California moves to create 1st universal health care system in U.S., but hurdles remain

By Adam Beam The Associated Press
Posted January 11, 2022 


California Democrats on Tuesday took their first step toward abolishing the private health insurance market in the nation’s most populous state and replacing it with a government-run plan that they promised would never deny anyone the care they need.

But the proposal that cleared a legislative committee in the state Assembly is still a long way from becoming law. It faces strong opposition from powerful business interests who say it would cost too much. And even if it does become law, voters would have to approve a massive income tax increase to pay for it — a vote that might not happen until 2024.

Still, Democrats hailed Tuesday’s vote for jumpstarting one of their long-stalled policy goals and signaling they won’t back away from a fight even during an election year. In an hours-long hearing, some lawmakers and advocates assailed a health care industry they say has benefited corporate interests at the expense of consumers.

Ady Barkan, a 38-year-old married father of two, was diagnosed with ALS six years ago and now is mostly paralyzed. He testified at Tuesday’s hearing with the help of a computerized voice that spoke as he typed using technology that followed the movement of his eyes. Barkan said he has battled his private insurance carrier to get treatment he needed, including suing them to get a ventilator that keeps him alive.

“Even good health insurance, which I have, does not cover the cost of the care I need to survive,” he said.

To pay for everything, Democrats have introduced a separate bill that would raise taxes on businesses and individuals by about $163 billion per year, according to an analysis by the California Taxpayers Association, which opposes the bill. Voters would have to approve the tax hikes. Assembly member Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose and the author of the proposal, said Tuesday it could be 2024 before that proposal made it to the ballot.

The bill that advanced on Tuesday would create the universal health care system and set its rules. It cleared the Assembly Health Committee on an 11-3 vot\2:06Schumer, Pelosi praise Supreme Court decision to save Affordable Care ActSchumer, Pelosi praise Supreme Court decision to save Affordable Care Act – Jun 17, 2021

“If government-run health care becomes law, millions of Californians will flee the state — either to avoid the $163 billion per year in new taxes or to escape the lengthy waits for care that will become the norm,” Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron said.

Even some Democrats who voted for the bill had sharp criticism for the proposal. Assembly member Autumn Burke, a Democrat from Inglewood, said advancing the bill without a funding source made a mockery of the process.

“This bill has been sold to my community that it is going to change things now and that it is free. And neither one of those things are true,” she said.

Business groups, led by the California Chamber of Commerce, said the government-run health care system would be so expensive that the tax increase still wouldn’t be enough to pay for everything. In 2018, California’s total health care expenditures totaled $399.2 billion, accounting for 13.2% of the state’s gross domestic product, according to an analysis by the Healthy California for All Commission.

“Completely abolishing the current system in face of unrelenting pandemic by annually taxing Californians hundreds of billions of dollars is not the solution,” said Preston Young, a policy advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce.

Kalra, the San Jose Democrat and the author of the proposal, said he knew opponents would focus on how much the plan would cost. But he said that argument distracts from the fact that Californians are already paying “the highest health tax in the world.”

“You may refer to it as premiums, deductibles, co-pays, denial of care,” Kalra said, saying none of those costs would exist under a universal health care system. “It’s clear as day they are being fleeced and far too many understandably feel helpless about it.”

California’s health care system is paid for by multiple entities — patients, insurance companies, employers and governments. But a universal health care system would be paid for by a single entity — the government, or the “single payer.”

A single payer system has been a staple of California progressive political rhetoric for decades. But it’s not been easy to accomplish in a state where most people pay for private health insurance through their jobs. In 1994, voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have created a universal health care system. Another attempt passed the state Senate in 2017, but it never got a vote in the state Assembly.

Questions about how to pay for a single payer system have doomed previous plans. In 2011, Vermont enacted the nation’s first universal health care system in the country. But state officials abandoned it three years later because they said they couldn’t afford to pay for it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to do it when he ran for governor in 2018, and voters elected him in a landslide. But in his first three years in office, Newsom has focused more on making sure everyone in California has health insurance — a strategy he said contains “the spirit” of a single payer system.

