‘A perfect storm for the whole food system right now’: One of the world’s largest fertilizer companies warns that every country—even those in Europe—is facing a food crisis
Tristan Bove – January 26, 2023
The Ukraine war upended the global economy in many ways. Energy markets have been among the most affected, with declining Russian oil and natural gas exports to the West sparking a domino effect of fuel crises worldwide. But the war has also warped another critical facet of the global economy: food.
Prior to the war, Russia and Ukraine were global breadbaskets as top producers and exporters of wheat, sunflower seeds, and barley. The fighting ended up aggravating hunger and food crises in low-income countries that are dependent on imports. But both Russia and Ukraine are also key cogs in the global fertilizer industry, and the war has triggered a shortage of the critical commodity that few people consider but is nevertheless essential to global food security.
Much as Russian President Vladimir Putin leveraged the world’s reliance on his country’s fossil fuels to weaponize energy supplies during the war, he is doing something very similar with fertilizer and food, Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Norwegian chemical company Yara International, among the world’s largest fertilizer producers and suppliers, told the Financial Times in an interview published Thursday.
Putin’s energy gambit, which sent fossil fuel prices soaring and left Europe on the brink of recession last year, has so far not gone as expected, with a warm winter working against him and Europe able to buy natural gas from elsewhere. But Holsether warned the world’s reliance on Russia for fertilizer threatens more disruption of food supply, adding to existing challenges of logistics bottlenecks and climate change.
“If you look at the role that we have allowed Russia to have in global food supply, we depend on them. How did that happen? What kind of weapon is that? And Putin is weaponizing food,” Holsether said.
“It is sort of a perfect storm for the whole food system right now: very challenging in Europe, of course, with higher prices; even worse in other parts of the world where a human being dies every four seconds as a result of hunger,” he added.
Global fertilizer crisis
When natural gas prices surged last year after Russia invaded Ukraine, so did prices for fertilizer, which manufacturers such as Yara produce with ammonia and nitrogen obtained as a byproduct from natural gas. Fertilizer prices had already begun increasing in 2021 due to high energy costs and supply-chain issues.
Declining natural gas prices and weak demand among farmers have eased pressures somewhat over the past few months. Earlier this month, fertilizer prices fell to their lowest level in nearly two years in tandem with natural gas prices. But despite falling prices, Holsether insists that the global fertilizer market is precarious, and countries should shift from relying on Russian natural gas, to safeguard their agricultural industries.
“Putin has weaponized energy and they’re weaponizing food as well,” Holsether told the BBC at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It’s the saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”
Fertilizer prices remain high by historical standards, and the World Bank warned earlier this month that global supply is still tight due to the war, production cuts in Europe, and stricter export controls in China.
Averting a food crisis
If fertilizer is in short supply or prices remain unaffordable to many countries, farmers may be unable to keep their soil fertile enough for crops.
Concerns over fertilizer have taken center stage in recent weeks in Africa, which is heavily reliant on Russian food imports, and where agricultural production has taken a blow in recent years due to drought in many countries. The eastern Horn of Africa—including Somalia, Sudan, and Kenya—has been particularly hard-hit, as it is likely on the verge of a sixth straight failed rainy season, the worst drought conditions in 70 years of recorded data.
Securing additional sources of fertilizer was the cornerstone of a $2.5 billion U.S. food assistance package to Africa signed last month, while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted the importance of stabilizing fertilizer supply in Africa multiple times during a visit to Zambia this week.
“Now we’re in 2023, it’s tragic and shouldn’t be like that,” Holsether told the FT about the state of global hunger. “That should be a very strong reminder of the need to have a more robust food system—from a climate perspective, from a logistics perspective, but also from a political perspective.”
Holsether said that all countries must become more self-sufficient with their food production. For fertilizer, he touted the promise of “green fertilizers” that use hydrogen and renewable energy to produce ammonia rather than natural gas, saying that clean and local solutions are critical to decoupling the global food system from Russia’s war.
Holsether also warned that European nations should not rely on their wealth to avert a food or fertilizer crisis. Like with natural gas, Europe has in recent months turned to the U.S. for nitrogen to replace Russian imports, but Holsether warned that Europe buying its way out of a food crisis is no remedy for global food insecurity.
“Yes. Not near term…there will be a shortage and there will be a global auction for food—but Europe is a wealthy part of the world,” Holsether said when asked if Europe should be concerned for its food security.
“But we need to think it through,” he added, saying that Europe buying food and fertilizer products from other countries will only create more global supply shortages and take away from other countries in dire need.
“In terms of food and food security, when you have that, you see wars or mass migrations, extremism, all these things,” he said.
Ukraine forces pull back from Donbas town after onslaught
Andrew Meldrum – January 25, 2023
Ukrainian soldiers sit on top of an APC during combat training in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)A Ukrainian soldier looks out of an APC during combat training in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)Ukrainian servicemen attend combat training in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Kateryna Klochko)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces have conducted an organized retreat from a town in the eastern region of the Donbas, an official said Wednesday, in what is a rare but modest battlefield triumph for the Kremlin after a series of setbacks in its invasion that began almost 11 months ago.
The Ukrainian army retreated from the salt-mining town of Soledar to “preserve the lives of the personnel,” Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s forces in the east, told The Associated Press.
The soldiers pulled back to previously prepared defensive positions, he said.
Moscow has portrayed the battle for Soledar, which lies near the city of Bakhmut, as key to capturing the entire Donbas.
The accomplishment takes the Russian forces a step closer to Bakhmut, but military analysts say capturing Soledar is more symbolic than strategic.
