Pittsburgh bridge collapse injures 10 people

Pittsburgh bridge collapse injures 10 people

By Alex Sundby January 28, 2022

A Pittsburgh bridge collapsed Friday morning, sending multiple vehicles and a public bus plummeting into a park below, officials said. Ten people suffered minor injuries and four people were taken to area hospitals, but none of the injuries were life-threatening, CBS Pittsburgh reports.

“This could have been much worse,” Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman told CBS Pittsburgh at the collapse site. Fetterman noted a winter storm delayed the start of schools and kept people off the roads.

Images from the scene showed vehicles piled up amid the rubble. Gas lines running along the bridge ruptured, causing a large leak, and crews shut off the lines, officials said in a statement.

Five vehicles and an Allegheny County Port Authority bus were on the overpass when it collapsed into Frick Park below at around 6:40 a.m., officials said in the statement. Crews were searching the area to see if anyone may have been in the park when the collapse happened.

The bridge was last inspected in September, Mayor Ed Gainey told reporters. Fire Chief Darryl Jones said authorities were investigating what caused the collapse, which happened hours before President Biden was scheduled to visit the area to speak about infrastructure and other topics.

“With him coming today to talk about this infrastructure bill, to discuss why this funding is so important, today is significant,” Gainey told reporters.”… At the end of the day, we could have had some serious injuries.”

Vehicles are seen in a pileup after a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh on January 28, 2022.
Vehicles are seen in a pileup after a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh on January 28, 2022.JEREMY H.
At collapse site, Biden calls state of U.S. infrastructure “just mind-boggling”

At the bridge collapse site, President Biden said it was “mind-boggling” how far behind the U.S. has been on investing in its infrastructure. The president made the comments to a group of elected officials and first responders as he surveyed the damage from the collapse.

“We have been so far behind on infrastructure for so many years it’s just mind-boggling,” Mr. Biden said. “…We used to be number one in the world.”

Biden visits bridge collapse site

President Biden is visiting the bridge collapse site shortly after he arrived in the Pittsburgh area for a previously scheduled event.

Five vehicles and a bus were on bridge when it collapsed

Five vehicles and an Allegheny County Port Authority bus were on the bridge when it collapsed into Frick Park below at around 6:40 a.m., officials said in a statement. Crews were searching the area to see if anyone may have been in the park when the collapse happened.

“This could have been much worse”

Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman said it was fortunate that a winter storm hitting Pittsburgh at the time of the collapse helped keep people off the roads.

“This could have been much worse,” Fetterman told CBS Pittsburgh at the collapse site. “We were fortunate that there was a public school delay and the traffic could have been much more pronounced.”

“I’m just grateful nobody was killed,” Fetterman told the station. 

Rescuers used ropes and human chain to pull people to safety

Pittsburgh Fire Chief Darryl Jones said rescuers repelled down between 100 feet and 150 feet on ropes to reach people after the collapse. Others formed a human chain to pull people up to safety.

“It wasn’t vertical, but it was fairly steep,” Jones told reporters.

No life-threatening injuries reported

Ten people suffered minor injuries and three people were taken to area hospitals, but none of the injuries were life-threatening.

Vehicle pileup seen amid the rubble

Images from the scene showed vehicles piled up amid the rubble. CBS Pittsburgh reports a gas line runs under the bridge, and officials said the gas line was shut off.

Vehicles are seen in a pileup after a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh on January 28, 2022.
Vehicles are seen in a pileup after a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh on January 28, 2022.JEREMY H.
Biden visiting Pittsburgh later today

The collapse happened hours before President Biden was scheduled to visit Pittsburgh to speak about infrastructure and other topics. White House press secretary Jen Psaki that Mr. Biden’s trip was expected to go on as planned.

Couldn’t have come at a better time. Pennsylvania will receive an extra $1.63 billion in federal infrastructure funds to fix bridges

Pittsburg Post Gazette

Pennsylvania will receive an extra $1.63 billion in federal infrastructure funds to fix bridges, 3rd most in U.S.

Ed Blazina, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  January 14, 2022 

A man walks on the Nine Mile Run Trail — which passes under the Commercial Street Bridge — on March 9, 2020, in Squirrel Hill.

Pennsylvania has the second most bridges in poor condition and will receive an additional $1.63 billion in federal funds over the next five years to help fix some of them, according to details of a federal bridge program announced Friday.

Background material released by senior Biden Administration officials shows that Pennsylvania has 3,353 bridges listed in poor condition — second behind Iowa, which has 4,571. The state will receive the third most money for bridges under the federal infrastructure bill, one of seven states to receive at least $1 billion over five years.

The state is waiting for decisions by regional planning organizations before it announces which bridges will benefit from the new program, which will bring $327.2 million to the state this year. Possibilities in this area include two structures on the Parkway East — the Commercial Street Bridge on the inbound side near the Squirrel Hill Tunnel and the Frazier Street Bridge near Oakland — and the McKees Rocks Bridge.

“As far as specific bridges, we’re not at that point yet,” said Alexis Campbell, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. “We’re doing the 2023 update [to the state bridge program] now. We will put that money to good use, for sure.” Ashley MurrayAirports, including those in Western Pennsylvania, first among transit hubs to get funds under bipartisan infrastructure law

The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, which oversees transportation projects in 10 counties, expects to decide which road and bridge projects to fund at its June meeting.

Gov. Tom Wolf joined U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in Philadelphia Friday morning to highlight the program. Mr. Wolf called the program “a historic investment” for the state and nation.

“Strong infrastructure is critical to the quality of life for all Pennsylvanians, especially strong, safe bridges,” the governor said. “Bridges are the lifelines that connect our communities to one another, while modern, reliable infrastructure is essential for Pennsylvania-based businesses to expand.”