“When you’re governor, you’ve got to be in the `how’ business,” Newsom said. “I believe in a single payer financing model. The `how’ at the state level is the question that needs to be answered thoughtfully.”

Civil Rights Icon Ida B. Wells Is Commemorated With A Barbie Doll

"When kids learn about heroes like Ida B. Wells, they don't just imagine a better future -- they know they have the power to make it come true," toymaker Mattel said.

By Josephine Harvey
01/12/2022

Famed Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells is the latest female historical icon to be immortalized as a Barbie doll.

Mattel’s Barbie brand announced that Wells was the latest addition to its Inspiring Women series, which spotlights role models who paved the way for generations of girls.

“When kids learn about heroes like Ida B. Wells, they don’t just imagine a better future ― they know they have the power to make it come true,” the company said.

Wells, born into slavery during the Civil War, fought racism, sexism and violence in her work as a prominent journalist who exposed injustices against Black people in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She led an anti-lynching movement, traveled nationwide and abroad to expose the practice at great personal risk, and went on to participate in the founding of the NAACP.

Other Barbies in the collection have included Maya Angelou, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Billie Jean King and Ella Fitzgerald.

Son of top PLO official released after two years in Egyptian prison

Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Shaath, an advocate for the Israel BDS movement, was released after Shaath agreed to renounce his Egyptian citizenship.

Egyptian-Palestinian political activist Ramy Shaath holds up the arm of his wife, Celine Lebrun-Shaath, as he arrives at Roissy Airport in Roissy, outside Paris, on Jan. 8, 2022, after being detained in Egypt for more than two years. - JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images

Daoud Kuttab
@daoudkuttab
January 12, 2022

After 900 days in an Egyptian jail waiting for a proper trial, Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Nabil Shaath was released by Egyptian authorities on Jan. 8. Shaath was imprisoned in July 2019 along with other Egyptian activists. He is believed to have been jailed because of his activity as the Egyptian coordinator of the Boycott and Divestment Movement for Palestine (BDS). It was seen as a gesture done by the Egyptians to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Donald Trump. Shaath stayed in jail almost a year after both were no longer on the political map.

Shaath is the son of former Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath.

But Israeli Ambassador to Paris Aliza Bin Noun left little doubt that Israel was supportive of Shaath’s imprisonment because of his role with BDS. Bin Noun tweeted that the welcome by French authorities to Shaath contradicted French law against hatred to Jews and Israel and that Shaath’s support for BDS constitutes just that. “Boycott and incitement to hatred of Israel and Jews are prohibited by French law,” stated the tweet shortly after Shaath’s arrival in Paris.

French President Emmanuel Macron had publicly called for Shaath’s release during a press conference with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Macron welcomed Shaath’s repatriation with his French wife, Cecile Le Brun. “I welcome the decision of the Egyptian authorities to release Ramy Shaath. I share the relief of his wife, Celine Le Brun, whom he finds in France, with whom we have not given up. Thank you to everyone who played a positive role in this happy outcome,” Macron said in a tweet in French.

The calls for the release of Shaath had received international support. More than 100,000 people signed an Amnesty International petition, and demonstrations in major world capitals called for his release. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said in a short statement that the “Palestinian presidency thanks and expresses gratitude to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and to the Arab Egyptian Republic for the response to the call by the President of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas to release the son of Nabil Shaath.”

A family statement celebrated his freedom and thanked “all the volunteers, the human rights organizations, public figures and thousands of citizens from the Arab region, diaspora and the world who advocated for his release. We are also grateful to the hundreds of lawmakers and government officials who publicly and privately championed Shaath’s case, particularly those who have done so steadfastly and against all odds in France, Europe and the United States.”

Ahmad Samih, an Egyptian activist living abroad, told Al-Monitor that Shaath represented the struggle of Palestinians and Egyptians. “In the same way that Ramy Shaath struggled against the Israeli occupation, his release from Egyptian jail paints a much larger picture of the struggle of both Egyptians and Palestinians who are victims of different types of occupation.”

