'Our community is bleeding': Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached 'crisis point'


Lauren Gambino in Washington

THE GUARDIAN
Thu, March 18, 2021, 


Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.

The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.

“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”

Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. 

Photograph: AP

Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”

Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.

Related: FBI under pressure to tackle anti-Asian hate crime in wake of Atlanta shootings

“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.

The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.

Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.

The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.

Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.

“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.

In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.

At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.

A student holds a sign at the We Are Not Silent rally organized by the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Coalition Against Hate and Bias in Bellevue, Washington, on Thursday. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images

Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.

During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.

“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.

In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.

“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”

“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

I'm 'afraid to leave my house': Asian women are living in fear

Sara M Moniuszko
USA TODAY

3/18/2021

Many Asian women are living in fear. They've been living in fear long before the shootings Tuesday night that showed America the brutality of anti-Asian violence.

Asian women are scared to leave the house, worried for their families and overwhelmed by the spate of recent attacks against the Asian community, including the three shootings at Atlanta-area spas Tuesday night that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

Jennifer Chung, a Korean-American living in Atlanta, said she felt "numb" when she heard the news. At least four of the victims were women of Korean descent.

"There's just been so much going on within our community all over, not just the U.S. but even the world," she said. "It's kinda morbid, but you're thinking it was just a matter of time for it to happen down the street from you. And it's devastating that it was an incident that took so many lives."

Christine Liwag Dixon, a Filipino-American living in the New York-metro area, said the killings on Tuesday left her "shocked but not surprised."

"I’ve spent the last year afraid to leave my house alone in this wave of violence against Asians. When I heard what had happened, it was overwhelming," Liwag Dixon, 31, said. "It seems like almost every day there’s a new incident, but this one was just so horrifying and so violent.”

Experts say witnessing violence – or personally experiencing violence or harassment – can lead to trauma, which can cause a range of debilitating mental and physical health effects. For Asian women, the trauma is complex as it is often layered with racism, sexism and hyper-sexualization.

 
'It's a shared trauma'

Michi Fu, a professor and licensed psychologist who specializes in cross-cultural and international mental health, said racial discrimination and hate incidents can be "very confusing and isolating."

“Even if I have personally not suffered an attack, just witnessing something on TV where I can relate to the person the incident occurred to, it can be just as traumatic,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be me working at a (spa) in Atlanta… I can experience what we call vicarious traumatization.”

Fu explained someone who experiences trauma can suffer from a range of issues, including diagnosable mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress disorder as well as physiological issues such as prolonged lack of sleep, eating issues and high blood pressure.

Chung said she personally felt the impact of Tuesday's shootings.

"As minorities, we understand the perspective that is put upon us when white supremacy is the framework of how everything's built," she said. "So, it's a shared trauma and it's a shared burden."

The Atlanta-area attacks follow a rise in anti-Asian violence amid the coronavirus pandemic, which also signals a larger trend of violence against Asian women. From March 2020 to February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, received 3,800 reports of anti-Asian hate, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

Stereotypes and hyper-sexualization of Asian women are factors in what drives harassment and violence against them.

In a 2008 paper, White Sexual Imperialsm: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, Sunny Woan wrote that "white sexual imperialism, through rape and war, created the hyper-sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman. This stereotype in turn fostered the overprevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women."

Liwag Dixon said she's personally experienced targeted harassment.

It's "the sort of thing that can be passed off as a joke and as harmless, but it’s really not," she said. "A lot of these men have an Asian fetish and will say, ‘Oh I have yellow fever’ or ‘I’ve never been with an Asian woman before, you’re so exotic.'

"A lot of times it walks that line where it’s very uncomfortable and you feel targeted but you don’t feel like you’re in physical danger, but sometimes they get a little too close… and you wonder, am I going to end up murdered in a ditch? Are they going to try to rape me?”


Liwag Dixon recalled a specific incident when she was walking to get into an Uber and a crowd of college-aged men cornered her on the street and used racial slurs and sexually inappropriate language.

“I was very scared for my safety,” she said.

Chung, a singer, was bombarded with comments about her identity and appearance when she started posting videos to YouTube in 2007.