Other Democrats also touted their support for the program.

“For a long time, Pennsylvanians have had to make do with driving over thousands of bridges in poor condition,” Sen. Bob Casey said in a statement. “ Now, I am proud to say that this year alone, hundreds of millions of dollars will go towards repairing and upgrading those bridges, which are so vital to the Commonwealth. 

“This investment will better connect communities, stimulate job growth across Pennsylvania and make commutes to work and school much safer.”

Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon said the additional money will help the state fix hundreds of bridges “in desperate need of repair.” 

“This historic federal funding — passed with bipartisan support — will ensure that we are able to invest in these critical transportation connections in communities across our region and create good, union jobs for construction and trades workers,” he said in a statement.

Allie Carroll, spokeswoman in Pennsylvania for the Republican National Committee, said Mr. Buttigieg’s visit was an attempt by the Biden Administration to cover for “an insanely horrible week” in Washington, where it appears the federal voting rights act is not likely to move forward.

“As Pete Buttigieg grandstands in Philadelphia today, voters know that Biden’s sputtering agenda is on a bridge to nowhere,” she said in a statement.

The program requires a state match of 20% for bridges that are owned by the state. As an incentive for the state to help other levels of government, the new program waives that local match for bridges owned by counties, cities, boroughs and townships. 

The additional money for bridges comes in addition to $4 billion over five years for state roads the agency will receive under the infrastructure bill. That will average out to about $1.33 billion extra for five years, but it still falls way short of the extra $8.1 billion a year the state says it needs to meet normal annual road and bridge work.

So that extra money will not stop the state from pursuing additional funding from other sources. That includes charging tolls on nine major bridges, including the Interstate 79 bridge near Bridgeville, that the department wants to turn over to private firms for replacement and maintenance for 30 years using tolling proceeds.

It also wants to replace the gasoline tax with fees for each package delivered to homes and for rides provided by services such as Uber and Lyft as well as eventually charging motorists a fee for miles driven. 

Federal officials said the bridge money is available immediately and states can begin spending it this spring. They acknowledged some areas, including local PennDOT projects, have experienced trouble obtaining steel and other material due to supply chain problems.

The long-term nature of the program should stimulate industry to step up production and the shortage of materials should not delay the program overall, they said.

Nationally, the bridge program will invest $27.3 billion over five years, which the federal Department of Transportation called the “largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system” in the 1950s. Officials stressed that the money was allocated to states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and tribal nations according to need.

The amount each state gets varies by the size and condition of its poor bridges. For example, Iowa has the most bridges rated poor at 4,571, but many of them are small so it will receive $438 million for upgrades while California’s 1,634 bridges are larger and more expensive, so it will receive the most money at $4.2 billion.

As far as neighboring states, New York will receive the second most money at $1.9 billion for 1,702 poor bridges; New Jersey will get $1.1 billion for 502 poor bridges; West Virginia $506.7 million for 1,5454 bridges; and Ohio $483.3 for 1,377 bridges.

This program also isn’t the only one dedicated to bridges. The department is developing guidelines for a five-year, $12.5 billion competitive grant program.

Big Myth About Donald Trump, GOP Leaders Is Busted In Blistering New Ad

HuffPost

Big Myth About Donald Trump, GOP Leaders Is Busted In Blistering New Ad

Lee Moran September 30, 2021

Progressive PAC MeidasTouch calls out the “malignant force” of the GOP in its blistering new ad.

The 2 1/2-minute spot, released Wednesday, slams the Republican Party for becoming a “misguided personality cult” in honor of ex-President Donald Trump.

The video highlights Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, noting how some GOP governors continue to “recklessly” ignore facts and sacrifice lives “in the callous pursuit of votes.”

“These aren’t leaders of a political movement, they’re leaders of a cult. And they kill,” the PAC, founded by attorney Ben Meiselas and his two brothers in 2020, captioned the clip with the hashtag #TrumpCultKills.

Both the video and the hashtag have gone viral on Twitter, joining otherhard-hittingclips from the PAC to garner hundreds of thousands of views online.

A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

NPR – Climate

A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

Nathan Rott – January 28, 2022. – Heard on Morning Addition

A man fishes near docked oil drilling platforms in 2020 in Port Aransas, Texas. A federal judge has revoked oil and gas leases sold in the Gulf of Mexico in November, saying the Interior Department did not take into account its impact on climate change.Eric Gay/AP

Late last year, just days after pledging to cut fossil fuels at international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history.

On Thursday, a federal judge invalidated that sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the administration didn’t adequately consider the costs to the world’s climate.

The administration used an analysis conducted under former President Donald Trump that environmental groups alleged was critically flawed.

CLIMATE
The Biden administration sold oil and gas leases days after the climate summit

The decision represents a major win for a coalition of environmental groups that challenged the controversial sale, calling it a “huge climate bomb.”

Eighty million acres — an area twice the size of Florida — were put up for auction in November.

Climate groups urged the Biden administration to stop the sale, but the Interior Department said it was compelled to move forward after a different federal judge struck down the administration’s temporary moratorium on new oil and gas lease sales. Oil and gas companies only ended up bidding on 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico.

Those leases will be vacated by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia’s decision, and the Interior Department will have to conduct a new environmental analysis if it decides to hold another sale.

“We are pleased that the court invalidated Interior’s illegal lease sale,” said Earthjustice’s senior attorney, Brettny Hardy. ”We simply cannot continue to make investments in the fossil fuel industry to the peril of our communities and increasingly warming planet.”

ENVIRONMENT
The Western megadrought is revealing America’s ‘lost national park’

The development and consumption of fossil fuels is the largest driver of climate change. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, worsening wildfireshurricanes and heat waves, and disrupting the natural world.