Ukraine’s military, which has held out in Soledar against a monthslong onslaught of superior Russian forces, has said its fierce defense of the eastern stronghold helped tie up Russian forces.
Russia claimed almost two weeks ago that it had taken Soledar, but Ukraine denied it.
Many of Russia’s troops around Soledar belong to the private Russian military contractor Wagner Group, and the fighting reportedly has been bloody.
Since its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has prioritized taking full control of the Donbas — a region made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, where it has backed a separatist insurgency since 2014. Russia has seized most of Luhansk, but about half of Donetsk remains under Ukraine’s control.
Taking control of the town would potentially allow Russian forces to cut supply lines to Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, though the strength of Ukraine’s new defensive positions was not known.
The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, said earlier this month that the fall of Soledar wouldn’t mark “an operationally significant development and is unlikely to presage an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.”
The institute said Russian information operations have “overexaggerated the importance of Soledar,” which is a small settlement. It also argued that the long and difficult battle has contributed to the exhaustion of Russian forces.
Perhaps more worrying for Moscow, Western military help for Ukraine is now being stepped up with the delivery of tanks.
Elsewhere, Russian forces have continued to pummel Ukrainian areas, especially in the south and east.
Russian strikes wounded 10 civilians in the eastern Donetsk province on Tuesday, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the provincial governor, said.
Five were wounded when Russian shells slammed into apartment blocks, he said.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Wednesday that over the previous 24 hours Russian forces had launched four missile strikes, 26 airstrikes and more than 100 attacks from rocket salvo systems.
Russian forces are concentrating their efforts on establishing control over Donetsk province, conducting offensive operations around the embattled cities of Bakhmut, Lyman and Avdiivka, and the village of Novopavlivka, according to spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun.
In addition to Donetsk, the Russian attacks struck settlements in the country’s northeastern Kharkiv and Sumy, northern Chernihiv, easternmost Luhansk, southeastern Zaporizhzhia, and southern Kherson provinces.
Democrats revel in the GOP’s ‘doozy’ of an idea for a national sales tax
Ben Werschkul, Washington Correspondent – January 25, 2023
It’s a bill that is opposed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), unlikely to pass the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and has approximately 0% chance of becoming law anytime soon.
But Democrats don’t want to stop talking about the Republicans’ proposal to replace income taxes with a national sales tax.
“This so-called fair tax plan is the craziest yet. It’s a real doozy,” Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday as the Senate Majority Leader took time out of his schedule to appear alongside House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for a press conference devoted to the subject. “Just the biggest lollapalooza I have ever seen around here.”
President Biden is also set to focus on the subject in a big way in a speech Thursday in Springfield, Virginia, with White House aides promising a contrast between the Democratic and GOP economic agendas that they hope voters will remember in coming years.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), left, meets with Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the leader the House Democratic Caucus, in Schumer’s office on Capitol Hill in December. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) is the leading proponent of the idea and pushed back in a statement to Yahoo Finance, saying “Washington Democrats are fear-mongering about this bill because it takes power away from the federal government and puts it in the hands of the American people.”
Yet even voices sympathetic to Republicans urge the party to back away.
Grover Norquist, a tax reduction advocate, told Semafor it was “a political gift to Biden and the Democrats;” the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page called it “masochism;” and Steve Forbes of flat tax fame called it a “belated, but huge Christmas present” for Democrats.
To top it off, Larry Kudlow, the former Director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, said it “really is a lousy idea” when he interviewed McCarthy on Tuesday.
The bill would eliminate all income taxes — from the payroll tax to corporate taxes to personal income taxes and more — and would also eliminate the Internal Revenue Service, just the latest salvo in the GOP’s feud with the tax-collection agency.
And while Americans may like the idea of no longer filling out tax forms each April, the bill would replace the trillions of dollars lost with a national sales tax.
The rate would begin at 23% in 2025 and could increase. An analysis of the plan from the Brookings Institution found that a rate around 30% — on top of existing state sales taxes — would be needed to cover the losses.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) during a budget hearing in 2022. (Roberto Schmidt-Pool/Getty Images)
Economists have also criticized the plan for lowering the the tax burden from high-income earners and corporations and shifting the onus to middle- and lower-class Americans who spend a much higher percentage of their monthly income on goods and services.
The Tax Policy Center found the idea would be a hike for 80% of Americans and a tax cut for the richest Americans. The top 20% would go from paying 84.2% of all federal income taxes to 65.1% under a theoretical federal retail sales tax.
But now, a full vote seems less likely in the near future. Three New York Republicans have already announced their opposition to the proposal and those “no” votes along with McCarthy would mean the bill would likely be defeated if put up for a full House vote.
Carter maintains that the bill removes complexity from the tax code, will encourage economic growth, and is better for working Americans. But the Georgia Congressman doesn’t seem to be expecting a floor vote soon.
“I’m excited for open debate on this legislation and for it to go through the committee process,” he said, adding it will be an opportunity for “a transparent discussion” about improving the tax system.
‘Go home and tell your moms’
Meanwhile, the unlikelihood of a national sales tax doesn’t seem to be dampening Democrats’ enthusiasm for discussing the issue.
During a recent speech, President Biden sarcastically proclaimed: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea…go home and tell your moms, they’re going to be really excited about that.”
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) sent a letter to Senate leadership Tuesday, pledging “I will take on anyone” to stop the idea while his colleagues like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) have taken to Twitter to mock the proposal.