"There was a lot of messages and scary videos people would send me that had nothing to do with me personally, per se, but attacking me as an Asian or bringing up things that had to do with how I look, how I sounded," she explained.

Liwag Dixon said sometimes these stereotypes are viewed as "positive," which is harmful.

“They’ll say, ‘Well you should be flattered… for this attention that I’m giving you,' " Liwag Dixon said.

Chung said there's an element of dehumanization.

"The stereotypes that are put on like Asian women, especially with our bodies... we're seen more as products rather than people," Chung said.

The role of racism

In a statement Wednesday, Asian American Advancing Justice, a non-profit legal aid and civil rights organization, said the broader context of the recent shootings "cannot be ignored."

"The shootings happened under the trauma of increasing violence against Asian Americans nationwide, fueled by white supremacy and systemic racism," the statement read.

Georgia law enforcement indicated the crime was motivated by sex, not race. But Elizabeth Kim, the chief operating officer of Restore NYC, a nonprofit that works to provide housing and economic solutions for survivors of trafficking, said such determinations are premature.

“It’s not an either-or proposition. The racism and the misogyny and the violence are very much intertwined," she said. "I wouldn’t say we should pivot to say it is a crime only in sexual nature and not of a racial nature and vice-verse.”

The shootings "absolutely" make Chung fearful of her personal safety.

"You feel rage and you feel sadness and you think like, what can I do? And also, will it make a difference or will it make me a target?" she said. "You can't really relax

The US has a long history of discriminating against Asians and once banned Chinese people from becoming citizens for 60 years

John Haltiwanger
Thu, March 18, 2021

BUSINESS INSIDER

The first group of 82 Japanese-Americans arrive at the Manzanar internment camp (or 'War Relocation Center') carrying their belongings in suitcases and bags, Owens Valley, California, March 21, 1942. Getty Images

The US has seen a major rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and racism over the past year.

There's a long history of discrimination against Asians in the US.

Understanding this history could be crucial to combatting the rising tide of anti-Asian hate today.

The US has seen a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year, sparking calls for law enforcement and leaders in Washington to ramp up efforts to combat discrimination against the Asian community.

Congressional lawmakers met with prominent Asian Americans on Thursday as part of a hearing focused on the rising tide of anti-Asian discrimination nationwide, just two days after a series of shootings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors left eight people dead - including six Asian women.

Between March 2020 and late February 2021, there were roughly 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents reported across the US, with 68% coming from women, according to new data released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate. Women reported hate incidents 2.3 times more than men, the report said.

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 150% in 2020 from the year prior, according to an analysis of hate crimes in 16 US cities recently released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled much of this anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. Many Republican leaders, including former President Donald Trump, have poured gasoline on the fire by insisting on calling COVID-19 the "Chinese virus."

Though there's been a significant rise in discrimination against the Asian community in the past year, it's also nothing new. This brand of hatred is part of a long tradition in the US. Indeed, anti-Asian racism has played a major role in the American story.

In the 19th century, xenophobia and nativist sentiments drove the US to adopt what was effectively a whites-only immigration policy. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred Chinese workers from coming to the US and blocked Chinese nationals in the US from becoming citizens. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law in US history that explicitly prohibited immigration on the basis of race.

"Beginning in 1882, the United States stopped being a nation of immigrants that welcomed foreigners without restrictions, borders or gates," Erika Lee, a professor at the University of Minnesota, said in her book At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During The Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. "In the process, the very definition of what it meant to be an 'American' became even more exclusionary." America became a "gatekeeping nation" with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Lee said.

The law remained in force for six decades before it was replaced by the Magnuson Act in 1943, which was still quite restrictive and only permitted a quota of 105 Chinese immigrants annually. Immigration law in the US would continue to discriminate against Asians in major ways until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is just one example of the myriad forms of discrimination people of Asian descent have faced in the US. During World War II, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing over 100,000 people of Japanese descent into detention camps in the US.

The order was largely motivated by anti-Japanese sentiments after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese Americans in the western US faced suspicion and rampant discrimination, even as many in the community served in the war - and in many cases were thrown into some of the most dangerous missions in Europe.