Roughly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels extracted from public lands.

The Biden administration has promised to review the country’s oil and gas leasing program to better account for its contribution to climate change.

Shortly after taking office, it temporarily blocked all new oil and gas leasing on public lands while it conducted its review, but the moratorium was struck down after being challenged by more than a dozen Republican-led states.

Scheduled lease sales resumed after that decision, including the massive sale in the Gulf, which elicited nearly $200 million in bids.

CLIMATE
Lawsuit alleging oil companies misled public about climate change moves forward

The climate impact analysis used by the Biden administration was actually conducted under Trump. It argued that not leasing the acreage would result in more greenhouse gas emissions because it would increase fossil fuel production abroad.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote that the Interior Department acted “arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding foreign consumption from their greenhouse gas emissions,” adding that the “error was indeed a serious failing.”

“The U.S. offshore region is vital to American energy security and continued leases are essential in keeping energy flowing from this strategic national asset,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, in a statement.

The Biden administration could choose to do a new analysis and put the section of the Gulf of Mexico up in another lease sale. Environmental groups would be waiting.

“The fight is not over,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director at Friends of the Earth. “We will continue to hold the Biden administration accountable for making unlawful decisions that contradict its pledge to take swift, urgent action on ‘code red’ climate and environmental justice priorities.”

Sequela: Long after a pandemic is ‘over’, new and terrible symptoms can appear.

Daily Kos

Sequela: Long after a pandemic is ‘over’, new and terrible symptoms can appear.

Mark Summer, Daily Kos Staff January 26, 2022 

Dr. James Samuel Pope, looking into a Covid-19 patients room, makes his rounds in the ICU with his team of fellow doctors, physician assistants, pharmacist and other medical workers at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut on January 18, 2022. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
Health care workers conducting rounds within an ICU filled with COVID-19 patients

“Sequela” is a word that few Americans recognize today. Unfortunately, it’s a word that is much more likely to become familiar over the next few years… even decades. A sequela is a long-term pathological effect resulting from exposure to a disease. When the pandemic ends, the damage is not going to be over. 

There’s often a tendency in the media—and in social media—to try to frame the damage of COVID-19 to an either-or situation. Someone gets sick for a few days, and they either recover and are fine, or they die and count among the ever-growing total deaths. It’s that sort of all-or-nothing approach that allows people to say things like, “Well, the survival rate is 99.9%, so …” Add more nines to the end of that number, depending on how many right-wing news programs you watch. 

Nationally, the actual survival rate is something closer to 98.8%, but that’s not the point. Studies have already indicated that 43% of those who have had at least one symptomatic COVID-19 infection tend to have issues that persist over an extended period. For those who have required hospitalization, the number jumps to 57%. In the United States alone, that’s something over 15 million people who are now suffering protracted illness due to a single, nonlethal infection from COVID-19.

Those suffering these persistent symptoms aren’t really going through a never-ending infection with SARS-CoV-2. “Long COVID” is a sequela—a long-term pathological effect resulting from exposure to COVID-19. For some of these 15 million, the damage is minor and transient. For others, it is debilitating and possibly lifelong.

Many sequelae aren’t obvious. And they may not show up for years.

What kind of long-term effects can be generated by an infection is difficult to predict. As an example, mumps is a viral infection that’s mostly focused on the salivary glands. The primary symptoms include pain on the sides of the face, difficulty in swallowing, fever, headache, and fatigue.

But mumps can also cause temporary or permanent hearing loss. That loss can be subtle. It can be severe. It can affect one ear. It can affect both. Most importantly, hearing loss can have an onset that begins at the same time as other symptoms of the disease, but it can also not appear until months after other symptoms have passed. 

Shingles may be one of the best-known sequela. Unusual in that it represents a continuous infection of the herpes zoster virus over a period of years or decades, shingles can even produce its own sequela in the form of postherpetic neuralgia: debilitating pain that persists for months or years after the typical shingles rash has disappeared.

Similarly, highly infectious measles is primarily a viral infection of the respiratory system. However, it can generate horrific damage to the central nervous system that doesn’t become evident for years. Among the possible consequences of a measles infection is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSP), which is described as “a progressive, disabling, and deadly brain disorder.” This disorder is relatively rare, but when it does appear in measles patients, the SSP comes seven to 10 years after that first infection.

An infectious disease places an enormous strain on the body. In the case of a viral disease, cells in the affected area are hijacked to produce millions of copies of the invading virus. Then those cells are torn apart as the virus particles escape. It’s also not unusual for this replication process to fail, leaving behind fragmentary bits, proteins, and the contents of all those exploded cells. In the case of a large, rapid mutation—like the omicron variant—a virus may generate a large number of transcription errors, resulting in a lot of “junk” floating around the system.

The long-term results of tissue damage, viral fragments, and the efforts of the body’s own systems attempting to control the infection are hard to judge. But this much should be clear: A large-scale pandemic has consequences that can appear well after the infection itself has been brought under control. In the case of a novel virus that suddenly infects a large portion of the population in a short period, the resulting sequelae can be expected to be significant, both in terms of the number of cases, and their effect on every aspect of society.

In particular, neurological sequelae are frequently associated with epidemics and pandemics. 

Nervous system infection or dysfunction during pandemics is common and its enduring consequences, especially among vulnerable populations, are frequently forgotten.

After the 1918 flu pandemic, whole new waves of symptoms appeared in flu survivors years after the immediate threat was past. One of the first sequela to be noticed in the United States was a big increase in miscarriages, stillbirths, premature delivery, and maternal mortality that peaked a year after the flu was gone.

More mysteriously, the years after the 1918 flu saw a wave of fatigue and depression that spread around the world. Sometimes, the symptoms were easy to miss—after all, this was a society just moving on from World War I—and there was a tendency to connect the cases that appeared afterward with similar symptoms that had happened years before. 

