Over 200 medical journals warn climate crisis is the “greatest threat to public health”
Rebecca Falconer
Global warming is affecting people’s health and officials need to urgently address the climate crisis now as it can’t wait until the COVID-19 pandemic is over, editors of over 230 medical journals warned Sunday evening.
Why it matters: This is the first time so many publications have come together to issue such a joint statement to world leaders, underscoring the severity of the situation — with the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal among those issuing the warning.
Ahead of this November’s UN general assembly and the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, with the journals warn: “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C and to restore nature.”
Threat level: “Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world,” states the editorial, also run in the New England Journal of Medicine, the International Nursing Review, the Chinese Science Bulletin and Brazil’s Revista de Saude Publica.
“Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming could reach 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial levels by 2030.
Of note: World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement ahead of the editorial’s publication that the “risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”
“We will end the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s no vaccine for the climate crisis,” Tedros added.
State of play: The editorial reports that heat-related mortality among people older than 65 has risen by over 50% in the past 20 years.
Global warming has also impacted on farming production, “hampering efforts to reduce under-nutrition,” the journal editors-in-chief write.
“Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.”
The bottom line: “The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse,” the editorial warns.
‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution
Hurricane hit heavily industrialized region hard shortly after it was revealed a nearby steel plant pumped sulphur gas in atmosphere for six years
Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.
As Myrtle Felton’s roof took flight from her home, with Hurricane Ida pounding the walls, she thought about the steel plant next door.
Here in St James parish, in the heart of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” – a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America and highest risk rates of cancer – Ida hit hard.
On Felton’s small street in the small town of Romeville, downed trees crushed trailer homes. A felled electrical pylon still blocks entry four days after the hurricane passed. Many people have no generators, and there is no power. The tarmac is lined with electrical cables.
In an adjacent field, less than a mile away, the hulking Nucor steel plant casts an imposing shadow over the landscape. Just a few months ago it was revealed that the plant had been quietly pumping cancer-causing sulphuric acid mist and hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere for six years without a permit, contributing to an already dangerous cocktail of emissions.
The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian
Felton, 67, had always attributed the rotten-smelling air to the plant, along with the black, sticky speckles on her car and the corrosion on her home. But the recent revelations left her incredulous.
As Ida blew away her already weakened metal roof, leaving brown water seeping in through the seams of her ceiling, she thought to herself: “Well, it needed replacing anyway.”
Black women like Myrtle Felton have been on the frontlines of the climate justice fight in south Louisiana for years. And now many of them find themselves bearing the brunt of a natural disaster the intensity of which is linked to the climate crisis. Down here, it’s a battle on many fronts.
“I’m in the middle of everything by myself,” said Felton. “Nobody comes, nobody calls. Nobody do anything. Whatever you get, you get it on your own.”
“I’m so frustrated I can hardly talk,” Felton said.
Her neighbour, Barbara Washington, a 70-year-old local environmental campaigner put it bluntly: “Sure, give me my water, give me some Gatorade, but you’re already poisoning us.”
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Nucor said the corporation was offering two food handouts, one on Friday and one next Wednesday and that it was “actively donating supplies and support to help the community”.
The company did not respond to questions over its plant’s emissions or if the facility sustained damage during the storm.
St James parish has yet to provide any residents in Romeville with tarps, Felton and Washington said, an account confirmed by local councilman Mason Bland, who said he had been distributing water but was waiting for federal assistance for tarps.
Bland, the councilman for St James’ district four, estimated that 95% of residents in his jurisdiction had sustained serious damage.
Advocates working with community members in St James pointed to even longer-term concerns. District four of the parish, populated with 64% Black residents and with a child poverty rate of 47%, was marked in a controversial 2014 local land plan as a “residential/future industrial” zone.
The designation, also given to the parish’s fifth district, which is majority Black as well, gives industry greater planning flexibility to expand and, advocates argue, signals the local government’s intent to push the residents out as industry proliferates.
“I worry about elected officials exploiting the disaster to further reduce the populations,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She argued that the lack of disaster resources in the district was indicative of the parish’s longer-term disinvestment.
“The way it’s characterized is that those are dying districts, ignoring the active role that the parish plays in killing them,” Rolfes said.
