After spending much of the past year casting doubt on the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccines developed to stop it, Republicans are now blaming the new surge in Delta variant COVID-19 infections on anything and anyone except themselves, Dartagnan noted at DailyKos.com (7/21), citing Jonathan Weisman’s and Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s report in the New York Times (7/21), “Amid a widening partisan divide over coronavirus vaccination, most Republicans have either stoked or ignored the flood of misinformation reaching their constituents and instead focused their message about the vaccine on disparaging President Biden, characterizing his drive to inoculate Americans as politically motivated and heavy-handed.”
Meanwhile, the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus is disproportionately hitting the least-vaccinated, most Republican states with a vengeance. As reported by Business Insider:
“[T]he variant isn’t hitting all states equally. Delta cases have risen primarily in states with low vaccination rates, which for the most part are heavily Republican — ‘red’ states such as Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Wyoming. Overall, these states have seen higher upticks in daily cases and hospitalizations than ‘blue’ states that voted Democratic in the 2020 election.”
Let’s be clear on something: Variants to the COVID-19 virus are caused by allowing the virus to continue spreading among the unvaccinated, giving it more time and opportunity to mutate. The more unvaccinated people there are, the better the chance of a variant developing and spreading. That’s what led to this Delta variant that’s now ravaging the vaccine-refusing Republican population in this country.
In simpler terms, Republican intransigence and political pandering created and abetted the conditions that led to the spread of the Delta variant and encouraged an environment that allowed it to flourish. And now that it’s disproportionately killing “their” people, in red-leaning states, Republican elected officials are desperately seeking—once again—to avoid the blame.
The Times’ Weisman and Stolberg reported that on July 20, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the No. 2 House Republican who said he had received his first Pfizer vaccine shot only on July 18, blamed the hesitance on President Biden and his criticism of Donald J. Trump’s vaccine drive last year. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said skeptics would not get their shots until “this administration acknowledges the efforts of the last one.”
And Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., pointed the finger at the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
“Every time Jen Psaki opens her mouth or Dr. Fauci opens his mouth,” he said, “10,000 more people say I’m never going to take the vaccine.”
Dartagnan observed, “What crap. Rep. Scalise waits until July 2021 to get a vaccine and blames that … on Biden? Hey Steve, Trump and his wife got their vaccinations in January! What, you didn’t know that? What kind of ‘representative’ are you?”
“And Sen. Marshall blames this new COVID-19 variant scourge on Anthony Fauci? Someone who spent the entire pandemic trying to convince people to wear masks and get the vaccines when they became available? And Psaki is somehow contributing to this by encouraging people, at every opportunity over the past five months, to get vaccinated?
“Newly elected wingnut Sen. Tuberville says that Republicans won’t get vaccinated until Biden ‘acknowledges the efforts’ Trump supposedly made. What efforts, exactly? The ‘efforts’ that resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, as a result of a year’s worth of COVID-19 disinformation by Trump and the Republican Party?”
DOCTOR DESCRIBES COVID-19 PATIENTS BEGGING FOR VACCINE. “An Alabama doctor gave the kind of account of her job during the COVID-19 pandemic that nearly brought me to tears in one paragraph,” Lauren Floyd noted at DailyKos (7/21).
“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” Dr. Brytney Cobia wrote in a gut-wrenching Facebook post (7/18). “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.
”A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same,” Cobia added. “They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has generally deferred to former President Donald Trump in matters related to the pandemic, Lauren Floyd noted at DailyKos (7/21), but he reversed course and shared the doctor’s story, initially reported in the Birmingham News. “This is heartbreaking,” the Republican senator tweeted. “Getting the COVID vaccine only takes a few minutes. It’s effective, safe, and doesn’t cost you a dime. I got mine, and I encourage you to talk to your doctor about getting yours.”
GREEN ENERGY SHIFT WOULD NET 8M ENERGY JOBS: STUDY. Critics of a shift to a post-carbon economy often claim that a fossil fuel phase-out would leave millions of people out of work. And while millions of fossil fuel industry jobs would indeed be lost under a robust climate policy, a study published (7/23) shows overall energy sector employment would actually increase by over 40% by 2050 due to gains in renewable energy jobs, Brett Wilkins reported at CommonDreams (7/23).