But the wave of what would come to be known as “La Von Economo’s encephalitis lethargica,” which peaked in 1923, went beyond some kind of international weltschmerz or even an outbreak of depression. Those suffering the disorder presented with a whole spectrum of symptoms, among which was a sleepiness so profound that patients would drift into a fugue at any time of the day. After a week or two, patients improved. Or they got worse, tumbling toward coma and death. Those affected were described as having “corpse-like” faces that were rigid and devoid of emotion, 50% of those affected died.

In some areas, the wave of encephalitis lethargica generated a secondary wave of famine because the “debilitating lethargy” left people unable to plant and harvest crops. 

How far into the future can the sequelae from the COVID-19 pandemic stretch? The consequences will literally be with us for the lifetimes of all those infected. Possibly longer. Male babies born during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic were at increased risk of heart disease six decades later.

Calculating the loss of lives, much less quality of lives, seems impossible.

What kind of sequelae can we expect from this pandemic? We don’t know. Studying those suffering “long COVID” may provide some clues. So should a look at the consequences of past pandemics. But because the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects so many parts of the body, nasty surprises can be expected for a long time. 

The problem with such a broad pandemic is that even rare side effects can generate enormous numbers. Encephalitis affects 1 out of 1000 mumps patients. But with 73 million COVID-19 cases in the U.S. alone, a rare problem is going to be way too common. Any planning for health care in the future should be made based on the assumption that the 2020-2022 pandemic is going to cast a long shadow down the decades, one that will extend through generations.

Oh, and … wear a mask.

How Corporations Took Over Our Food System

In These Times – Rural America

Death of a Sales Barn: How Corporations Took Over Our Food System

A new report explains how a handful of agribusiness firms came to dominate U.S. agriculture, how they’re ruining rural America, and how we can stop them.

Zoe Pharo January 26, 2022

GETTY IMAGES

Joe Maxwell, a fourth-generation hog farmer in Mexico, Missouri, used to sell his pigs at the Mexico sales barn, which held livestock auctions almost every day of the week. Today, the barn only hosts a sale once a week. Maxwell remembers the decline this way: ​“When we got ready to sell our pigs, there got to be fewer and fewer people wanting to buy,” he says, ​“until there was just about one.”

The death of the small-town sales barn, not to mention other local businesses, illustrates the dramatic changes that have consumed U.S. agriculture in recent decades. These changes have transformed farming from a decentralized model largely in the public arena — with local livestock auction houses and publicly-funded agricultural research — to a highly-concentrated model in the private arena — in which seeds, research, and equipment software are seen as intellectual property and guarded by dominant agribusiness firms. 

As of 2020, 2 million farmers and 21 million food and farm workers stand on one side of the U.S. food system while 325 million eaters stand on the other. In between them are a handful of multinational companies — Tyson, JBS, Bayer, to name some of the biggest — who manage nearly every step of how food gets from producer to consumer. 

But if this concentrated, corporatized food system seems inevitable or inescapable, it isn’t. In a new report, titled ​“Bigger Is Not Better: The High Cost of Agribusiness Consolidation,” the international human-rights federation ActionAid explains how we got here and details the nearly 70 years of policy decisions that created our industrial food system.

Today’s consolidation, according to the report, can be traced back to the post-World War II period, when politicians worked to dismantle the New Deal Agriculture framework. This included programs like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Roosevelt’s economic recovery program, which paid farmers to limit their crop production. The legacy of the New Deal model is complicated — it discriminated against Black farmers and encouraged mechanization and consolidation — but it did set up generations of farmers for success. 

In the 1950s, inspired by technological innovation, business groups worked to address the ​“inefficiencies of farming,” and according to the report, they saw the primary problem as an excess of labor — in other words, too many farmers. These groups aimed to replace a third of family farms, which numbered in the millions, with a few larger farms, capable of producing commodities with less labor and more technology. As Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, famously put it, ​“get big or get out.” 

A series of federal farm bills brought more acres into production and lowered price floors (the lowest legal price that can be paid for a good) which allowed agribusiness companies to pay less for farm goods than they cost farmers to produce. As farmers scrambled to make up for lost revenue and increase their volume, federal enforcement of antitrust laws, which prevent unlawful mergers and business practices and encourage competition among buyers, declined under both the Carter and Reagan administrations. 

In 1996, the U.S. Farm Bill, known as the ​“Freedom to Farm Act” (or, to many farmers, as the ​“Freedom to Fail Act”) put the nail in the coffin of small holders. This law ended the last vestiges of supply management, once the dominant farm policy in the United States. 

Supply management, says Gary Hoskey in a video by ActionAid, can be described as ​“don’t raise more than what can be consumed.” Its necessary components are a floor price for commodities based on the cost of production, a commodity reserve that fluctuates depending on crop success, and conservation programs that take agricultural land out of production — allowing farmers to remain in production during long periods of low prices. 

Instead, the new farm bill further entrenched industrial farming practices by encouraging farmers to plant chemical- and machinery-dependent monocrops like corn and soybeans. Around this time, meatpacking companies began investing in hog confinement and moving to vertical integration. According to the report, their model was that of Don Tyson, the former president of Tyson Foods, in which his company owned all parts of the supply chain except the riskiest: the farm.

These days, the largest food retailers are getting into livestock and dairy markets themselves, cutting out farmers altogether. For example, in 2019, Costco opened its own, fully vertically-integrated meatpacking plant in Nebraska to produce its $4.99 rotisserie chickens. As firms grow, according to the report, they prefer to source from fewer companies in their supply chain, as this simplifies ordering, transport, and other processes. 

