skip to main |
skip to sidebar
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
Kolby KickingWoman
INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/historic-day-standing-rock-pipeline-company-told-shut-down-remove-oil
A federal judge has ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down and remove all oil within 30 days, a huge win for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the other plaintiffs.
In a 24-page order, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that he was "mindful of the disruption" that shutting down the pipeline would cause, but that it must be done within 30 days. The order comes after Boasberg said in April that a more extensive review was necessary than what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already conducted and that he would consider whether the pipeline would have to be shuttered during the new assessment.
“Following multiple twists and turns in this long-running litigation, this Court recently found that Defendant U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it granted an easement to Defendant-Intervenor Dakota Access, LLC to construct and operate a segment of that crude-oil pipeline running beneath the lake,” said the opinion from Boasberg.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court handed another blow to the disputed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada by keeping in place a lower court ruling that blocked a key permit for the project.
Monday's order also put on hold an earlier court ruling out of Montana as it pertains to other oil and gas pipelines across the nation.
That’s a sliver of good news for an industry that just suffered two other blows — Sunday's cancellation of the $8 billion Atlantic Coast gas pipeline in the Southeast and the ruling that shut down the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
"The Court does not reach its decision with blithe disregard for the lives it will affect," Boasberg wrote in Monday's Dakota Access ruling. "It readily acknowledges that, even with the currently low demand for oil, shutting down the pipeline will cause significant disruption to DAPL, the North Dakota oil industry, and potentially other states.
This doesn’t appear to be the first time Boasberg has reversed or rescinded a previous judgment.
According to BallotPedia, since 2018 the judge has ruled against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining asylum seekers more than seven days and also stopped states from implementing work requirements for Medicaid programs.
Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, called the ruling "shocking" and noted that the pipeline is moving 570,000 barrels of Bakken oil a day.
"I think there's a lot of questions about the authority of this liberal district court judge to make such a significant ruling," Ness said of Boasberg, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. "There is no doubt that the lawyers are all gearing up and looking at every possibility of a stay or an appeal or something."
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
From the outset of the pipeline’s construction, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith Jr. said the tribe stood against the project.
“There are many problems with the information ETP (Energy Transfer Partner) submitted to the Corps of Engineers on DAPL. ETP estimates that 12,500 barrels of oil would be the worst-case scenario, but that is based on a nine-minute shutdown time. By looking at prior spills, we know that the true shutdown time is hours, and can even take days. Now, the fight continues, but it is in federal court.” —Chairman Mike Faith of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Photo courtesy of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Facebook 2018)
“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” Faith said. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”
The pipeline extends more than 1,000 miles from North Dakota to Illinois – but the issue is the portion of the project that is buried under the Missouri River. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe said a leak will contaminate their drinking water and sacred lands.
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation sit next to the Standing Rock Sioux and Missouri River. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier celebrates the decision.
"I applaud the actions of the US District Court in finding what we knew all along, that this pipeline, like many other actions taken by the US government, is in fact illegally operating," read the statement. "The fact that this operation had been operating illegally for three years before this conclusion was finally made shows you the power that money holds on the American government."
Late in the Obama administration the Corps of Army Engineers announced it would suspend approval of the project while an Environmental Impact Statement was prepared. “A few months later, however, following the change of administration in January 2017 and a presidential memorandum urging acceleration of the project, the Corps again reconsidered and decided to move forward,” the opinion said. “It granted the sought permit, construction was completed, and oil commenced flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. “
This the court found was a substantial error and a violation of the National Environmental Environmental Policy Act.
The bottom line: “The Corps had not been able to substantiate its decision to publish” only an Environmental Assessment and not an Environmental Impact Statement.
Bernie Sanders: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and millions of others who fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline showed us the power of standing together against injustice. We can create a future where a clean environment and indigenous rights matter more than Big Oil’s profits.
Energy Transfer last year proposed increasing the pipeline's capacity to as much as 1.1 million barrels to meet growing demand for oil from North Dakota, without the need for additional pipelines or rail shipments.
Before the coronavirus pandemic devastated the U.S. oil industry, daily oil production in North Dakota - the nation's No. 2 oil producer behind Texas - was at a near-record 1.45 million barrels daily. The state's output slipped to below 1 million barrels daily in May amid low energy prices and sparse demand.
Permits for the project were originally rejected by the Obama administration, and the Army Corps of Engineers prepared to conduct a full environmental review. In February 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the Corps scrapped the review and granted permits, concluding that running the pipeline under the Missouri River posed no significant environmental issues.
The Corps said that opinion was validated after an additional year of review, as ordered by Boasberg in 2017.
Boasberg had ruled then that the Corps "largely complied" with environmental law when permitting the pipeline but ordered more review because he said the agency did not adequately consider how an oil spill under the Missouri River might affect the Standing Rock Sioux's fishing and hunting rights, or whether it might disproportionately affect the tribal community.
“Yet, given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease,” Boasberg’s ruling stated.
