikh said. “When there are things that come out of that the data that challenge what you are hoping the policy answer would be, you get divergence from wanting to trust the science.”

Parikh said he found it ironic that much of the distrust in science is spread by technology — social media, smartphones — that only exists because of scientific advances.

Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson agreed: “The struggle continues, trying to get the general public to embrace all of the science the way they unwittingly embrace the science in their smartphones.”

___

The General Social Survey has been conducted since 1972 by NORC at the University of Chicago. Sample sizes for each year’s survey vary from about 1,500 to about 4,000 adults, with margins of error falling between plus or minus 2 percentage points and plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The most recent survey was conducted Dec. 1, 2020, through May 3, 2021, and includes interviews with 4,032 American adults. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Facing the prospect of a Black woman justice, right-wing media goes berserk, corporate media goes wobbly

By

 Dan Froomkin

 -

January 27, 2022 

President Biden’s intent to nominate a Black woman to fill Justice Stephen Breyer’s emptying seat on the Supreme Court has freaked out right-wing media, sending the likes of Tucker Carlson and Larry Kudlow into torrential rants of racist and misogynistic froth and whiny white grievance.

That’s not really so shocking. It’s laughable, ironic, and pathetic, given how 108 of the 115 people who have served on the Court have been white guys, and how overdue such a nomination is.

But what is shocking is that the New York Times treated as a serious, debatable proposition the view that Black women have been overrepresented in Biden’s judicial nominations.

The Times article by Michael D. Shear and Charlie Savage focused on how Biden’s promise “underscores how much Black women have struggled to become part of a very small pool of elite judges in the nation’s higher federal courts.”

But Shear and Savage then went on to respectfully relate the argument that there is something off about Biden’s attempt to fix that. They wrote:

Half of Mr. Biden’s first 16 nominees for federal appeals courts have been Black women — as many as all previous presidents combined had appointed. That emphasis has attracted scrutiny from across the ideological spectrum.

And to illustrate this “scrutiny from across the ideological spectrum,” they quoted a seriously compromised Republican operative:

But conservatives like the National Review legal commentator Ed Whelan have pointed out that the number of Black women Mr. Biden has nominated is strikingly disproportionate to the available pool of Black women with law degrees.

According to a 2021 profile of the legal profession by the American Bar Association, just 4.7 percent of American lawyers are Black and 37 percent of lawyers are female. The report did not break out Black women in particular, but the implication is that roughly 2 percent of American lawyers are both Black and female.

Steve Vladeck, the prolific and perspicacious University of Texas law professor, was quick off the mark Wednesday night to call out the Times:

Others on Twitter also criticized the Times for quoting Whelan — and compounding their mistake by not explaining who he is.

Whelan, after all, is the guy who was forced to apologize and take a leave from the think tank he runs after he peddled a conspiracy theory on social media as part of the PR campaign to cast doubt on the veracity of a sexual assault allegation against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

By contrast to the Times, the Washington Post focused on how the appointment would be “a milestone in the country’s history.”

Seung Min Kim and Ann E. Marimow quoted Democratic Sen. Patty Murray saying “The court should reflect the diversity of our country, and it is unacceptable that we have never in our nation’s history had a Black woman sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

The Freak Out

The prospect of a Black woman Supreme Court justice is eliciting a particularly visceral response from right-wing media, raising two questions that political journalists should really address:

• Why are they so freaked out exactly? (Hint: Black. Woman.)
• Is there no limit to the racism and misogyny that can be expressed on Fox and elsewhere without negative consequences? (Although, sadly, their open embrace of replacement theory indicates the answer is no.)

Tucker Carlson, as HuffPost reported, spent “12 minutes railing against President Joe Biden’s vow to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.”

He mocked Biden for not picking a Pacific Islander or a trans woman instead. And in a classic example of projection, Carlson said

You almost got the impression that Joe Biden believes all Black women are the same. They’re identical.

Not much later, he illustrated my point exactly:

So you have to wonder at this point, since we are going by skin color and gender, why Joe Biden is ignoring the obvious choice. Why doesn’t bite and strike a real blow for equity and just nominate Bridget Floyd, George Floyd’s sister.

He put this photo up on the screen.

Larry Kudlow was outraged. “I am offended by President Biden’s woke promise to appoint an African-American female,” he said.

He had an alternative proposition: “that Joe Biden would consider the most eminently qualified person, including white people. That’s right, white people.”

This was followed by a sound bite from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Kudlow continued:

Instead, in Biden-world, we will end racism by being racist. We will end prejudice by being prejudiced. We will end divisions by being divisive. I think it’s a travesty. I think it disqualifies Biden from being president. I think it’s much worse than big government socialist spending, or tax hikes, or central planning regulators, or ending fossil fuels, or open borders.