Washington, who traces her lineage in Romeville back to emancipation, charted the area’s population decline over decades. Gas stations, restaurants, a post office and a school all have left over the years, along with many younger residents who have uprooted to other locations.
“It’s almost like a ghost town now,” she said, the trauma of the storm still obvious as she spoke. Her home too sustained major damage, and she was living without power until Thursday when the Bucket Brigade provided her with a generator.
Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.
She prayed as the storm hit: “If everything else is gone, just spare our lives,” she remembered saying.
Now, the lack of these basic local resources will make recovering from Ida even harder. The drive for gas is longer. The quest for food and water more arduous.
Some of the trailer homes in Romeville appear damaged beyond repair, with many people evacuating and concerns some may not return.
Bland, the councilman, declined to comment on allegations that the parish is trying to force residents out in favor of industry.
“I can’t tie the two together right,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s not something I’m willing to make a statement on.”
But Felton and Washington made clear Ida’s destruction only strengthened their resolve to stay put.
“You come here and try to run us out,” Washington said. “But we’ve been here for generations. There’s a legacy. I was born and raised here. I could move, but I’m still here for the fight, because someone has to do it.”
Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest
Kathy Gannon
Afghanistan Women Fighting On 1-6
Women gather to demand their rights under the Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades. (AP Photo/Kathy Gannon)
Women gather to demand their rights under the Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades. (AP Photo/Kathy Gannon)
A woman joins a group to demand their rights under the Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades. (AP Photo/Kathy Gannon)
Farhat Popalzai, a Women’s rights activist speaks during an interview with The Associated press after a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades. (AP Photo/Kathy Gannon)
Women gather to demand their rights under the Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021. The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades. (AP Photo/Kathy Gannon)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers.
Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.
Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. The insurgent group must now govern a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.
The women’s march — the second in as many days in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died fighting the Taliban before marching on to the presidential palace.
“We are here to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” said 20-year-old protester Maryam Naiby. “I love my country. I will always be here.”
As the protesters’ shouts grew louder, several Taliban officials waded into the crowd to ask what they wanted to say.
Flanked by fellow demonstrators, Sudaba Kabiri, a 24-year-old university student, told her Taliban interlocutor that Islam’s Prophet gave women rights and they wanted theirs. The Taliban official promised women would be given their rights but the women, all in their early 20s, were skeptical.
As the demonstrators reached the presidential palace, a dozen Taliban special forces ran into the crowd, firing in the air and sending demonstrators fleeing. Kabiri, who spoke to The Associated Press, said they also fired tear gas.
The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a roll back of rights gained over the last two decades.
For much of the past two weeks, Taliban officials have been holding meetings among themselves, amid reports of differences among them emerging. Early on Saturday, neighboring Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Gen. Faiez Hameed made a surprise visit to Kabul. It wasn’t immediately clear what he had to say to the Taliban leadership but the Pakistani intelligence service has a strong influence on the Taliban.
The Taliban leadership had its headquarters in Pakistan and were often said to be in direct contact with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Although Pakistan routinely denied providing the Taliban military aid, the accusation was often made by the Afghan government and Washington.
Faiez’ visit comes as the world waits to see what kind of government the Taliban will eventually announce, seeking one that is inclusive and ensures protection of women’s rights and the country’s minorities.
The Taliban have promised a broad-based government and have held talks with former president Hamid Karzai and the former government’s negotiation chief Abdullah Abdullah. But the makeup of the new government is uncertain and it was unclear whether hard-line ideologues among the Taliban will win the day — and whether the rollbacks feared by the demonstrating women will occur.
Taliban members whitewashed murals Saturday that promoted health care, warned of the dangers of HIV and even paid homage to some of Afghanistan’s iconic foreign contributors, like anthropologist Nancy Dupree, who singlehandedly chronicled Afghanistan’s rich cultural legacy. It was a worrying sign of attempts to erase reminders of the past 20 years.
The murals were replaced with slogans congratulating Afghans on their victory.
A Taliban cultural commission spokesman, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, tweeted that the murals were painted over “because they are against our values. They were spoiling the minds of the mujahedeen and instead we wrote slogans that will be useful to everyone.”
