News Releases

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson recieve Woodrow Wilson Awards, Author: Dave Bassett, CC-3.0

ELI CLIFTON, eli.clifton@gmail.com, @EliClifton
    Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative-Journalist-at-Large at Responsible Statecraft. He just wrote the piece “Miriam Adelson Picks Up Where Late Husband and GOP Kingmaker Left Off.”

    Clifton writes: “It’s big news when a political party’s biggest funder announces, after a period of mourning for the death of their spouse, that they will be continuing their role as the go-to funder for congressional and presidential candidates in 2022 and 2024. You also might expect a discussion of how that donor expects to influence U.S. politics with their campaign donations. You’d be wrong.”

    On Sunday, Politico “provided in-depth reporting on how ‘Republican mega donor Miriam Adelson — the widow of casino mogul and longtime GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson — is staging a return to politics, positioning herself to be a force in the 2022 midterms and beyond.’

    “This is big news. Adelson, a U.S.-Israel dual national, is worth $30 billion as the majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, a casino and resort company with enormous business interests in Singapore and Macau, a Chinese Special Administrative Region.

    “Foreign policy, both in the Middle East and East Asia, is clearly a central area of interest for the woman likely to emerge as the single biggest funder of Republican Party candidates in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

    “One of the couple’s final political acts, before Sheldon Adelson’s death on January 11th, was to fly Jonathan Pollard — a former U.S. Navy analyst who spent 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to spying for Israel — to Israel on one the family’s private 737s once Pollard’s travel ban was lifted.

    “Indeed, foreign policy has been the key-defining issue-area of the Adelsons’ political giving. The Adelsons helped to support the ultra-hawkish pro-Likud, anti-Iran echo chamber, including, among other groups, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Israeli American Council, United Against Nuclear Iran, and the  Zionist Organization of America — all of which the couple financially supported over the last two decades. They also provided tens of millions of dollars to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee over the years, but abruptly withdrew their backing in 2007 because of its support in Congress for an economic aid package for Palestinians. …”

    Clifton notes that virtually none of this context was provided in “Politico’s write-up of Miriam committing to carry-on the political giving previously conducted in collaboration with her husband.”

    See recent piece from the media watch group FAIR: “Politico’s Staff Must Toe New Owner’s Line — Including Endorsing Israel.”

MIKE ELK, mike.elk@gmail.com, @MikeElk
    Elk is a labor reporter and founder of PayDayReport.com.

    His work was just featured in the in-depth piece “‘It’s a walkout!’ — Inside the fast-food workers’ season of rebellion” in the Washington Post: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics only tracks major stoppages that involve more than 1,000 workers. But Mike Elk, a labor reporter and founder of PayDayReport.com, has compiled a database of 1,600 walkouts since March 2020 that included as many as 100,000 workers.”

    Elk highlighted the scope of labor actions in just one town: “One thousand hospital workers are striking at Cabell Huntington Hospital in West Virginia. Nearly 500 steelworkers in Huntington have been on strike at Special Metals already for four weeks.

    “With only 50,000 people living in Huntington, West Virginia, having nearly 1,500 workers out on strike is sure to have a huge impact.

    “This could be a landmark strike movement in this small West Virginia town that could mobilize more support nationwide for the growing strike movement.

    “More than a year and a half ago, Payday was the first outlet to identify a massive strike wave, beginning when we launched our Payday Report Strike Tracker in March of 2020.

    “Since then, we have recorded more than 1,600 strikes and walkouts.

    “Some commentators suddenly started dubbing October #Striketober because of strikes at John Deere, Kellogg, and the retail workers. …

    “These commentators failed to pick up on the strike wave because the walkouts were fundamentally different from walkouts in the past. Instead of calling upon unions and going on traditional strikes, many non-union workers organized on social media and simply walked out.”