Of the people pushed into these internment camps during the war, roughly 80,000 were US citizens. The order also impacted some German and Italian Americans, but the vast majority of detainees were of Japanese descent.

The US government has made efforts to apologize for discriminatory actions against the Asian community, including the internment of Japanese Americans, but the hateful sentiments that contributed to these moves persist. Understanding this history could be crucial to thwarting the ongoing discrimination against Asians in the US.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Nearly 70% of Reported Anti-Asian Incidents in the Past Year Were Against Women

Wed, March 17, 2021

Two women holding signs that say stop Asian hate

Dia Dipasupil, Getty Images

Last night, March 16th, eight people were shot and killed at three Asian massage parlors around Atlanta, six of whom were Asian and all but one were women. Despite the shooter's claim this morning that the violence was not racially motivated, according to New York Magazine, these victims are now part of an alarmingly fast-growing statistic that has been on the rise since March of 2020. Nearly 3,800 reports of racist incidents targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. were documented between March 2020 and February 2021, with over 500 of these hate incidents occurring in 2021 alone. That's a massive jump from the 2,800 incidents reported in 2019.

According to a February 2021 report from Stop AAPI Hate, a group that is dedicated to collecting data and raising awareness about hate incidents against AAPI communities, these hate incidents were reported across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with businesses being the primary location for Asian-related hate crimes to occur.

The report also shared a staggering statistic that women are 2.3 times (68%) more likely to report Asian-targeted hate incidents than men.

The Stop AAPI Hate report includes anonymous victim testimony from verbal and physical assaults that occurred throughout the last year. Assailants used both racial and gender-based slurs, blamed their victims for the COVID-19 pandemic, and in many cases, coughed on them.

"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," San Francisco State University Professor of Asian-American studies Russell Jeung told NBC News. Jeung, who co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, believes that racism, sexism, and the stereotypical idea that Asian women are subservient and weak contributes to the higher percentage of women-reported hate incidents.

Though racism against Asians in the U.S. is not in any way a new phenomenon, this influx of AAPI-targeted hate incidents no doubt stems from the racist rhetoric used by former President Donald Trump when he spoke about the coronavirus pandemic. Because the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, Trump often referred to it as "the China virus" and even more offensively as "the kung flu."





President Joe Biden, however, vilified those responsible for hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Asians in the U.S. in his national address earlier this month, calling the attacks "un-American." And in January 2021, he signed a memorandum denouncing AAPI discrimination, and as a result, Congress will reintroduce a bill to provide more support to law enforcement to investigate all reports of hate-related incidents.

To learn more about Asian-related hate and/or report an incident, head over to the Stop AAPI Hate website. Here you can also learn how to support your local AAPI community and where to donate funds to help the cause.

'A reckoning is near': America has a vast overseas military empire. Does it still need it?

The U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.

Kim Hjelmgaard, 

USA TODAY

Feb. 25, 2021

MANAMA, Bahrain – After weeks at sea, hundreds of young Americans shed their military uniforms for baseball caps and T-shirts and poured forth from the main gates of the heavily fortified U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet base, a major hub for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had just docked in Bahrain, a small Arab island nation on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. The disembarking U.S. service members were intent on cutting loose for a respite from their national security mission patrolling one of the world's busiest and most volatile shipping lanes.

About 200 miles to the east, across a body of water that has seen many tense naval encounters and acts of sabotage, sat America's longtime adversary Iran.

It was November 2019.

A few months later, the U.S. and Iran would nearly enter into an open confrontation after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. soldiers. The attack was retaliation for the Pentagon's assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

For the sailors, Bahrain's "American Alley" was a taste of home: a thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants and shops catering to Westerners. The sailors clutched iPhones and Starbucks coffee and fended off attempts by locals to sell them watches and other trinkets.

For America's military planners back in Washington, the sailors represented a longstanding bedrock of U.S. national security: one of the Pentagon's hundreds of footholds all over the planet.

Sea change in security threats

For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance, an achievement that has underpinned its influence, national security and efforts at promoting democracy.