Meanwhile, the young women demonstrators said they have had to defy worried families to press ahead with their protests, even sneaking out of their homes to take their demands for equal rights to the new rulers.
Farhat Popalzai, another 24-year-old university student, said she wanted to be the voice of Afghanistan’s voiceless women, those too afraid to come out on the street.
“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” she said. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”
Popalzai and her fellow demonstrators are too young to remember the Taliban rule that ended in 2001 with the U.S.-led invasion. The say their fear is based on the stories they have heard of women not being allowed to go to school and work.
Naiby, the 20-year-old, has already operated a women’s organization and is a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Paralympics. She reflected on the tens of thousands of Afghans who rushed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban overran the capital on Aug. 15.
“They were afraid,” but for her she said, the fight is in Afghanistan.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party
Lee Moran
MSNBC’s Joy Reid dedicated her “Absolute Worst” segment on Friday to explaining why the GOP is anything but the pro-life party, despite its claims.
“The ReidOut” anchor referenced Texas’ extreme new anti-abortion law, Republican opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates, GOP voter resistance to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and the party’s anti-environment policies to make her point.
“You can’t call yourself a pro-life party if your policy goals are to allow the maximum number of people to die of COVID, including children, by banning mask mandates in businesses and schools and raising doubts about vaccines,” she said.
“You can’t call yourself the pro-life, pro-family party if your policy goals are to put bounties on pregnant women and to force teenage girls to give birth after getting pregnant as a result of incest and rape,” Reid added.
“The Republican Party is a lot of things; anti-democracy, anti-voting, anti-history, anti-facts, deeply opposed to anti-racism. What they are not is pro-life,” she concluded, saying it’s now “loudly and proudly the pro-death party.”
Amid criticism, one veterans’ organization calls Biden administration ‘least culpable’ on Afghanistan
Tim O’Donnell, Contributing Writer
VoteVets.org Alex Wong/Getty Images
Many veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are frustrated with the execution of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan,Politico reports. For some, it has reportedly led to an increase in PTSD symptoms.
“I haven’t talked to anybody who isn’t angry or disappointed in how this was carried out,” Tom Porter, the executive vice president of government affairs with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (which consists of more than 425,000 members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan), told Politico. “Nobody thinks there was a plan.”
But Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran and the chair of the Democrat-aligned advocacy group VoteVets, thinks Biden doesn’t deserve the brunt of the criticism about the U.S. departure. “Let’s investigate,” he told Politico. “Right, let’s talk about the Trump deal with the Taliban that was only a deal between the United States and not a deal with the Afghan government. If we want to do investigations on Afghanistan, there’s 19 years of administrations to look at, and there’s about three months of [the Biden] administration. So let’s open this thing up and let’s talk about it, because the person who is least culpable is this administration.” Read more at Politico.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations into five states—Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—that are banning local school districts from imposing mask mandates. They are relying on two federal laws: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with a disability from discrimination and guarantees them a right to a free education, and Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by public education systems. The states could be found in violation of federal law if the investigation finds that “students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education.”
The penalties include loss of federal funding—or the school can simply agree to change its policies, which in this case would be choosing life by requiring masking and vaccination for school employees.
These students with heightened risk of illness include my 5-year-old daughter Nusayba, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who is immuno-suppressed due to her liver transplant. I recently wrote about how we were desperately trying to get her into virtual school, along with her brother, Ibrahim, who just turned 7. Thankfully, they were both admitted, and now I’m at home doing tech support until 3:30 p.m., but at least I know they are safe.
Meanwhile, there’s already been one COVID case on the second day of school. And their school is far from the worst of it. Thanks to the GOP’s multi-pronged and coordinated attack on masks, social distancing, and vaccines at schools, Delta is still thriving and there have been massive outbreaks at schools across the country.
A medical professional oversees as a fifth-grader gives himself a rapid COVID-19 test on the first day of school at Montara Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
This isn’t a “both sides” problem. Of the 10 states with the most COVID-19 cases per capita, as of Wednesday, nine of them were led by Republican governors—surprise!—and voted for Trump in 2020, as The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, 16 Democratic states have statewide mask requirements for schools. Tennessee, one of the five states being sued, just set a new record for COVID hospitalizations, and previously moved to cut off all vaccine outreach to students and young adults.