In a piece headlined “Watchdog finds no misconduct in mistaken Afghan airstrike,” the AP describes “an independent Pentagon review” which has “concluded that the U.S. drone strike that killed innocent Kabul civilians and children in the final days of the Afghanistan war was not caused by misconduct or negligence, and it doesn’t recommend any disciplinary action.”

NBC News reports: “Pentagon review found that footage showed child present minutes before U.S. drone attack in Kabul.”

Representatives of BanKillerDrones.org say the Pentagon “must be called upon by people around the world and by the U.S. Congress to make public all of the communications and logs, including communications with the White House, pertaining to the August 29, 2021 drone attack that killed 10 members of the Ahmadi family in Kabul, including seven children.”

“The Pentagon’s assertion that no one did anything illegal to cause the drone deaths of the Ahmadi family members is a shameful side-stepping and a further cover-up of who made what decisions and why in this horrible slaughter,” said Nick Mottern, a co-coordinator of BanKillerDrones.org. “We need to see all the records surrounding this incident, including those that may help us to know the role of President Biden, if any.”

Kathy Kelly, a peace advocate who has visited Afghanistan 28 times since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and also a co-coordinator of BanKillerDrones.org, said: “By recommending against any disciplinary action following the slaughter of 10 civilians, seven of whom were children, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is endorsing reckless cruelty waged through ghastly drone attacks.”

Mottern noted that a wide array of international human rights law experts have asserted that U.S. drone attacks violate international law and principles of war, so the use of an armed drone on August 29th was illegal. Further, he said, Air Force veteran Daniel Hale was sent to federal prison in July at the hands of the Biden Administration for releasing government documents that addressed precisely the faulty intelligence and other problems with the U.S. drone program that led to the August 29th drone attack. “The use of weaponized drones should have been shelved years ago,” Mottern said.

They added: “It is beyond outrageous that the Pentagon has yet to provide full reparations for the killing of Ahmadi family members and has failed to meet their need for speedy passage to the United States.” BanKillerDrones.org has called for reparations of $3 million for each of the 10 Ahmadi family members killed. The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration paid “nearly $3 million” to the family of Giovanni Lo Porto, who was mistakenly killed in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan in 2015.

Contact:
Kathy Kelly, kathy.vcnv@gmail.com
Nick Mottern, nickmottern@gmail.com

On Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to advance former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s nomination as the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Two Democrats voted ‘No,’ but were offset by the Biden administration securing the backing of Republicans on the Committee. The nomination now moves to the full Senate.

The Chicago Tribune reports: “Progressive Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Edward Markey of Massachusetts asked to be recorded as ‘No’ votes on Emanuel as the committee took a single vote to approve 14 ambassador nominations at once.” Emanuel’s backers include “former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress.”

DELMARIE COBB, dlcobb@thepublicityworks.net
    Cobb is a political activist from Chicago who helped organize a broad effort to oppose Emanuel’s nomination; see below. She said today: “The recent elections results show the most loyal voting bloc in the Democratic Party are Black voters. As always, it’s about turnout. Yet, we continue to be taken for granted by elected officials at every level of the party. How President Joe Biden could forget so quickly who helped to put him in office is incredible. He shows his appreciation by trying to resurrect Rahm Emanuel from the heap of failed mayors. What a slap in the face to Black voters to nominate a man who is synonymous with a police murder, police coverup and public policies that failed Chicago’s most underserved communities.”

The AP notes: “Emanuel would head to Japan at a moment when Biden wants to increase focus on the Indo-Pacific.”

Sen. Merkley released the following statement: “Black Lives Matter. Here in the halls of Congress, it is important that we not just speak and believe these words, but put them into action in the decisions we make. I have carefully considered Mayor Emanuel’s record — and the input of civil rights leaders, criminal justice experts, and local elected officials who have reached out to the Senate to weigh in — and I have reached the decision that I cannot support his nomination to serve as a U.S. Ambassador.” See video posted by RootsAction: “Rahm Emanuel Evades Senator Jeff Merkley’s Questions On Laquan McDonald.”