The Department of Defense spends more than $700 billion a year on weaponry and combat preparedness – more than the next 10 countries combined, according to economic think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.


INTERACTIVE: 3 maps show why the U.S. is the 'world's police'

The U.S. military's reach is vast and empire-like.

In Germany, about 45,000 Americans go to work each day around the Kaiserslautern Military Community, a network of U.S. Army and Air Force bases that accommodates schools, housing complexes, dental clinics, hospitals, community centers, sports clubs, food courts, military police and retail stores. About 60,000 American military and civilian personnel are stationed in Japan; another 30,000 in South Korea. More than 6,000 U.S. military personnel are spread across Africa, according to the Department of Defense.

Yet today, amid a sea change in security threats, America's military might overseas may be less relevant than it once was, say some security analysts, defense officials and former and active U.S. military service members.

The most urgent threats to the U.S., they say, are increasingly nonmilitary in nature. Among them: cyberattacks; disinformation; China's economic dominance; climate change; and disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which ravaged the U.S. economy like no event since the Great Depression.

Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank that advocates for U.S. military restraint overseas, said maintaining a large fighting force thousands of miles from U.S. shores is expensive, unwieldy and anachronistic.

"It was designed for a world that still faced another military hegemon," Parsi said. "Now, pandemics, climate chaos, artificial intelligence and 5G are far more important for American national security than having 15 bases in the Indian Ocean."

It may also be counterproductive. Parsi said terrorism recruitment in the Middle East has correlated with U.S. base presence, for example.

Meanwhile, American white supremacists, not foreign terrorists, present the gravest terrorism threat to the U.S., according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security issued in October – three months before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.

Delivering his first major foreign policy speech as commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden said earlier this month that he instructed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lead a "Global Posture Review of our forces so that our military footprint is appropriately aligned with our foreign policy and national security priorities."

BIDEN: New twist on Trump's 'America First' foreign posturing[

How big is the US military investment?

At the end of World War II, the U.S. had fewer than 80 overseas military bases, the majority of them in the allies' vanquished foes Germany and Japan.

Today there are up to 800, according to data from the Pentagon and an outside expert, David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University in Washington. About 220,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel serve in more than 150 countries, the Defense Department says.

China, by contrast, the world's second-largest economy and by all accounts the United States' biggest competitor, has just a single official overseas military base, in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. base in Africa, is just miles away.) Britain, France and Russia have up to 60 overseas bases combined, according to Vine. At sea, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers. China has two. Russia has one.

The exact number of American bases is difficult to determine due to secrecy, bureaucracy and mixed definitions. The 800 bases figure is inflated, some argue, by the Pentagon's treatment of multiple base sites near one another as separate installations. USA TODAY has determined the dates for when more than 350 of these bases opened. It's not clear how many of the rest are actively used.

"They're counting every little patch, every antenna on the top of a mountain with an 8-foot fence around it," said Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who also served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Breedlove estimated there are a few dozen "major" U.S. overseas bases indispensable to U.S. national security.

Yet there's no question that the U.S. investment in defense and its international military footprint has been expanding for decades.

When the Korean War came to an end in 1953, eight years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a growing military-industrial complex, the Pentagon was spending about 11% of GDP, or $300 billion, on the military, according to the Defense Department and a manual calculation by USA TODAY. Today the Pentagon easily allocates more than twice as much on defense spending each year, adjusted for inflation, even if the overall budgetary figure represents a far lower percentage of U.S. GDP at just 3%.

COVID-19 kills and costs more

Even as the U.S. spends more on defense, some experts say the U.S. military has been operating under a national security strategy that is remarkably unchanged since World War II and thus is ill-suited to newer, more dynamic threats.

"A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit," said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates for a smaller world role for the U.S. military. "If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it."
Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities
A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit. If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.


Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and political scientist Nora Bensahel recently suggested the Defense Department should prepare for smaller budgets as money is shifted to other priorities.

"The pandemic has suddenly and vividly demonstrated that a large, forward deployed military cannot effectively protect Americans from non-traditional threats to their personal security and the American way of life," they wrote on the foreign policy website War on the Rocks. "In a deeply interconnected world, geography matters far less, and the security afforded by America's far-flung military forces has been entirely irrelevant in this disastrous crisis."