“You wonder who is sitting in some dungeon, some laboratory, some basement cooking up these extreme ideas to try jam them down the throats of the American people,” added Leader Jeffries Wednesday.
It was former Georgia Congressman John Linder who first proposed the idea in 1999 and later co-authored a book called “The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS.”
“The only tax collector that the consumer would ever see is the smiling face behind the register at the local grocery store,” Linder said in 2000 about the proposal that has been periodically revived over the last 20 year without ever gaining widespread Republican support.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
America Has a Debt Problem, and the Answer to It Starts With Form 1040
Binyamin Applebaum – January 25, 2023
Mr. Appelbaum is a member of the editorial board.
Credit…Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photograph by TokenPhoto, via Getty Images
Washington’s favorite show, “Debt Ceiling Chicken,” is playing again in the big white theater on Capitol Hill. And once again, it is diverting attention from the fact that the United States really does have a debt problem.
Republicans and Democrats in recent decades have hewed to a kind of grand bargain, raising spending and cutting taxes, and papering over the difference with a lot of borrowed money.
From 1972 to 2021, the government, on average, spent about 20.8 percent of gross domestic product while collecting about 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in revenue. It covered the gap with $31.4 trillion in i.o.u.s — the federal debt.
The government relies on this borrowed money to function, and for decades, it has defied a variety of dire predictions about the likely consequences. Notably, there’s no sign that Washington is exhausting Wall Street’s willingness to lend. In financial markets, U.S. Treasuries remain the ultimate comfort food. There’s also little evidence the government’s gargantuan appetite is making it harder for businesses or individuals to get loans, which could impede economic growth.
But the federal debt still carries a hefty price tag.
The most immediate problem with the government’s reliance on borrowed money is the regular opportunity it provides for Republicans to engage in blackmail. Congress imposes a statutory limit on federal borrowing, known as the debt ceiling. The government hit that limit this month, meaning the total amount of spending approved by Congress now requires borrowing in excess of that amount.
Raising the ceiling ought to be a formality, since it simply allows the government to meet the obligations Congress already has approved. But House Republicans say they won’t raise it without a deal to cut future spending.
The Biden administration is rightly insistent that it won’t pay Congress to do its job, as the Obama administration agreed to do in 2011.
After all, Americans don’t want large spending cuts. The vast majority of federal spending is supported by most Americans. About 63 cents of every federal dollar goes to mandatory programs, the largest of which, Social Security and Medicare, are wildly popular. Others, like Obamacare subsidies, are less popular, but there’s no need to speculate about what would happen if Republicans tried to cut the program. They’ve tried and failed repeatedly. An additional 15 cents goes to discretionary programs. The big-ticket items, like health care for veterans, highway construction and subsidies for law enforcement, are pretty popular, too. The rest is the defense budget and interest payments.
Indeed, Americans need more federal spending. The United States invests far less than other wealthy nations in providing its citizens with the basic resources necessary to lead productive lives. Millions of Americans live without health insurance. People need more help to care for their children and older family members. They need help to go to college and to retire. Measured as a share of G.D.P., public spending in the other Group of 7 nations is, on average, more than 50 percent higher than in the United States.
But Democrats ought to emphasize a distinction between resisting Republican demands and defending the government’s current borrowing habits. There is another, better way to fund public spending: collecting more money in taxes.
In recent decades, proponents of more spending have largely treated tax policy as a separate battle — one that they’ve been willing to lose.
They need to start fighting and winning both.
It costs money to borrow money. Interest payments require the government to raise more money to deliver the same goods and services. Using taxes to pay for public services means that the government can do more.
The United States paid $475 billion in interest on its debts last fiscal year, which ran through September. That was a record, and it will soon be broken. In the first quarter of this fiscal year, the government paid $210 billion.
The payments aren’t all that high by historical standards. Measured as a share of economic output, they remain well below the levels reached in the 1990s. Last year, federal interest outlays equaled 1.6 percent of G.D.P., compared with the high-water mark of 3.2 percent in 1991. But that mark, too, may soon be exceeded. The Congressional Budget Office projects that federal interest payments will reach 3.3 percent of G.D.P. by 2032, and it estimates interest payments might reach 7.2 percent of G.D.P. by 2052.
That’s a lot of money that could be put to better use.
Borrowing also exacerbates economic inequality. Instead of collecting higher taxes from the wealthy, the government is paying interest to them — some rich people are, after all, the ones investing in Treasuries.
If the debt ceiling serves any purpose, it is the occasional opportunity for Congress to step back and consider the sum of all its fiscal policies.
The nation is borrowing too much but not because it is spending too much.
The real crisis is the need to collect more money in taxes.
Startup aims to convert invasive zebra mussels in Lake Michigan into a renewable product
Alex Garner – January 25, 2023
Zebra mussels are an invasive species in the US.
PLYMOUTH, Wisc.— AntiMussel hopes to mitigate trillions of invasive zebra mussels infiltrating the Great Lakes by harvesting them for use in paper and pharmaceutical products.
The Plymouth, Wisc.-based startup, which has raised nearly $20,000 in funding and placed second at county and regional pitch competitions, will launch a pilot program this spring to remove the mollusk from Lake Michigan.
In a 250-square-meter and 80-foot-deep area, AntiMussel will connect a suction to the lake floor and transport them to shore. Wind speed and water temperature data will also be collected.
AntiMussel hopes to use the abundance of zebra mussels as a renewable resource for calcium carbonate, which is typically processed from limestone into varying products like Tums, white melamine paint and plastic.