The study—conducted by the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment in collaboration with researchers from the University of British Columbia and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and published in the journal One Earth—concludes that “jobs in the energy sector would grow from today’s 18 million to 26 million” under a climate policy aimed at keeping global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and even the more ambitious target of 1.5°C.
“Over 12 million people work in the coal, oil, and natural gas industries today,” the paper states. “However, to keep global warming well below 2°C, a target enshrined in the Paris Climate Agreement, all three fossil fuels need to dramatically decline and be replaced by low-carbon energy sources.”
According to the study, of the total jobs in 2050 under the well below 2°C scenario, 84% would be in the renewables sector, 11% in fossil fuels, and 5% in nuclear. Moreover, while fossil fuel jobs, particularly extraction jobs, which constitute 80% of current fossil fuel jobs, would rapidly decline, these losses would be more than compensated by gains in solar and wind jobs.
A large portion (7.7 million in 2050) of the growth in solar and wind jobs would be in manufacturing jobs which are not geographically-bound, and which could lead to competition between countries to attract these jobs. Results show how regionally, the Middle East and North Africa, and the US could witness a substantial increase in overall energy jobs with renewable energy expansion, but China may see a decrease with a decline of the coal sector.
Johannes Emmerling, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement that “currently, an estimated 18 million people work in the energy industries—a number that is likely to increase, not decrease, to 26 million if we reach our global climate targets. Manufacturing and installation of renewable energy sources could potentially become about one-third of the total of these jobs, for which countries can also compete in terms of location.”
EVICTIONS, LOSS OF UNEMPLOYMENT AID THREATEN MILLIONS WHILE COVID RESURGES. A good part of the the country is being swamped by the coronavirus at the same time some of the safety nets created by Congress are expiring or states are refusing to continue them, including some of the states in the middle of this new surge, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (7/23).
The federal moratorium on evictions enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was scheduled to expire at the end of July, and the possibility of the administration extending it was complicated (7/23) when a federal appeals court ruled the CDC exceeded its authority in extending the eviction freeze this year. It’s not clear where this leaves the expiring moratorium.
The government could appeal to the Supreme Court, but in June, when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to reject an attempt by a landlord group to lift the ban, one member of that majority—Brett Kavanaugh—indicated that any further extensions of the moratorium would require action from Congress. But economists and housing activists are lobbying for the administration to act.
About 6 million renters face eviction at the end of July. One analyst, Paul Williams, a fellow at the Jain Family Institute, estimates that about 80% of those households are in counties with rapid Delta variant COVID-19 surges.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been tracking economic insecurity during the pandemic, and finds that about 11.4 million renters are behind on rent. The administration has extended the moratorium on mortgage foreclosures.
At the same time, unemployment has stagnated while a couple dozen states have either cut off or will cut off boosted unemployment insurance (UI) before the Sept. 6 expiration of the program. In the 12 states that cut federal UI in the first half of June, unemployment has not decreased as lawmakers insisted it would. “Certainly there was no immediate boost to employment during the 2-3 weeks following the expiration of the pandemic UI benefits,” Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, has found.
Dube found that “even as there was a clear reduction in the number of people who were receiving unemployment benefits—and a clear increase in the number of people who said that they were having difficulty paying their bills—that didn’t seem to translate, at least in the short run, into an uptick in overall employment rates.” That means that cutting off unemployment was not the magic wand to make the economy come roaring back, as Republicans promised. It just means more people are facing economic insecurity. This is dangerous for the nation’s economic recovery, particularly when coupled with a new surge in the pandemic.
WATER IS ESSENTIAL. COMPANIES TRYING TO TURN A BUCK ON IT ARE NOT. The American Prospect has a deep dive by Lee Harris into the commodification of the essentials of life, such as water (7/22) and, as Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com, “The private equity cowboys are getting involved in a big way, which is never a good thing, and there’s a serious warning in the story about why we should keep an eye on where and to whom the infrastructure money, er, flows once the federal spigot is opened, whenever that is. Our scene opens in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where there were some flash floods a little while back. Private equity to the rescue!”