Now, thousands of its school-aged kids have COVID-19 with no end in sight. Some school districts in the United States are even leaving it up to parents to decide if they will quarantine their exposed child or send the child to school to spread the disease to other unvaccinated children.
However, this doesn’t stop the right-wing hate machine. Onward they persist with their nihilistic, counter-majoritarian death march.
Republicans, such as those in Texas, believe they have the freedom to infect their kid and your kids with coronavirus, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to control their own bodies. Other conservative activists believe “freedom” means harassing and threatening school boards, intimidating health care workers, and spreading the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which is now a domestic terror threat. Among other things, some suggest that anyone who believes in vaccines and mask mandates in schools is actually a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” That’s what Melissa, an alleged nurse from Lee County, Florida, recently said at a school-board meeting where she said that Christians around America will “take them all out,” referring to anyone who opposed her pro-death initiatives to spread COVID-19.
People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate. Alexandra Wimley/AP
You’d think she’s a kooky outlier, a walking punchline. But she’s an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in this death movement that is holding our children’s safety hostage to advance their culture war. They aren’t the “American Taliban” or “enforcing Sharia,” and we should stop using Islam and Muslims as the benchmark for extremism. They are agents of White Christian Supremacy hellbent on ensuring minority rule for white men by any violent means necessary.
Our kids are simply the bait and collateral damage.
Steve Lynch, a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, is an anti-masker encouraging violence against school boards unwilling to submit to his anti-masking belligerence. On Aug. 29, he said, “You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men… They can leave or be removed.”
In Buncombe County, North Carolina, anti-maskers tried to “overthrow” the school board, encouraged in part by Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who fought a tree and lost, and continued rehabilitating the imprisoned violent insurrectionists of Jan. 6 at a recent rally by referring to them as “political hostages.” He said he’s working on “busting them out,” and he also seemed to call for another riot, despite this past one effectively killing five people, including a police officer, and being followed by law-enforcement suicides. He urged the Macon County Republicans to “defend their children” from harmful vaccines.
One of my lovely fans emailed me this week to warn me that violence will “spill out into the streets” and “there [are] 100 million Americans waiting for the day. I don’t foresee any Army coming to the rescue of the voices such as yourself who spin a web of lies and hateful rhetoric.”
He used his full name and email address. There’s no need to hide in the shadows and wear the hoods when your elected officials and your God-King, Trump, openly incite potential violence and criminality.
A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty
They are deliberately using threats of violence to terrorize the majority and have us cede ground. It seems to be working, as school-board members are stepping down across the country, unwilling to tolerate the “toxic and impossible” environment.
We’re dealing with a potential criminal element, and might need to flex with more than the Education Department and broad vaccine mandates to save our kids. I asked former career federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner if the Department of Justice could step in with a criminal investigation if there’s evidence that these GOP-led state governments are actually harming children.
“I happen to believe that, because education is primarily a local issue, that local and state prosecutorial authorities should be evaluating whether the state governors and governments are recklessly and criminally endangering our children,” Kirschner told me, holding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a prime example.”
He believes DeSantis’ mask bans in Florida school districts might give prosecutors enough evidence to initiate a criminal investigation. He cited the recent Florida judge who overturned the recent mask ban and sided with parents whose lawsuit alleges, in part, that the policy violates the state constitution that requires providing a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system” of public schools.
“I cannot understand why our prosecutorial authorities—federal, state, and local—seem to have concluded that we shouldn’t try to hold elected politicians accountable for killing the citizenry,” Kirschner added.
It is still possible that the Department of Education is introducing the carrot before the Department of Justice unleashes the stick. From my eyes, these GOP leaders are helping to actively kill people and harm children with their pro-death policies. That should immediately warrant criminal investigations and liability for causing avoidable COVID deaths.
The rest of us, the majority, need to stand our ground against this belligerent minority for the sake of our children’s safety and public health.
We can’t “both sides” or seek a bipartisan solution with a pro-death movement. Enough.