Ideally, the company wants to create a renewable calcium carbonate product with a corporate partner.
A view of the Sheboygan lighthouse as seen, Tuesday, May 31, 2022, in Sheboygan, Wis. A search for a man who was last seen near a break wall on Lake Michigan will continue today, according to the Sheboygan Fire Department
“I want to skip that 6 to 8 million years of geology that it takes to make limestone and instead remove the mussels from the lake where we don’t want them, process them, and we end up with a ground calcium carbonate material that is exactly what is being sold on the market now,” Tyler Rezachek, AntiMussel founder and U.S. veteran, said.
Participating in the pitch competitions helped Rezachek connect with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, who will take him along on a research boat this spring to study zebra mussels, too.
“I was really kind of an entrepreneur in search of a problem,” Rezachek said about starting AntiMussel. “And zebra mussels (have) been something that I’ve heard about my whole life but never heard anything else about other than how to stop them from spreading.”
Zebra mussels were likely brought to the Great Lakes from Europe and Asia via ship ballast water in the 1980s. Since then, they’ve completely invaded the region and have riddled waterways feeding into the Mississippi River and western states Texas and California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
They negatively impact ecosystems in several ways, like outcompeting and incapacitating native mussel and other aquatic species.
Additionally, a female zebra mussel can release up to 1 million eggs per year once reaching reproductive age of two, according to the National Parks Service.
Not much can be done to remove them once a large population has invaded a lake or river.
“At this point, they’re so well established that I could have boats out there sucking zebra mussels all day every day and probably never put a dent in the population,” he said.
Today, an estimated 300 to 750 trillion zebra mussels are in the Great Lakes.
Zebra mussels can also overwhelm commercial, agricultural, forestry and aquaculture industries in the state, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
They also burden taxpayers.
According to some estimates, broad removal and resulting increases in water bills can cost taxpayers up to $1.5 billion a year.
Rezachek said only 3% of the costs is dedicated to preventing further spread.
According to Rezachek, efforts to get rid of zebra mussels center on taking them off infrastructure, like applying chemicals or pressure washing, rather than completely removing them from the water.
“None of those solutions stop mussels from reproducing or remove the resulting shell,” he said. “They just push them away.”
A young woman checks over her cell phone while getting some beach time in at Deland Park, Saturday, July 9, 2022, in Sheboygan, Wis.
The remaining shells wash onto beaches.
“We can’t walk on a lot of beaches on Lake Michigan now because they’re covered in mussel shells, and they’re razor sharp and they’ll cut your feet and your dog’s feet,” Rezachek said. “And they’re just going to keep collecting there, and the waves just keep pushing them on the beaches. So, unless we remove those in mass, we can never make beaches reusable for people again.”
Heavily infested water bodies like Lake Michigan are beyond the point for a complete elimination of zebra mussels, but there is still hope for smaller lakes.
While AntiMussel will focus on the Great Lakes, it also hopes to conduct customer surveys to see if landowners across the state need zebra mussel clean-ups on private beaches or in lakes.
“The smaller lakes that maybe only have a few thousand mussels in them, they’re not lost,” Rezachek said. “We can get those back and eliminate the mussels there, but then we have to stop them from getting there.”
To help prevent the spread, the National Parks Service suggests boaters drain boats, motors and livewells (circulating tank) before leaving an area of water, wash boats and trailers, and let them dry for at least five days before taking the boat out again because zebra mussels, dependent on water currents and transportation, can infest boat motors and livewells.
If you care about your country and your rights, don’t vote for any Republicans in 2022
Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY – January 24, 2023
Now that primary season is over there is a simple test for voters, especially Republicans and independents: If you care about the future of America, democracy and your own rights, don’t vote for Republicans. Any of them. Even the officeholders who have stood up to Donald Trump and the newcomers who pitch themselves as reality-based and results-oriented.
Even so, the Republican Party is on a dark path and should not hold power anywhere until it comes back into the light. That’s especially true on Capitol Hill.
Congressional math is unforgiving. If there is just one more Republican than Democrat in the House or Senate, a power-obsessed party in thrall to election deniers and conspiracists will control committees, agendas, investigations and leadership positions.
Republican voters are key to the outcome. About 8% of them voted for Democrats in 2018, TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, a Democratic data and polling expert, told me in an email. If that rises to 15% this year, he added, “the GOP has no chance of taking back either the Senate or the House.”
That’s not an unrealistic goal given the percentage of Republicans who voted for abortion rights last month in Kansas (roughly 30%, Bonier said Wednesday at a New Democrat Network webinar) and the chunk of GOP voters alarmed by Trump and his “Make America Great Again” loyalists. A new poll found a quarter of Republicans agree that Trump’s MAGA movement threatens democracy.
President Joe Biden accurately summarized that threat in a recent speech: “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.”
As national security expert Tom Nichols wrote afterward in The Atlantic, “We should be deeply troubled that Joe Biden had to give this speech at all.” And he had to. Because even now, after the Trump mob’s insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, two impeachments, years of election lies, escalating legal problems and the FBI recovery of top secret government documents from Mar-a-Lago, Trump is not a spent force.
Former President Donald Trump and ally Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sept. 3, 2022.
Hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on their deadly quest to block Congress from finalizing Biden’s win, 147 Republican lawmakers went ahead and objected to certified election results from Arizona, Pennsylvania or both. Over 18 months later, the party is still with Trump. Polls show roughly 70% of Republicans don’t view Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and most Republicans want Trump as their 2024 nominee.