One stark illustration of how U.S. national security priorities may be out of sync with the times: Since 9/11, wars and various American anti-terrorism raids and military activity around the world have taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. troops and cost the federal government $6.4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

As bad as that is, in less than 5% of that time, the coronavirus pandemic has accounted for more than 70 times the human toll as the U.S. exceeds 500,000 dead – also with at least a $6 trillion price tag, according to an analysis of Congress and Federal Reserve allocations. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the pandemic has cost the U.S. at least $8 trillion.)



But preventing such deaths may not simply be a matter of taking money away from the Pentagon but shifting focus within it.

For instance, White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt announced Feb. 5 that more than 1,000 active-duty troops would begin supporting vaccination sites around the U.S.

Tom Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and defense expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the U.S. military has helped with international disease outbreaks in the past.

After an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Pentagon sent troops, supplies and contractors to help stem a disease that killed more than 11,000 people and cost the economies of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia an estimated $53 billion.

"We don't have the luxury of just saying, 'OK, the military wasn't that useful last year so we're going to turn it in and get an army of doctors instead," Spoehr said.

Spoehr said it's important the U.S. takes a wide view of national security that encompasses conflict and terrorism as well as pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity and overseas bases and troops have a role to play.

Climate chaos leading to social chaos

In 2017, the Trump administration dropped the Obama administration's designation of climate change as a national security threat. The omission came even though many members of Congress, U.N. Security Council principals, U.S. allies and dozens of security think tanks and research institutes say climate poses a potentially "catastrophic" threat to national and global security. (In one of his first executive orders, Biden re-elevated climate change as a national security priority.)

The World Health Organization estimates that climate change – ranging from insidious heat to flooding – already contributes to about 150,000 global deaths each year. Mark Carney, United Nations envoy for climate action and finance, has warned that the world is heading for death rates equivalent to the COVID-19 pandemic every year by the middle of this century unless drastic action is taken.

Along with wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, these natural disasters destabilize countries, including the U.S., by causing disease, food shortages, social and political

FOR MORE CHARTS & VIDEOS

US military budget: What can global bases do vs. COVID, cyber attacks? (usatoday.com)

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Immigration bill creating green card process for farmworkers passes House, legislation now goes to Senate

Rebecca Morin
USA TODAY
3/18/2021

WASHINGTON – The House on Thursday passed legislation that would create a pathway for undocumented farmworkers to earn a green card, sending the bill to the Senate.

The bill, called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, cleared the chamber in a bipartisan 247-174 vote. Thirty Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the bill. One Democrat, Rep Jared Golden of Maine, voted against the legislation.

Unlike the American Dream and Promise Act, which also passed the House Thursday by a slim majority, Republican House leaders did not urge other GOP lawmakers to vote against the bill.

American Dream and Promise Act:House passes immigration bill creating pathway to citizenship for 'Dreamers'

The legislation would create a process to earn temporary status as Certified Agricultural Workers for people who have worked at least 180 days in agriculture over the past two years. Spouses and children could also apply for temporary status under the act.

The legislation would create a pathway for workers to get a green card by paying a $1,000 fine and engaging in additional agricultural work depending on how long they have worked in agriculture in the U.S.

The bill would also streamline the process to get an H-2A visa, which allows foreign citizens into the country for temporary agricultural work.

Farmworkers have been particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis. Their jobs often come with low wages and little access to the health care, which puts them at risk of the virus.

The bill passed the House in 2019 with bipartisan support, with 34 Republicans voting for it at the time.

The last comprehensive immigration bill, sponsored by a group of bipartisan senators, was brought up in 2013. That legislation, which included a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and tighter border security, passed the Senate with bipartisan support but died in the House. It's been more than three decades since Congress last enacted broad immigration changes.

Reach Rebecca Morin at Twitter @RebeccaMorin_

House votes to revive Equal Rights Amendment for women despite legal questions

Maureen Groppe
USA TODAY
3/18/2021

WASHINGTON – The House voted largely along party lines Wednesday to remove the expired deadline for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment for women, despite the Justice Department's view that such a move is not possible.