In a statement, the Indigenous Environmental Network is celebrating all the prayers and support the #NoDAPL movement has received over the years. While Boasberg’s opinion clearly states the flow of oil must stop, the organization is prepared to fight to see that through.
“The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes have shown the world that treaty rights and environmental justice are not token concepts without merit, but rather tangible arguments that inherently protect the sacredness of mother earth. We will continue to fight until DAPL is stopped completely,” the statement said.
In response to radical demands to defund and disband the police, liberal reformers are pushing the “Camden model.” Don’t fall for it. Camden relies on mass surveillance to pacify its population — all to benefit business interests.
Brendan McQuade JACOBIN
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/camden-model-not-model-its-obstacle-real-change
They’re doing it again.
In 2015, President Obama used Camden, New Jersey as a prop to announce the findings of the President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing, a package of procedural reforms to address the post-Ferguson crisis of police legitimacy. In 2012, Camden suffered the highest crime rate in the country and a murder rate 560 times higher than the national average. In 2013, the city disbanded its police force, launched the new Camden County Police Department, and embraced community policing. Violent crime dropped dramatically. As of 2018, it’s down 38 percent from 2013.
Scratch the surface of this feel-good story of crime reduction and community policing, and you’ll find a “surveillance city.” Camden is under constant monitoring: cameras, ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, automated license plate readers, a mobile observation tower. The much-praised police-citizen interactions that make up the work of “community policing” also double as moments of intelligence collection. It’s not just one-off interactions either. Police also develop relationships with neighborhood sentinels — “mothers with children, postal delivery workers, people who are engaged in local groups” — to gather intelligence. They organize residents to monitor their neighbors, report activity to police, and otherwise bolster police programs.
The data streams from these surveillance systems and the “human intelligence” from the “field contact cards” that officers fill out for every civilian encounter all flow back to Camden’s very own “fusion center,” the Real Time Tactical Operations Intelligence Center. There, analysts watch the city in real time and take direct control of a sequence of cameras in “virtual patrols.” Data-crunching algorithms target police deployments and direct analysts to focus on particular cameras.
In Camden, this “counterinsurgency surveillance” was inseparable from the imposition of austerity and the scandalous plunder that passed for urban renewal. Together, they formed a comprehensive pacification project, carried out to benefit business interests.
For exactly this reason, Camden has become the liberal establishment’s answer to the radical demands erupting from the country’s tear gas–choked streets. Ever since the Minneapolis City Council announced they’re disbanding the police department and shifting to community-based strategies, Camden is all over the media. Leading organizations on the ground in Minneapolis like Black Visions, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150 have explicitly rejected the Camden model — and for good reason. The current Camden fetish is an attempt to avoid any real reckoning with the failures of police and capital. It’s an attempt to recalibrate state violence in the guise of progressive reform. Camden is not a model. It’s an obstacle to real change.
The current focus on the Camden model also carries greater historical significance because it represents something much larger than the failures of liberal reform in the face of popular rebellion. Camden is a glimpse of a nightmare future of mass supervision — the next potential mutation of the various “peculiar institutions” of racial control and class domination that have shaped capitalism in the United States.
Slavery, the first and most brutal, was integral to the formation of the capitalist system. Karl Marx called it the “pedestal” upon which “the veiled slavery of wage-earners” rested. W. E. B. Du Bois described it as “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.” It took waves of slave revolts, a civil war, and a general strike of black workers to end slavery in the United States. The Jim Crow order that eventually emerged from the wreckage — following the counterrevolutionary destruction of Reconstruction — combined formal apartheid with vigilante and police terror. Black workers were prevented from entering high-paying industries and locked into what James Boggs called the “scavenger role,” creating a hyper-exploitable pool of “common labor” that formed “a ceiling for blacks and a floor for whites.”
Decades of civil rights organizing in the United States — overlapping and interacting with anticolonial struggles the world over — climaxed in 1968, with a generalized global revolt. Systems of formal racial domination collapsed. While integration (and decolonization) yielded “black faces in high places,” it failed to undo persistent racial inequalities. Instead, the United States became a global leader in imprisonment, caging the disproportionately (though not exclusively) black and brown surplus workers no longer needed in a lean “information economy.” Though distinct forms of domination and violence, all three of these indelibly shaped the various permutations of American capitalism.
Today, we find ourselves in another singular moment of struggle and change. After decades of organizing against mass incarceration and police violence and years of escalating struggle from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America and beyond, the United States, beset by a global pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is in revolt. And this revolt, like the earlier struggles that helped bring down the “peculiar institutions” of their times, is abolitionist. They are struggles for the collective freedom to flourish — not just campaigns to end injustices.
Abolition predated and is intertwined with the struggle for socialism because abolition always raises socialist questions: How will we care for each other? How we will share labor to meet our shared needs? Abolition is not a thing that can be won if we use the proper strategies. It is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. Abolition — and socialism for that matter — are horizons of struggle. To paraphrase the famous line from Marx, we make our own history, but not as we please; we struggle to change existing circumstances, given and transmitted from the past, and create new ones. In this moment, as with earlier turning points, we have before us exhilarating possibilities to build a new world and real potential for crushing defeat and reversals.
