Former US diplomat warns Biden policy on Israel is putting America at risk

ANNE FLAHERTY
Wed, June 12, 2024 

For 18 years, Hala Rharrit was a career veteran diplomat who took pride talking about American values such as human rights and freedom of the press.

Now, she's the first U.S. diplomat to resign her post in protest of Biden administration policies toward Israel and the war in Gaza.

In an interview with ABC News this week, Rharrit said she believes the steady stream of U.S. bombs and other weapons sent to Israel with few conditions is putting America's national security at risk as the Arab world grows more volatile -- and hostile to U.S. interests -- than ever.

"None of this is helping Israel," Rharrit said of Israel's ongoing war in Gaza. And the policy of shipping military aid with few conditions to Israel is "fundamentally bad for America," she added.

PHOTO: Former State Department diplomat Hala Rharrit. (U.S. Department of State)

The idea of diplomats and career government workers quitting their posts isn't new. Resignations also occurred in the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq War as officials questioned the rationale for the U.S. invasion and deaths of American service members.

Those protest resignations are back on the rise this spring as Rharrit has been joined by nearly a dozen government workers in recent months who have abruptly resigned in protest of Biden administration policies toward Israel and the Gaza conflict.

Others to leave their federal government jobs include Josh Paul and Stacy Gilbert – both longtime officials at the State Department who had direct roles in overseeing U.S. policy toward Israel – and U.S. Army Maj. Harrison Mann, an executive officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East-Africa Regional Center.

PHOTO: Palestinians children search through the rubble of their home a day after an operation by the Israeli Special Forces in the Nuseirat camp, in the central Gaza Strip on June 9, 2024. (Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)

The State Department declined to discuss personnel issues, but said officials have sought feedback from its employees throughout the war.

“I can say broadly that our staff have many ways to provide feedback and recommendations, both through the dissent channel and through more routine mechanisms including cables, emails, meetings, and spot reports,” a State Department spokesperson wrote in a statement.

“Since October 7, the Department has held multiple listening sessions specifically designed to give policy feedback related to the conflict. The Secretary, Deputy Secretaries, and Undersecretaries have participated in these sessions,” the statement added.

MORE: US holds off on sanctioning Israeli military units accused of human rights violations in West Bank before start of war with Hamas

From the Biden administration's standpoint, the steady flow of ammunition to Israel and statements of "ironclad" support were necessary to deter Iran and its proxies in the region, as well as terror groups like Hamas.

Officials also note that Hamas is to blame for the startling civilian death toll by hiding in encampments and in hospitals and schools. Hamas could lessen hostilities, they say, by releasing the remaining hostages and surrendering to Israel, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the notion of a permanent cease-fire.

U.S. advisers close to Biden also insist they haven't given Israel a pass -- repeatedly calling out Israel for not doing enough to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and publicly demanded that Israel do more to protect civilians, including thousands who has sought shelter in the southern Gazan city of Rafah.

Meanwhile, Israel also has accused Hamas of operating from civilian sites and insisted Israel won't be safe until every Hamas fighter is eradicated.

 Hala Rharrit traveling overseas during her work as a US diplomat. Rharrit resigned April 24 in protest of US policies in Gaza. (Courtesy of Hala Rharrit)

For Rharrit, part of her job at the State Department immediately following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel was to report back to Washington how Arab audiences viewed the conflict. As an Arab-language spokesperson based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, Rharrit would scour local media outlets and track popular personalities on social media reporting on the war.

What Arab audiences watched, she said, was mostly traumatizing images of children being killed or severely wounded in Israel's bombing campaign. Young people, freshly orphaned, were everywhere, too -- vowing revenge against Israel and the U.S. for supplying the weapons. There were also images of aid trucks backed up along the border juxtaposed with infants dying of malnutrition.

At the same time, Rharrit said she was given talking points to deliver to those Arab outlets -- carefully crafted phrases approved from State Department headquarters in Washington.

"Israel has a right to defend itself" and "the U.S. stands with Israel" were the oft-repeated phrases that omitted any mention of the heavy death toll of civilians, journalists and aid workers inside Gaza.

MORE: UN Security Council adopts US draft resolution supporting Gaza cease-fire plan

Rharrit said she pushed back, telling higher-ups the talking points were "disconnected" from what Arabs were seeing on their phones. The statements also were at odds with Biden administration statements on other conflicts like Ukraine that frequently called out attacks on civilians, offered condolences to communities and called for the protection of journalists, she said.

Then in January, her headquarters in Washington asked her to stop filing reports because they were no longer needed, she said.

When asked about the details, the State Department said reporting written by "the Dubai Regional Media Hub’s reporting after the October 7 attacks was read at the highest levels of the Department."

From Rharrit's viewpoint, senior officials at the State Department were willfully choosing to ignore how the nearly unconditional flow of offensive weapons to Israel was damaging support for U.S. policies overseas and its standing on the international stage.

"We [the U.S.], in the Arab world were seen as complicit because we were surging munitions" to Israel, said Rharrit, who resigned April 24.

In May, Biden took the unprecedented step of withholding a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel -- devastating, non-precision weapons he said Israel could use to kill civilians -- in a bid to urge restraint in Rafah. The move was met with swift and angry pushback from Republican lawmakers who said he had no right to withhold an aid package Congress had approved.

MORE: US withheld bomb shipment to Israel out of fears it could be used in Rafah

Other military aid continues to flow to Israel, as it has for decades, including both offensive and defensive weapons.

A recent report by the State Department concluded that it was "reasonable to assess" that U.S. weapons have been used by Israel in a way that is "inconsistent" with Israel's obligation under international law. At the same time, the report concluded the U.S. didn't have "complete information" and would not withhold weapons to Israel.

MORE: Biden admin doesn't have 'complete information' to verify whether Israel used US arms to violate international law in Gaza

Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and more than 240 were kidnapped in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war, according to Israeli officials.

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health estimates more than 37,000 people have been killed in the conflict, although those numbers could not be independently verified.

Israel has denied that it has violated international humanitarian laws and said it has the right to eliminate the same Hamas fighters that attacked civilians on Oct. 7.

Rharrit said she believes more staff resignations are possible. Still, she acknowledges many of her former colleagues are hoping the war will end before that happens and are waiting it out.

Either way, Rharrit said she believes there is a heightened risk for Americans working abroad, including U.S. service members stationed in the Middle East and diplomatic staff, because, she said, the U.S. is now inextricably bound to this war.

"The administration is willfully putting a target on our backs," she said.

Former US diplomat warns Biden policy on Israel is putting America at risk originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Israel Deletes X Video That Reportedly Says There Are ‘No Innocent Civilians’ in Gaza

Dan Ladden-Hall
Thu, June 13, 2024 

Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images

An official Israeli government X account deleted a post that reportedly contained a video in which a former hostage was quoted saying there are “no innocent civilians” in Gaza.

A post on the @Israel account, which is affiliated with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, appeared online Tuesday alleging that Gazan civilians had taken part in the Oct. 7 attacks. The post, which can still be seen on an archive site, also referred to reports of civilians in the enclave keeping Israeli hostages in their homes.

Doctors in Gaza Reuse Medical Implants Cut Out of Victims

“We need to talk about the elephant in the room,” read the post, which was deleted as of Thursday morning. “Many Gazan civilians participated in the horrific events of 7 October,” it continued. “It is also reported that Gazan civilians held Israeli hostages captive in their homes. The world must condemn this in the strongest terms.”

The video in the post, which The Daily Beast has not seen, reportedly includes a quote from Mia Schem—a French-Israeli woman who was kidnapped during the Nova music festival massacre and released from captivity during Israel’s temporary ceasefire with Hamas in November. “There are no innocent civilians there,” she is heard saying in the clip while text of her words appear as a caption, according to Middle East Eye.

Following her release, Schem gave television interviews in which she spoke about her experience in captivity. In one with Israel’s Channel 13 in December, she used the phrase that there “are no innocent civilians there,” while discussing her time in Gaza, according to the network’s translation of her comments, adding: “Families there live under the Hamas.” It’s not clear if this was the audio featured in the reported X post.

The Daily Beast has contacted the Israeli government for comment about the video’s contents and the post’s apparent deletion.

On X, critics reacted to the post with outrage before it was removed, alleging that such rhetoric implied that all Palestinians in Gaza could be legitimately targeted by Israel’s military. Several also shared screenshots appearing to show the original post.

Rates of civilian deaths, injuries, and suffering have drawn international condemnation throughout the war, including from Israel’s allies. The Israeli government is currently defending itself against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, while the top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court is seeking an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A separate U.N. inquiry released findings on Monday about the Israeli military operations in Palestinian territories after Oct. 7. It said that some unspecified Israeli officials had called for “violence and the killing of Palestinians, the erasure of the Gaza Strip, vengeance, collective punishment, noting that there are no innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.”

The inquiry on Wednesday accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes, with the panel concluding that Israel also committed crimes against humanity during its prosecution of the conflict.

Israel says around 1,200 people were killed and another 250 were taken hostage during the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Palestinian estimates, over 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its large-scale military operations in the enclave eight months ago.

The Daily Beast.

FORWARD TO THE PAST

Watch: IDF uses trebuchet to launch flaming projectile at Hezbollah

Nicola Smith
Thu, June 13, 2024 

IDF uses trebuchet

The Israeli militry has used a medieval-style trebuchet to lob incendiaries across the northern border into Lebanon.

A video that first emerged on social media on Thursday appeared to show Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers loading the wooden siege engine with flaming projectiles and launching them into Lebanese plantations.

The military responded that the use of the contraption was “a local initiative and not a tool that is widely used”, reported Israeli state broadcaster KAN News.


The ancient artillery weapon was used during the Middle Ages in sieges of castles and other fortified locations.

Trebuchets were used a lot in medieval times to breach castle walls and fortifications - iStockphoto

In this case, the device may have been used to clear dense vegetation in the border area which could help the army prevent terrorists infiltrating Israel, suggested Emanuel Fabian, the Times of Israel military correspondent, who initially posted the video.

The footage comes at a time of heightened hostilities between the IDF and the Hezbollah terrorist group, which has been intensifying its barrage of rockets, anti-tank missiles and explosive drones into northern Israel in support of Hamas throughout the Gaza war.

On Tuesday, the IDF killed Sami Taleb Abdullah, the most senior Hezbollah commander to die since the October 7 attacks.

The airstrike prompted the Lebanon-based group to launch a volley of some 250 rockets into the north of Israel, reaching as far south as the area of Tiberias.

Some 60,000 Israelis and 100,000 Lebanese residents are believed to have been displaced from both sides of the border.

Public outcry over dramatic bushfires sparked by incoming missiles in recent weeks spurred Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, last week to threaten an “extremely powerful” response and “strong action” to restore security to the north.

The US military on Wednesday urged a de-escalation in rising tensions between Israel and Lebanon. “We don’t want to see a wider regional conflict and we do want to see a de-escalation of tensions in the region,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said.

 "The area on the Lebanese border is characterized by boulders, thickets, and dense thorn vegetation, which poses a challenge to the IDF forces deployed in defense," the statement said.

The trebuchet, a weapon used as early as the fourth century BC, is known for its use of a counterweight, unlike catapults that rely on tension, to fling heavy projectiles out to great distances, but since the invention of gunpowder, its use has become less common.

Other posts show a soldier firing a flaming arrow with a bow near the border with Lebanon. Business Insider has been unable to independently confirm the details of the footage, including when the videos were filmed.

Greek PM Says LGBTQ Legal Reform Paused With Marriage Equality

Paul Tugwell and Eleni Chrepa
Wed, Jun 12, 2024,

(Bloomberg) -- Greece is shifting the focus of its LGBTQ rights agenda to changing attitudes rather than legislation, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, a blow to activists hoping for further reform after a landmark same-sex marriage bill was introduced earlier this year.

Long-demanded by Greece’s LGBTQ community, the introduction of marriage equality was “courageous” and “the right thing to do” although it did come with “some political consequences,” the Greek premier said in a Bloomberg interview on Wednesday at the prime minister’s office in Athens.

While Mitsotakis’s center-right New Democracy party came first in Sunday’s European Parliament elections with 28.1% of the vote, that was below the 33% share he secured in 2019, a drop partly attributed by Mitsotakis to some traditional supporters moving away from the party as a result of the same-sex marriage bill. Far-right parties collectively increased their share of the vote to 16.7%, up from 9.1% five years ago.

Greece’s Parliament voted in February to extend equal marriage and automatic parental rights to all of the country’s 10.5 million citizens, and to allow same-sex couples to adopt, a defining moment for Mitsotakis’ center-right party. Even after winning a landslide election in June last year, he had to rely on support from the center-left and leftist opposition parties to pass the measure amid resistance from parts of his own party as well as the influential Greek Orthodox church.

The move, which made Greece the first majority Christian Orthodox country to take the step, was “consistent with what we said we wanted to do before the elections” and “a landmark of what we did for the community,” he said.

Yet that move is likely to be the defining legislative action for Mitsotakis’s LGBTQ agenda, the premier said. Activists hoped instead it would be a first step before making further meaningful changes, such as extending surrogacy rights to male couples.

“It’s not so much a question of legislation, it’s a question of really making sure our discourse is non-discriminatory which is not easy in any country, especially when you have a resurgence of the far right,” he said.

A specific focus of that strategy starts at schools, with teacher training forming part of an anti-bullying strategy. While people can have different views over marriage equality, “I’m sure no one can accept a teenage being bullied because of their sexual orientation,” Mitsotakis said.

The plan to elevate women

The equality agenda also extends to other issues, most pressingly tackling the low participation of women in the labor force, an issue plaguing nations across Europe. Part of the prime minister’s solution is tackling the pay gap and also promoting more women in politics, the prime minister said.

While the male participation rate in the Greek labor market is 84.4%, close to the European Union average of 85.2%, the country falls much further behind for women, with only 67.2% actively participating in the labor market, according to Eurostat data for 2023. That puts them in the bottom three EU countries for this metric.

“A lot of it has to do with family balance and encouraging women to work and feel comfortable that children will be taken care of,” he said.

The premier hopes that part of the solution will be addressed through the introduction of a one-time cash payment for each child born — also an attempt to tackle the problem of having an ageing population. Mitsotakis’s government raised this benefit at the beginning of 2024, a measure he first introduced in 2019, from €2,000 ($2,165) to as much as €3,500 depending on the number of children born in a family.

Sign up for the Equality newsletter for weekly reporting from Claire Suddath on how gender, race and class are shaping capitalism in America and beyond.

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Opinion: This country’s 16-year-olds voted for the first time. The results are scary

Opinion by Paul Hockenos
Wed, June 12, 2024 

The last time the European Union voted, five years ago, teenagers across the continent were taking to the streets en masse: demonstrating for serious climate protection policies. They had no say, they inveighed, on decisions that would define their lives for years to come. “We’ll go to school if you keep the climate cool,” they taunted with verve, justifying their audacious skipping of class to protest.

Surveys show that young people (usually the 18 to 24-year-old bracket) in democracies on both sides of the Atlantic tend to cast their ballots for more reform-minded, left-of-center parties, rather than those on the right. This was why European conservatives had long opposed giving 16 and 17 year-olds the vote — even though older teenagers are legally permitted to work, drive vehicles and pay federal income taxes.

And, indeed, in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, the youngest voters turned out in droves, expressing their concerns about global warming in what observers called a “Green wave.” A third of Germany’s young people voted for the Greens.

Fast forward five years, and it’s a very different story.

This European Parliamentary election, which wrapped up on Sunday, was the first in which Germans as young as 16 were eligible to votesince the age was lowered from 18.

And in Austria, Belgium, Malta and Greece, 16 or 17-year-olds had the right to cast their ballot. These minors finally had a say on those issues that will affect them for years, if not decades, to come.

What a shock then – and coming days after the 80th anniversary of D-Day — that many German first-timers threw their votes disproportionally behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In this election, 16% of 16 to 24-year-olds voted AfD — up 11 percentage points from five years ago. (To be sure, the majority of teens didn’t vote for the far right. But the increase in the number who did is nonetheless alarming.)

The AfD, whose members repeat banned Nazi slogans and tout barely veiled racism and Islamophobia, claimed almost as much of the youth vote as the victorious Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance, and far more than the Greens.

Exit polls show that the topic of migration swung many voters —– of all ages — to the right. A full 95% of German AfD voters said Germany should limit the flow of foreigners and refugees into Germany. Nearly as many said they don’t care if the AfD is an extreme right-wing party, as long as it addresses the most important topics.

The latter assertion is the more unnerving as the AfD has made no secret of its extremist credentials. Just before the election, on May 20, the party’s lead candidate, Maximilian Krah, announced that members of the Nazis’ notorious paramilitary troops, the SS, weren’t automatically criminals. (Hitler’s elite forces were integral to carrying out the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, as well as brutally stifling domestic opposition to the dictatorship.)

The AfD responded by pulling Krah from the campaign trail but leaving him atop the slate. On Monday, as other scandals around him mounted, it decided to remove him from their new list of EU parliamentarians.

The remark was so offensive – and in general the AfD’s politics so much more radical than those of its far-right peers in Europe – that the European Parliament’s Identity and Democracy group, an alliance of populist right-wing parties that includes Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally, expelled the AfD from its ranks.

High school students demonstrate against global warming on March 1, 2019 in Hamburg, Germany. - Adam Berry/Getty Images/File

This year, the AfD’s menagerie of scandals seemed to grow longer by the week. The party is under surveillance from Germany’s intelligence service for the threat it poses to democracy. The agency could recommend that it be banned completely from politics. And then a recent German investigation found that 28 AfD members serving in German legislatures had been convicted of violence-related crimes, including verbal violence and incitement to hatred.

Not exactly the credentials of a party you would think would appeal to the next generation of German voters.

But this about-face of Germany’s youngsters doesn’t come out of the blue. German surveys show a general unhappiness with the post-pandemic economic and political conditions. “It seems as if the coronavirus pandemic left [young people] irritated about our ability to cope with the future, which is reflected in deep insecurity,” concluded the authors of “Jugend in Deutschland 2024.” The issues most responsible: personal finances, professional opportunities, the health sector, housing and social recognition.

The AfD addresses none of these issues directly but rather posits the termination of migration, and less EU control, as a cure-all for all of them.

And it’s not restricted to Germany either: in recent elections in Portugal, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France, the youngest voters threw their support behind extreme nationalist and eurosceptic parties in greater numbers.

Certainly, say experts, the pandemic and social media play a key role in this, above all TikTok, a medium that the far-right has exploited to its advantage.

This shift in attitude among Europe’s young people — and especially Germans, who are confronted with the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship in history class —– is extremely worrying. But it’s still too early to conclude, as the BBC does, that “the image of the radical-right voter – typically white, male, non-graduate and, above all, old” has changed long term.

Young people can be especially impulsive, emotional, and are on a steep learning curve. Their dissatisfaction with the sluggish economic recovery, a pandemic that unfairly punished them (for nothing), and the world’s confluence of other crises is understandable.

But they must vent this pique constructively, as the extreme right has no answers to these problems (which, oddly, I’ve heard hard right voters say they recognize.) This rightist rebellion is a temper tantrum that impedes democracy from addressing its own shortcomings.

Casting a protest vote for a dangerous party can have profound consequences — among them a future that is even less propitious than the one these young people seem to fear so much.

Paul Hockenos - Hayyan Al-Yousouf

Editor’s Note:Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based writer focusing on renewable energy in Europe. He is the author of five books on European issues, most recently “Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall and the Birth of the New Berlin.” The opinions in this article are his own. 

 Tax cuts vs. 'direct investments': Trump and Biden make dueling pitches to business leaders

Ben Werschkul
·Washington Correspondent
Updated Thu, Jun 13, 2024

The Trump campaign and the Biden administration offered a new outreach to the business world Thursday that crystallized their different promises to corporate America should they win the election.

Both, in a sense, offered carrots just of a different flavor during a chaotic day that played out in both Washington and in New York.

Donald Trump met Thursday morning with prominent CEOs in the nation's capital, speaking to a group supremely focused on tax reform.


The former president was interviewed on stage by Larry Kudlow, his former top economic adviser, and appeared before an audience that included figures like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Tim Cook of Apple (AAPL) and reportedly dozens more CEOs.

Former President Donald Trump waves as he heads to a meeting with CEOs in Washington, DC on Thursday. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images) (Nathan Howard via Getty Images)

Trump’s visit with the CEOs came during a wide-ranging day that included two stops on Capitol Hill to garner support from House and Senate Republicans and discuss strategy for the coming election. It was Trump’s first visit to Capitol Hill since he left office, and since the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump didn’t offer any initial commentary on what he told the CEOs but summarized the day in a short speech by saying Washington DC was no longer special and "we have to get elected" to change that.

From the other side, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also sketched out a vision of what a second Biden term might look like in a speech to New York business leaders.

She described a different approach from Biden focused on using the government for "public interventions to create a supportive environment for business and fuel private sector investments."

Yellen's message Thursday in New York also included a stick of sorts, as she reiterated President Joe Biden's overall plan - as he often puts it - to ask the business world to pay their "fair share" in taxes if he is reelected.

Biden was invited to address the gathering of CEOs alongside Trump but is currently in Italy for a G7 conference and sent White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, a former business executive, in his stead.
The focus on taxes

It remains to be seen which approach resonates with the overall business community and the public at large.

But many CEOs have signaled a close focus on taxes in the coming year ahead of the expiration of key provisions in the 2017 Trump tax cuts at the end of 2025.

Trump met Thursday with members of the Business Roundtable, an association of top business executives currently chaired by Cisco (CSCO) CEO Chuck Robbins. Proctor and Gamble (PG) CEO Jon Moeller heads up tax issues for the group as the chair of its tax and fiscal committee.

Ahead of the Trump meeting, officials at the group laid out detailed priorities for taxes and announced a willingness to spend over $10 million to get their message out that tax reforms are needed for global competitiveness.

In a back-and-forth with reporters, Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten downplayed Trump's less business-friendly ideas — such as his determination to impose a 10% tariff on US trading partners.

The third stop on Trump's day was a meeting with Senate Republicans. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)

"We're not looking at it as a package deal," he said. "We think that taxes ought to be low, and we think unjustified tariffs ought not be put into place."

Indeed, the plan Trump has outlined would center on an extension of his 2017 tax cuts that cut costs for many individuals and businesses. He is promising to extend those cuts and also potentially make new ones, including an idea to further lower the corporate tax rate.

During his visit to Washington, Trump also worked to put the plans into action if he wins. He met first with House Republicans, then with Business Roundtable CEOs, and then with Republican senators to plot strategy and try to garner support.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and other lawmakers are making plans — if their party sweeps the House, Senate, and Presidential elections this fall — to quickly push an extension of those tax cuts through Congress using a process known as reconciliation.

The maneuver requires only a simple majority in the Senate but requires unified control of government by one party.

"We believe we’re headed for a great November," Johnson said after the meeting and if it comes to pass "we will not waste a moment, we will be working on a very aggressive agenda" — mentioning fiscal issues as well as possible reforms to the judiciary following Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records.
The Biden team's pitch

The Biden team’s pitch to business is focused on more government support.

With the president in Europe, it fell to Secretary Yellen and Lael Brainard, Biden's top economic adviser, to offer that message.

Yellen spoke at the Economic Club of New York on what she calls "modern supply-side economics." She underlined how a second term for Biden could include more government help for businesses — while also standing firm that tax cuts would likely end.

She said that "traditional supply-side economics wrongly assumes that policies such as tax cuts for those at the top and deregulation will fuel growth and prosperity for the nation at large."

The Economic Club of New York presented US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen with the Peter G. Peterson Leadership Excellence Award on Thursday in New York City. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images) (Anadolu via Getty Images)

She instead laid out in detail a plan for additional collaboration saying "this broad-based approach brings benefits not just for American workers and families but for businesses and the economy as a whole."

Biden has indeed had notable successes using government power to spur strategically important sectors.

The 2021 CHIPS and Science Act spawned a wave of new semiconductor activity and put the US on pace, top officials said, to produce 20% of the world's most advanced semiconductor chips by the end of the decade. The US currently produces 0% of these chips.

And just this week, the White House announced that an electric vehicle tax credit in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has now saved consumers over $1 billion since taking effect in January.

The question, at least when it comes to how the message is received by CEOs, is whether business leaders will only be interested in the tax issue, where Biden is offering little for them to like.

"The last thing we want to do is go backwards on tax," said Cisco's Robbins during this week's discussion with reporters.

Biden's team has said his message may be unwelcome in C-suites, but they nonetheless feel it will nonetheless resonate with voters.

It was a point underlined in a new White House memo released Thursday where Brainard pointed out that Trump's promise of tax cuts does not include a plan of how they would be paid for.

Trump, she wrote, would balance the books by "making hard-working Americans pay — whether by taxing household purchases, severely cutting Social Security and other programs hard-working Americans count on, or ballooning our national debt."

In her own call with reporters, Brainard maintained that it was a winning issue and that people don't think billionaires and big businesses aren't paying enough, so "the president is on firm ground when he talks about tax fairness."

This post has been updated with additional developments.

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

'The whole supply chain is subsidised': inside the EU's blockbuster Chinese EV probe

South China Morning Post
Thu, Jun 13, 2024

It was just before lunchtime in Brussels, but the working day was creeping towards its end in Beijing, when phones pinged and screens flashed with the numbers that have threatened to upend China's ties with Europe.

Car companies, lawyers, business groups and journalists all received the news at once. After seven months of speculation: 17.4 on BYD, 20 on Geely, 38.1 on SAIC and 21 on nearly all others - the tariff percentages the EU would slap on electric vehicle imports from China landed with a bang.

In the Belgian capital, officials set about briefing reporters on what had been uncovered in an investigation that saw two dozen case handlers spend 250 mission days on the ground in China, conducting 100-plus company visits, piecing together thousands of pages of evidence, which cumulatively tore a new rift in an already fraught relationship.

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"The whole supply chain is subsidised," said a senior official, who read through the charge sheet on a case that many predict could launch a trade war.

"This means that the Chinese government provides subsidies to all operators," he continued. "Starting from the refining of lithium used in the batteries, to production of cells and batteries, to the production of BEVs [battery electric vehicles], and even transport of BEVs to EU markets."

Chinese business representatives were shocked. After a quick scan of the numbers, an executive at one affected EV company vowed to start shipping hybrid cars to Europe instead, since they would not be subjected to such high duties.

"The EU has disregarded facts and WTO rules, ignored China's repeated strong opposition, and ignored the appeals and dissuasions of many EU member governments and industries, and has acted unilaterally," fumed a statement from China's Ministry of Commerce, which landed minutes after the notification had been received.

Since day one, the EV probe - as it has become known across Europe, where it has dominated the debate on China - was steeped in controversy.

"Global markets are now flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars. And their price is kept artificially low by huge state subsidies. This is distorting our market," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during her annual State of the Union address last September.

Her announcement took many of her officials off guard. It was also news to the Chinese government, whose diplomats were instantly aggrieved at not being consulted before the public announcement, as is commonplace in the relationship.

Electric cars waiting to be loaded on to the BYD Explorer No 1 at Yantai port, in eastern China's Shandong province. Photo: AFP alt=Electric cars waiting to be loaded on to the BYD Explorer No 1 at Yantai port, in eastern China's Shandong province. Photo: AFP>

The work kicked off immediately: out of 21 Chinese groups exporting EVs to Europe, they shrunk the sample size to be investigated to three.

These were BYD, the hotshot upstart that would soon become the world's biggest EV seller, Geely, which spent the 2000s hoovering up blue-chip European brands like Volvo, and SAIC Motor, the 70-year-old state-run giant, owner of the iconic MG and joint venture partner to Volkswagen.

The eventual duty applied to most Chinese EV exports to Europe would be a weighted average calculated based on subsidies found on the books of those three companies. When experts noted the presence of behemoth SAIC on the list, they predicted countervailing duties could far outstrip the bloc's average rate of 19 per cent.

Questionnaires were sent to the companies, each running to 60-odd pages and over 18,000 words. They demanded access to financial information and forensic levels of details on the handouts each had received from the Chinese state.

"It is in your own interest to reply as accurately and completely as possible and to attach supporting documents. You may supplement your response with additional data," read the dry legalese that translated into a veiled warning that would become reality: comply with this, or you will be tariffed out of the European market.

As it was, only SAIC chose not to comply and found itself on Wednesday facing the highest import duty for all EU EV shipments, and the third highest countervailing duty the bloc has ever levied, Rhodium Group research showed. This will be applied on top of the pre-existing 10 per cent rate, meaning the cars will be almost 50 per cent more expensive.

The others - including BYD and Geely - played ball and will therefore be taxed at a lower rate than standard EU-owned models, which will face the weighted average of 21 per cent.

"SAIC is highly reliant on the European market and doesn't have plans yet to localise production, so it's going to be very affected by this," said Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert on China's EV trade at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

"BYD looks like it's going to be in a great position with an EU factory, low tariff, and a geographically diversified market."

The Chinese government was also sent a batch of questionnaires, which it declined to forward to selected lithium providers and local banks on the EU's behalf.

"The Chinese government has been very active, looking for justification of different steps," said the senior EU official. "There has been a lot of interaction, but less positive activity on their side when they were supposed to provide us with information requested."

Instead, Beijing tried to kill the investigation with a series of threats that multiplied as Brussels' probe raced towards its conclusion.

In January, it launched an anti-dumping process into EU brandy shipments, broadly seen as comeuppance for France, which was - along with Spain - among the strongest backers of the EV action. France shipped US$1.8 billion in cognac to China last year, customs records show.

In the past month, state media have carried threats of tariffs on EU pork, automotive, aviation, and dairy sectors.

"China will closely follow the EU's subsequent progress and will resolutely take all necessary measures to firmly defend the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies," the commerce ministry statement said.

Brussels is confident that it has a watertight case for the tariffs, and would welcome a WTO challenge, where it would point to the fact that some Chinese companies will pay lower duties than European rivals.

Their investigators turned up subsidies everywhere they looked. Lithium processers and battery makers were told by the state to sell to EV companies below market rates, they said, while the car companies were exempt from battery consumption taxes.

The firms issued green bonds that government-run financial institutions were ordered to buy, and were granted concessional land, income tax breaks and cheap refinancing options mandated by the People's Bank of China, the central bank.


An intersection of a Geely Zeekr electric vehicle, the high-end electric car brand under Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. Photo: Bloomberg alt=An intersection of a Geely Zeekr electric vehicle, the high-end electric car brand under Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. Photo: Bloomberg>

The EU believes its companies suffered as a result. Between January 2020 and September 2023, Chinese companies increased their EU market share from 4 per cent to 25 per cent, while local rivals' share dropped from 69 per cent to almost 60 per cent, officials said.

Chinese subsidies "jeopardised" Europe's green transition, they added, by suppressing the price at which European companies could sell EVs, meaning in some cases, they were incurring losses on each vehicle sold.

To environmentalists, who hold little truck with German car companies slow to wean themselves off combustion engines, it will sound like sour grapes.

"We want no tariffs that would not help us achieve our decarbonisation targets," Malta's energy minister, Miriam Dalli, told the Post last month. "Having products that are more pricey will not help us arrive at the ambitious targets."

But in Brussels, getting the probe over the line was seen as a test of its credibility, with officials saying they had to show China they not only bark, but bite too.

The three Chinese car companies now have four days to point out any flaws in the calculations, after which time member states have until July 15 to voice their own concerns.

The saga has pitted capitals against each other, with Paris cheering von der Leyen on, even as Berlin worked behind the scenes to kill it. At meetings, one senior official said, the Germans had even used the term "so-called overcapacity", in a sign of how aligned they were with Beijing.

Duties that will hold for five years must be set in early November, with some speculating that the next four months will be a mixture of retaliatory measures and frantic diplomacy.

"The focus now must be on keeping negative effects on international supply chains and European companies as low as possible," said Wolfgang Niedermark, a board member at the Federation of German Industries.

"European companies have no interest in a trade conflict with China escalating."

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Gavin Newsom Wants to Curb a Labor Law That Cost Businesses $10 Billion





Eliyahu Kamisher, Josh Eidelson and Andrew Oxford
Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 

(Bloomberg) -- For two decades, a California law has helped workers sue the world’s biggest companies. Drivers for Uber Technologies Inc. won a $20 million settlement, Google employees secured $27 million over complaints of free-speech violations, and Walmart Inc. agreed to pay $65 million for allegedly not providing seating to their cashiers.

Now, Governor Gavin Newsom is quietly overseeing talks about changing that law after prodding from some of California’s largest business interests, who say a cascade of progressive policy wins in the state – like raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour and increasing paid sick days — are eating away at their bottom lines.

Newsom’s office has brought together the state’s powerful California Chamber of Commerce with the California Labor Federation to hash out a compromise over the Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA, people familiar with the negotiations said. The law has cost big and small businesses $10 billion over the past ten years, according to one study, and is viewed by labor advocates as a model of worker protection.

The negotiators are in a race against time: June 27 is the deadline to strike a measure from Californians’ November ballot that would give voters the opportunity to repeal the law. The Chamber of Commerce is negotiating on behalf of a broad alliance, which includes the billionaire owner of the Wonderful Company, Stewart Resnick, car dealership owners, Walmart and McDonald’s Corp., along with small businesses across the state. The business coalition committed more than $31 million to entities backing the ballot measure, including the signature-gathering effort and an advertising blitz.