Last year, Louisiana-based Bernhard Capital Partners (BCP), a private equity firm, came to city leaders and offered them a fix. BCP had $750 million available for the city to finance these and other overdue improvement projects. They would also invest in economic development programs, such as business incubators and training programs at Fayetteville State, a historically Black university. In return, BCP requested a contract to operate the city’s water and power utilities for the next 30 years, and keep the profits.
“Many of these municipalities really don’t need to be in the business of operating utilities,” BCP co-founder Jeff Jenkins explained in a phone interview with the Prospect. “Bringing a private investment opportunity to these types of communities can really bolster and empower, especially underserved communities.”
Pierce noted, “My favorite scene in ‘The Big Short” is the one in which Jeremy Strong, playing Vinny of Front Point Partners, calls Ryan Gosling while Strong’s firm is on the brink of going in on Gosling’s heretical speculation about the housing market. Strong asks the fundamental question that every thinking human should ask when presented with a deal that seems to be too good to be true.
“How are you f***ing us?”
The overture is part of a public asset bonanza investors anticipate, amid much-needed federal investments in roads, bridges, and climate resilience. Private equity is seeking to capitalize on the one-off spending spree in President Biden’s infrastructure plans, using environmental violations and crumbling buildings to make the case that municipalities can’t manage their own assets, the Prospect noted.
One encouraging sign for private equity: talks over an infrastructure bill in Washington have included allowances for public-private partnerships (P3s), where companies manage new infrastructure assets. If federal dollars are shaved down enough, if the final P3 language is sufficiently business-friendly, or both, the forthcoming infrastructure package could mean open season for private-sector entrance into municipal utilities.
“And if this next part doesn’t give you a chill, it ought to,” Pierce wrote.
“We are in the business of being essential,” reads a Bernhard Capital banner in a trade publication for infrastructure investors.
No, folks. The water is essential. You are merely finding a way to turn a buck on it.
Agreements to put water, airports, and roads under private control often sour, because private firms guarantee investors that they will meet threshold profit targets. In Bayonne, KKR and Suez had guaranteed investors an 11% rate of return, and raised prices to keep up. Although private equity deals often involve flashy ribbon-cutting ceremonies and projects politicians can point to as progress, they often leave unglamorous maintenance spending to the city. KKR and Suez gave Bayonne $150 million upfront, but required the city to put in $157 million over the life of the contract to upgrade the water system, with yearly payments for infrastructure repairs. Added to the rate hikes, Bayonne’s mayor said, that became increasingly burdensome.
“Read the whole thing [at Prospect.org] because, I assure you, this is all coming soon to a water system near you,” Pierce wrote.
No matter who controls it, your drinking water should not contain an excess of PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” Pierce added, On July 22, the House of Representatives went long and … wait for it … bipartisan on a sweeping bill setting tough new standards for PFAS in drinking water, as well as muscled-up regulations by which the federal government can order PFAS clean-ups. From MLive:
“As passed by the House, the bill would require the US Environmental Protection Agency to establish nationwide drinking water standards within two years for PFOS and PFOA — which are only two individual compounds among of thousands of similar one[s] in the PFAS family. Presently, the EPA relies on a non-enforceable advisory level for the two chemicals in drinking water that’s far less stringent than legal limits multiple states have enacted. In Michigan, PFOS and PFOA must test below 16 and 8 parts-per-trillion (ppt), respectively, in public water supplies. The EPA advisory level for the two compounds is 70-ppt.
“The bill also directs the EPA to designate PFOS and PFOA as ‘hazardous substances’ within a year. That regulatory definition under federal Superfund law would give the EPA authority to force polluters to clean up PFAS contamination and recover some taxpayer costs.”
Pierce concluded, “Water, as they say, is life. One might even call it … essential.”
LAREDO CELEBRATES TERMINATION OF TWO BORDER WALL CONTRACTS. The Biden administration announced (7/23) that it’s cancelling two border wall contracts issued during the previous administration. While no construction had begun, the agreements were for 31 miles of border barrier in South Texas’ Webb County (Laredo) totaling over $500 million in taxpayer funds, Border Report said.
“THE BORDER WALL IN LAREDO IS DEAD,” the #NoBorderWall Coalition declared in a tweet. “An epic David vs. Goliath Battle. The people of Laredo won!”