Nisreen Haj Ahmad, director of Ahel, a Jordanian-based organization that trains leaders on organizing collective action, told Arab News that the concerted campaign by his wife and family attracted support from around the world. “It built power and used creative tactics. Resilience is the secret of this success.” Haj Ahmad, who is a friend of Shaath and Le Brun, said she hopes all political prisoners in Arab countries can gain their freedom. “The freedom of Ramy Shaath is evidence of the people's power and the importance of organizing despite difficult contexts.”

The BDS movement reflected this common struggle of Palestinians and Egyptians in their congratulatory statement for his release. “Our common struggle against Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid intersects with the struggles in the Arab region against despotic Arab regimes that act as tools of imperialism." The BDS statement also called on Egypt to remove Shaath’s name from any so-called terrorist lists. “We call on all international human rights institutions and relevant United Nations committees to intensify pressure on the Egyptian authorities to remove Shaath’s name, and anyone who has been arbitrarily added, from the so-called 'Terrorism List' and to release all political prisoners unconditionally."

Shaath’s release was possible only after his lawyers submitted documents on Jan. 1 confirming his approval to denounce his Egyptian citizenship. He had been charged, without any evidence, of supporting terrorism. Had he been convicted, he would have had all his properties confiscated by the Egyptian state. Egyptian law allows two years of pretrial detention. The condition of renouncing his citizenship was made after he was vindicated of all the charges against him by an Egyptian court.

Independent Egyptian website Mada Masr said that the controversial practice of forcing dual national citizens to denounce their Egyptian citizenship is based on a decree — known as Law 140 — issued by Sisi in November 2014 that allows the repatriation of foreign prisoners to their home countries, at the president’s discretion, to serve their time or be retried there. Mada Masr quoted legal scholars calling that law unconstitutional because it discriminates against Egyptian citizens.

Upon arriving at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, Shaath told waiting journalists that he will continue the struggle for a better Egypt and a free Palestine. “Our fight is not over, and we hope for a better Egypt … and a Free Palestine,” he said.

Shaath’s case exposed the unholy alliance that autocratic leaders in the Arab world have with Israel at the expense of the rights of their own citizens and at the expense, in Shaath’s case, of the issue of Palestine, which has overwhelming public support in Egypt and the Arab world.

'Whatever it takes to support': Coloradans plan to support King Soopers employees on strike

The signs are made and the plans are set. Come Wednesday morning, thousands of King Soopers employees in the Denver metro area are expected to walk off the job, and many Coloradans plan to support grocers during the strike.




By: CB Cotton
 Jan 12, 2022

DENVER — The signs are made and the plans are set.

Come Wednesday morning, thousands of King Soopers employees in the Denver metro area are expected to walk off the job, and many Coloradans plan to support grocers during the strike.

"I'll have my signs, we'll be honking horns, whatever it takes to support these folks," Frank Brown said

Brown, a Denver resident and former flight attendant, said after delving into details of failed negotiations between King Soopers and the union, he knew he wanted to support employees.

"We experienced much the same thing, almost identical to what these folks are going through as far as the negotiations," he said of his experience as a flight attendant.

United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7 has maintained the grocery chain failed to make an offer with livable wages, tools for on-the-job safety and better healthcare.

On Monday, King Soopers made similar claims, filing unfair labor practice charges against UFCW Local 7 for "refusing to bargain in good faith."

In a show of back-and-forth, the union has denied allegations against them, too, moving forward with a strike set to begin at 5 a.m. on Wednesday. The union said 8,400 employees across 77 stores will picket.

RELATED: MAP: These are the King Soopers stores that could be affected by the worker's strike beginning Wednesday

"It'll be at our local King Soopers just down the street here, and I bought hand warmers, toe warmers. I bought coffee," Brown said.

The union has set the stage for a strike that could last three weeks.

"They are the essential workers. They've been there throughout the pandemic," Brown said. "These folks went to the store to work, some of them got sick and some of them died."

King Soopers has categorically denied all of the allegations made by the union and unionized employees. In an interview with Denver7 on Monday, Joe Kelley, president of King Soopers, said the strike would "create havoc."

RELATED: After months of talk with King Soopers reps, UFCW Local 7 announces start of official strike

On Tuesday, the grocery chain said they provided their "last, best and final offer" to UFCW Local 7. The union said the final offer made by King Soopers was worse than previous ones.

