Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 59
December 16, 2024
December 16, 2024
Today, President Joe Biden designated a new national monument in honor of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first female Cabinet secretary, Perkins served for twelve years. She took the job only after getting FDR to sign on to her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed into law the Social Security Act that she designed and negotiated, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
The one area where Perkins fell short of her goals was in establishing public healthcare. It was not until 2010 that President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act.
Perkins’s work to build FDR’s New Deal sparked the modern American state.
Before Perkins, the primary function of the federal government was to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. Property rights, after all, had been the basis on which North American colonists had found the justification to rebel against the British crown, and that focus on the relationships inherent in property ownership had continued to dominate the government American lawmakers built.
But Perkins recognized that the central purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the communities of people who lived in the nation. She recognized that children, the elderly, women, and disabled Americans, all of whom contributed to society whether or not that contribution was recognized with a paycheck, were as valuable to the survival of a community as male workers and the wealthy men who employed them.
“The people are what matter to government,” she said, “and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system. A coalition of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the recognition of women’s equal rights, joined together to fight against the New Deal.
Their undermining of Perkins’s vision got little traction when they were attacking business regulation and taxes to support social services. Voters liked those things. But it began to attract supporters after 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision requiring the desegregation of public schools. That decision enabled those opposed to the New Deal to harness racism to their cause, warning American voters that a government that protected everyone would mean a government that used tax dollars paid by white Americans to benefit Black Americans.
Religious traditionalists’ role in undermining the New Deal grew in the 1970s. The new system dramatically expanded women’s rights, and when President Richard Nixon’s people worried he would lose reelection in 1972, they quite deliberately used the issue of abortion to claim that “women’s liberation” was destroying the family structure that religious traditionalists believed mirrored God’s relationship to his human flock.
By 1979, religious traditionalists had rejected the modern move toward women’s rights and made common cause with Republicans eager to derail the New Deal. In 1980 the support of those traditionalists put Republican president Ronald Reagan into the White House. Their influence grew in the 1990s as white evangelicals became the base of the Republican Party. By 2016 they had brought into the Republican Party a determination to reinstate a male-dominated, patriarchal world that resurrected the government Frances Perkins’s vision had replaced.
That impulse has grown until now, in 2024, attacks on women have become central to the destruction of the kind of government Frances Perkins helped to establish during the New Deal. Religious extremists in the Republican Party have in some states reduced or prevented women’s access to healthcare and are talking about taking away women’s right to vote, and the party itself has downgraded the role of women in society. When House Republicans released a list of their committee leaders for the next Congress last Thursday, there were no women on it. For the first time in 20 years, no House committees will be chaired by women.
“Very fitting in the MAGA Era—No Women Need Apply,” former Republican representative from Virginia Barbara Comstock posted on X.
In his term in office, President Biden has worked to reclaim Frances Perkins’s vision of a government that works for all Americans. When he took office, he promised to have a Cabinet that “looks like America,” and he created the most diverse Cabinet in American history. And he has emphasized women’s equality. In March 2024 he signed an executive order noting that, since women’s roles in American history have often been overlooked, it is imperative that we recognize the women and girls who have shaped the nation.
The creation today of the Frances Perkins National Monument tied together Perkins’s expansion of the government and the centrality of women to the American story. The event took place in the Frances Perkins Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., where acting secretary of labor Julie Su noted that Biden has been “the most pro-worker, pro-union president in history,” protecting pensions, defending unions, creating good jobs, and unapologetically wielding the power of the presidency on behalf of working people.
Su inducted the president into the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor, and Biden responded with the observation that “the American people are beginning to figure out all we’re doing is what’s basically decent and fair—just basically decent and fair.”
Then Biden spoke about Perkins and her work. He described how his administration has defended, protected, and expanded her vision. He reiterated that women have always been vital to the United States and insisted that they must be acknowledged both in our current society and in the way we remember our history.
As part of the day’s events, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the establishment of five new National Historic Landmarks recognizing women’s history: the Charleston Cigar Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 1945–1946, Black women led a strike that prompted the organization of southern workers; the Furies Collective, the Washington, D.C., home of a lesbian, feminist publishing group in the early 1970s; the Washington, D.C., Slowe-Burrill House, home of Black lesbian educators Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill in the early twentieth century; Azurest South in Petersburg, Virginia, the home and studio of early twentieth century Black architect Amaza Lee Meredith; and the Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio, New Mexico, where the two painted in the twentieth century.