Yup, that’s right: “Joe Biden shouldn’t be president. This racial prejudice is totally un-American.”

Sean Hannity went on the attack.

Tomi Lahren took a racist shot.

And Maria Bartiromo seriously insisted that “speculation” was “rising” that Biden would pick Kamala Harris and maybe nominate Hillary Clinton as vice president. It is, but it’s nuts.

The Counter-Backlash

Lucky for us, we have people like Elie Mystal and Nicole Hannah-Jones to put the racist, sexist right-wing meltdown into context.

They’ve been on a roll on Twitter and TV. A tiny sample:

The Coverage Going Forward

I worry about how this story will be reported on by our corporate media because it touches on some issues that it typically avoids, elides, or screws up.

This nomination ought to spur all sorts of important discussions – about racial justice in general, but also specifically about the need for redress, and the notion that Biden is trying to fix something that remains broken.

I mean, you sometimes do need to redress historical wrongs. You do need to acknowledge the past, and how it continues to influence the present. Those are not crazy ideas.

But our elite newsrooms just aren’t comfortable going there. You could see that in their resistance to addressing the actual substance of critical race theory – while gleefully reporting about how clever it is for Republicans to demonize it.

The substance of critical race theory, as it happens, is highly relevant to the nomination of a Black woman justice, as Nikole Hannah-Jones explained:

Similarly, coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision to reopen the debate about affirmative action has avoided the central issue of racial justice, focusing instead on whether “diversity” justifies giving some preferences to under-represented groups.

Robert Barnes and Nick Anderson of the Washington Post were far from alone in framing the issue as one of “whether universities may consider the race of applicants when trying to build diverse student bodies.”

That is indeed what a lot of the arguing is about, but it’s important to remember that affirmative action (as I wrote in a 1998 primer for the Washington Post) was born of the civil rights movement, and is the nation’s most ambitious attempt to redress its long history of racial and sexual discrimination.

It’s still needed because the playing field is not level yet. Granting modest advantages to minorities and women is more than fair, given hundreds of years of discrimination that benefited whites and men.

But our big newsrooms don’t like to address the playing field issue anymore – something most vividly illustrated by the one exception to the rule: the epic 2014 Atlantic essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates, making the case for reparations.

“America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this,” Coates wrote.

Celebrating muckraker Morton Mintz’s 100th birthday

By

 Dan Froomkin

 -

January 26, 2022 

Morton MIntz

Morton Mintz is turning 100 today, a good excuse to briefly review his extraordinary career as a pioneering hero of investigative reporting in medicine and public health.

As a reporter at the Washington Post for 30 years – from 1958 to 1988 – Mintz relentlessly exposed corporate crime and misconduct, particularly in the drug, tobacco and automotive industries.

In 1962, Mintz broke the story of the consequences of using thalidomide, the sedative/tranquilizer that caused thousands of babies to be born armless, legless or limbless to women who had taken the drug during the first trimester of pregnancy.

As he wrote in a 2013 essay, “The story dealt a lasting blow to the then widely-held notion that science and technology always or nearly always produce benign results.”

His continued to report on unsafe medicines and medical devices, most notably the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine birth control device that seriously injured tens of thousands of women.

In his book, “AT ANY COST; Corporate Greed, Women and The Dalkon Shield” Mintz wrote that he saw the Dalkon Shield story as proof of “the chasm between the flesh-and-blood person and the paper corporate person.”

He famously concluded: “The human being who would not harm you on an individual, face-to-face basis, who is charitable, civic-minded, loving, and devout, will wound or kill you from behind the corporate veil.”

After leaving the Post, Mintz became a powerful critic of the corporate media. In a 1991 essay, he wrote about how a “built-in, chronic tilt chills mainstream press coverage of grave, persisting, and pervasive abuses of corporate power.” He called out “pathetically inadequate coverage of life-threatening corporate misconduct.”

In an email to a fellow journalist, Mintz wrote: “It’s long seemed to me that, in my experience, too many reporters, too much of the time, failed to ask themselves a simple two-word question: ‘What’s important?’”

He was one of the founders of NiemanWatchdog.org, a website that operated between 2004 and 2012. It posed questions that journalists should ask to hold the powerful accountable. I was deputy editor.

The most lasting lesson I learned from Mintz was about the value of congressional oversight – and the terrible cost of its absence.

I once asked him how he was able to break so many incredible stories.

“I stayed until the end of the hearings,” he said.

He spoke nostalgically about the virtuous circle that used to exist between journalists and the heads of congressional committees, one playing off the other to advance important investigations.

And he explained how much the country was suffering from the collapse of congressional oversight.

At the Post, Mintz was a real reporter’s reporter – and distinctly not an editor’s reporter. He was a proud union member, at one point writing a series of Guild bulletins documenting the Washington Post Co.’s own corporate greed under the headline “The Fruits of Your Labor.” He once wrote a letter to then-editor Ben Bradlee complaining that his editors had subjected him to “morale-crushing discouragement and nibblings to death.”

I posted a note on the Washington Post alumni Facebook page about Mintz’s upcoming birthday.

Eugene L Meyer, a former longtime Post reporter, wrote:

Mort is an exemplar and an inspiration. He always spoke truth to power, was an important voice in our Wash Post Guild unit. He was a bottomless pit of (appropriate) outrage. His achievements were hall-of-fame monumental. We are all in his debt.

John Schwartz, now a science reporter for the New York Times, wrote:

They say never meet your heroes, but meeting Mintz was a joy. I’d taken up the FDA beat at the Post and marveled at his work on thalidomide and on the early smoking lawsuits. He missed nothing. We talked and emailed and he was helpful and provided insights that helped me immeasurably on tough topics that he knew more about than I ever would. When we finally did meet, he startled a little and said, “John, I had a completely different mental image of you!”

“I know,” I said. “I write taller.” And we had a good laugh.

And Nell Henderson, economics editor at the Wall Street Journal, emailed:

Happy Birthday Mort!

Hope you’re well and enjoying your long life surrounded by family, friends and fans.

When I joined the Washington Post’s Business Section in 1984, your desk was between our section and Woodward’s office overlooking the Russian embassy.

I was in awe of your work, exposing defects in the making and selling of public dangers like the Dalkon Shield and defective arthritis medicines and heart valves.

Thank you for being tireless, persistent and stubborn in your determination to make the world safer for us all.

And thank you for inspiring all the journalist around you, including me.

All the best,

Nell Henderson

Happy birthday from me, too, Mort. You’re one of the greats.

Amazon Endorses Federal 

Cannabis Legalization

The retail giant of Amazon is putting its support behind Rep. Nancy Mace

 and her introduction of the States Reform Act.

Shutterstock

Amazon said this week that it supports a Republican congresswoman’s proposal to end the prohibition of marijuana on the federal level, the company’s latest embrace of legalization. 

In a tweet posted on Tuesday, Amazon said it was “pleased to endorse” a bill introduced by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

“Like so many in this country, we believe it’s time to reform the nation’s cannabis policy and Amazon is committed to helping lead the effort,” the company said. 

Mace introduced the legislation, called the “States Reform Act,” in November, saying at the time that “Washington needs to provide a framework which allows states to make their own decisions on cannabis moving forward.”

The bill would remove cannabis from Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, a law that has kept weed illegal on the federal level and has made some states hesitant to pursue their own cannabis laws. 

“Today, only three states lack some form of legal cannabis,” Mace said in her November announcement. “My home state of South Carolina permits CBD, Florida allows medical marijuana, California and others have full recreational use, for example. Every state is different. Cannabis reform at the federal level must take all of this into account. And it’s past time federal law codifies this reality.”

Mace said that her bill would enshrine protections for veterans who have used cannabis to treat their PTSD, and would be respectful of each state’s own unique laws.

“This is why I’m introducing the States Reform Act, a bill which seeks to remove cannabis from Schedule I in a manner consistent with the rights of states to determine what level of cannabis reform each state already has, or not,” she continued in her announcement. “This bill supports veterans, law enforcement, farmers, businesses, those with serious illnesses, and it is good for criminal justice reform. Furthermore, a super-majority of Americans support an end to cannabis prohibition, which is why only three states in the country have no cannabis reform at all. The States Reform Act takes special care to keep Americans and their children safe while ending federal interference with state cannabis laws. Washington needs to provide a framework which allows states to make their own decisions on cannabis moving forward. This bill does that.”

On Tuesday, Mace touted the bill’s endorsement from Amazon, saying the company “is making a common-sense decision that many other businesses, large and small, agree with.”

“Amazon employs nearly a million U.S. workers, and this opens up their hiring pool by about 10 percent. Cannabis reform is supported by over three quarters of the American public, and the States Reform Act is something both sides of the aisle can get behind,” Mace said.

For Amazon, America’s second largest employer, the endorsement is yet another sign of the company’s weed-friendly stance.

Last June, Amazon said that it would “no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, and will instead treat it the same as alcohol use.” In September, the company went further, saying it was reinstating “employment eligibility for former employees and applicants who were previously terminated or deferred during random or pre-employment marijuana screenings.”

The are also emerging signs that the company is set to ramp up its pro-marijuana lobbying efforts, with Politico reporting in July that cannabis groups “are pinning their hopes on Amazon using its experienced lobbying team and deep pockets to support their efforts, believing it could help them launch ad campaigns and persuade lawmakers opposed to legalization—especially those who represent states where cannabis is legal—to change their minds.”