15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days
Mary Papenfuss
A 30-year teaching veteran was one of 15 Miami-Dade County public school staff members who died of COVID-19 in just 10 days as Florida continues to reel amid the continuing, overwhelming toll of an unfettered pandemic.
“It’s a tremendous loss,” said a school official, referring to the death of longtime teacher Abe Coleman, 55, earlier this week.
“The number of lives that he impacted are countless. So many young men had the benefit of him intervening in their lives and pointing them in the right direction,” Marcus Bright, who works with a local education program 5000 Role Models of Excellence, told NBC-6 TV.
Coleman taught at Holmes Elementary School in Miami’s Liberty City area, which is a primarily Black neighborhood with 42% of the population living below the poverty line.
Local education officials haven’t released the identities of the other teachers or staff members.
“The loss of any of our employees is one that is always profoundly felt as every member of this organization is considered a part of Miami-Dade County Public Schools family,” the district said in a statement. “We extend our hearts and prayers to the loved ones of those whose lives have recently been lost.”
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has dismissed the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations and signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools, issued no comment on the astounding death rate in the county schools system.
The state Health Department was sued earlier this week by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.
The suit argues that the DeSantis administration is deliberately manipulating COVID-19 data to make it appear the problem was not as dire as it actually is.
“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said in a statement after the suit was filed.
“That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”
Madison Cawthorn: behold the rotten fruit of extreme Republican gerrymandering
David Daley
Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The congressman from North Carolina brandished a gun as he addressed a Macon county Republican event last weekend. “We all need to be storing up some ammunition,” Madison Cawthorn warned the crowd, as he embraced the big lie about the 2020 presidential race and insisted that “we all know it was a stolen election”.
Then, chillingly, Cawthorn conjured a second civil war being fought over his fraudulent claims. “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place,” Cawthorn said, “and that’s bloodshed … As much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.”
We awaken every day to pillars of liberal democracy torn down, wrecked norms and ruined institutions, fresh assaults on foundational freedoms from state legislatures and runaway courts, political leaders bathed in the hateful stew of rightwing media and racing to bend a knee before an authoritarian leader who himself bowed before dictators and cared so little for his voters that he offered them bleach during a pandemic.
The roots of this fearful moment run deep: a constitutional system unprepared for a political party willing to play constitutional hardball; a Democratic party that neglected local elections while Republicans invested in a decades-long effort to capture state legislatures and the courts; winner-takes-all districts that break toward extremes under severe polarization; a nation that has never been willing to embrace multiracial democracy.
But there’s a simpler reason that Cawthorn can spew such an abhorrent incitement to violence. His extremism was created intentionally by aggressive partisan gerrymandering. Cawthorn and many of the other demagogues and conspiracy theorists who have hijacked the Republican party owe their seats to the noncompetitive districts Republicans drew themselves a decade ago. Without gerrymandering, Cawthorn would just be another loudmouth Twitter troll pumped full of Newsmax nuttiness. With it, he’s issuing a call to arms as a prominent member of an elite Washington club of 435.
The road to political power for Cawthorn, who has been accused of multiple instances of inappropriate sexual behavior and even lying about the car wreck that left him paralyzed, began not long after the 2010 elections. He has denied those allegations. That year, Republicans spent more than $1m on a dark-money, negative-ad driven effort to win control of North Carolina’s house and senate just in time to dominate redistricting. When they won, a determined Republican party focused on drawing a congressional map that would turn this moderate state inside-out – producing 10 reliable Republican seats and just three Democratic districts.
The key to the entire map? Asheville, the largest city in western North Carolina, an enclave of vegan restaurants and independent bookstores surrounded by conservative mountain towns. With Asheville as its core, the 11th district had long been a swing seat, see-sawing between a Republican from 2000 through 2004 and a Democrat during 2006, 2008 and 2010 as this area, like so many others, rallied behind the Iraq war and then shifted Democratic as the war and economy soured. Republicans needed to win the 11th to assure a 10-3 map. So they drew the district line straight through Asheville, neatly attaching half of the city to a larger number of rural, conservative towns, and diluting the Democratic vote across two districts they could never hope to win.