Even cooperatives, ​“farmer-run organizations formed to give farmers a better shot against big corporations,” the report says, ​“now too often look like corporations themselves.” Many now own processing facilities as well, making them both the buyer and seller, which undercuts farmers in the same way as vertically-integrated companies. In the late 2000s, farmers filed two class action lawsuits against Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, but settled out of court.

As processors have concentrated, sales have shifted from open cash markets — like sales barns — to contract arrangements between processor and grower. ​“While contracts can guarantee a secure future price for a farmer,” the report notes, ​“the reality is that the buyer generally sets the terms, which can be extremely restrictive for and unfavorable to the farmer.” For livestock, for example, the company supplies specific feed, medicine, and other inputs. 

As a result of these forces, farms these days are fewer and bigger, and mid-sized farms have been the hardest hit. A quick measure that economists use to see whether a market is freely competitive or subject to manipulation is to look at the percentage controlled by the top four firms. When four companies control over 40%, the market is considered uncompetitive, and over 70% indicates a monopoly. Today, the top four companies control 85% of the beef market, 85% of the corn seed market, and 90% of grain trade. Meanwhile, 20% of farms control nearly 70% of U.S. farmland.

Political Promises to Farmers

In 2008, when Barack Obama campaigned on enforcement of antitrust rules and breaking up agribusiness power, the message resonated in rural areas and farming communities. During his campaign, Obama said he planned to ​“reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.””As president, Obama allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”

After he was elected, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a landmark, year-long investigation into the issue in 2010. Thousands of farmers testified and submitted public comments, the ActionAid report says, often at great risk to their livelihoods. However, the inquiry ended quietly: the release of a 24-page memo in which the federal government simply reiterated its ​“commitment to vigorous antitrust enforcement in the agricultural sector” but took no serious action. 

In fact, in the decade since, agribusiness consolidation has only increased. According to ActionAid, the DOJ has since greenlighted many major agribusiness mergers, including those that shrank the ​“Big Six” seed and chemical companies down to the ​“Big Three” and those that further consolidated the meatpacking industry.

Democrats’ failure to address agribusiness consolidation, some argue, has real political consequences. Bill Hogseth, who lives in a rural Wisconsin county that went for Obama twice before swinging to Trump in 2016, put it this way in an essay for Politico: ​“Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system…. [T]hese moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have reason not to push policies distasteful to agribusiness. The largest multinational corporations — including Bayer, Smithfield, and grain dealer Archer Daniels Midland — spend millions in direct lobbying and political donations, according to the report. 

These corporations have cleverly styled themselves as the ​“farm lobby” and have a great deal of influence in Washington, D.C. and state capitals, using farmers as a front to push their agenda. The Farm Bureau, for example, has state-level chapters in all 50 states and claims to be ​“the voice of agriculture,” but its real business is selling insurance through FBL Financial Group. 

The Farm Bureau is not the only group claiming to represent family farmers while supporting big businesses. ActionAid reports that almost two dozen commodities have research and promotion boards funded by ​“checkoffs,” a mandatory tax collected from farmers, for every animal or pound of raw goods they sell. Though not explicitly political, these boards have financial connections with trade groups that lobby for specific state laws — for example, those that exempt concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and other large-scale operations from environmental regulations. 

The Environmental Impact of Consolidation

The corporate consolidation of farming also has devastating environmental impacts, according to the report. Industrial livestock production, one of the most consolidated and technology-dependent parts of the food system, is responsible for 14.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is comparable to the entire global transportation sector.
“You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.”

Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and manure from CAFOs can also damage water and air quality. Four companies control 70% of the global agrochemical market, and the chemicals they manufacture are linked to water contamination and serious health effects — and are often banned in other countries. U.S. regulatory oversight generally depends on voluntary self-monitoring and manufacturer reporting, and decisions are driven by cost-benefit analyses that place a monetary value on health weighed against the financial benefits of chemical use.

With climate change making water and arable land even more scarce, investors and multinational corporations have identified farmland as a lucrative asset class and are buying up farmland around the world. For example, TIAA, the retirement fund manager with close to $1 trillion in assets, is now the world’s largest land investor, with holdings from Brazil to Illinois. The report says these farmland investments are often more subtle than traditional land grabs, in which a corporation or government simply seizes land from its original owner or steward without negotiation or payment, but raise many of the same ecological, legal and human rights concerns.

In addition to damaging the land, industrial agriculture is a major public health hazard. According to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, farming monocultures of genetically similar animals and plants, increasing deforestation and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria via the widespread use of antibiotics in CAFOs all make people more vulnerable to future epidemics. ​“You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases,” Wallace says in the report.

This system locks countries into the production of particular goods for export — in the United States, corn and soybeans — which undermines each country’s own food security and sovereignty. The report notes that a highly specialized and concentrated supply chain is vulnerable to shocks and bottlenecks. During the pandemic, for example, shuttering just three pork packing plants impacted 10% of the nation’s pork supply — hog prices plummeted and farmers had to euthanize their animals, while shoppers faced shortages. 

In April 2020, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to reopen but did not mandate any worker protections. According to the report, by September 2020, more than 44,000 plant workers had tested positive for Covid-19 and at least 210 had died, with rural areas becoming some of the worst virus hot spots in the nation. 

How We Can Really Feed the World

Farming in the United States, once dependent on diversification and complex ecosystem knowledge, is now highly mechanized and dependent on fossil-fuel based technology, ranging from chemical fertilizers and pesticides to genetically-modified seeds, GPS-guided precision agriculture techniques, and automated climate-controlled barns. 70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food.

Agribusiness frequently promotes these innovations and consolidation as the only way to feed the world, but this system still fails us: at least 720 million people, including 42 million in the United States, still go hungry, according to the report. And, despite the reach of consolidation, 70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food. The report puts it this way: ​“It is actually a network of localized and regionalized farmers and markets that most efficiently feeds the world, community by community.” 