The president of UCFW Local 7, Kim Cordova, has said all offers from King Soopers have been concessionary.

"When you give them a raise, and then you ask for concessions throughout the rest of the contract, like a higher cost of health insurance or you cap their sick time — that one got me — I mean, these folks have been sick," Brown said emphatically. "Being subjected to COVID, I've lost family members and my partner has lost family members. Yeah, I have a problem with that."

For Brown, the matter is personal. His mother died due to COVID-19.

"Her and five of her friends all passed away from it a week before the vaccine came out," he said through tears.

King Soopers has said they've used ample precautions to protect employees. Brown said he'll be listening to employees who say otherwise

Kristi Noem Still Doesn’t Understand How COVID and Vaccines Work

‘IRRESPONSIBLE’

OPINION
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

The reckless South Dakota governor wants to “recognize natural immunity” from COVID. She’s not only wrong—she’s also encouraging hesitant folks not to get vaccinated.

Michael Daly
Special Correspondent
Updated Jan. 12, 2022

Halfway into robotically reading her hour-long State of the State speech off teleprompters, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem promised “to protect the people’s right to a medical or religious exemption from COVID vaccines.”

She then raised her hand with the index finger extended to emphasize some particular idiocy.

“We will also recognize natural immunity,” she said.

The majority of the state legislators applauded, indicating they are not only Republicans but also foolish enough to endorse her fiction that people who have had COVID-19 do not need to be vaccinated.

A leading research bioinformatician at the Yale School of Public Health terms such thinking “irresponsible.”

“Contracting COVID once does not make you immune over the long term and certainly does not make you immune to new variants,” Jeffrey Townsend told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

Townsend is the author of a study published by The Lancet Microbe in October 2021 whose conclusion he summarized in a Yale News write-up.

“Reinfection can reasonably happen in three months or less,” he was quoted saying. “Therefore, those who have been naturally infected should get vaccinated. Previous infection alone can offer very little long-term protection against subsequent infections.”

The surge of the Omicron variant has been affirming that principle as people are getting COVID for a second or even a third time. Noem is not just wrong but reprehensibly reckless.

“The issue with that declaration is that there’s going to be many people who are not going to be protected against new infections, whether or not they’re new variants,” Townsend said. “Having such a declaration is not properly understanding the dynamics in this pandemic.”

He added that the present COVID situation “is as serious as it has ever been.”

“We’re going to have more people in the hospital with Omicron now than from other variants,” he said. “It’s already crazy and it’s getting worse.”

And as has been repeatedly noted by The Daily Beast, there is a possibility that a variant can arise that is as contagious as Omicron and as deadly as Delta.


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“And the possibility of that variant increases with people getting infected more,” Townsend said. “The more people there are, the more different variants form and some of them, some very small fraction of them, are going to become new variants that are immunoevasive.”

One variant of the very small fraction of infections can become a surge if it can evade the body’s defense.

“And the immunoevasion will occur regardless of whether it’s vaccine or natural immunity,” Townsend added.

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In other words, people who refuse to get vaccinated and give the virus more opportunities to mutate are endangering all of us, even those responsible enough to get the jab.

And in that lies ultimate fallacy in Noem’s disingenuous insistence that she is not anti-vaccine, merely pro freedom.

“Governor Noem has repeatedly encouraged South Dakotans to get vaccinated against COVID-19, but she has consistently reiterated that this should be a choice,” her spokesman, Ian Frazer, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

But when Noem suggests that having had COVID makes the vaccine unnecessary, she is in truth encouraging hesitant folks not to get the jab.

And her resistance to a mandate is part of an image she is constructing of a cowboy-hatted, horse-riding, flag-waving champion of freedom who has led South Dakota to economic triumph amid the pandemic

“The strongest economy in America,” Noem has boasted again and again.

In truth, South Dakota ranked 45th in GDP for the third quarter of 2021 as reported by the Board of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

That illusion seems to be part of her effort to be on the Republican ticket in the next presidential election. The Trumpian types have sought to minimize the pandemic from the start, and Noem has embraced immunity as a magical solution to the pandemic.

Back in May, she announced at a tourism event that South Dakota was about to achieve herd immunity.

“We’re very, very close, and I would expect that most people in the state feel comfortable conducting normal day to day life activities. We’ve got distribution levels that are very good and outstanding across the country… We’ve got people who had the virus and have recovered from it, and a lot of folks have the antibodies.”

By “distribution levels,” Noem apparently meant positivity rate. It was then down to 14 percent in South Dakota. It has spiked above 33 percent with the arrival of Omicron. Those who tested positive on Thursday included the 14-year-old son of a Sioux Falls businesswoman.

When your kid’s sick as hell and you can’t get a bottle of cough syrup because Walgreens shut down, I wouldn’t call that freedom.

The teen had just returned to school following the holidays. The mask policy there is in keeping with Noem’s no-mandate philosophy.

“None of the kids wear masks at school,” reported the businesswoman, who asked that her name not be used.

She said her son’s oxygen level had dropped to 92 percent when it should be 98 or higher. He was coughing so hard on Monday night that his mother dashed out to a Walgreens on 41st Street. She arrived only to find it had closed early due to a pandemic-related shortage.

“When your kid’s sick as hell and you can’t get a bottle of cough syrup because Walgreens shut down, I wouldn’t call that freedom,” she told The Daily Beast.


Michael Daly
Special Correspondent
@MichaelDalynycmichael.daly@thedailybeast.com

COP26: lest we forget

Simon Pirani

 

| 12th January 2022 | 

The Author

COP26 is long forgotten but the legacy of oil exploitation will last for ever.

No sooner had politicians signed the Glasgow Climate Pact in November, than the US government paved the way for new oil and gas output, by selling $191 million of new drilling licences.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and 29 other companies bid at an auction for blocks in the Gulf of Mexico, in an area twice the size of Florida.

This article first appeared at the Chartist magazine.

The sale came after the Joe Biden administration’s moratorium on new drilling was overturned in the courts. Earthjustice said the sale was a “climate bombshell”: if all that production goes ahead, an extra 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere.

Heating

On the plus side, the UK’s biggest new oil project, Cambo, suffered a blow, as Shell pulled out, after forceful mobilisation by climate campaigners. Siccar Point Energy, which owns 70 percent of the project, then said it is pausing work.

Cambo could still go ahead, though, and if it does, that will be thanks in part to the UK’s lavish tax breaks for North Sea producers. Siccar Point says the project is “not forecasted to pay taxes for many years”.

The company-friendly tax regime means that in 2020 the treasury collected a paltry £255 million from oil and gas producers, while handing rebates of £39 million to BP and £110 million to Shell. 

These tax breaks are just one part of a multi-billion-dollar mountain of subsidies for fossil fuel producers from rich countries’ governments.

And those subsidies form the background to COP26’s failure to tackle global heating, and to the decisions made there, which Climate Action Tracker estimates will lead to 2.1-2.7 degrees of warming, far above the 1.5 degree target.  

Blaze

Some politicians claimed the talks were successful, because the Glasgow Climate Pact mentioned the transition away from fossil fuels, which no international agreement has done before. But what a mention.

 

The actual words are that the conference “calls upon [all countries] to “accelerat[e] efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.

That passage had started the week as “accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels”, but was watered down.  

The media focused on India, whose environment minister urged the coal “phasedown” instead of “phase-out”. But far more significant were (i) the phrase “unabated coal power”, which opens the door to the false solution of carbon capture and storage (that will supposedly “abate” carbon dioxide emissions), and (ii) the reference to “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.

The idea of “inefficient” is a get-out for the world’s richest nations, in the G20 group – who promised in 2009, in a blaze of publicity, to phase out all fossil fuel subsidies, and at the last count (2017-19) were paying $584 billion per year of them. And they will themselves decide which billions, if any, are “inefficient”.

Atmosphere

The G7 nations, the richest of all, poured $189 billion into coal, oil and gas between January 2020 and March 2021 in their pandemic response packages – outstripping clean energy investments of $147 billion.

These subsidies are a better measure of politicians’ intentions than their words. Other factors to keep in mind are:

■ The insistence by rich country governments, the UK included, on supporting domestic oil production that will ensure that the 1.5 degree target is breached.

■ The support governments give to oil companies greenwashing their investment strategies, by welcoming their representatives to Glasgow – while clean energy’s share of oil and gas companies’ capital investment is 1%, with analysts hoping it will rise to 4%.  

■ The promotion of gas as a solution to climate change, rather than a problem. Increases in gas consumption are incompatible with the 1.5 degree target – but coal-dependent countries in Asia are considering switching to gas. And that makes the big western-owned oil and gas companies happy. The Global Methane Pledge, launched with a fanfare in Glasgow, will underperform, Climate Action Tracker says.

■ The whole idea of “net zero” – that economies can keep pumping greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use into the atmosphere, since they can be removed later – is music to oil companies’ ears.

Movement

Scientists, under political pressure, started including greenhouse gas removal guesstimates in their climate models in the 1990s, to make the politicians’ numbers add up. It meant governments could claim targets were being met. This falsehood has taken on a life of its own, producing a huge illusion factory about carbon removal techniques that will probably never work at scale.

False carbon capture “solutions” were promoted in Glasgow, along with carbon trading schemes under which nations can buy credits, allowing others to pollute, in order to “meet” (ha ha) their own targets. Glasgow audiences also heard inflated claims for hydrogen, another technofix beloved of oil companies.

The UK government stands out as a promoter of these false solutions. Carbon capture and hydrogen, along with electric vehicle manufacture – the decarbonisation effect of which is constantly exaggerated – play major parts in its Net Zero Strategy.

In response, the labour movement should embrace genuinely low-carbon technologies that can achieve zero carbon – not “net zero”, but real zero – in a way that serves people, not fossil fuel companies.

This Author

Dr Simon Pirani is an energy researcher and historian. His most recent book is Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto 2018). He blogs at People and Nature and tweets as @SimonPirani1.This article first appeared at the Chartist magazine.

Can We Cut the Crap on “Unconstrained Globalized Capitalism”?

The idea that global capitalism in the last four decades has been in any sense “unconstrained” is frankly so laughable that no serious newspaper or magazine should ever print anything making such an absurd claim.

January 12, 2022 by Center for Economic and Policy Research 1 Comment


By Dean Baker

I get why the Right likes to make it seem that the huge upward redistribution of the last four decades was just the result of the market working its magic, but why do so many liberals feel the need to play along? We got yet another example of this bizarre behavior in a column by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, which tells us:

“But the far-right surge [e.g., Donald Trump] also worked in tandem with the pandemic’s challenges to bring to a close the era of austerity and unconstrained globalized capitalism. The way opened for a new wave of government activism.”

The idea that global capitalism in the last four decades has been in any sense “unconstrained” is frankly so laughable that no serious newspaper or magazine should ever print anything making such an absurd claim. In this period, the importance of government-granted patent and copyright monopolies has exploded. They may redistribute more than $1 trillion annually from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from these monopolies. That comes to almost $8,000 a year for every family in the country. It is close to half of all pre-tax corporate profits. It’s hard to believe that anyone who has been alive and awake over this period could have missed the importance of this massive government intervention in the economy.

Similarly, the push for free trade has been very one-sided. While our trade negotiators worked hard to eliminate barriers to trade in manufactured goods, thereby pushing down the wages of workers in the manufacturing sector and workers without college degrees more generally, they did almost nothing to eliminate the protectionist barriers that allow our doctors and dentists to earn roughly twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This transfers roughly $100 billion annually, or $700 per family, from the rest of us to doctors earning an average of $300k a year and dentists earning an average of more than $200k.

I totally understand why the beneficiaries of this upward redistribution would want to pretend it is just the natural working of the market, but why the hell would people who claim to be opposed to it, like Dionne, go along with this farce? And perhaps even worse, why do media outlets with pretenses of being serious print it?

This post was previously published on climatenewsnetwork.net and under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0.

Dr. Anthony Fauci Reveals Why He Called GOP Senator A ‘Moron’ On Hot Mic

The nation’s top infectious diseases expert slammed Republican Sen. Roger Marshall’s "stunning" line of inquiry.


Lee Moran
01/12/2022 


Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday night explained to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes why he muttered “what a moron” on a hot mic following an exasperating Senate health committee hearing exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).

Marshall had quizzed Fauci on his investments and demanded disclosure. Fauci pointed out the information is actually public in his financial statement. “What a moron. Jesus Christ,” Fauci was heard saying afterward.

Hayes suggested Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, was a “little frustrated with that line of inquiry” from Marshall.

“It just is an example, again, he was implying, if you listen to the entire dialogue, that in my position responsible for drug trials and having so-called inside knowledge of what drug works and what drug doesn’t work, that maybe I was making investments sort of like ahead of the game here,” Fauci explained.

“He was totally implying that, and he made the statement that we can’t get your financial statement,” he continued. “It was stunning to me that a United States senator doesn’t realize that my financial statement is public knowledge. It was just like, ‘Where have you been?’”


Watch the video here:

 

Unease, Protests as Yet Another US Nuclear Sub Arrives in Arctic Norway

12 hours ago

© US Navy

Igor Kuznetsov

All materials

According to the protesters, the port calls by US nuclear submarines endanger the inhabitants and the local environment, draw Norway into a superpower conflict and make the city of Tromsø, Western Europe's largest above the Arctic circle, a military target.

On Tuesday, 11 December, the nuclear submarine USS Washington arrived in Tromsø in northern Norway, sparking strong reactions and protests.

The US submarine is armed with cruise missiles and tasked with patrolling the northern waters, where Russian submarines sail out of the Northern fleet's bases at the Kola Bay and the Barents Sea.

According to protesters who gathered outside the guarded gates of the Tønsnes harbour outside of Tromsø, the port calls make Norway a piece in a dangerous game between superpowers.

Håkon Elvenes of the organisation “No to nuclear-powered warships” believes that US nuclear submarines should not be allowed to dock in Norway, and is concerned about the symbolic effect of them being invited into Norwegian waters.

“This represents a dangerous mix of military and civilian purposes. It is a mixture that may be in conflict with international law, and which hasn't been assessed well enough by the Norwegian authorities,” Elvenes argued to national broadcaster NRK. “There is always a risk that something can happen to any nuclear reactor, we have plenty of examples of that. And if something happens first, the consequences will be great,” he added.

Elvenes's organisation received support from the Young Reds, the youth wing of the Reds Party. Its leader Alberta Tennøe Bekkhus argued that that NATO has pursued aggressive rhetoric and a provocative policy against Russia, and that Norway is to blame for welcoming large military forces from the US. By facilitating port calls by nuclear US submarines, Norway is stirring the superpower conflict further, she argued.

“It is absolutely right to criticise Russia for a lot of what it does, but we think it is beside the point to only talk about Russia, when the West and Norway also have been involved in creating this conflict,” Bekkhus told NRK.

Therefore, the Young Reds argue that a new agreement between the US and Norway on the military use of Norwegian soil is completely wrong.

“Now you will actually introduce permanent areas that can be used for this. It will only make Norway more insecure,” Bekkhus argued.

Bekkhus referred to the Supplementary Defence Cooperation Agreement (SDCA), which facilitates further defence ties with the US. The agreement complements existing bilateral agreements with the US and NATO and allows for the creation of so-called “agreed areas” at Norwegian military bases to be used jointly by Norwegian, US and allied forces. It is furthermore possible for the US to set up its own infrastructure on the bases, which are paid for by the US, with American usage rights, but will be owned by Norway.

“The fact that we invite American forces in the way we do makes us more insecure. It contributes to unnecessary provocations and further conflict,” Bekkrus mused. “The way NATO is doing now, I believe it makes the world more insecure. This puts Norway in a more dangerous situation,” she concluded.

Last year, a visit by a fellow US sub sparked similar reactions and protests as it transpired that the Tromsø municipality lacked the expertise or equipment to handle a possible accident with radioactive leakage, which could lead to a deadly public health crisis as well as environmental pollution.

'I Fear That Our City Will Become a Bomb Target': US Sub Greeted With Protests in Norway

11 May 2021, 05:06 GMT

Reds Party leader Bjørnar Moxnes argued that the Defence Ministry had underestimated and downplayed the consequences of an accident and stressed that Tromsø will become a major military target.

With a population of above 71,000, the city of Tromsø is Western Europe's largest above the Arctic Circle.

Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned the last port call that happened in May 2021 and suggested that the civil port in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border was becoming “the next NATO outpost”.

Biden Calls Capitol Riot An Attempted 'Coup'

TEHRAN (FNA)- President Joe Biden on Tuesday described the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters as an attempted “coup".

“The violent mob of January 6, 2021, empowered and encouraged by a defeated former president, sought to win through violence what he had lost at the ballot box,” Biden said during a speech in Atlanta pushing for the passage of voting rights legislation, The Hill reported.

“To impose the will of the mob, to overturn free and fair election, and for the first time, the first time in American history, to stop the peaceful transfer of power. They failed, they failed, but democracy’s victory was not certain nor is democracy’s future,” he added.

“That’s why we’re here today: to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle, forces that attempted a coup, a coup against the legally expressed will of the American people by sowing doubt, inventing charges of fraud and seeking to steal the 2020 election from the people,” he continued, noting, “They want chaos to reign. We want the people to rule.”

The speech came on the heels of Biden’s forceful address marking the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack last week. Tuesday’s speech appears to be the first instance of the president using the word “coup” to describe the attack, which he called an “armed insurrection” last week.

Others like Fiona Hill, a former Trump White House national security official who testified during his first impeachment, have similarly accused Trump and his allies of trying to stage a “coup", or a violent overthrow of government.

Biden on Tuesday argued for passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to counteract restrictive voting laws being imposed by GOP-controlled legislatures across the country. He endorsed changes to the legislative filibuster in order to pass the bills.

The speech was the latest instance of Biden employing fiery rhetoric to push back against Trump, who he referred to repeatedly as the “defeated former president”, and his role in the January 6 riot.

The House Committee investigating the capitol attack issued three new subpoenas Tuesday targeting those who assisted in planning Trump’s rally ahead of the riot, including a White House official who helped draft his speech that day.

The committee issued a subpoena to Ross Worthington, a White House adviser and speechwriter, along with Andy Surabian and Arthur Schwartz, Republican strategists the committee said were involved in rally planning.

The subpoenas say each of the men was in touch with a wide array of those in Trump’s orbit, including his son Donald Trump Jr., his girlfriend and White House adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, rally organizer Caroline Wren, and others at the White House. Each was also said to have been in touch with Katrina Pierson, the Trump campaign spokeswoman, and Taylor Budowich, Trump’s spokesman.

“The Select Committee is seeking information from individuals who were involved with the rally at the Ellipse. Protests on that day escalated into an attack on our democracy. Protestors became rioters who carried out a violent attempt to derail the peaceful transfer of power. We have reason to believe the individuals we’ve subpoenaed today have relevant information,” Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) announced in a statement.

The committee has already subpoenaed Pierson, Budowich and Wren.

Surabian and Schwartz both served as advisers to Trump, Jr., a sign the committee is edging closer to the Trump family – a group Thompson said would not be off limits.

Surabian also briefly served in the White House as strategist Steve Bannon’s deputy, but left shortly after his boss did.

Subpoenas to the two advisers note their involvement in discussions over appearance fees for speakers and media coverage of the rally. They were also reportedly involved in discussions over concerns of having right-wing provocateurs Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, both who have been subpoenaed by the committee, speak at the rally.

Worthington's subpoena focuses largely on his role in helping draft Trump’s speech, noting that it forwarded false claims that the election was stolen.

An attorney for Surabian stated he was already working for a super PAC in support of Republican Senate candidates in Georgia by the time the rally took place.

"He had nothing at all to do with the events that took place at the Capital that day, zero involvement in organizing the rally that preceded it and was off the payroll of the Trump campaign as of November 15, 2020," attorney Daniel Bean noted.

"Mr. Surabian is a close friend to Donald Trump Jr. and is running a Super PAC that opposes the reelection of one of the members of the committee. Accordingly, we believe this is nothing more than harassment of the Committee’s political opponents and is un-American to the core," Bean added.