In a district like this, the Republican primary was now the only race that mattered; the Democratic incumbent saw the writing on the wall and promptly announced his retirement. A small-town businessman who had dabbled in meteorology, a local sandwich shop and real estate read the angry base of this new district perfectly. His name was Mark Meadows, and you can watch on YouTube the moment when he first tasted power. Meadows’s closest Republican competitor dissembled when a Tea Party audience asked about pursuing an investigation into Barack Obama’s citizenship. Meadows pounced with a quick, direct answer: “Yes.” As the crowd roared, Meadows gives a tiny smirk. “You know what?” he added. “We’ll send him back home to Kenya or wherever it is.”
When Meadows led an Obamacare rebellion that forced a government shutdown in October 2013, Karl Rove called the insurgent Republican members his redistricting strategy helped create a “suicide caucus”. The New Yorker took a look at the districts they represented, and discovered a kind of America in reverse – whiter, more rural, more conservative, at a time when demographic trends were headed the other direction. These districts became 2% whiter ahead of 2012. They were 75% white, on average, compared with 63% elsewhere. The Republican party engineered themselves a fantasia: Obama defeated Mitt Romney by four percentage points nationwide. But not in “suicide caucus” nation. There, Obama went down to a stunning 23-point defeat.
That’s what Cawthorn inherited when Meadows left Congress for a seat at Trump’s side as White House chief of staff: a district Republicans cannot lose, where red meat and outrage are all that matters, demographics and representativeness be damned. Cawthorn learned his lessons well. Generate outrage, generate attention, generate big dollars fundraising off the hate.
The census numbers released last month show a nation that continues on its path to diversity. But can a multiracial nation become a multiracial democracy? Not if we continue to redistrict in this toxic fashion. The connection between gerrymandering and polarization is a complicated one; they act as accelerants on each other. Yet there’s no denying this: Cawthorn and his ilk would not be in office without it. There is a huge difference between the kind of candidate who won this very seat a decade ago, and the two extremists who have held it for the last decade. And when we lose swing seats and bridge builders to those who urge Americans to stockpile weapons and ammunition, we have lost an important part of ourselves.
As the 2021 redistricting cycle gets underway, and the maps that will define our politics for the next 10 years are crafted in state capitals nationwide, Cawthorn’s dark vision hangs in the balance. If lawmakers continue to draw tilted maps that maximize the number of seats their party wins, at the cost of representative results in otherwise competitive states, they will continue to produce districts easily captured by ultra-radical zealots like Cawthorn. They will continue to incentivize elected officials to cater only to the militant base that drives party primaries. And we could break, once and for all, under the strain of this existential test.
David Daley is the author of the national bestseller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy
GOP Senate campaign heats up after report tying Budd to bankruptcy that hurt farmers
Will Wright
The race for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina heated up in recent days after a Washington Post story detailed how farmers lost millions of dollars in the bankruptcy of a company led in part by the family of Rep. Ted Budd.
Budd, whose candidacy won former president Donald Trump’s endorsement in June, has faced sharp criticism from his competitors after the story published on Tuesday. Both former Gov. Pat McCrory and former Rep. Mark Walker, who are also vying for the nomination, jumped at the chance to accuse Budd of being a “D.C. insider” who swindled farmers.
AgriBioTech, based in Henderson, Nev., was a “full-service seed company” specializing in forage and turfgrass that also researched and developed seed varieties and processing plants, according to a company news release.
Budd was not an officer of the company, but was a shareholder. His father, Richard Budd, took over as chief executive in 1999 and served as chairman of the board, according to federal securities filings.
Budd was also one of 11 people who signed a loan to AgriBioTech to try and save the faltering company less than a year before the company declared bankruptcy, his campaign acknowledged. AgriBioTech repaid the loan with interest, but more than 1,200 farmers in 39 states went unpaid for more than $50 million of products.
Following AgriBioTech’s bankruptcy filing in 2000, a lawsuit filed in Nevada claimed that Richard Budd transferred millions of dollars out of the company to his family, including Ted Budd, before paying back farmers for their products. In a settlement reached in 2005, the Budds agreed to pay about $6 million to the farmers without admitting wrongdoing, according to a report by the Las Vegas Sun at the time.