Though agriculture has great potential to support ecosystems and benefit the environment — by raising fewer animals, using cover crops, rotationally grazing, saving seeds from year to year and using food waste as feed, to name a few regenerative methods — these practices are generally discouraged by the current agricultural regime. Instead, agribusiness has so far responded to climate change by proposing market-based mechanisms, like soil carbon markets and ​“green finance,” that, according to the report, do not protect against further consolidation. 

To begin undoing the consolidated power block that is corporate agribusiness, the report has a few suggestions. First, an immediate moratorium on agribusiness mergers and on all mergers and acquisitions for agribusiness companies. Revisiting the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, last introduced in 2019 by Sen. Cory Booker, would be a start, and would allow time to develop new, stricter procedures for mergers and acquisitions.

Other helpful steps, according to the report, could include creating land trusts to provide land access to young and marginalized farmers, ensuring living wages for farmers and farmworkers, establishing incentives for conservation practices and developing a new federal farm program that guarantees farmers a fair price based on the costs of production. ActionAid adds that the USDA and EPA must enforce protections for farmers, workers and the environment, including stronger Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) rules. 

A sustainable future for agriculture may not look like a return to the days of the sales barn but, as this report makes clear, it doesn’t look like corporate control, either. Instead, ActionAid’s report makes the case that we need to move towards a decentralized food system with re-localized economies, and quickly.

Zoe Pharo is a Chicago-based writer and In These Times editorial intern. She holds a degree in political science from Carleton College. 

Apparently Florida’s Gov. DeSantis is trying to kill off the repub’s most faithful voters

DailyBeast

DeSantis’ Demented Doc Is About to Get the Grilling He Deserves

Michael Daly January 26, 2022

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

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a politician by profession, so he easily puts politics above all else, even when it concerns the fight against a virus that has killed 870,000 Americans, including 61,000 of his constituents.

“Without a shred of clinical data to support its decision, the Biden Administration has revoked the emergency use authorization for lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatments,” DeSantis tweeted after the FDA’s Monday night announcement that it was suspending approval of the two main therapeutics offered by the centers he opened with great fanfare just last week.

DeSantis went so far as to say, “This indefensible edict takes treatment out of the hands of medical professionals and will cost some Americans their lives. There are real-world implications to Biden’s medical authoritarianism – Americans’ access to treatments is now subject to the whims of a failing president.”

But Dr. Joseph Ladapo, appointed by DeSantis appointed as the state’s surgeon general and now awaiting lawmakers’ confirmation to that post, is a physician. Ladapo therefore had the moral and professional responsibility to set people straight regarding the clinics that were opened by the health department he heads. He instead affirmed the governor’s fiction.

“The federal government has failed to adequately provide the United States with adequate outpatient treatment options for COVID-19,” Ladapo said. “Now, they are scrambling to cover up a failure to deliver on a promise to ‘shut down the virus.’”

Ron DeSantis Opens Antibody Centers That Are Useless Against Omicron

The truth is that the treatment options being offered by the clinics had been rendered all but useless by the Omicron variant. The manufacturer of one of the two main monoclonal treatments acknowledged that in a statement on Tuesday.

“The original REGEN-COV antibody cocktail has been administered to millions of people, and we are extremely proud of the critical role this medicine has played during the pandemic. However, it does not work against #Omicron in lab tests, which tells us that unfortunately it is also not going to work in people infected with this variant,” a Regeneron spokesperson said. “According to the CDC, over 99% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are now caused by the Omicron variant, and thus we believe the FDA’s decision to amend the Emergency Use Authorization was appropriate at this time.”

Ladapo just ignored this inconvenient reality. He had at other times described reliance on vaccines and face coverings and testing as “the trifecta of stupidity.” And he gave no indication he would not simply further his reckless and irresponsible nonsense on Wednesday, when he is scheduled to appear at a confirmation hearing by the Health Policy Committee of the state Senate.

Early misgivings about his suitability arose during a “get acquainted” visit to the Senate after his appointment in October. The senators Ladapo visited included Democrat Tina Polsky, who has a sign on her door asking all who enter to wear a mask. He and two men with him strode inside and stood in the waiting area with their faces uncovered.

Entire Universe Dunks on Florida Surgeon General After Insane Mask Standoff

Polsky asked Ladapo to put on a mask. He suggested there were alternatives such as going outside.

“I said, ‘No, I would like to sit here in my office where I have chairs and a comfortable setting, but I would like you to wear a mask,’” she recalled to The Daily Beast.

Ladapo balked and seemed to seek a debate.

“But I wouldn’t engage in it,” she remembered, “And it just went on and on.”

Polsky had particular cause for concern. She had recently undergone surgery for breast cancer and was about to begin a regimen of radiation that would be disrupted if she tested positive for COVID-19

“I said. ‘I have a serious medical condition’’’ she remembered. “He said, ‘We can talk about that.’ I said, ‘No.’ I kept backing up into my aide’s office because I was so uncomfortable. I had my mask on, of course.’”

Ladapo continued to refuse.

“I didn’t talk to him about any substantive issues because he wouldn’t put on a mask so I could sit down and have a conversation with him about his credentials,” she remembered.

She realized that he was likely just to go on and on.

“I said, ‘You can leave now, if you’re not going to wear a mask. I know everything I need to know about you and your role as the top medical professional in the state,’” she recalled.

Ladapo departed.

“The real kicker was when he left, my other aide was outside and heard him say something like, ‘I love to rile up those liberals,’” Polsky told The Daily Beast.

When word of the encounter reached the press, DeSantis defended Ladapo, saying Polsky had just been playing politics. But the president of the state Senate, Wilton Simpson, is a gentleman as well as a Republican.