Believers of Trump’s Big Lie that he was the true winner have elevated so many delusional Republicans that 60% of voters will find election deniers on their 2022 ballots, according to FiveThirtyEight. Its analysis of GOP nominees for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general found at least 200 of 552 say the 2020 election was illegitimate. If they win, they could influence and possibly even overturn elections in 40 states.
Some of these races are out of reach for Democrats. In U.S. House contests, FiveThirtyEight found that “118 election deniers and eight election doubters have at least a 95 percent chance of winning.”
At the same time, Real Clear Politics counts eight toss-up Senate races, 11 toss-ups for governor and 34 in the House. Concerned conservatives and moderates could make the difference in these contests – particularly if they vote Democratic no matter what kind of Republican is running.
This seems unfair to Republicans who have shown principled independence. By my count, 20 in the House made it to the fall ballot despite voting for an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the violent Capitol riot. Two of them, California’s Rep. David Valadao and Washington state’s Rep. Dan Newhouse, also voted to impeach Trump for inciting the rioters.
Valadao’s tight race could be one of the few that determine House control. Does he deserve to be reelected? Maybe. But could America survive a GOP-controlled House unscathed? Also maybe, and that’s not good enough.
The same argument holds for candidates like Senate nominee Joe O’Dea in Colorado, who says he’d be an “independent-minded” senator, and House nominee Allan Fung in Rhode Island, who says he’d work with Democrats to solve problems. That’s commendable, but voting for them could produce a Republican House or Senate.
I wouldn’t even bet on fact-based Republican governors. Some could face veto-proof legislatures dominated by MAGA fantasists. And some could fold. Look at New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who a month ago declared that “Trump won the election. … I’m not switchin’ horses baby. This is it.” Sununu called Bolduc a “conspiracy theorist-type” and “not a serious candidate” for the GOP Senate nomination. But right before Tuesday’s primary, Sununu said he’d endorse Bolduc if he won.
A MAGA-driven America is a grim prospect. Would future Republican candidates admit defeat if they lost, or would they make sure, through legislation and manipulation, that they’d win? Would they cement minority rule and further restrict fundamental rights like voting and abortion?
Biden has correctly distinguished between “mainstream Republicans” and Trump’s extreme “MAGA Republicans.” They are different, and mainstream GOP politicians holding the line deserve credit. Nevertheless, when it comes to who controls Congress and the levers of power in states across the country, all that counts right now is the “R” after their names.
Medical experts divided on whether 2nd FDA-approved Alzheimer’s drug provides a benefit
Laura Ramirez – Feldman, Reporter – January 23, 2023
An MRI scan of the brain of a patient affected by Alzheimer’s disease. (Getty Images)
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved a drug that may help patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s by slowing down the progression of the disease. In clinical trials, the drug, called lecanemab, reduced the rate of cognitive decline among participants.
But doctors and health experts are divided on whether it warranted an accelerated FDA approval. While some of them have praised the agency’s decision, describing the drug as groundbreaking, others are skeptical about whether it provides a substantial benefit.
In the U.S., over 6 million people are living with Alzheimer’s, an incurable and fatal disease that affects the brain and causes loss of cognitive function over time. While there are available medications that can treat Alzheimer’s symptoms, there have been no treatments that address the underlying cause of the disease. This is why some doctors have welcomed the accelerated approval of lecanemab. The FDA is likely to consider a full approval later this year.
“We’re pretty excited that we finally have something,” Dr. Reisa Sperling, who directs the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, recently told NPR.
Heather Snyder, vice president of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer’s Association, told Yahoo News that the organization “celebrates” the Jan. 6 approval of the drug. “This is now the second approved treatment that evidence suggests changes the course of Alzheimer’s disease in a meaningful way,” she said.
Lecanemab, which will be marketed as Leqembi, is the second Alzheimer’s drug to receive a fast-track approval by the FDA. This accelerated authorization is usually given to promising treatments targeting diseases for which there are no other effective options available. In the summer of 2021, the agency gave a similar drug — aducanumab, sold under the brand name Aduhelm — accelerated approval as well. But the move was controversial because the FDA approved the drug despite conflicting evidence about whether it provided a benefit to patients, and against the recommendation of one of its committees of outside experts.
Aduhelm’s accelerated approval prompted a congressional investigation. Since then, the federal Medicare program has decided not to cover Aduhelm treatment for the general population, but only for patients who were enrolled in the clinical trial. Some hospital systems across the country have also declined to offer the drug to Alzheimer’s patients. Due to the controversy surrounding the drug’s efficacy and its high price, as well as the negative publicity it has received, few patients have received it. As a result, many doctors who treat the disease have been left, once again, with limited options.
Snyder said that even though Leqembi is not a cure, the fact that it may slow the progression of the disease would give patients more time to enjoy aspects of daily life.
“That could be things like participating in a birthday party, or going to a wedding, recognizing their spouse, their children, their grandchildren, their neighbors, and really that time is enabling an individual to also make decisions about their care as they go forward as well,” she said.
Lecanemab, which will be marketed as Leqembi, received accelerated approval by the FDA on Jan. 6. (Eisai via Reuters)
Like Aduhelm, lecanemab was developed by Eisai in partnership with fellow drugmaker Biogen. These treatments are monoclonal antibody therapies that are designed to remove a substance called beta-amyloid from the brain. Beta-amyloid is a naturally occurring protein that becomes toxic when it clumps together and forms the sticky plaques that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
The theory behind the development of monoclonal antibody treatments like lecanemab is that amyloid plaques cause the loss of brain cells that leads to cognitive decline in people who suffer from Alzheimer’s. By reducing the amount of amyloid plaques in the brain, these treatments are believed to help slow the process of memory loss and cognitive decline.