“I wish my efforts to save ABT had been successful, but they were not,” Richard Budd said in a statement provided by his son’s campaign. “I did my best, but in this case, my best was not enough to save the company.”
In an interview this week with the Winston-Salem news channel WXII, Ted Budd said he “never had any involvement” with the company. His campaign spokesman, Jonathan Felts, said in a statement that farmers’ accusations of fraudulent transfers were “untrue allegations which is, sadly, a typical tactic in these sorts of lawsuits.”
“Ted’s got the Trump endorsement and has the momentum to win this race,” Felts said. “Some reporters suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and will say or do anything if they think it might hurt President Trump’s political popularity.”
McCrory, Walker’s response
All three of the leading Republican candidates have tried to paint themselves as outsiders in Washington, and both Walker and McCrory are using the Post’s story as a way to kick the legs off Budd’s efforts.
“Do we really need another Washington politician like this representing North Carolina in the United States Senate?” McCrory wrote on Twitter.
Walker wrote on Facebook that the report was “unsettling but confirms the Budd record: follow big money and you always find Ted Budd.”
“Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story, but the opening chapter of Budd putting money over principle,” Walker added. “You cannot expect to serve North Carolina in the U.S. Senate with this lack of judgment and refusal to answer questions.”
State of the campaigns
The U.S. Senate race in North Carolina will play a pivotal role in determining which party will control the chamber after the 2022 midterm elections. The primary is scheduled for March 8.
So far, Budd has cashed in on his Trump endorsement by raising $700,000 in the second quarter. He also loaned his own campaign $250,000, and came into the race with an extra $1.1 million in cash from his House races. McCrory raised $1.24 million in the second quarter, and Walker has raised more than $1.25 million since he declared his candidacy in December.
It is unclear what impact Budd’s connection to AgriBioTech will have on the race.
Jordan Shaw, a campaign advisor to McCrory, wrote on Twitter that Budd is “going to need a better answer” than denying connection to the company.
The oil industry has embarked on a lobbying blitz in an effort to derail any attempts by Congress to repeal fossil fuel subsidies as part of a much broader assault by corporate interests on the $3.5 trillion budget package that Democrats are currently drafting.
In particular, the oil industry is worried about the potential loss of one specific subsidy that they receive: the intangible drilling cost (IDC) deduction. This allows companies to deduct from their taxes the costs of drilling new wells.
The industry’s fear follows a letter sent to Democratic leadership on August 30, by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the Chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who chairs the subcommittee on Environment.
The letter, signed by 50 other Democrats from the House of Representatives, specifically calls for the removal of the IDC deduction as part of the budget reconciliation process underway. The tax giveaway is worth billions of dollars each year, and makes up a large portion of the $20.5 billion that Democrats are targeting.
“Fossil fuel subsidies have been embedded in our tax code for over a hundred years, enriching oil and gas companies and their lobbying firms at the expense of our planet. It comes as no surprise to see Big Oil currently working overtime to protect these benefits,” Congressman Ro Khanna’s office told DeSmog in a statement. “What’s different now is that we have a real chance to end the worst of these subsidies in the Build Back Better Act and I’m committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to do so.”
Among those lobbying is a relatively obscure industry lobby group, the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which is heavily pushing Congress to keep the IDC in place. AXPC is a collection of some of the largest fracking companies in the U.S., including ConocoPhillips, Chesapeake Energy, EOG Resources, Occidental Petroleum, Pioneer Natural Resources, EQT, and ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy.
AXPC’s website is sparse, but has a heavy focus on the intangible drilling cost deduction, which appears to be one of only a few policy issues on which the industry front group is lobbying. According to The Hill, AXPC is “rounding up support from moderate Democrats from fracking-heavy states such as Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio to ensure the deduction survives.”
AXPC warns that eliminating the IDC deduction would result in job losses, and frames its potential elimination as “increased taxes.”
AXPC also says that without the intangible drilling cost deduction, the number of wells drilled would decline by 25 percent. Whether or not those figures are accurate, it is true that federal largesse does prop up otherwise unprofitable drilling to some extent.
A recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters in July found that the IDC deduction can boost the returns of an oil drilling project by as much as 11 percentage points. For projects that were already profitable to begin with, the subsidy simply pads corporate profits. For projects on the margins, the subsidy results in extra drilling.
AXPC also argues that some methane regulations and fees would “empower” Russia and Iran due to higher costs on American producers. Methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, and leaks from a range of oil and gas infrastructure in both the U.S. and around the world.
Ties to Republican Politics and Industry
The industry lobby group AXPC is led by Anne Bradbury, who previously worked in the House of Representatives for two former Republican Speakers of the House of Representatives – House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). Liz Bowman, AXPC’s vice president for communications, previously worked at the oil trade group American Petroleum Institute, and also in the public affairs office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration. The handful of other staffers working at AXPC also have extensive backgrounds in both Republican politics and the oil and gas industry.
According to Greenpeace, the oil companies that make up AXPC have long enjoyed federal subsidies, receiving at least $92 billion combined since 1998, while also racking up more than $700 million in fines for environmental and other violations.
Meanwhile, those companies also doled out $188 million in executive pay in 2020, a year in which many of them tapped federal bailout money in the CARES Act, aid meant to prop up the economy during the pandemic. And even as the oil companies received huge sums for pandemic relief, they also laid off workers.
Last year, Bailout Watch, a watchdog group, singled out Diamondback Energy and EOG Resources in its “Hall of Shame” for their particularly egregious behavior of taking federal bailout money while boosting pay to executives and shareholders. Both are members of AXPC.
AXPC did not respond to a list of questions from DeSmog.
The Stakes Are ‘Turbocharged’
As climate scientists continue to warn with increasing alarm, the world needs to phase out fossil fuel production and consumption as fast as possible. The International Energy Agency also warned earlier this year that new oil and gas projects are not compatible with global climate targets.
“[T]he fact that [the IDC] subsidy still exists at all, when the U.S. and the world need to be phasing down oil and gas consumption and production, indicates that removing it would be a prudent step, both for fiscal reasons as well as for climate reasons,” Pete Erickson, climate policy director at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and a coauthor of the Environmental Research Letters study, told DeSmog.
Any subsidy for fossil fuels is counterproductive and the IDC is the single most lucrative federal subsidy that the oil industry receives, according to Erickson.
The Democrats have slim majorities in both the House and the Senate, and will need virtually all of their members to vote in lockstep to successfully repeal fossil fuel subsidies. Oil lobbying outfits like AXPC only need to peel off a handful of Democrats in order to keep the federal spigot open.
“The legislative stakes are being turbocharged by ecological breakdown,” John Noel, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace, told DeSmog. Wildfires continue to ravage California. Much of Louisiana is without power after Hurricane Ida. And New York, Philadelphia, and other parts of the northeast just suffered catastrophic flooding. All of those disasters unfolded within days of each other, and come after several months of global climate-fueled catastrophes, ranging from floods in China and Germany, to wildfires in Siberia.
Louisiana National Guard rescue people in LaPlace, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. The National Guard. (CC BY 2.0).
As climate disasters like these continue to mount, it is creating “a visceral rage at the fossil fuel industry because it’s common knowledge now that they are the stakeholders that are standing in the way of rapid progress and they have delayed action in order to preserve their short-term profits,” Noel said. “They’re losing their grip on the narrative. When they do finally lose their grip totally, the backlash is going to be intense and it’s going to be swift.”
Noel pointed to the federal support for fracking, adding: “If there was ever a moment in the history of fossil fuel production to close these tax loopholes it would be right now.”
UPDATE (09/03/2021): On Friday, AXPC responded to DeSmog, stating that it does in fact support methane regulations. “AXPC is not opposed to methane regulations, we support methane regulations that balance driving down emissions with domestic production. We support methane regulations that: encourage innovation, allow for new technologies, quantify the costs/benefits of new requirements for existing facilities, avoids duplication, and properly implements the Clean Air Act,” Liz Bowman, a spokesperson for AXPC, said in a statement.
A medical professional oversees as a fifth-grader gives himself a rapid COVID-19 test on the first day of school at Montara Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate. Alexandra Wimley/AP
A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty
