Monday, December 21, 2020


With Perdue and Loeffler Under Fire for Shady Transactions, Warren Intros Bill to Ban Lawmakers From Trading Stock

"With U.S. senators brazenly trading stocks to profit off a raging pandemic, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act is more urgent than ever."


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 Published on Saturday, December 19, 2020

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Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) attends a rally on December 04, 2020 in Savannah, Georgia. 

(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday reintroduced legislation that would bar members of Congress from owning or trading individual stock as two of her Republican colleagues—Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler—continue to face criticism from their Democratic runoff opponents over suspiciously well-timed transactions earlier this year.

"This legislation would dramatically improve some of the greatest systemic weaknesses in our laws and enforcement structures that allow corruption—both illegal and legal—to pervert the powers of government against the people."
—Liz Hempowicz, Project on Government Oversight

Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the lead sponsor of companion legislation in the House, alluded to the controversy surrounding Perdue and Loeffler's trades, some of which came around the time senators were receiving briefings from the White House as the coronavirus first began spreading in the United States. Faced with accusations of insider trading, Perdue and Loeffler have both denied wrongdoing.

"After nearly four years of the most corrupt president in American history and with U.S. senators brazenly trading stocks to profit off a raging pandemic, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act is more urgent than ever in order to rein in corruption, strengthen ethics, end lobbying as we know it, improve the integrity of our judiciary, reform campaign finance laws and finally ensure that we put people over profits and communities over corporations," Warren and Jayapal said in a joint statement Friday.

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, Perdue—who made an estimated 2,596 trades in a single Senate term—"purchased up to $260,000 worth of Pfizer stock between February 26 and February 28, in the early days of a market downturn. On the 28th, he issued a news release reporting that he had regularly attended briefings led by the coronavirus task force; records subsequently showed that he had bought the third tranche of Pfizer shares that same day."

Jon Ossoff, Perdue's Democratic challenger, has repeatedly called attention to the Georgia senator's prolific trading and labeled him a "crook."

"His blatant abuse of his power and privilege to enrich himself is disgraceful," Ossoff said of Perdue during a "debate" earlier this month that the Georgia senator refused to attend.

Loeffler, one of the richest members of Congress, has also come under fire for her stock trades. As Mother Jones reported last month, "On January 24, just three weeks into her Senate career, Loeffler attended a private Senate briefing by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, about the coronavirus threat."

"Afterward, Loeffler continued to publicly downplay the risk from the virus and its economic impact," Mother Jones noted. "But in the three weeks following the meeting, Loeffler and [her husband Jeff] Sprecher made more than 20 stock sales amounting to between $1.25 million and $3.1 million. Loeffler also bought stock in two companies that produce teleworking software."

During a debate earlier this month with Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock, Loeffler was asked directly whether she believes members of Congress should be barred from trading stock while in office.

Loeffler dodged the question, saying, "What's at stake here in this election is the American dream. That's what's under attack."

In addition to prohibiting members of Congress from owning and trading stock, Warren and Jayapal's legislation would also ban lawmakers, cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and other top government officials from serving on corporate boards; impose a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress; and overhaul the nation's campaign finance system.

"This legislation would dramatically improve some of the greatest systemic weaknesses in our laws and enforcement structures that allow corruption—both illegal and legal—to pervert the powers of government against the people," Liz Hempowicz, director of Public Policy at Project on Government Oversight, said in a statement.

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'This Is Atrocious': Congress Crams Language to Criminalize Online Streaming, Meme-Sharing Into 5,500-Page Omnibus Bill


"These types of decisions should never be made in closed-door negotiations between politicians and industry or rushed through as part of some must-pass spending package."


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 Published on Monday, December 21, 2020

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"When a big bill like this comes together, your job as a lawmaker is to try to get as many of your legislative and funding priorities into the text as possible," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). (Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

"When a big bill like this comes together, your job as a lawmaker is to try to get as many of your legislative and funding priorities into the text as possible," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). (Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Lawmakers in Congress are under fire from digital rights campaigners for embedding three controversial changes to online copyright and trademark laws into the must-pass $2.3 trillion legislative package—which includes a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill and a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill—that could receive floor votes in the House and Senate as early as Monday evening

The punitive provisions crammed into the enormous bill (pdf), warned Evan Greer of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, "threaten ordinary Internet users with up to $30,000 in fines for engaging in everyday activity such as downloading an image and re-uploading it... [or] sharing memes."

While the citizenry had almost no time to process the actual contents of the 5,593 page legislative text, Greer said Monday afternoon that the CASE Act, Felony Streaming Act, and Trademark Modernization Act "are in fact included in the must-pass omnibus spending bill."

As Mike Masnick explained in a piece at TechDirt on Monday:

The CASE Act will supercharge copyright trolling exactly at a time when we need to fix the law to have less trolling. And the felony streaming bill (which was only just revealed last week with no debate or discussion) includes provisions that are so confusing and vague no one is sure if it makes sites like Twitch into felons.

"The fact that these are getting added to the must-pass government funding bill is just bad government," Masnick added. "And congressional leadership should hear about this."

According to Fight for the Future, "More than 20,000 people had called on House and Senate leadership to remove these dangerous and unnecessary provisions from the must-pass bill," yet Congress chose to include them anyway.

"This is atrocious," Greer said in her statement. "We're facing a massive eviction crisis and millions are unemployed due to the pandemic, but congressional leaders could only muster $600 stimulus checks for Covid relief."

And yet, lawmakers "managed to cram in handouts for content companies like Disney?" Greer continued. "The CASE Act is a terribly written law that will threaten ordinary Internet users with huge fines for everyday online activity. It's absurd that lawmakers included these provisions in a must-pass spending bill."

Explaining why the inclusion of these provisions is dangerous, Masnick said "there's a reason [why] copyright is generally controversial." Even "small changes" threaten a "massive impact on... the public's ability to express themselves," he wrote.

As The Verge's Makena Kelly reported:

The CASE Act would create a quasi-judicial tribunal of "Copyright Claims Officers" who would work to resolve infringement claims. As outlined in the bill, copyright holders could be awarded up to $30,000 if they find their creative work being shared online.

Proponents of the CASE Act, like the Copyright Alliance, argue that the bill would make it easier for independent artists to bring about copyright claims without having to endure the lengthy and expensive federal courts process. Still, critics of the bill, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, argue that the CASE Act could fine ordinary internet users for engaging in everyday online behavior like sharing memes.

Greer echoed Masnick, saying that "we've seen time and time again that changes to copyright law have profound implications for online freedom of expression and human rights."

"Frivolous copyright takedowns are already a huge problem for the next generation of artists and creators, streamers, gamers, and activists," Greer noted, advocating instead for what she called "a fair system that protects human rights and ensures artists are fairly compensated."

Considering how artists and musicians "are suffering immensely during the pandemic," Greer added, "Congress should be working quickly to provide immediate relief, not cramming controversial, poison-pill legislation into budget bills to appease special interests."

The way Congress jammed through these changes "is a total and complete travesty," said Masnick. "People should be mad about this and should hold the congressional leadership of both parties responsible."

Calling on "House and Senate leadership to remove the copyright provisions from the continuing resolution and move them through regular order so we can have transparent and open debate about the right balance," Greer said that "these types of decisions should never be made in closed-door negotiations between politicians and industry or rushed through as part of some must-pass spending package."

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'Slap in the Face for People Suffering Across the Country': Critics Slam Watered-Down Covid Relief Deal

"Congress must pass this bill to address the immediate need, but let's be clear: this should be considered a down payment at best."
Published on Monday, December 21, 2020
by Common Dreams

People wait in line to receive donations from the food pantry at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen on December 15, 2020 in New York City.
 (Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

In the wake of Sunday night's agreement on a roughly $900 billion Covid-19 relief package that is far smaller than economists say is necessary, progressives argued that the "slap-in-the-face" bill must be passed to help stem the suffering of working-class Americans but that much more will be needed to address the crisis that has claimed more than 300,000 lives and 20 million jobs in the United States so far.

"To say this relief package is a day late and a dollar short is an understatement to say the least," said People's Action director George Goehl in a statement released Sunday night.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his fellow congressional Republicans "prioritized the profits of the 1% over the well-being of everyone else since this pandemic began," Goehl said. "The result is a diluted bill that's barely a Band-Aid, but definitely a slap in the face for people suffering across the country."

"When the history books are written about this pandemic," Goehl added, McConnell and the GOP "will be remembered as heartless souls who played politics with people's lives by blocking life-saving relief for months."

The legislation includes $600 direct cash payments to Americans who earned $75,000 or less in 2019, though that hard-fought-for sum is meager compared to what other OECD countries have allocated to workers, including several nations that subsidized wages by 75% to 100% and didn't have gaps of more than 260 days between relief packages.

In addition, the bill extends paid sick leave benefits and augments jobless benefits by $300 per week for 11 weeks, averting a catastrophic post-Christmas Day scenario in which 12 million people would lose unemployment insurance. It also provides much-needed funding—$10 billion for childcare, $13 billion for nutrition aid, $25 billion in rental assistance, and $82 billion for schools, as Common Dreams reported Sunday.

Progressives defeated the corporate immunity provision McConnell has spent months pushing for, but urgently needed fiscal aid for state and local governments was also cut from the bill.

Although specific details of the agreement are still emerging, the package will reportedly leave out hazard pay for frontline workers while the Washington Post reported Sunday that Republicans extracted tax deductions for "three-martini lunch" expenses "in exchange for... tax credits for low-income families." And, according to Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project, the legislation excludes 13.5 million adult dependents.

The bill is "not nothing, but it's obviously inadequate...during an economic meltdown that has been punctuated by mass starvation and intensifying poverty," the Daily Poster's David Sirota wrote Sunday night. "For comparison, only three years ago, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that enriched the wealthiest 1% of households."

Do not let them tell you we don't have enough money for unemployment, robust survival checks, or guaranteed health care.

We do.

We spend it on the military, tax breaks for the rich and three-martini-lunch tax deductions.— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) December 18, 2020

AFSCME president Lee Saunders in a statement released Sunday night called the new Covid-19 relief package "a slap in the face to frontline public services workers—including nurses, first responders, sanitation workers, corrections officers, and others—who have risked their lives and livelihoods during this pandemic."

While the pandemic-driven economic slowdown has led to sharp declines in tax revenue, states and localities do not share the federal government's ability to run deficits. Citing the devastating impact of the crisis on municipal budgets across the country, Saunders pointed out that "already, 1.3 million frontline public service workers have been thanked for their heroism with pink slips, with more than a million more on the chopping block."

"Congress has turned its back on out frontline heroes and the communities they serve," Saunders said, adding that neighborhoods across the country will "pay the price with further job losses and cutbacks in essential services."

The legislation could have been even worse, Goehl pointed out, had it not been for the advocacy of progressive elected officials like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and the Congressional Progressive Caucus as well as "grassroots organizations turning up the heat."

"We fought tooth and nail to get people direct cash payments, even though we know a one-time, $600-per-person check isn't nearly enough to survive," Goehl noted. "We also pushed hard to make sure both extended and enhanced unemployment insurance and direct cash assistance were included instead of pitted against each other. By standing up for workers, we kept corporations accountable by rejecting the corporate liability shield."

Goehl said that "Congress must pass this bill to address the immediate need, but let's be clear: this should be considered a down payment at best."

While the bill extends the CDC eviction moratorium through January 31 and provides $25 billion in emergency rental assistance, "Congress should have done much more to address the housing crisis faced by tens of millions of people," he said. "We need a complete moratorium on evictions, rent and mortgage cancellation, and erasure of pandemic-related housing debts. Rental assistance just means the landlord gets paid with no strings attached, not even a commitment not to evict the tenant next month if they take the money."

In addition, the People's Action director emphasized the need for "funding for state and local governments to prevent deep cuts to essential local programs, services, and the workforce."

Alluding to the significance of the January 5 runoff contests in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate, Goehl said progressives should be "ready to fight for robust relief and economic recovery under President-elect Biden."

Sirota cautioned that "if Democrats don't win the Georgia Senate races and gain control of the upper chamber... it will almost certainly become far harder to pass emergency relief bills through Congress."

With Biden in the White House, Sirota said, the GOP will have "an even bigger incentive to try to starve the country for their own political gain."
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As Congressional Leaders Strike Relief Deal, AOC Slams Democrats for Trying to 'Lock Their Left Flank in the Basement'

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COVID-19, the Climate Crisis, and Mutual Aid

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

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


Disaster relief workers. (Photo: Creative Commons)


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Hertsgaard

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

 


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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