In a clinical study of nearly 1,800 people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, those who were given lecanemab for 18 months experienced 27% less decline in memory and thinking compared with those who received a placebo. Although the trial results were positive and unprecedented, some experts believe the excitement for the drug is not proportional to its apparent benefit.
“The clinical trial data shows a statistically significant but clinically undetectable difference in the outcome measure between active treatment and placebo over 18 months,” Dr. Michael Greicius, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University, told Yahoo News.
He said the accelerated FDA approval of lecanemab made sense because in clinical trials the drug showed that it can affect a biomarker associated with a disease. In this case, that biomarker is the reduction of beta-amyloid in the brain. “Lecanemab definitely removes amyloid plaques,” Greicius said.
But some experts fear that the approval of lecanemab will incentivize drug companies to focus on therapies targeting amyloid plaques while neglecting other treatment approaches that may be more fruitful.
“I do consider it a game changer, but in a negative sense, for how it will change the clinical and research landscape around Alzheimer’s disease,” Greicius said.
The new drug, which is administered through intravenous infusions every two weeks, is costly. The companies that develop it have said it will be priced at $26,500 per year. So far, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has said it will not cover the drug, and unless lecanemab receives full FDA approval, that isn’t likely to change.
“What CMS is doing by restricting coverage for approved treatments is unprecedented,” Snyder said. “It’s not something we’ve seen before, and it’s wrong.”
If CMS ultimately decides not to cover lecanemab, Greicius said, the drug will likely be used, but not very widely, as it would have to be paid for out of pocket.
He noted that there are some safety concerns about lecanemab that need to be considered, particularly a condition that can occur with most other drugs that remove amyloid plaques from the brain, known as ARIA, or amyloid-related imaging abnormalities. Two forms of ARIA involve brain swelling and bleeding.
In the lecanemab study, more than 12% of people who received the drug experienced swelling of the brain, and more than 17% had bleeding. While few participants experienced complications, there have been at least three deaths linked to the drug, though those patients appear to have had additional risk factors.
But Snyder said these side effects should not be a reason for doctors and patients in the early stages of the disease not to consider the medication.
“It’s really important to remember this, Alzheimer’s is fatal … and all treatments have side effects,” she said. “So it’s important that we manage those and we understand them, and an individual should weigh any treatment decision — not just with this medication or this disease, but across the board — be able to weigh the potential benefits and risks [in] conversation with their clinician.”
US governor defends ban on African American history course
January 23, 2023
The Republican leader of the US state of Florida defended his ban on an African American studies course Monday, railing against its pushing of “social justice” topics such as “queer theory.”
“We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline. If it’s education, then we will do (it),” Governor Ron DeSantis, who is considered one of the favorites for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, told reporters.
“This course on Black history: what is one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids,” he added.
The class covers more than 400 years of African American history and is being rolled out as part a nationwide “advanced placement” program giving high school students the chance to take college-level subjects before graduation.
But Florida’s Department of Education has objected to the inclusion of “Black Queer Studies” and topics such as Black feminism and the alleged promotion of critical race theory, an academic discipline investigating systemic racism in American society.
Officials have also complained about its approach to the debate over reparations — the argument for compensating Black Americans for slavery — telling organizers the program violated state law and rejecting its inclusion in Florida schools.
DeSantis has seen his political stock rise following a big election win in November and he is now considered former president Donald Trump’s main rival in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.
He has gained support on the right for his hardline stances on “culture war” issues such as public health restrictions during the pandemic and alleged “woke” indoctrination in education.
He argued Monday that the purpose of education was the “pursuit of truth,” and not to use schools as “an instrument of what they consider social justice and social change.”
“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” DeSantis said. “When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
The decision to block the course has been met with outrage from the American Civil Liberties Union, which said DeSantis had “no right to censor speech he disagrees with” while Vice President Kamala Harris said at the weekend anyone banning teaching US history “has no right to shape America’s future.”
Biden’s Cabinet is sticking around, bucking the turnover trend of his predecessors
Peter Nicholas and Carol E. Lee – January 23, 2023
Jim Watson
WASHINGTON — Ron Klain’s imminent departure as the White House chief of staff is the first step in a broader reshuffling among President Joe Biden’s advisers as he prepares for a 2024 re-election bid.
Jeff Zients, who led the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, is set to replace Klain, and other White House aides are expected to leave in the coming months and shift over to the campaign, sources said.
But one part of Biden’s administration has been unusually stable, and it looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future: the Cabinet secretaries who run the sprawling federal government. Not one of the 15 department heads in the presidential line of succession quit in the first half of Biden’s term, nor have any given notice that they plan to leave any time soon, White House officials said.
The absence of turnover among the Biden appointees — whose jobs include stopping crime, keeping food safe and guarding against attack — is a rarity. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, only Barack Obama had no one from the Cabinet step down by the midpoint of his first term, said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Miller Center, a think tank on the presidency at the University of Virginia.
By contrast, Donald Trump churned through Cabinet secretaries as president — and senior staff members — at a head-spinning clip; nearly half his Cabinet had turned over as he entered his third year in office. By early 2019, Trump had cycled through seven of 15 Cabinet secretaries and was on his third chief of staff.
“Not one single member of the Cabinet has left in disgrace, is writing a tell-all book or has bad-mouthed the president,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who is close to the Biden White House. “There are no leaks, no backbiting, nothing.”