The resolution, which must also be approved by the Senate, says the amendment shall be part of the Constitution whenever it's been ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. That happened last year.

But the 222 to 204House vote came decades after the seven-year ratification deadline set by Congress as well as a three-year extension approved when the amendment was coming close to passage in the 1970s.

"With President Biden and Vice President Harris at the helm, this will finally be the year we ratify the ERA to the Constitution,” said California Rep. Jackie Speier, co-chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus and author of the resolution.

President Joe Biden has made equity a priority of his administration. Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman to win a national election.

"Now is the time for us to recommit ourselves to tearing down the systemic barriers that continue to fuel gender disparities and limit opportunity for half of the American people," Biden said in a statement after the vote.

But Biden has not removed a barrier to passage put up by his predecessor.

During the Trump administration, the Justice Department said Congress can’t revive the proposed amendment; it can only restart the ratification process.

"We conclude that Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a deadline on the ratification of the ERA and, because that deadline has expired, the ERA Resolution is no longer pending before the States," the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel wrote.

Asked if Biden will rescind that opinion, an administration official said Biden won’t dictate an outcome. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not issue a "statement of administration policy" on the ERA resolution as it did on another bill debated Wednesday that would revive a law aimed at reducing domestic and sexual violence.

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Speier told USA TODAY on Wednesday she is confident the Justice Department's 2020 opinion will be withdrawn.

"If you talk to any constitutional scholar, they said the opinion that was offered by the Justice Department last year was laughable, that it could not hold water in any real serious court of law," she said. "That was a political statement."

Only four House Republicans voted for the resolution, which no Democrats opposed.

The measure is supported by two GOP senators, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins. But it doesn’t have enough Republican support to avoid a Senate filibuster.

"I wish that I could tell you that we had more Republican support for that at this point in time," Murkowski said Tuesday. "We continue to work that."

The Senate did not take it up after the House passed the resolution last year.

If adopted, the Constitution would state that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Supporters say it's a long-needed protection for women who face discrimination in the workplace and struggle against domestic violence and sexual harassment.

Though many federal, state and local laws prohibit discrimination, those can be changed much more easily than a constitutional amendment. Courts treat sex discrimination cases inconsistently, advocates say.

"We have the right to demand that we be put in the Constitution," Speier said. "We want in."

Opponents argue it's an unnecessary amendment that would enshrine in the Constitution protections for abortion, voiding any federal or state restrictions. Anti-abortion groups have pointed to court decisions in Connecticut and New Mexico that used state-approved equal rights amendments to allow "medically necessary" abortions for women on public assistance.

"Men and women are already equal under the Constitution. This legislation would make us no more equal," Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn., said during floor debate. "It is merely a vehicle for the far-left, special interest groups to use to enact their pro-abortion agenda."

Douglas D. Johnson, senior policy adviser for National Right to Life and director of its ERA Project, said the Constitution does not empower Congress to time travel back to 1972 to resuscitate a long-dead constitutional amendment.

Lawmakers are trying to do so, he said, because they know they can’t restart the ratification process without opening the amendment up to changes, including those that would be sought by abortion opponents.

Congress approved the ERA in 1972, including in it what the Congressional Research Service calls a "customary, but not constitutionally mandatory," seven-year deadline for ratification by three-fourths of the states. When the number of states fell three short of the required 38 by 1977, Congress extended the deadline to 1982. No additional states acted by the new deadline.

Ratification efforts began anew in 2017 when women took to the streets in protests following President Donald Trump's election.

Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the amendment that year, followed by Illinois in 2018.

Virginia approved it last year, the first time that a proposed constitutional amendment was adopted by the required number of states after a deadline under the premise that it could still be ratified.

Those states unsuccessfully argued in court that the deadline is not enforceable because the Constitution doesn’t give Congress the power to impose one. They also argued that while the deadline was included in the introductory clause to the amendment, it was not in the amendment’s text that states approved.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, ruled against the states on March 5.

"The Court will not pull the rug out from under Congress’s long-accepted practice of declaring ratification conditions in a proposing resolution’s preamble based on a technicality," Contreras wrote.