Elites are looking to Camden for a history they can mobilize to quell this radical upsurge, a blueprint for “reform,” a lesson in changing everything so it may all stay the same.
They’re doing it again.
Why Camden?
Mass supervision is most visible in Camden because the city suffers certain contradictions in an exaggerated form. Camden never recovered from deindustrialization. In the mid-twentieth century, Camden was home to 365 different industries that employed 51,000 people. By the early 1980s, the city had lost nearly 32,000 jobs, including 28,700 in manufacturing. The population collapsed, dropping 40 percent from its 1950 peak of 125,000. By the 2010 census, this beleaguered city of 77,000 was 48 percent black and 47 percent Hispanic. Over a third of residents lived below the poverty line. If one of the characteristics of the financialized global economy is the mass expulsion of once-included workers from the formal economy and social order more generally, then Camden is ahead of the curve.
Camden is ahead of the curve in other ways, too. Mass incarceration has been unraveling since at least the Great Recession. Nationwide, state and federal prison populations are down 9 percent, from some 1.61 million in 2010 to 1.46 million in 2018. New Jersey is one of the leaders of decarceration: the state prison population has dropped by over a third since its 1999 peak. The growing fiscal costs of mass incarceration, especially after the 2008 crash, and changing drug laws are two of the principal reasons.
Camden sits at the intersection of the fiscal crisis of the state on the one hand, and the violence of the drug economy and the policing of it on the other. For decades, the city has relied on state aid to maintain basic services in the face of long-term economic decline and a dwindling tax base. For just as long, the drug trade has filled the economic vacuum. The drug trade in Camden is estimated at $250 million. According to the state troopers and intelligence analysts I interviewed at the New Jersey State Police’s intelligence center, the city has some of the purest heroin in the Northeast and is the “starting point, or one of the starting points, for the heroin trade.” It’s hard to get a decent job in Camden but, according to police and intelligence analysts, a drug set can make easily $20,000 in a day.
Under these conditions, it is easy to appreciate why Camden is a harbinger for a new peculiar institution: mass supervision. Ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing now manage a surplus population that is too costly to cage. But it’s not just these acute social problems that have transformed Camden into an open-air prison. It’s the political situation that produced them. A poor, almost exclusively black and brown, high-crime city is an easy target for victimization and vilification. And that’s exactly what happened.
The Pacification of Camden
Over several years, the New Jersey state government imposed a new social order on Camden. It happened through a corrupt series of devil’s bargains and backroom deals between New Jersey governor Chris Christie (2010–18), South Jersey political boss George Norcross III, Camden mayor Dana Redd (2010–18), and police chief Scott Thompson. The specifics are scandalous but the structural effect is more important than the dirty details of its execution. Camden was pacified. These elites and their corporate allies mobilized the whole government in a proactive, organized, and systematic police war to fabricate a social order conducive to capital accumulation.
The stage was set by crushing austerity. Almost as soon as he became governor, Christie declared that “the taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going to pay anymore for Camden’s excesses” and slashed $445 million in aid. Christie, Norcross, and Redd worked together to bring economic shock therapy to Camden. They cooperated to delay the long-promised construction of a new school in Lanning, at the site of a decaying nineteenth-century building. Eventually, they developed a plan to build five new charter schools in Camden that will all carry the Norcross name.
In addition to pushing for school privatization, Christie, Norcross, and Redd also worked to bring new investment into the city, doling out $1.6 billion tax breaks. An investigation by WNYC and ProPublica found that “at least $1.1 billion went to Norcross’s own insurance brokerage, his business partnerships and charitable affiliations, and clients of the law and lobbying firms of his brother Philip.”
This plundering of the public coffers took place in a larger context shaped by a terrible spike in violence and the reformation of the police department. After Christie imposed austerity in 2010, Camden laid off 168 of its 368 police officers. The remaining cops responded with sickouts. At times just a dozen officers patrolled the city. Crime surged. By 2012, Camden had the highest murder rate in the country.
But even as Camden bled, the city spent $77,000 on overtime to provide security at the Susquehanna Bank Center, a concert venue and one of the main anchors of the small middle-class enclave between Rutgers-Camden and the waterfront. Scott Thomson, the much–celebrated chief of both the disbanded Camden Police and the reformed Camden County Police, made this “deployment decision” to provide security for large capital investment and those who came to Camden as consumers. Activists and community leaders I interviewed in 2016 suspected these events were intentional acts to trigger a crime spike, grab headlines, and create the conditions to impose further changes in the city.
Regardless of these alleged machinations, the changes came. In May 2013, the city disbanded the municipal police and replaced them with the reformed Camden County Police. Everything about the move was an affront to democracy. Camden residents petitioned to have a ballot initiative to stop the dissolution of the police department, but Mayor Redd successfully sued to block her own constituents from voting on the decision. Even though the new department carries the name Camden County, the force only has jurisdiction over the city — and the Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders, not the Camden City Council, has authority over it.