In establishing the 57-acre family farm of Frances Perkins on the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, as a National Monument today, Biden acknowledged both the importance of Perkins’s New Deal vision of a government that benefits everyone and the centrality of women’s equality to that vision.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/biden-cabinet-diversity-gender-race.html
https://www.nps.gov/places/furies-collective.htm
https://www.nps.gov/places/slowe-burrill-house.htm
https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/020-5583/
https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
https://francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osec/osec20241216-0
https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/lectures/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1933-02-19/ed-1/seq-23/
X:
December 15, 2024
December 15, 2024
Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican. The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
Widespread calls to protect drinking water ran up against lobbyists for oil companies and members of Congress from oil districts. They complained that the science of what substances were dangerous was uncertain and that how they would be measured and regulated was unclear. They complained that the EPA was inefficient and expensive and was staffed with inexperienced officials.
Then, in 1972, an EPA study discovered that waters downstream from 60 industries discharging waste from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River’s mouth in New Orleans had high concentrations of 66 chemicals and toxic metals. Chemical companies had sprung up after World War II along the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, potentially polluting the water, while the lower end of the Mississippi River collected all the runoff from the river itself.
Two years later, an analysis of drinking water and cancer death rates among white men in that same area of Louisiana suggested that carcinogens in the water might be linked to high cancer rates. Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs, a Democrat, told Congress that “it is really vitally important to our region that we have controls enforced on the toxic organic compounds that come into the river from the industrial and municipal discharges, from runoffs from from agricultural regions, from accidents on the river, and from chemical spills on the river.”
Concerns about the area of Louisiana that later came to be known as “Cancer Alley” were uppermost, but there were chemical companies across the country, and Congress set out to safeguard the lives of Americans from toxins released by corporations into the nation’s water supply. The Safe Drinking Water Act, the first law designed to create a comprehensive standard for the nation’s drinking water, was Congress’s answer.
The new law dramatically improved the quality of drinking water in the U.S., making it some of the safest in the world. Over the years, the EPA has expanded the list of contaminants it regulates, limiting both new man-made chemicals and new pathogens.
But the system is under strain: not only have scientific advances discovered that some contaminants are dangerous at much lower concentrations than scientists previously thought, but also a lack of funding for the EPA means that oversight can be lax. Even when it’s not, a lack of funding for towns and cities means they can’t always afford to upgrade their systems.
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“[B]y ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”
—
Notes:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/13002
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/9100C9IA.TXT
Lindy Boggs, November 19, 1974, Congressional Record, p. 36401.
https://fluxconsole.com/files/item/211/109412/SurvivingCancerAlleyReport.pdf
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-environmental-quality
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-safe-drinking-water-act
https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/environmental-health/dwp/pws/SDWA50.shtml
Bluesky:
December 14, 2024
December 14, 2024
Spent the day with family and friends, and am going to finish a lovely day with an early bedtime.
This photo of the harbor comes from a neighbor. There’s nothing quite like the sky in the winter, and Allen captured one of our spectacular sunrises.
[Photo by Allen Guignard.]
December 13, 2024
December 13, 2024
Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.
Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.
When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.
Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”
Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.
If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.
That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.
The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.
But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.
Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”
Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.
Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.
Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”
There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.
In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.
Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.
Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.
And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”
So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.
Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
—
Notes:
https://time.com/7201565/person-of-the-year-2024-donald-trump-transcript/
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/25-010.pdf
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/pam-bondi-doj-trump-loyalists-republicans-rcna183832
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-did-congress-set-ten-year-term-fbi-director
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/11/fbi-director-trump-wray-00193822
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/02/politics/who-is-kash-patel-trump-fbi-director/index.html
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-ceo-perplexity-give-1-million-to-trumps-inaugural-fund
https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-million-to-trumps-inaugural-fund-32a999c1
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-59
Popular InformationA Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 millionChinese Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for a banana — sold by Sotheby's as conceptual art — and then ate it last Friday…Read more12 days ago · 897 likes · 59 comments · Judd Legum
The BulwarkThe New Age of Trump: Protection Money and FU You MoneyToday’s Secret show is a banger. I’m just going to give you one quote from Sarah as your teaser…Read more21 hours ago · 340 likes · 368 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/03/trump-crypto-chinese-entrepreneur/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/world/africa/trump-massad-boulos-middle-east.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexander-smirnov-pleads-guilty-bidens-fbi-informant/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/health/aaron-siri-rfk-jr-vaccines.html
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/11/nx-s1-5225390/trump-kimberly-guilfoyle-ambassador-greece
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/03/patel-deep-state-trump-retribution/
X:
RpsAgainstTrump/status/1867275935105659369
RadioFreeTom/status/1861112503645643037
Bluesky:
wordswithsteph.bsky.social/post/3ld3bfsuzts2s
December 12, 2024
December 12, 2024
Ten days ago, on December 2, President Joe Biden arrived in Angola, the first U.S. president to visit central Africa since President Barack Obama traveled there in 2015. In the United States, the story got lost under the president’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, but it is the far more important one, since events in the 54 countries on the continent of Africa are key to the global future.