While the Biden administration in June announced that it would be returning more than $2 billion that the previous administration had taken from military funds for its “stupid and racist wall,” Gabe Ortiz noted at DailyKos (7/26), the two soon-to-be-cancelled contracts “were funded with DHS fiscal year 2020 appropriations, CNN reported.
“The contracts worth $564M—more than $18M per mile—would have destroyed the city landmarks of Las Palmas Nature Trail and Riverbend, parts of Laredo College, the downtown Tres Laredos Park, small businesses, private homes, family ranches, and many other iconic river sites,” #NoBorderWall Coalition continued. Environmental activists had previously called the damage inflicted by this stupid project, “incalculable.”
Ecstatic community leaders told Border Report that they hoped that two other contracts negotiated by the US Army Corps of Engineers for the region also end up on the chopping block. Advocates said those contracts total $484 million and would “destroy an additional 40 river miles that extend from the Colombia International Bridge to El Pico Rd, as well as the northern reach of Zapata County and historic San Ygnacio.”
“It’s a tremendous amount of money that they wanted to waste for an ineffective, destructive wall that would threaten our life, our property, our culture. We weren’t going to accept it,” Rio Grande International Study Center’s Melissa Cigarroa told Border Report. “But our community, our organization, our people would not accept it. It was so counter to our way of life and to what we live every day. There is no disaster. There is no danger.”
Rio Grande Valley counties also refused to be a part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s border emergency declaration.
In a tweet, #NoBorderWall Coalition said Friday’s announcement “directly contradicts the ‘disaster’ narrative that Gov. Greg Abbott is using against Laredo and other border communities to launch his reelection campaign, and which Webb County Judge Tijerina joined for possible state taxpayer dollars to fill county coffers.” Educator Dr. Sylvia Dominguez said the “’disaster’ narrative is a fantasy, and clearly refuted by the facts,” the group continued.
Abbott has since announced his own plan to complete some of the previous president’s wall. He’s so into copying that bill he’s also forcing some of that bill onto taxpayers. He also promised “transparency and accountability” in crowdfunding for further funds, but “Abbott’s office is not disclosing the locations of donors, nor is it requiring that they identify themselves with their real names,” The Texas Tribune reported. “The shortcomings in the donation disclosures have raised ethical concerns about the private fundraising effort for the governor’s major state initiative.”
“DHS continues to review all other paused border barrier projects and is in the process of determining which projects may be necessary to address life, safety, environmental, or other remediation requirements and where to conduct environmental planning,” Friday’s announcement from the administration continued.
ARIZONA LAWMAKER BOOED OFF STAGE BY HER OWN PARTY. An Arizona legislator running for secretary of state found herself on the wrong side of quickly turning GOP sentiment (7/24) after she voiced opposition to the frivolous and seemingly unending audit of 2020 election results in the state’s Maricopa County, Lauren Floyd of DailyKos noted (7/26). A crowd booed State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita off the stage before she could even complete a thought at a “Protect Our Elections” rally the anti-Democrat PAC Turning Point Action held in support of former President Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories in Phoenix.
“Why don’t you listen to what I have to say? We the people, look. It’s we the people who are empowered by our founding ...” Ugenti-Rita told the crowd in video shared by Brahm Resnik, a reporter for KPNX. “Listen. Fine, Okay ... I am running to be your next secretary of state. I’m going to win the primary. Thank you very much.” She conceded after several failed attempts to start her speech and walked off of the stage after about 90 seconds, Newsweek reported.
Resnik said in a Twitter thread the crowd’s reaction was in response to the legislator opposing a fellow Republican’s wish list for election changes.”FYI Trump base crowd was primed to boo @MichelleUgenti. Wasn’t anything she said,” Resnik tweeted. “Boos rained all over room from start till she bailed out.”
Ugenti-Rita tweeted a thread of her own after the event. In it she said: “I’ve been on the frontlines of the battle for election integrity for the last 10 years. I wrote the law banning ballot harvesting, cleaned-up our mail-in voter rolls, strengthened ID requirements just to name a few of my accomplishments, something every candidate on that stage praised. I’ll put my record of fighting for election integrity up against anyone. What I won’t do is vote for ‘show’ legislation that does nothing to strengthen election integrity and introduced for self serving reasons.” She added that she supported the audit, “but I do not support the Trump audit any longer … Sadly, it’s now become clear that the audit has been botched.”