When the dust settled, the new Camden County Police was better funded and staffed by more officers, both younger and whiter, than the disbanded police department. They came out in force. Aggressive enforcement of minor infractions lurked beneath media-friendly optics of community policing. Use of force complaints skyrocketed. The situation reached its breaking point in the summer of 2014, after a series of police encounters inflamed the city, including the arrest of Xavier Ingraham, in which police broke Ingraham’s neck and left him paralyzed (predictably, the police contest the twenty-year-old’s account). Under pressure from the community and, especially, the local NAACP chapter, the Camden County Police instituted a now highly regarded de-escalation training program.
The situation settled. Excessive force complaints have nose-dived 95 percent since 2014. Crime dropped, too, and everyone — local media, national media, President Obama — attributed it to police practice, even though, as Rutgers-Camden professor Stephen Danley notes, the crime spike and decrease was mirrored in other New Jersey cities that also suffered through Christie’s austerity.
The economy also finally started to pick up. In October 2018, the unemployment rate had declined to 6.8 percent, the lowest since 1990 (although it did increase to 8 percent in subsequent months). The recovering job market has not translated, however, into rising living standards. As of July 2019, the Census Bureau estimates that 37 percent of the city still lives in poverty. But the continuing immiseration of Camden is beside the point for those controlling the city’s fate. From their perspective, the Camden model worked.
It worked for them personally. Police chief Scott Thompson, for example, rode his newfound celebrity to professional success and personal profit. From 2015 to 2019, he served as president of the Police Executive Research Forum, a powerful police professional association dedicated to “police professionalization.” In October 2019, he retired and became the executive director for global security for Holtec International, an energy company that counts George Norcross III among its board of directors and that, in 2014, received a $260 million tax break, the second-largest in the state’s history, to open a “Technology Center” in Camden.
The Camden model also worked for reasons beyond the transparent corruption of South Jersey’s venal elite. Camden is now thoroughly pacified and, as such, open for business. Violent crime, while still high by national standards, is in check. The city is stable enough to garner large capital investments. The community policing measures have won the police some legitimacy. Although the protests sweeping the nation have made their way to Camden, they have not been very large or disruptive. Instead, the police marched with protesters, leading local and international media to highlight Camden as proof that community policing can facilitate peaceful protest. No wonder that the Camden model is attracting so much attention.
No wonder that they’re doing it again.
Mass Supervision or Abolition?
The Camden model may well be the most dangerous idea circulating in liberal elite circles at the moment. Camden did not “abolish” or even “reimagine” policing. Camden reformed policing, which is to say it gave its cops more technology, training, and hires in the aftermath of a crisis. Minneapolis will likely do something similar, absent sustained popular pressure in support of a real alternative.
The Minneapolis case represents perhaps the first critical fight, but there are others and will be more. Decarceration will continue. The Trump administration’s law-and-order politics haven’t put a brake on the drop in state and federal prison populations. What’s more, the pandemic has made the epidemiological risks of incarceration plain, increasing the pace of decarceration and adoption of electronic monitoring or e-carceration. The pandemic is also opening up new opportunities for surveillance schemes in the name of public health, contact tracing, and potentially, a system of immunity passports. Add an unfolding depression and the austerity that is already straining fiscal budgets, and there is no going back. These developments will likely further accelerate the end of mass incarceration and hasten the recalibration of the administrative violence of state power around a new logic: mass supervision.
In this context, it does not seem alarmist to worry that the righteous calls to defund the police will be rolled into a larger set of austerity measures, that demands for structural change will be narrowed down to procedural reforms, that the Camden model will be generalized, and that mass supervision will become the fourth peculiar institution.
But there are also reasons for hope — and reasons to fight. The George Floyd rebellion is shaking the country to its core. The breakthrough of abolitionist thought is expanding our ideas of what’s possible — and doing so in ways that are aligned with the struggle to transcend capitalism. As Angela Davis recently declared, “abolitionist strategies are antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist, internationalist.” The challenge for us is to ensure that the horizons called forth by the rebellion and related demands to defund and disband the police aren’t overtaken by the Camden model and used to pacify us.
They may be doing it again, but there’s no guarantee it will work.
“It’s going to cause enormous confusion and uncertainty,” Hartle said. “ICE is clearly creating an incentive for institutions to reopen, regardless of whether or not the circumstances of the pandemic warrant it.”
AP LOS ANGELES TIMES
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/new-ice-guidelines-say-international-students-must-leave-us-if-classes-go-online
International students will be forced to leave the U.S. or transfer to another college if their schools offer classes entirely online this fall, under new guidelines issued Monday by federal immigration authorities.
The guidelines, issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, provide additional pressure for universities to reopen even amid growing concerns about the recent spread of COVID-19 among young adults. Colleges received the guidance the same day that some institutions, including Harvard University, announced that all instruction would be offered remotely.
President Trump has insisted that schools and colleges return to in-person instruction as soon as possible. Soon after the guidance was released, Trump repeated on Twitter that schools must reopen this fall, adding that Democrats wanted to keep schools closed “for political reasons, not for health reasons.”
“They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” Trump wrote.
Under the updated rules, international students must take at least some of their classes in person. New visas will not be issued to students at schools or programs that are entirely online. And even at colleges offering a mix of in-person and online courses this fall, international students will be barred from taking all their classes online.
It creates an urgent dilemma for thousands of international students who became stranded in the U.S. last spring after the coronavirus forced their schools to move online. Those attending schools that are staying online must “depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction,” according to the guidance.
The American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, said the guidelines are “horrifying” and will result in confusion as schools look for ways to reopen safely.
Of particular concern is a stipulation saying students won’t be exempt from the rules even if an outbreak forces their schools online during the fall term. It’s unclear what would happen if a student ended up in that scenario but faced travel restrictions from their home country, said Terry Hartle, the council’s senior vice president.
“It’s going to cause enormous confusion and uncertainty,” Hartle said. “ICE is clearly creating an incentive for institutions to reopen, regardless of whether or not the circumstances of the pandemic warrant it.”
The international education group NAFSA blasted the rules and said schools should be given the authority to make decisions that are right for their own campuses. It said the guidance “is harmful to international students and puts their health and well-being and that of the entire higher education community at risk.”
Nearly 400,000 foreigners received student visas in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, down more than 40% from four years earlier. School administrations partly blame visa processing delay.
Colleges across the U.S. were already expecting sharp decreases in international enrollment this fall, but losing all international students could be disastrous for some. Many depend on tuition revenue from international students, who typically pay higher tuition rates. Last year, universities in the U.S. attracted nearly 1.1 million students from abroad.
Trump’s critics were quick to attack the new guidelines. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said the “cruelty of this White House knows no bounds.”
“Foreign students are being threatened with a choice: risk your life going to class in-person or get deported,” Sanders said in a tweet. “We must stand up to Trump’s bigotry. We must keep all our students safe.”
Dozens of colleges have said they plan to offer at least some classes in person this fall, but some say it’s too risky. USC last week reversed course on a plan to bring students to campus, saying classes will be hosted primarily or exclusively online. Harvard on Monday said it will invite first-year students to live on campus, but classes will stay online.
Immigration authorities suspended certain requirements for international students early in the pandemic, but colleges were awaiting guidance on what would happen this fall. ICE notified schools of the changes Monday and said a formal rule would be forthcoming.
The announcement was the Trump administration’s latest pandemic-related strike against legal immigration. Last month, authorities extended a ban on new green cards to many people outside the United States and expanded the freeze to include many on temporary work permits, including at high-tech companies, multinational corporations and seasonal employers.
The administration has long sought deep cuts to legal immigration, but the goal was elusive before the coronavirus.
There is no rosy way to view tens of thousands of dead Americans—especially in contrast with other nations that have managed to control the outbreak. In the words of one New Zealand health expert, “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up.”
Sonali Kolhatkar
https://portside.org/2020-07-07/merits-medicare-all-have-been-proven-pandemic
A pandemic is not the time to be having discussions about how to design a national health care system. The fact that the United States, which has 4 percent of the world’s population, leads the world with 25 percent of all coronavirus infections, indicates at a glance that something about our nation’s health care is irredeemably broken. In just a few months, more than 40 million Americans became unemployed in a country where a majority are expected to obtain health care through employer-provided insurance. Even the New York Times has pointed out that, “Nothing illuminates the problems with an employer-based health care system quite like massive unemployment in the middle of a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease outbreak.”
The Times has hardly been a champion of the nationalized health care system that progressive activists have demanded for years. The unimaginably large (and growing) death toll from COVID-19 should not be, as the paper’s editorial board member Jeneen Interlandi says, “an opportunity to look at health care reform with fresh eyes—and to maybe, finally, rebuild the nation’s health care system in a way that works for all Americans.” We, as a nation, should have figured this out a long time ago.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, pointed out at a recent Senate hearing, left unchecked the coronavirus could spread to 100,000 people per day. Republican Senator Rand Paul was not happy with this grim assessment, instead demanding that the scientist instead offer up “more optimism” to the American people about the disease. But that is precisely how opponents of a single-payer health care system have painted our deeply flawed employer-based system for many years—with a veneer of positivity that was never matched by reality.
As FiveThirtyEight points out in examining pre-pandemic surveys of health care, “Americans tend to have a much rosier view of the health care they personally receive than the health care system in general or the cost of health care.” This should come as no surprise given the massive amount of propaganda that health insurers have paid for to convince people that the current system is good enough. However, no amount of optimism is going to help us survive the current COVID-19 crisis. There is no rosy way to view tens of thousands of dead Americans—especially in contrast with other nations that have managed to control the outbreak. In the words of one New Zealand health expert, “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up.”
In Arizona, one of the new hotspots of the disease, health care providers have taken to rationing health care—in a manner reminiscent of many developing nations or socialist regimes that the United States has criticized in the past. One report explained that Arizona’s rationing plan, “would see patients rated on a scoring system to determine who should be prioritized based on the severity of their condition.” In Houston, Texas, which is considered another COVID-19 epicenter, pediatricians are now taking on adult patients as hospital beds fill up to capacity.
There is little to no information about how the nation’s uninsured are expected to pay for COVID-19 treatments if they are hospitalized. Contrast that with a nation like the UK where there’s no question about any other entity besides the National Health Service (NHS) picking up the tab for any and all patients. During the current crisis, the UK government has even recruited all private hospitals to bolster the NHS’s capacity, forcing them to place lives over profits. Imagine the United States ever taking such a step to prioritize the health care of Americans!
The Wall Street Journal, aghast that a free-market system of the type that it has relentlessly promoted has not worked in the realm of health care, declared in an op-ed, “Rationing Care Is a Surrender to Death.” But op-ed writer Allen C. Guelzo, a fellow of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, had no answers beyond standard capitalism pablum saying vaguely that we need to, “Improvise, innovate, imagine.”
It’s not just our health care in the form of treatments and hospitalizations that is showing itself to be wholly inadequate in the face of a pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry, which has also preyed upon Americans for far too long, is charging outrageous prices for drugs that taxpayers paid to help them develop. Amidst the worst medical crisis in modern history, the drug manufacturer Gilead has set the price for remdesivir—a drug that has shown modest success in COVID-19 treatment—at a whopping $3,120 per patient. Infuriatingly, that same company, which made good use of U.S. tax dollars in its research and development, is licensing the drug to generic manufacturers outside the U.S. to produce remdesivir at a substantially lower cost to non-American patients.
The shocking extent of the coronavirus crisis in the United States is explained in large part by a libertarian economic approach. It is the same sort of approach that successive administrations have taken in addressing our health care needs and can be boiled down to the adage, “survival of the fittest.” Rather than imposing rules and regulations to protect Americans through a nationalized health care system and an aggressive cost-control mechanism for lifesaving drugs, Americans have been left at the mercy of their employers, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and private hospitals. Similarly, instead of taking a strong federal approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus as other nations have successfully done, the Trump administration has washed its hands of any responsibility for the virus’ spread. An absence of strong federal guidelines on how people need to protect themselves has resulted in a culture war of comical proportions where Fox News-fed Republicans claim that rules requiring protective face masks are akin to “practicing the devil’s laws.”
Such hyperbolic language is reminiscent of the hysteria over so-called “death panels” in the early years of the Obama administration. That phrase was used to cast the most modest of government regulations of our health care system as a scenario where dispassionate committees of technocrats would decide who gets to live or die. Never mind that such a description was a more apt one for our existing system of care where corporate executives decide which treatments to pay for and which to forego.
Just as progressives were right more than a decade ago that a single-payer or Medicare for All system was best poised to meet our health care needs, that same rallying cry for such a universal and free health care plan remains more relevant and appropriate than ever. Even the New York Times agrees, admitting perhaps a bit reluctantly that, “A single-payer system in which one entity (usually the federal government) covers every citizen regardless of age or employment status, could work.” But is it too late?
Had the nation gone down a different path in 2008 or anytime in the decade following it, we would have been better poised to take on the current crisis. There is little comfort to be had in being right on the issue of health care under our current grim circumstances.
Beijing has trumpeted plans to reduce reliance on the sooty fuel but data shows consumption and production are trending up not down
By TIM DAISS
JULY 8, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/china-reverts-to-its-dirty-coal-ways/
Coal-fired power plants that belch pollution and contribute to global warming were supposed to be phased out in a more environmentally sensitive China.
In recent years, Chinese officials have spun and won applause for new clean environment narratives at various climate change and other environmental events and fora. But the facts on the ground increasingly belie those clean energy ambitions and claims.
In June, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) said the country plans to boost domestic oil production this year by 1% to 3.85 million barrels per day (bpd). The NEA also outlined plans to ramp up natural gas production, the cleanest burning fossil fuel, by 4.3% year on year to 181 billion cubic meters (bcm).
Pumped up crude oil output is already underway, expanding by 1.3% year on year in May at 16.46 million tons, according to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data.
China’s natural gas production increased even more in May, up a whopping 12.7% year on year, as the country’s economy swung back into gear after a Covid-19 lockdown that crushed energy demand in the first quarter.
The NEA plan also aims to increase renewable energy, including hydro, solar, wind, ethanol, and coal-to-liquids, as a larger percentage of the country’s energy mix and to offset reliance on mostly imported hydrocarbons.The NEA plans 900 gigawatts (GW) of new installed non-fossil fuel power generation capacity in 2020, lowering the share of coal in the national energy mix to 57.5% from 57.7% in 2019, a small but noteworthy reduction.