The Biden administration has made it a point to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Africa. It recognizes the importance of a continent whose 1.5 billion people are expected to climb to 2.5 billion in the next 25 years, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed out last Thursday. The median age of Africa’s inhabitants is 19, and by 2050 it is expected that one out of every four humans on Earth will be African.
The administration has worked to ease African distrust of the U.S. stemming from its history of enslavement, its tendency to back right-wing forces during the post–World War II and Cold War period when African nations threw off colonial rule, and the disdain with which Trump treated African countries during his administration.
The Biden administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders' summit in December 2022, backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, and pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law.
During Biden’s term, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia.
In Angola last week, Biden said that the U.S. is “all-in on Africa.”
He was in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor, a development project centered around a rail line linking the port of Lobito, Angola, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Africa’s interior mining region. Biden traveled to Angola for a summit on the Lobito project as well as other infrastructure investment in the region, joining leaders from Angola, DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia on their own continent to demonstrate his conviction that the African people themselves must determine their own future.
The White House, other democratic countries, regional development banks, and international investors have put more than $6 billion behind the Lobito Corridor. They are hoping to ease the transport of critical minerals from interior countries like Zambia and DRC to Lobito. It currently takes a truck about 45 days to make the journey from the interior to Durban, South Africa; the railway would cut the trip out of the interior to about 45 hours.
The railway will strengthen global supply chains for those minerals while also benefiting local people, local governments, and the local region in Angola, Zambia, and DRC. The project includes investments in clean energy, agriculture, trade between countries, and clearing the mines from Angola’s decades-long civil war along the route, all of which will create good jobs for local workers.
“It’s a game-changer. Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper and most importantly, I think, it’s just plain common sense,” Biden said at the summit.
The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of a new investment program from the Group of Seven (G7) called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The G7 is a forum of advanced economies that share values of liberal democracy, and the PGII is the answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested billions in infrastructure in developing African countries but brings with it the risk of debt traps for the governments that borrow from it. PGII is designed to connect democratic countries, the private sector, and development banks to create “sustainable and transparent investment in quality infrastructure.”
On December 5, Eugene Robinson noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are blasting Biden’s announcement last Tuesday of $1 billion in additional humanitarian aid to 31 African countries to address famine and displacement. Biden said that this help was “the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do,” and Robinson noted that it is also smart. “Ultimately, it will be Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians, Angolans and the people of other African nations who decide the continent’s future,” he wrote. “They will remember who was there beside them all along. And who was not.”
Russia has also been working to gain influence in Africa with an eye to extracting the continent's valuable minerals. It turned to the continent after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country. They have gone from calling the insurgents “terrorists” to referring to them as “armed opposition,” and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin has no plans for a public meeting with Assad.
The Syrian ambassador in Moscow told Russian media: “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner…confirms the correctness of change and brings hope for a new dawn.” Former Russian and Soviet diplomat Nikolai Sokov told Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian: “Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [and] discards those who lose them.” But, as the Institute for the Study of War noted, Russia’s inability to preserve Assad’s regime will make the African autocrats see it as an unreliable partner, an impression the Kremlin’s rapid about-face will do little to relieve.
On Monday, a senior administration official emphasized the same idea of self-determination that Biden’s administration applied to development in African countries. He told reporters that Assad’s collapse “is a day for Syrians, about Syrians. It’s not about the United States or anyone else. It’s about the people of Syria who now have a chance to build a new country, free of the oppression and corruption of the Assad family and decades of misrule. We owe them support as they do so, and we are prepared to provide it. But the future of Syria, like the fall of Assad today, will be written by Syrians for Syrians.”