Simpson sent a memorandum to all the senators and their staff with the subject “Respect and Decorum in the Senate.” He reported that he had learned of an “interaction” in Polsky’s office “during which her request that visitors… wear a mask was not respected.”

“This incident is even more disappointing given the health challenges Senator Polsky is currently facing,” the memo said. “However, it should not take a cancer diagnosis for people to respect each other’s level of comfort with social interaction during a pandemic. What occurred in Senator Polsky’s office was unprofessional and will not be tolerated in the Senate.”

Ladapo said nothing until six days after the incident. He offered no apology.

“It is important to me to communicate clearly and effectively with people,” he tweeted. “I can’t do that when half of my face is covered.”

As there is no mandate in the senate, Ladapo would not be required to cover any of his face when he appeared before the Health Committee. The Democratic members include Sen. Janet Cruz, who promised she will “ask many questions” about Ladapo’s positions.

“In my opinion, he’s proven time and time again that data and science are not on the top of his mind when making decisions about the health and wellness of Florida,” she told The Daily Beast.

“So much misinformation is flying around, it’s important to have Florida’s top doc, if that’s what you want to call him, grounded in fact and not in extreme political rhetoric. His rhetoric does not line up with the reality,” she said, adding that “he takes this direction from a governor that feels the same way.”

Cruz noted that Ladapo attended Harvard, but wonders if this is proof that sometimes an Ivy League education does not stack up to “just plain common sense.”

“Or is it just a straight up opportunist who will say and do anything to advance his career?” she wondered. “I don’t know, but I’m disappointed. I’ve been disappointed by many of his comments.”

Cruz spoke of a friend whose 42-year-old nephew failed to get vaccinated and ended up critically ill with COVID in a small community hospital. The friend called to ask Cruz to help get him transferred to a hospital in Tampa that could better treat him.

“I said, ‘Yeah, let’s try,’” Cruz recalled.

But the nephew died before he could be moved. Cruz noted that the nephew’s wife had gotten vaccinated and was fine, but now a widow.

“That’s the kinda stuff that makes me nuts, when I have a Harvard-trained physician that will not recognize the power of the vaccine,” Cruz said.

Cruz noted that her husband is a retired nephrologist, a specialist who was sought out by other specialists with difficult cases.

“I watched him devote 50 years of his life to saving sick patients,” she said. “I’ve watched this man get up at four o’clock in the morning and try to go save someone… And then I see a physician who won’t stand up for a vaccine. I just can’t believe that someone could go to one of the finest medical institutions in the country and perhaps the world and deny the efficacy of a vaccine and the fact that it saves lives.”

Cruz is nonetheless all but certain the Health Policy Committee will approve Ladapo. He will then appear before the Ethics and Elections Committee, whose members include Polsky. The whole Senate will then vote on the appointment. And it seems likely the Senate will impugn its own dignity by approving Ladapo as Florida’s top doctor.

The ultimate question is whether he should be a doctor at all.

As white nationalists, January 6th extremists embrace Christian nationalism, even darker forces revive

Daily Kos

As white nationalists, January 6th extremists embrace Christian nationalism, even darker forces revive

David Neiwert, Daily Kos Staff January 28, 2022 

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 13: Nicholas Fuentes holds up a cross while speaking to people associated with the far-right group America First attend an anti-vaccine protest in front of Gracie Mansion on November 13, 2021 in New York City. A U.S. Circuit Court granted an emergency stay to temporarily stop the Biden administration's vaccine requirement for businesses with 100 or more workers as many feel it is an unlawful overreach. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
White nationalist ‘Groyper’ leader Nick Fuentes holds aloft a crucifix at an anti-vaccination rally in New York City in November.

Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at The Washington Post.

With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,” that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”

As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”

“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.

Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s. Fuentes’ rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”

This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.

A video captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”

He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

As journalist Katherine Stewart explained in The New York Times:

A final precondition for the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form. It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol—were seen praying together.

At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11 captured on video by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service, Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.

Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:

I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.

Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.

The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as Patriot movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.

That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:

Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, “Set the DC Patriots Free” and “We Are Americans, Not Terrorists.” The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the “Stop The Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., last year.

“The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI,” he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.

The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.

Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, who is currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.

The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned a similarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero. “We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, ‘Hallelujah!’ So we are thankful for Trump.”

Then he added: “But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We’ll be looking for the next guy to lead the way.”

Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.

“The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself,” Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of USA Today. “It’s deeply baked into our nation. It’s deep, but it’s also been proven time and time again to be wrong.”

While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.

“For them, it’s just shorthand for identity,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. “There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles.”

Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today’s religious displays are an “intense redeployment of old tactics.”

“People don’t want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true,” DeMichele said. “It’s very important to understand that it’s not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity.”

The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented Patriots to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult. Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media had been a powerful vector for this confluence.

“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”

Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”

One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights who later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)

Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—QAnon influencer GhostEzra, who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.

“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.

As Stewart explained in The NYT, Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:

National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the public will take notice remains to be seen.

As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism): When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of scripture.

This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.

We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.

6 in 10 republi-cons can’t admit Biden won in 2020, and won’t vote for those who do

Yahoo! News

Poll: Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans say they will not vote for any candidate who admits Biden won ‘fair and square’

Andrew Romano, West Coast Correspondent January 27, 2022

Joe Biden, with one hand on a Bible held by his wife and the other hand raised, is sworn in president.
Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via Reuters)

Despite a mountain of evidence showing the 2020 presidential contest wasn’t rigged against Donald Trump, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (57 percent) now say they will not vote in upcoming elections for any candidate who admits that Joe Biden won the presidency “fair and square.”

Only 17 percent say they would consider voting for a candidate who accurately characterizes Biden’s victory as legitimate.

These numbers underscore the degree to which Trump’s “big lie” claiming Biden cheated his way into the White House — a falsehood that three-quarters of Trump voters (74 percent) now believe — has become a litmus test for the entire GOP, crowding out other issues and strengthening Trump’s grip on the party ahead of the 2022 midterms.

For his part, Trump has made it clear that supporting his election fabrications is key to his own personal endorsement. Indeed, the former president is backing primary candidates against state officials who bucked his attempts to overturn the election.

The poll data also helps explain why Republican presidential hopefuls such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis now want to spend millions of dollars on special “election crimes” police units tasked with finding fraud where they previously insisted there was none.

“The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence,” DeSantis said immediately after the 2020 election. “That’s how elections should be run.”

The survey of 1,568 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Jan. 20 to 24, found that when asked which issue they want future candidates to focus on the most, the share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say “stopping Democrats from rigging and stealing elections” (17 percent) — something that Democrats are not doing — is statistically equivalent to the share who say “bringing down inflation” (19 percent).

A flag reads: Stop the Steal.
A flag at a campaign rally with President Donald Trump and Sen. Kelly Loeffler in Dalton, Ga., on Jan. 4, 2021, the eve of Georgia’s Senate runoff election. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Other core conservative policies don’t even come close: “ending COVID restrictions” (10 percent), “fighting crime” (8 percent), “outlawing abortion” (5 percent), “cutting taxes” (5 percent), “appointing Supreme Court justices” (2 percent) and “giving parents more controls over schools” (2 percent). Only “securing the border” (23 percent) ranks higher.

Likewise, if the GOP wins control of Congress in November, 56 percent of Republicans say they want the party to launch yet another investigation of the 2020 presidential election — twice the number (28 percent) who say the opposite.

Trump remains the GOP’s most powerful and influential figure. Looking ahead, 56 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners say Trump’s endorsement is more important than that of “other Republican leaders” (23 percent) when they are deciding how to vote. Half (50 percent) say Trump was “the best Republican president” — far better than George H.W. Bush (4 percent) and his son George W. Bush (9 percent), and significantly better even than conservative icon Ronald Reagan (37 percent). Eighty-two percent rate Trump favorably, and 83 percent say they would vote for him in a rematch with Biden.

For the broader population of voters, Biden’s job approval rating continues to sink. Fifty-three percent of Americans disapprove of how he’s handling the presidency, compared with 40 percent who approve, and a mere 2 points now separate him (42 percent) and Trump (40 percent) in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup. In the Dec. 13 Yahoo News/YouGov poll, Biden (45 percent) led Trump (38 percent) by 7.

President Donald Trump delivers his first State of the Union address to Congress in 2018 as Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan applaud.
Trump delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 30, 2018. (Win McNamee/Pool via Reuters)

There are signs that at least some Republicans are open to alternatives to Trump. More than a quarter (27 percent) say he should not run again. Sixteen percent say they would consider voting for centrist West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin if he were to run for president as an independent, more than the number of Democrats (10 percent) or independents (15 percent) who say the same. And 21 percent already say they would vote for DeSantis over Trump in the GOP primary; other potential candidates — including former Vice President Mike Pence (6 percent), former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (6 percent) and Fox News host Tucker Carlson (2 percent) — combine for another 19 percent of the vote, and 12 percent say they’re not sure.

DeSantis’s unfavorable rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (12 percent) is also lower than Trump’s (15 percent). More than half (51 percent) rate the Florida governor “very” favorably, on par with the far more familiar Trump (57 percent).

As a result, less than half of Republicans and GOP-aligned independents (46 percent) currently say they would vote for Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries. Still, it’s worth noting how close that number is to the 45 percent of the popular vote that Trump won across all Republican primaries in 2016 — enough to secure him the nomination and ultimately propel him to the White House.

_________________

The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,568 U.S. adults interviewed online from Jan. 20 to 24, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or nonvote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.8 percent.

Biden urges Congress to act now on Equal Rights Amendment

Reuters

Biden urges Congress to act now on Equal Rights Amendment

Susan Heavey January 27, 2022

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Thursday called on Congress to immediately enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution and formally protect women’s rights nearly a century after lawmakers first raised them.

In a statement, Biden urged Congress “to pass a resolution recognizing ratification of the ERA,” saying recent legal analysis showed there was nothing preventing lawmakers from acting.

The Democratic president’s call comes amid jostling over the deadline to enact the ERA, which passed Congress in 1972 with a 1982 deadline to be enacted if 38 state legislatures voted to approve. Nearly 100 years have passed since it was first introduced in 1923.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives separately unveiled a resolution to enshrine the ERA, but it could fall short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate, where Democrats control just 50 seats.

While supporters say the ERA is needed to protect against sexual discrimination and would help achieve equal pay, opponents argue the original timetable has passed and that the amendment is no longer needed.

Virginia became the 38th state in 2020 to adopt the ERA, but Republican then-President Donald Trump sought to block ratification with a legal memo saying the process must begin anew.

A new Justice Department legal analysis, however, allows the process to move forward and “makes clear, there is nothing standing in Congress’s way from doing so,” Biden said.

House oversight panel Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and other Democrats argue that the ERA made clear it takes effect two years after the final state’s ratification, with Thursday marking two years since Virginia’s vote.

The resolution “reaffirms what we already know to be true: the Equal Rights Amendment is the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Maloney said.

The issue also remains entangled in the federal courts: Virginia, Illinois and Nevada sued to have the ERA declared valid.

In a statement, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration said it would abide by the Justice Department’s legal opinion unless otherwise directed by a final court order. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; Additional reporting by David Morgan and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Jonathan Oatis)