The new Republican-controlled House may try to yank at least one from his job. Some GOP House members hope to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in reprisal for what they see as lax immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border. A White House official said Mayorkas would fight any such attempt and has no wish to step down.
The durability of Biden’s Cabinet is something of a surprise. Before the midterm elections in November, some administration officials believed Cabinet departures hinged on whether Democrats kept control of the Senate. The thinking was that Cabinet officials would feel freer to leave because Biden would have an easier time getting a successor confirmed by the Senate than if Republican leader Mitch McConnell ran the chamber.
Democrats, indeed, kept the Senate, but the exodus from the Cabinet didn’t happen. In an interview after the midterms, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she wasn’t planning to leave before the term was over, despite the more favorable climate for confirmation.
“We have a lot of work to do,” she said in November. (There had been continual speculation that Yellen would leave and be replaced by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who in turn would be succeeded by Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia. When the Yellen domino didn’t fall, the others stayed in place.)
Why Cabinet members stay put rather than take better-paying jobs in the private sector or embark on independent political careers may have something to do with how they’re treated. Biden has made it a point to show them they’re valued, aides argue.
Before he gives a speech to a union group, he’ll call Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to make sure he is comfortable with the text, said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser. When a businessperson raises a concern with him, he’ll pick up the phone and call Raimondo.
Few members of Biden’s Cabinet are strangers. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm played the part of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during Biden’s debate preparation in the 2008 campaign. Biden thoroughly vetted Raimondo as a potential vice presidential pick in 2020.
“This is a president who really uses his Cabinet and values his Cabinet,” Dunn said. “Often, Cabinet members feel as though they are disconnected from the White House. In this case, the president has really depended on his Cabinet for advice.”
“They are a group of people that he has deep relationships with and who he listens to and seeks wisdom from that’s broader than their Cabinet agencies,” she added.
Going back decades, presidents have steadily concentrated power in the White House, at the Cabinet’s expense, historians say. Some Cabinet secretaries have felt marginalized as presidents stocked the West Wing with trusted advisers and usurped the prerogatives of Cabinet members who had thought they were brought in to run things.
The most glaring examples are in the foreign policy realm. Presidents have steadily padded the White House’s National Security Council with staff members who have, in some cases, left the secretary of state isolated. President Richard Nixon entrusted his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, with his most sensitive and consequential foreign policy goals, diminishing Secretary of State William Rogers.
Trump had no rapport with his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who once privately referred to him as a “moron” and was eventually fired by tweet.
But Biden is more of an institutionalist, having helped vet and confirm Cabinet secretaries throughout his 36 years as a senator. He also has an affinity with some members of his Cabinet forged through a long career in politics.
“Biden’s inner circle is so close-knit it’s almost familial,” said Chris Whipple, who recently published a book about Biden’s presidency. “It’s not so much a team of rivals but a bunch of team players. Those are just the people he chose. They’ve been pretty cohesive, and I don’t see a whole lot of movement.”
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked together for two decades, starting in the early 2000s, when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Blinken was the Democratic staff director.
Asked about Blinken’s primacy in foreign policy matters, Dunn said Biden’s “relationship with Tony is so deep and goes back so far that it’s just a given.” She laughed.
Another enticement for the Cabinet to stay is that the next two years may be more fun. After grinding negotiations, Biden spent the first two years passing trillion-dollar infrastructure and climate change bills that it’s the Cabinet’s job to implement. That means ribbon-cuttings and visits to grateful states — all of which are helpful in cementing legacies in office.
“It’s just like any job,” said Tenpas of the Miller Center. “When there’s success, you want to keep doing it.”
How Kevin McCarthy Forged an Ironclad Bond With Marjorie Taylor Greene
Jonathan Swan and Catie Edmondson – January 23, 2023
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), fist bumps with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as he arrives for a photo with freshman GOP members of the 117th Congress on the East Steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, on Jan. 4, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy, R-Calif., told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.”
Such a declaration from McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced.
But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Greene, the far-right rabble-rouser and acolyte of former President Donald Trump, and McCarthy, the affable fixture of the Washington establishment, according to interviews with 20 people with firsthand knowledge of the relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.
Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said. Both he and Greene agreed to brief interviews for this article. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”
It is a relationship born of political expediency but fueled by genuine camaraderie, and nurtured by one-on-one meetings as often as once a week, usually at a coffee table in McCarthy’s Capitol office, as well as a constant stream of text messages back and forth.
McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.
Greene, in turn, has taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to McCarthy, who has little in the way of a fixed ideology of his own and has come to regard the Georgia congresswoman as a vital proxy for the desires and demands of the right-wing base that increasingly drives his party. He has adopted her stances on opposing vaccine mandates and questioning funding for the war in Ukraine, and even her call to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to show what she has called “the other side of the story.”
McCarthy’s agenda, Greene said, “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees.”
‘Kevin Did This to You’
It was a right-wing conspiracy theory that first came between McCarthy and Greene, but not in the way that many people think.
When Greene entered Congress in January 2021, Republican leaders viewed her as a headache, and McCarthy regarded her as potentially beyond redemption. During her primary, social media posts had emerged in which she embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and warned of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”
Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, had intervened to oppose Greene — an affront she would not forget — but McCarthy, who eschews confrontation and conflict, would not go that far. He issued a statement through a spokesperson condemning the statements, but did not endorse her opponent.
Weeks after Greene was sworn in, more conspiracy-laden posts surfaced, including diatribes in which she had questioned whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and endorsed the executions of Democratic politicians including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.