That system, the official suggested, caused Assad’s fall. “[I]t is impossible not to place this week’s events in the context of the decisions the President has made to fully back Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, and Ukraine against Russia,” the official said. After bipartisan support for that position, the official added, “Hamas is on its back; its leaders are dead. Iran is on its back. Hezbollah is on its back. Russia is on its back. It’s just abandoned its only ally in the Middle East. Now, the Assad regime, Russia and Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, has just collapsed. None of this would have been possible absent the direct support for Ukraine and [Israel] in their own defense provided by the United States of America.”
The official recounted the importance of sanctions against the Assad regime and noted that the U.S. has maintained a military presence in Syria to counter the Islamic extremists of ISIS, targeting 75 ISIS targets immediately after Assad’s fall to ensure that ISIS does not regroup in the chaos of the moment.
The official noted that the administration still believes there is a path to a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza, especially in the wake of Assad’s fall and the “dramatically changed balance of power in the region”—“a path…to a Middle East that is far more stable, far more aligned with our interests, and far more aligned with the interests of the people of the Middle East who want to live in peace, without wars, and in prosperity in a region that is more integrated and prosperous and peaceful.”
Today, Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Jordan and Türkiye, where he met with King Abdullah II and President Recep Tayyip Erodğan to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Syria.
Journalist Mike Eckel noted that “[t]he fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further.” Considering the ties of Russia to Syria, and the role Syrian bases have played in Russian influence in Africa, those reverberations will, in some form, echo across the African continent.
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Notes:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative
https://apnews.com/article/biden-africa-angola-trump-china-cd30e0123d91bf520846b28ffeacef80
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/05/biden-africa-aid-china-russia/
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-8-2024
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/politics/joe-biden-africa-trip-pardon-south-korea/index.html
https://www.rferl.org/a/syria-russia-tartus-hmeimim-base-military-withdrawal/33232501.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/09/russia-military-bases-syria-tartus-hmeimim/
https://www.mei.edu/publications/how-russia-made-hemeimeem-air-base-its-african-hub
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/12/israel-syria-war-news-hamas-gaza-lebanon/
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December 11, 2024
December 11, 2024
Yesterday, President Joe Biden spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he gave a major speech on the American economy. He contrasted his approach with the supply-side economics of the forty years before he took office, an approach the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said he would reinstate. Biden urged Trump and his team not to destroy the seeds of growth planted over the past four years. And he laid out the extraordinary successes of his administration as a benchmark going forward.
The president noted that Trump is inheriting a strong economy. Biden shifted the U.S. economy from 40 years of supply-side economics that had transferred about $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% and hollowed out the middle class.
By investing in the American people, the Biden team expanded the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” as Biden says, and created an economy that he rightfully called “the envy of the world.” Biden listed the numbers: more than 16 million new jobs, the most in any four-year presidential term in U.S. history; low unemployment; a record 20 million applications for the establishment of new businesses; the stock market hitting record highs.
Biden called out that in the two years since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, the private sector has jumped on the public investments to invest more than a trillion dollars in clean energy and advanced manufacturing.
Disruptions from the pandemic—especially the snarling of supply chains—and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine created a global spike in inflation; the administration brought those rates back to around the Fed’s target of 2%.
Biden pointed out that “[l]ike most…[great] economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America’s progress is everyone’s progress.”
But voters’ election of Donald Trump last month threatens Biden’s reworking of the economy. Trump and his team embrace the supply-side economics Biden abandoned. They argue that the way to nurture the economy is to free up money at the top of the economy through deregulation and tax cuts. Investors will then establish new industries and jobs more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Those new businesses, the theory goes, will raise wages for all Americans and everyone will thrive.
Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it clear they intend to restore supply-side economics.
The first priority of the incoming Republican majority is to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, many of which are due to expire in 2025. Those tax cuts added almost $2 trillion to budget deficits, but there is little evidence that they produced the economic growth their supporters promised. At the same time, the income tax cuts delivered an average tax cut of $252,300 to households in the top 0.1%, $61,090 to households in the top 1%, but just $457 to the bottom 60% of American households. The corporate tax cuts were even more skewed to the wealthy.
In the Washington Post yesterday, Catherine Rampell noted that Republicans’ claim that extending those cuts isn’t extraordinarily expensive means “getting rid of math.”
At a time when Republicans like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are clamoring for cuts of $2 trillion from the budget, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will add more than $4 trillion to the federal budget over the next ten years. Republicans who will chair the House and Senate finance committees, Representative Jason Smith (R-MO) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), say that extending the cuts shouldn’t count as adding to the deficit because they would simply be extending the status quo.
Trump has also indicated he plans to turn the country over to billionaires, both by putting them into government and by letting them act as they wish. Last night, on social media, President-elect Trump posted: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Biden called out the contrast between these two economic visions, saying that the key question for the American people is “do we continue to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all of America and Americans, supporting unions and working families as we have the past four years? Or do we…backslide to an economy that’s benefited those at the top, while working people and the middle class struggle…for a fair share of growth and [for an] economic theory that encouraged industries and…livelihoods to be shipped overseas?”
Biden explained that for decades Republicans had slashed taxes for the very wealthy and the biggest corporations while cutting public investment in infrastructure, education, and research and development. Jobs and factories moved overseas where labor was cheaper. To offset the costs of tax cuts, Biden said, ‘advocates of trickle-down economics ripped the social safety net by trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare, trying to deny access to affordable health care and prescription drugs.” He added, “Lifting the fortunes of the very wealthy often meant taking the rights of workers away to unionize and bargain collectively.”
This approach to the economy “meant rewarding short-termism in pursuit of short-term profits [and] extraordinary high executive pay, instead of making long-term investments…. As a consequence, our…infrastructure fell…behind. A flood of cheap imports hollowed out our factory towns.”
“Economic opportunity and innovation became more concentrated in [a] few major cities, while the heartland and communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries like China, bolstering their manufacturing investment and jobs instead of [our] economy. Even before the pandemic, this economic agenda was clearly failing. Working- and middle-class families were being hurt.”
“[W]hen the pandemic hit,” Biden said, “we found out how vulnerable America was.” Supply chains failed, and prices soared.
Biden told the audience that he “came into office with a different vision for America…: grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up; invest in America and American products. And when that happens, everybody does…well…no matter where they lived, whether they went to college or not.”
“I was determined to restore U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” he said. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act “mark the most significant investment in America since the New Deal,” with new factories bringing good jobs that are rejuvenating towns that had been left behind in the past decades. Biden said he required that the government buy American goods as the country invested in “modernizing our roads; our bridges; our ports; our airports; our clean water system; affordable, high-speed Internet systems; and so much more.”
Eighty percent of working-age Americans have jobs, and the average after-tax income is up almost $4,000 since before the pandemic, significantly outpacing inflation.
Biden and his team worked to restore competition in the economy—just today, the huge grocery chain Albertsons gave up on its merger with another huge grocery chain, Kroger, after Biden’s Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger because it would raise prices and lower workers’ wages by eliminating competition—and their negotiations with big pharma have dramatically cut the costs of prescription drugs for seniors. The administration cut junk fees, capping the cost of overdraft fees, for example, from an average of $35 a month to $5.
Biden quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques in Time magazine a month ago, saying: “President-elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history, which is the envy of the world.”
In his speech, Biden noted that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” to disrupt the decisions and investments the nation has made over the past four years, and he urged Trump to leave them in place. “Will the next president stop a new electric battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, that will create thousands of jobs?” he asked. “[W]ill we deny seniors living in red states $35-a-month insulin?”
In their article, Sonnenfeld and Henriques noted: “President Trump will likely claim he waved a magic wand on January 20 and the economic clouds cleared,” and they urged people: “Don’t Give Trump Credit for the Success of the Biden Economy.”
Biden gave yesterday’s speech in part to put down benchmarks against which we should measure Trump’s economic policies. “During my presidency, we created [16] million new jobs in America” and saw “the lowest average unemployment rate of…any administration in 50 years.” Economic growth has been a strong 3% on average, and inflation is near 2 percent, he said.
“[T]hese are simple, well-established economic benchmarks used to measure the strength of any economy, the success or failure of any president’s four years in office. They’re not political, rhetorical opinions. They’re just facts,” Biden said, “simple facts. As President Reagan called them, ‘stubborn facts.’”
Biden is willing to bet that if the American people pay attention to those facts, they will recognize that his approach to the economy, rather than supply-side economics, works best for everyone.
Today the NASDAQ Composite index, which focuses on tech stocks, broke 20,000 for the first time.
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Notes:
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://apnews.com/article/kroger-albertsons-79e366723d7287b2df71d96730fba76e
https://time.com/7176493/trump-credit-success-biden-economy-inflation/
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-did-tcja-affect-federal-budget-outlook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/10/trump-tax-policy-math-gop/
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