China will continue to replace coal-fired power plants with electricity-based heating to curb coal consumption, the NEA said. It will also accelerate the construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipelines and storage facilities.
But this is where central plans and statistical reality diverge.
While China – the world’s largest coal producer and consumer – is officially calling for a reduction in its reliance on the polluting fuel, its statistical consumption patterns tell a different story.
Coal used by coastal power plants at five major Chinese utilities hit 488,800 tons during the last week of March, more than double from a record low seen on February 10, according to China Coal Transport & Distribution Association (CCTDA).
Though China’s coal uptick was partly in response to a spike in electricity demand as factories restarted after lockdown measures ended in mid-March, coal imports in April surged 35% to 34.42 million tons from a year earlier.
That demand, which slipped slightly year on year in May, is projected to rise the rest of the year at power plants and among industrial users as the economy stirs back to life.
There are central plans to use much more. China plans to add coal storage facilities across its power plants in 2020 to ensure stockpiles at or above 15 days’ normal supply for coal-driven power plants.Despite the green rhetoric, China’s coal consumption in 2019 was up not down by 1% over the previous year, driven by stronger energy demand. That marked the third consecutive annual rise in coal use.
The government is also permitting more domestic coal production, with as much as 141 million tons worth greenlighted from January to June of 2019, an increase of 2.6% year on year, according to government data. In 2018, only 25 million tons of domestic production was approved.
Analysts now expect China will not only boost coal production and build more coal-fired plants, but will also ease pressure on local governments to shut older and inefficient coal mines.
The boost in coal production comes as the government struggles to meet energy demand and as it prepares for promulgation of its next Five-Year Plan, which will provide guidance for policy and industrial development from 2021-2025.
China, the world’s largest greenhouse (GHG) emitter due to its massive coal consumption, accounts for a whopping 27% of GHG emissions while representing only 18% of the global population.
China’s increased coal consumption, production and power development, critics say, is inconsistent with Paris Climate Accord goals, under which non-OECD Asia’s coal power generation needs to be reduced by at least 63% by 2030 and then totally phased out by 2037.
Given the reality that most coal-fired power plants have a lifetime of around 50 years, the fact that China is building new ones will necessarily put its stated climate change and GHG reduction agendas in jeopardy.
Simply put, China will remain reluctant to phase-out capex intensive coal-fuelled plants as long as it is faced with ever-rising energy demand and the cost of replacing coal with gas-fueled power plants remains more expensive.Jennifer Song, an analyst with Morningstar, a global financial services firm, told media two weeks ago “we expect coal to remain the primary source for [power production] baseload dispatch, given China’s cheap and plentiful coal reserves.”
“Coal-fired generation’s reliability and large-scale make it well suited to meet the country’s power needs,” she added.
China’s renewed, if not stealthy, coal playbook may come as a surprise to many given the ongoing supply overhang in global LNG markets, where the super-cooled fuel’s prices are now near historic lows.
Spot prices for the fuel in Asia, home to nearly two-thirds of global LNG demand, have plunged to $2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), below the cost of most producers’ breakeven points.
That’s led, in turn, to a recent surge of canceled and redirected cargoes. The average LNG price for August delivery to northeast Asia is estimated at between $2.15-$2.30/MMBtu, compared to the July delivery assessment of $2.10/MMBtu and an August estimation of around $2.20-2.30/MMBtu.
But while China’s energy demand is still growing, even with global economic headwinds and a damaging trade war with the US, it lacks the LNG infrastructure to take full advantage of LNG market conditions and reduce its coal dependence.
To be sure, China is not alone to blame for the rise in coal’s usage. In 2018, at the height of climate change concerns, global coal demand rebounded and grew 1.4% due to increased consumption in Asia, where the fuel’s overall usage increased by 2.5%.
Some of the region’s largest coal users continue to rely on dirty hydrocarbons, mostly for their power sectors but also for industrial usage including steel production. Other coal addicts include India, though its coal usage slipped marginally last year, as well as Asian economic tigers Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan.
By Pasqualina Curcio on July 6, 2020
https://www.resumen-english.org/2020/07/the-impact-of-the-economic-war-on-venezuela/
It would be impossible to count each and every one of the ways in which the war on Venezuela declared by imperialism has harmed the country. The aggressions that we, the Venezuelans, have experienced since 1999 have been not only economic; they have been psychological as well. There is no way to measure the consequences of the hate planted by the anti-democratic opposition, with its anti-socialist propaganda; it has extended to the point of burning people alive for being Chavistas. The outrage felt by the Venezuelan people when they see those who have sold out their native land while calling themselves Venezuelan is also immeasurable.
Having said all that, but focusing on the economic effects, we have brought up to date the calculations made in March 2019. Up to that point the economic war had caused losses that totaled $125,000,000,000. (125 billion dollars.) We have calculated the corresponding damages for the year 2019 as a total of $68,000,000,000. (68 billion dollars.) Thus, the total economic losses between 2016 and 2019 total $194,000,000,000. For Venezuelans, these 194 billion dollars is equivalent to approximately 16 months of national production. With this money we would have been able to pay our entire foreign debt, which is 110 billion dollars, according to the Central Bank of Venezuela. Or we might have had resources sufficient to import enough food and medicine for 45 years.
The break-down of these losses is as follows: 25 billion dollars corresponds to the money and material goods that have been looted from us, while 169 billion dollars represents what we have been unable to produce from 2016 to 2019 as a result of the attack on Petróleos de Venezuela SA (64 billion dollars) and of the attack on the Venezuelan bolivar (105 billion dollars.) John Bolton confessed in January of 2019 that, “We froze all the assets in U.S. territory of the state enterprise Petróleos de Venezuela SA (Citgo). Today’s measure totals $7 billion in assets blocked at this time. Plus, over $11 billion lost in export proceeds over the next year,”
According to the Ministry of Foreign Relations, the U.S. and its allies have looted 25 billion dollars from us. They disguise this as “sanctions” while others elegantly call it unilateral coercive measures, but it is nothing more than a barefaced daylight robbery and an act of piracy. About 5,400 million dollars are held in 50 banks, including the 31 tons of gold that the Bank of England has retained. The assets and dividends of Citgo, amounting to 18 billion dollars, are also included.
They have not only robbed us but, in addition, in January 2019, the U.S. State Department announced that they would turn control of the assets, property, and goods in bank accounts belonging to the Venezuelan government over to Guaidó and making him responsible for the administration of these resources. We would like to know just how many of these dollars have been spent to protect the people of Venezuela in these times of quarantine? What is very clear to us is that 200 million of those dollars were allocated for a contract with SilverCorp whose objective was to pay mercenaries to kill Venezuelans.
With regard to the gold held by the Bank of England, we must say that the bank is required to return it to its owner immediately upon request. Now it seems, according to the English, that the owner is Guaidó, who they say is the “interim president” of Venezuela. This is such a crude robbery that no one in their right senses would believe anything so absurd. The whole world knows that it is not Guaidó who is seated in the UN General Assembly, nor in the UN Human Rights Council, nor in the UN Security Council, nor in the meetings of OPEC. Obviously he is not seated in the presidential palace of Miraflores either, nor does he give orders to the National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela.
Is it Guaidó who is confronting COVID-19 in Venezuela and coordinating medical aid and protocols with the world Health Organization?
William Brownfield, ex-ambassador of the U.S. in Venezuela, admitted, “If we are going to sanction PDVSA, this will have an impact on the entire people, on the ordinary citizen. The counter-argument is that the people suffer so much from the lack of food, safety, medicines, public health, that at this moment perhaps the greatest resolution would be to accelerate the collapse even if it produces a period of suffering of months or perhaps years.”
The attack on Petroleos de Venezuela is not being done casually; it is a premeditated and precisely aimed action. Anything that affects the petroleum industry will have repercussions not only in the industry itself, but chiefly on the national economy and thus on the Venezuelan people.
The petroleum industry generates 95% of the hard currency that enters Venezuela as a result of exports. The decrease of these exports, whether due to a fall in the levels of petroleum production or by a decrease in petroleum prices, affects the influx of hard currency, and thus the imports of supplies, repair parts, machinery for national production. Petroleos de Venezuela is the catalyst for our domestic production.
The price of petroleum fell for 4 consecutive years for the first time in history, for a 65% decrease. In addition, the commercial and financial blockade against Petroleos de Venezuela, the difficulty or impossibility of getting supplies and repair parts, and the financial obstacles, among other reasons, have had an effect on petroleum production, which has decreased by 64%. – going from 2.8 million barrels a day in 2013 to one million in 2019. This has resulted in a 78% fall in petroleum exports, which went from 85 billion dollars annually in 2013 to 19 billion dollars in 2019.
Republican Virginia State Senator Richard Black admitted, referring to Venezuela,
“We demonetized their currency and, through the international banking system, we made the Venezuelan currency worthless and then we go and say: ‘Look how bad this government is, your currency is worthless.’ Well, it wasn’t them; it was us who made their currency useless,” (Sputnik 09-12-2019).
The attack on the Venezuelan bolivar currency, a main weapon of the economic war, not only induced hyperinflation and with this the loss of the buying power of the working class, it also shrunk national production. As wage earners see their buying power diminish due to rapid and disproportionate increase in prices, this also decreases demand for goods and causes a decrease in production by sellers.
Since 2013, imperialism has caused a criminal depreciation of the Venezuelan bolivar currency by 241,657 million percent, which has given rise to an increase in prices by 11,500 million percent from that year to this.
Each person can come to their own conclusions about what these economic losses of 194 billion dollars mean in terms of anguish, outrage, quality of life and lives of Venezuelans. Draw your own conclusions as well about the immeasurable level of consciousness and thus of resistance shown by the Venezuelan people who have confronted the enemies of their country with high morale and with the best of strategies; the union between civilians and the military.