Outraged Democrats demanded that McCarthy oust her from congressional committees, and when he made no move to do so, they scheduled a vote to do it themselves. As the pressure built, some of Greene’s far-right allies told her yet another conspiratorial story that she believed: McCarthy, they said, was secretly working with Pelosi to strip her of power.
Enraged, Greene stormed into McCarthy’s office in the Capitol late one night in February 2021 and handed him a letter signed by Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on her committees. They had received “countless” messages, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.
It served as a not-so-subtle warning to McCarthy that the Republican base would be outraged if he did not ensure she kept her committee seats. McCarthy tried to explain to Greene that he agreed that what Democrats were doing was outrageous, but that as minority leader, he had neither the power nor the votes to stop it.
But Greene did not believe McCarthy, a person familiar with her thinking said. After she was booted off the Education and Budget Committees, members of her inner circle told her, “Don’t forget: Kevin did this to you.”
‘The Principal’s Office’
The relationship remained fraught throughout Greene’s first year in Congress, as the same pattern played out again and again in their interactions. A controversy would erupt over an outrageous comment Greene had made, then McCarthy would summon her to deal with the matter privately.
Greene would joke to friends, “Uh-oh, I’ve been called to the principal’s office.”
But even as she continued to traffic in offensive conspiracy theories and spoke at a white nationalist rally, McCarthy refused to punish her and often refrained from even criticizing her comments until pressed by reporters. It was a calculated choice by McCarthy, who leads more by flattery and backslapping than through discipline.
And by early 2022, Greene had begun to believe that McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Greene raced to McCarthy’s office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Instead of telling Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Greene’s case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.
The efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but they impressed Greene and revealed how far McCarthy was prepared to go to defend her. It was part of a broader and methodical courtship of the hard right by McCarthy that included outreach to conservative media figures and Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser Stephen Miller.
He had studied the two previous Republican speakers of the House, former Reps. John Boehner of Ohio and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a person familiar with his thinking said, and concluded that one of their fatal errors had been unnecessarily isolating far-right members, who in turn made their lives miserable. So McCarthy set out to do the opposite.
Approaching Symbiosis
Still, the alliance between McCarthy and Greene did not truly begin to flourish for several more months. At a party in the Dallas suburbs at the home of Arthur Schwartz, a GOP consultant and outside adviser to McCarthy, Greene found herself in the corner of a great room chatting with Devin Nunes, a former top Republican on the Intelligence Committee and a committed Trump ally.
Nunes told Greene about the time he had witnessed McCarthy yelling at Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who was then the majority leader, for his party’s decision to remove Greene from her committees, and threatening that he would do the same to Democrats when Republicans came to power.
Greene recalled it as the first time she had heard from somebody she trusted that McCarthy had defended her, rather than conspired with Democrats to blackball her.
“That conversation had a big impact on me,” she said.
From then on, the two settled into a kind of symbiotic relationship, both feeding off what the other could provide. Greene began regularly visiting McCarthy, frequently dropping by his office, and he began inviting her to high-level policy discussions attended by senior Republicans and praising her contributions.
He was impressed not only by Greene’s seemingly innate understanding of the impulses of the party’s hard-right voters, but also by her prowess at building her own brand. He once remarked to allies with wonder at how Greene, as a freshman, was already known by a three-letter monogram: MTG. “She knows what she’s doing,” McCarthy marveled privately. “You’ve got AOC and MTG.”
After Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, winning only a narrow majority and guaranteeing that McCarthy would have a tough fight to become speaker, Greene was quick to begin barnstorming the right-wing media circuit as one of his top surrogates, using her conservative credentials to vouch for his.
As her peers on the far-right flank of the party refused to support McCarthy, subjecting the Republican leader to a four-day stretch of defeats, Greene was unflinching in her support, personally whipping votes on the House floor and strategizing on calls with Trump.
Greene’s support for McCarthy created a permission structure for other GOP lawmakers to do the same.
Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., said in an interview that when conservatives back home sought an explanation for his support for McCarthy, he would comfort them by replying: “Well, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are standing with Kevin McCarthy. And so am I.”
The relationship has also paid off for Greene, no longer the fringe backbencher stripped of her power. Republican leaders announced last week that she would serve on two high-profile committees: Oversight and Homeland Security. She is also likely to be appointed to a new Oversight select subcommittee to investigate the coronavirus, according to a source familiar with McCarthy’s thinking who was not authorized to preview decisions that have yet to be finalized.
It is already clear that she is influencing McCarthy’s policy agenda.
After Greene had told McCarthy that vaccine mandates were morally wrong and that he needed to stop them, he fought vociferously — and successfully — to include the repeal of the military coronavirus vaccine mandate in last year’s defense bill.
After she told him that the party faithful could not understand why Congress continued to send money to help Ukraine secure its borders, when the United States’ southern border was not secure, McCarthy helped pave the way for Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee to put forward and support a bill sponsored by Greene, who does not sit on the panel, demanding that Congress audit U.S. aid sent to Ukraine.
And after she told McCarthy that many people imprisoned for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were being victimized, he signaled that Republicans would start an inquiry of their own digging into the work of the panel that was investigating the assault.
“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene said. “It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”
In the early hours of Jan. 7, after McCarthy had finally clinched the speakership on the 15th ballot and pallets of Champagne were being wheeled into his new office, Greene opted not to join the celebration. But she sent him a text message the next day telling McCarthy how happy and proud she was — and how she could not wait to get started.