The states could appeal the decision.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a longtime supporter of the ERA, said last year that she would like the process to "start over" because of the controversy over the late ratifications.

She also noted that some states that backed the ERA have since rescinded a"If you count a latecomer on the plus side," Ginsburg said during an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center, "how can you disregard states that said 'We’ve changed our minds?'"

Opponents argue it's an unnecessary amendment that would enshrine in the Constitution protections for abortion, voiding any federal or state restrictions. Anti-abortion groups have pointed to court decisions in Connecticut and New Mexico that used state-approved equal rights amendments to allow "medically necessary" abortions for women on public assistance.

"Men and women are already equal under the Constitution. This legislation would make us no more equal," Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn., said during floor debate. "It is merely a vehicle for the far-left, special interest groups to use to enact their pro-abortion agenda."

Douglas D. Johnson, senior policy adviser for National Right to Life and director of its ERA Project, said the Constitution does not empower Congress to time travel back to 1972 to resuscitate a long-dead constitutional amendment.

Lawmakers are trying to do so, he said, because they know they can’t restart the ratification process without opening the amendment up to changes, including those that would be sought by abortion opponents.

Congress approved the ERA in 1972, including in it what the Congressional Research Service calls a "customary, but not constitutionally mandatory," seven-year deadline for ratification by three-fourths of the states. When the number of states fell three short of the required 38 by 1977, Congress extended the deadline to 1982. No additional states acted by the new deadline.

Ratification efforts began anew in 2017 when women took to the streets in protests following President Donald Trump's election.

Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the amendment that year, followed by Illinois in 2018.

Virginia approved it last year, the first time that a proposed constitutional amendment was adopted by the required number of states after a deadline under the premise that it could still be ratified.

Those states unsuccessfully argued in court that the deadline is not enforceable because the Constitution doesn’t give Congress the power to impose one. They also argued that while the deadline was included in the introductory clause to the amendment, it was not in the amendment’s text that states approved.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, ruled against the states on March 5.

"The Court will not pull the rug out from under Congress’s long-accepted practice of declaring ratification conditions in a proposing resolution’s preamble based on a technicality," Contreras wrote.

The states could appeal the decision.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a longtime supporter of the ERA, said last year that she would like the process to "start over" because of the controversy over the late ratifications.

She also noted that some states that backed the ERA have since rescinded approval, raising another legal question. Five states – South Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky – voted to withdraw in the 1970s.

"If you count a latecomer on the plus side," Ginsburg said during an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center, "how can you disregard states that said 'We’ve changed our minds?'"

'We will not let you take our voice from us': Rep. Meng responds to Republicans at hearing on anti-Asian discrimination

Nicholas Wu, USA TODAY

Thu, March 18, 2021, 4:29 PM·4 min read

WASHINGTON – Asian American lawmakers have sounded the alarm on derisive language about the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic more than a year ago. And in Thursday's hearing on anti-Asian violence and discrimination, Congress' first on the issue in more than 30 years and just days after a shooting in Atlanta left six Asian Americans dead, one Democratic lawmaker gave an emotional plea to end the use of divisive language.

"Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we've been screaming out for help," Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., said before a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

Responding to Republican lawmakers' arguments that the focus on hate crimes could hamper free speech, Meng told lawmakers they could criticize other countries, but "you don't have to do it by putting a bull's-eye on the back of Asian Americans across the county, on our grandparents, on our kids."

Getting visibly emotional, Meng said, "This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions. And we will not let you take our voice from us."

Earlier in the hearing, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, asked whether the committee's attempts to prevent hate crimes and hate incidents against Asian Americans would hamper free speech.

"It seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society," he said of the hearing, though he said he opposed hate crimes and wanted justice to be served for the perpetrator of the shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian or Asian American.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., the top Democrat on the panel holding the hearing, countered, "Being spat at, slapped in the face, lit on fire, slashed with a box cutter, and shoved violently to the ground ... that's not speech."

Asked about the question of free speech, one of the expert witnesses, John Yang, president and executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said leaders had an "obligation to model behavior that we want our community to follow'" instead of trying to be divisive.

Asian American advocates and lawmakers had long warned that rhetoric by political leaders including former President Donald Trump about COVID-19 could inflame discrimination against Asian Americans. Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, noted how more than a year ago her group “began to sound the alarm” on anti-Asian stigma amid the pandemic. What started as “dirty looks and verbal assaults” escalated to attacks and violence against Asian Americans and now, almost a "daily tragedy," she said.

She was part of a group of lawmakers, advocates and experts on anti-Asian discrimination testifying Thursday. The hearing had been scheduled before the shooting in Atlanta, but the tragedy there made the hearing even more important, witnesses said.

"What we know is that this day was coming," Chu said.

Chu called on Congress to take action on two pieces of legislation – the NO HATE Act and the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act – both of which aimed to improve hate crimes reporting. She also asked for a national day to speak out against anti-Asian hate to be held on March 26.

Asian American lawmakers introduced legislation addressing the issue in the last Congress, but other than the House's passage of a nonbinding resolution condemning anti-Asian bigotry and discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic, no legislation was signed into law.

Actor and advocate Daniel Dae Kim made an appeal to Republican lawmakers, the majority of whom had voted against the nonbinding resolution.

"I wonder, will the 164 members of the House who refused to acknowledge us last fall, do so again, canceling the humanity of an entire community of Americans?" he said.

Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group tracking hate incidents, said it has received nearly 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the country since March 2020, compared with roughly 100 incidents a year in previous years.

The group's co-founder, Manjusha Kulkarni, told lawmakers Thursday that the majority of the incidents recorded by her group did not involve a hate crime but found the level of verbal harassment and abuse reported by Asian Americans in public spaces "worrisome."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Grace Meng says Republicans 'putting a bull's-eye' on Asian Americans

White House refuses to call Saudi leader MBS a 'killer' after Biden called Putin one

John Haltiwanger
Thu, March 18, 2021


Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends a session of the Shura Council in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on November 20, 2019. Bandar Algaloud/Courtesy of Saudi Royal Court/Handout via Reuters


The White House declined to say whether Biden views MBS as a "killer."

A US intelligence report said MBS ordered the operation that led to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden recently referred to Putin as a "killer," leading Russia to recall its US ambassador.


The White House on Thursday declined to refer to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a "killer," though a recently declassified US intelligence report said he ordered the operation that led to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

President Joe Biden referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose critics sometimes end up poisoned or dead, as a "killer" in a recent interview. When asked if Biden would use the same word to characterize Prince Mohammed, popularly known as MBS, White House press secretary Jen Psaki during Thursday's briefing said, "I don't think I need to add more killer names from the podium."

Biden's remarks on Putin led Russia to recall its ambassador from the US - a major diplomatic snub. Psaki said Biden does not regret calling Putin a "killer."

Biden has faced criticism for not sanctioning Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, following the release of the report on Khashoggi's brutal killing. It was already widely agreed upon that the Saudi leader had ordered the killing, but the release of the report in late February represented a formal, public recognition of this by the US government.

Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist at the time of his death, was killed by agents of his own government in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Over two years after his killing, Khashoggi's remains have still not been located.

The Biden administration did issue sanctions against Gen. Ahmed al-Asiri, a former deputy head of the Saudi intelligence services, and the Saudi Rapid Intervention Force (RIF) over their involvement in Khashoggi's killing. The State Department also issued a new visa policy that included restrictions on 76 Saudis "believed to have been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing."

Though Biden on the campaign trail pledged to make Saudi Arabia a "pariah" over the killing, he ultimately let Prince Mohammed off the hook.

The White House defended its actions by underscoring the importance of the diplomatic relationship between Washington and Riyadh. The US has long viewed Saudi Arabia as an important security partner in the Middle East and a vital buffer against Iran, a country both governments view as a major threat. But the benefits of the US-Saudi relationship have come under increasing scrutiny in Washington since Khashoggi's killing, which fostered bipartisan condemnation of Prince Mohammed.

The Biden administration has pledged to recalibrate the US-Saudi relationship, and the president last month announced the US would stop supporting the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen conflict.