TEXAS SENATE SAYS KLAN HAD ITS GOOD SIDE. The Texas Senate passed legislation (7/21) that would end requirements that public schools in Texas teach about women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement in social studies classes. Texas children will no longer need to be bothered with learning about Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez or Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would no longer be required curriculum.
Just in case you were dense enough to believe that this wasn’t overt racism, Texas senators voted 18-4 to pass Senate Bill 3, which would remove a requirement for public school teachers to teach that the Ku Klux Klan is “morally wrong.” So if a teacher wants to have a group of fifth graders justify the Klan’s treatment of Black people—now they can have at it, SemDem noted at DailyKos (7/21). (By the way, that’s not hypothetical. In South Carolina, in 2017 a teacher assigned her fifth graders to imagine that they were members of the Ku Klux Klan and told them to justify their treatment of Black people.)
The Texas Senate bill would have amended HB 3979, which was passed in the regular session this past spring tp prohibit the teaching of “critical race theory” — the bugaboo of Republican politicians who have pushed for limits on teaching practices relating to race and racism, but the original bill, which takes effect in September, would require that “historical documents related to the civic accomplishments of marginalized populations” be taught. SB 3 contains no such provision, but the absence of Democratic House members puts the House passage of SB 3 in doubt.
More than a dozen other states are considering or have passed bills that would limit the teaching of certain ideas linked to “critical race theory,” the academic study of racism’s pervasive impact, NBC News reported (7/21).
In May, Tennessee Gov. BIll Lee (R) signed a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), wrote in a letter to state education board members that they should “take immediate steps to ensure that Critical Race Theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum.”
TEXAS WEIGHS SANCTIONS AGAINST BEN & JERRY’S OVER ITS BOYCOTT OF ISRAELI SETTLERS. Texas state Comptroller Glenn Hegar is considering blacklisting the popular ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s over its decision to stop doing business in Israeli-occupied territories, the Houston Chronicle reported (7/22).
The Republican official announced (7/22) that his staff was investigating whether the company has violated a Texas law that prohibits the state from contracting with entities that boycott Israel.
Ben & Jerry’s, which is based in Vermont and owned by Unilever, announced it was pulling its products from shelves in the occupied West Bank and contested East Jerusalem. In a statement, the company said doing business there is “inconsistent with our values.”
Israel has controlled both territories for more than a half century, though Palestinians claim them as part of their own future independent state. Israeli settlements there, home to about 700,000 people, are seen by many in the international community as illegal, and obstacles to peace negotiations between the two groups.
In 2017, the Republican-led Texas Legislature passed a law meant to counter the growing boycott, divest and sanction movement, which encourages companies to pressure Israel into changing its policies toward Palestinians. Nine companies are currently blacklisted.
A search of state records Thursday did not show any existing contracts with Ben & Jerry’s. The comptroller’s office declined interview requests, but in a statement, Hegar said Texans have “made it very clear that they stand with Israel and its people.”
UNION WINS BARGAINING VOTE AT TEXAS CHICKEN PLANT. Workers at a Pilgrim’s poultry plant in Waco, Texas, voted overwhelmingly to bargain for a contract through United Food and Commercial Workers Local 540, the Texas AFL-CIO announced (7/22).
Texas AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Leonard Aguilar, who passed out handbills with organizers to support the union drive, congratulated the 400 workers at the plant for the victory. “Your overwhelming vote will definitely make your lives better through higher wages, benefits, and a voice on the job. More than that, your courage and your solidarity will inspire workers across this state to stand up for their rights, too.”
Aguilar noted the hard-won victory arrived in the middle of a national action week in which organized labor was working to pass the PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize). “The company in this case allowed the process to happen without interference and intimidation, and true labor law reform from Congress would afford millions more workers who want to join a union the means to do so without fear of reprisal.”
Pilgrim’s, formerly Pilgrim’s Pride, was founded in 1946 in Pittsburg, Texas, by Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim. The company in 2009 was bought by JBS, a Brazil-based multinational. Pilgrim’s headquarters were relocated from Texas to Greeley, Colo.
The Texas AFL-CIO is the state labor federation consisting of 240,000 affiliated union members who advocate for working families in Texas.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021
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