Seeking Compromise

Yet both sides would rather strike a compromise, according to people familiar with the negotiations, in order to forgo the massive expense of a ballot fight. The governor is also eager to get PAGA off the ballot, according to a person familiar with his thinking, to keep focus on a separate ballot measure that he opposes which would require voter approval for new taxes.

Newsom, who started his career running a hospitality group, has often sought to appease the business leaders who are perennially frustrated by policies enacted by the state’s liberal lawmakers.

PAGA “is a California-only issue that businesses in California are subjected to, and it adds a huge layer of costs for them,” said Jennifer Barrera, president of the California Chamber of Commerce.

Outlines of a possible deal remain vague, with the business coalition saying it wants to bolster state enforcement and reduce avenues for civil litigation. Labor leaders are willing to reform aspects of PAGA in ways that would lead to fewer lawsuits based on minor violations of state labor code. But they insist that workers retain the ability to use PAGA claims to get around forced arbitration, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

“We’re willing to work on reforms that do two things,” said Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California Labor Federation, a coalition of unions. “One: change the working conditions that are illegal. Two: make the worker whole.”

The push to overhaul PAGA is an effort by business interests in California to fight back against a series of major wins the state’s progressive leaders have notched. Last year, after hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike around the state, lawmakers approved a hike in the minimum wage for health-care workers to $25 an hour. In October, Newsom approved sweeping climate change legislation forcing companies to disclose carbon emissions across their entire supply chain.

The governor’s office took notice of the PAGA reform effort last year during talks that led to a $20 minimum wage deal for California fast-food workers. Franchisees requested that Newsom pair the wage hike with a PAGA deal to offset new costs, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. While PAGA wasn’t addressed, the governor’s staff said they would try to tackle PAGA in a future compromise.

The business groups’ playbook is a familiar one in California politics. Companies often look to sidestep the legislature by funding a ballot measure that would take their issue directly to voters. They then use the prospect of a costly ballot fight to force negotiations overseen by the governor’s office. If an agreement is reached, the legislature approves the compromise with the governor’s blessing, and all sides avoid spending tens of millions of dollars trying to drum up support or opposition.

“There’s an opportunity of course, just like with any other ballot measure that qualifies, for the legislature to step in and fix PAGA,” said Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association. “We’ve got $20 million in our bank account and we’re prepared to push the measure forward.”

PAGA passed the California legislature in 2003. The law is unique in that it allows employees to act as “private attorneys general,” bringing lawsuits on behalf of the government for workplace violations.

The parts that especially exasperate businesses are the ability for workers to file suits on behalf of their colleagues and duck forced arbitration clauses. As forced arbitration clauses become increasingly common, workers are turning to PAGA more than ever. In 2022, the number of PAGA settlements topped 3,165, an 1,100% increase from 2016, according to a study funded by the California Chamber of Commerce.

“We had signed our rights away” by agreeing to forced arbitration, said Melissa Viviana Covarrubias, a janitorial worker in San Diego who’s accusing her company of illegally misclassifying employees as independent contractors and depriving them of minimum wage, overtime and rest breaks. PAGA “allowed us to sue on behalf of the state. It’s pretty awesome to be able to do that.”

Cottage Industry

PAGA settlements are divided between the state, workers and their lawyers. The law’s success – built on a cottage industry of attorneys that specialize in PAGA claims – nabbed the state more than $200 million in civil penalties in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. In New York, a PAGA-like bill has been introduced every session since 2017.

Unions worry wage theft will go unpunished if PAGA is repealed. Workers can file claims seeking unpaid wages with the state labor commissioner, but a recent investigation found that office took a median of 854 days to issue decisions. The delay contributed to a backlog of 47,000 unprocessed claims by the middle of last year, according to the state auditor.

Weakening PAGA would force even more workers to rely on that chronically underfunded agency, opponents of its repeal argue.

“PAGA is the only way most workers can escape arbitration agreements specifically designed to silence them,” said Lea-Ann Tratten, political director for Consumer Attorneys of California. “Without PAGA, workers have nowhere else to turn.”

Opponents of PAGA’s current structure say the law largely benefits lawyers who file lawsuits for technical violations of the state’s sprawling labor code like spelling errors. They point to cases where attorneys reap payouts that are larger than what the workers get. The business coalition says instead of lawsuits, the state should bolster enforcement of the labor code and raise penalties for certain violations to deter bad actors.

“It’s insulting that attorneys get the majority of the fees,” said Heath Flora, the top Republican on the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee.

--With assistance from Daniela Sirtori.

 Bloomberg Businessweek

Georgia residents are fighting efforts to build a massive monkey-breeding facility in their city

Kayla Steinberg
Updated Thu, June 13, 2024 at 8:32 AM MDT·7 min read
74

A plan to build a massive monkey-breeding facility that could eventually house 30,000 long-tailed macaques in a small Georgia city has sparked a multipronged legal battle pitting residents against a company whose executives have faced scrutiny for their past handling of animals destined for medical research.

The fate of the facility is in the hands of the Georgia Court of Appeals, which will consider Thursday whether to overturn the validation for a bond that the city of Bainbridge promised to Safer Human Medicine, a company started by animal research industry veterans. It received the bond after Bainbridge leaders greenlighted the project in December.

But in the ensuing months residents, with help from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, began to push back against the project.

“It feels like somebody’s going to drop a bomb in the middle of everything that we’ve worked and built,” said lifelong Bainbridge resident June Faircloth. “We can’t sit back and let it happen.”

An artist's rendering of a planned monkey enclosure in Bainbridge, Ga. (Safer Human Medicine)

It’s not the first such project to have gotten local opposition — with support from PETA — at a time when researchers say they are running low on monkeys for medical testing. Long-tailed macaques are among the most common monkeys used in research in the U.S., and while monkeys are used in a fraction of a percent of animal studies, researchers say they’re critical.

A monkey-breeding facility in Brazoria County, Texas, planned by the company Charles River Laboratories was put on hold this year after local opposition that was aided by PETA arose. PETA also pushed back after a Chinese-owned company bought land in Florida a couple of years ago for a possible primate facility — the plan was eventually scrapped.

The battles highlight how animal rights activists, together with residents, have found some success in opposing new facilities despite the ongoing needs of scientists.

Animal testing for research purposes has a long history — as does opposition to it. And while many scientists have advocated for more humane treatment of animals used in research, they have also warned that stopping such research would seriously hinder many medical advances. Animal testing is regulated in the U.S. by the Animal Welfare Act of 1966.

Dr. Paul Johnson, the director of the Emory National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said monkey research helped develop Covid vaccines, an HIV vaccine that’s in clinical trials and belatacept, a drug used in kidney transplantation.

The testing can be traumatic for the monkeys. Some are euthanized, while others cycle through studies.

“We study monkeys because their brains are wired very much like human brains,” Johnson said.

In Bainbridge, a town of about 14,000 in the southwest corner of Georgia, residents began to turn on the macaque project after the December vote.

Faircloth, a one of the main organizers of the Bainbridge pushback, turned her interior design office into a hub for community members fighting to, in their words, “Stop the Monkey Farm” — with signs, flyers and hats interspersed among flooring and fabrics. Many protested and spoke at town halls. Some set up a website and a Facebook group that has grown to more than a thousand members. And every Tuesday night, they get together and pray.

Safer Human Medicine intends to build multiple monkey enclosures on a property in rural Georgia. (Safer Human Medicine)

Residents have voiced concerns about the facility itself to the possibility that monkeys would escape — which has occasionally happened at other facilities in the U.S., including one run by Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, though with no reports of harm to nearby residents.

“We’re looking at a jungle: noise, stink and the possibility of diseases,” said Penny Reynolds, who lives across from the land set aside for the facility in Bainbridge.

Safer Human Medicine has assured residents that it would take every precaution to make sure all waste would be contained in its facilities and sent to the city wastewater treatment plant. It also said that most noise would stay within the facility and that there wouldn’t be a “noticeable smell.”

Greg Westergaard, the CEO of monkey breeder Alpha Genesis, says a lot goes into setting up monkey breeding facilities.

“There’s a lot of training involved; there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure involved,” he said. “It’s going to smell, and you’re going to have runoff from the cleaning.”

Bainbridge residents have pointed to the backgrounds of some of Safer Human Medicine’s executives — two of whom previously served in leadership positions at companies that have come under scrutiny — as reasons to doubt their commitment.

Safer Human Medicine CEO Jim Harkness was the chief operating officer of Envigo, a company that pleaded guilty last week to neglecting thousands of dogs and agreed to pay a record $35 million fine. Chief Operating Officer Kurt Derfler left his job at Charles River Laboratories last year, just months after the Justice Department subpoenaed it as part of its investigation of possible wild monkey smuggling from Cambodia. Charles River Laboratories said at the time that any concerns about its role were “without merit.”

Neither Harkness nor Derfler was individually charged in relation to those cases.

Safer Human Medicine declined interview requests. It said by email, “Envigo was operating during unprecedented circumstances brought on by the pandemic.” It added, “We have been committed to operating responsibly and ethically for decades in this field and we will continue doing just that.”

A long-tailed macaque, also called cynomolgus macaques, climbs a pole in Indonesia in 2023. (Chaideer Mahyuddin / AFP via Getty Images file)

Safer Human Medicine said it wouldn’t be using wild-caught macaques — which can carry viruses like herpes B. The macaques would come from Asia, it said, without specifying where.

The community organizing in Bainbridge has moved the needle. Rick McCaskill, the executive director of the Development Authority of Bainbridge and Decatur County, said that what was once billed as a “tremendous investment” of almost $400 million and 260 jobs quickly turned sour. After backlash from the community arose, Bainbridge leaders voted in February to rescind their support for the Safer Human Medicine project.

“We felt like the divisiveness and the unrest in the community was outweighing the benefit of the project,” McCaskill said.

Research monkeys are bred at the seven National Primate Research Centers, each with its own breeding colony, as well as other facilities across the country. The National Primate Research Centers often use rhesus macaques, while pharmaceutical companies tend to use long-tailed macaques — the type Safer Human Medicine plans to breed.

There has been some movement away from animal testing for drug development, which was once required by the U.S. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, allowing for alternatives to animals when possible. This year, several members of Congress introduced a bill to take it a step further — and facilitate a move away from animal research.

“It’s likely going to be a collection of alternatives, from AI to computer models to organs on a chip,” said Jim Newman, the communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, a group that advocates for medical testing on animals when needed. “But what we currently have available can only reduce animals by a certain amount.”

An artist's rendering of a planned monkey enclosure in Bainbridge, Ga. (Safer Human Medicine)

For now, researchers still depend on monkeys for some testing, and some animal researchers say the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of long-tailed macaques — reporting a more than 20% drop in imports in 2020 after China cut off its exports. They say prices for long-tailed macaques are skyrocketing.

Safer Human Medicine says it sees its planned facility as an answer to the shortage. It said it would start out with 500 to 1,000 monkeys and scale up. It said the money to build the facility would come from industry and private funding within the U.S. It wouldn’t share names.

It’s not entirely clear how much of the community is against the facility. Some local politicians who campaigned on opposing it didn’t win in recent elections, though it’s not apparent that their losses had anything to do with those positions.

Still, Faircloth said her group has no plans to back down.

“If we don’t stand up for our rights, then we’re just going to be rolled over,” she said. “We just can’t let that happen.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com