Over the last month, numerous activists from Chicago have spoken up against the nomination including:

Dorothy Homes, Justice For Families:
“Rahm Emanuel covered up the murder of my son… Rahm Emanuel does not deserve to be the ambassador of anything. Rahm Emanuel belongs behind bars.”

Camiella Williams, Adult Advisor to GoodKidsMadCity:
“If Rahm Emmanuel’s appointment as Ambassador for Japan is confirmed, all the organizing efforts put in to remove him as Mayor of Chicago will go in vain! Rahm showed the entire world, he cannot be trusted as a public servant when he concealed the murder tape of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald for his political gain.”

The Center for Economic and Policy Research recently released an assessment: “Building Back Better Could Be Better.”

Executive Action Tracker:
Out of 77 actions Biden could take without Congressional mandate identified by The American Prospect, there are 15 yes, 11 partial, 6 no, and 1 no longer applicable. For example, the magazine notes that Biden could: “Implement free public college by using existing statutory authority to forgive loans equal to average public-college tuition on a rolling basis for two- and four-year public colleges.” Another example: “Write rules to crack down on IRA stuffing, ending the possibility that someone like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) can have $100 million in an IRA.”

Paid Leave:
CEPR co-founder Dean Baker notes in “NYT Spreads Fox News Style Misinformation on Family Leave and Childcare” that: “An article discussing the future prospects for paid family leave dismissed the claim by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand that almost every country in the world has paid family leave, by saying that most of these countries actually do not expect women to work after they have had children. …

“While it is true that many women in developing countries with paid family leave do not work outside the home, most wealthy countries with paid leave actually have higher rates of women’s labor force participation than the United States. According to data from the OECD, 83.8 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 64 were in the labor force in Finland. In Germany, the figure was 84.4 percent; in France, it was 79.3 percent. By comparison, in the United States, it was just 77.2 percent, a figure that puts it well behind most other wealthy countries.”In short, the story is the exact opposite of what the New York Times told readers. The U.S. workforce relies less on women than most of the wealthy countries that provide paid family leave.”

Taxing the Rich:
The Washington Post reported recently: “Billionaire tax out, corporate minimum tax in: Where the White House landed on tax plans.” The Post notes that one thing that did make it is a 5 percent surcharge on annual income greater than $10 million and a 3 percent surcharge on income greater than $25 million. Baker, responding to dropping many tax measures aggressively targeting the rich, said: “With the surtax, there’s no question of its constitutionality. It seems much safer. … But it will do less about inequality, because this is not a hit to the richest people whereas the other one would have been.”

Overview:
Max B. Sawicky, senior research fellow at CEPR, just gave this overview in In These Times magazine: “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in the Build Back Better Deal.”

For interviews with CEPR economists, contact: Karen Conner, conner@cepr.net

MITCH JONES, Seth Gladstone, sgladstone@fwwatch.org
    The Biden administration is pressing Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act, touted as the most substantial investment in climate action in the nation’s history. Passing the spending bill is intended to demonstrate to world leaders at the COP26 conference in Glasgow that the United States is finally serious about addressing the climate crisis.

    Jones is policy director at the national advocacy organization Food & Water Watch.

    He said today: “As it currently stands, the Build Back Better reconciliation package does relatively little to confront climate pollution from fossil fuels. Talking about it as the most comprehensive climate legislation of all time is misleading, in that Congress has done next to nothing to compare it to. The bill primarily delivers an array of tax credits for purchases of renewable energy and electric cars, while expanding financial incentives for so-called ‘carbon capture’ schemes and protecting the billions of dollars that are wasted on domestic fossil fuel subsidies. These are the government giveaways that literally make oil and gas drilling look profitable to Wall Street and fossil fuel corporations.

    “The intense focus on the success of this spending bill takes some of the spotlight away from the actions that the Biden administration could be taking on its own to rein in fossil fuel production. The White House has extraordinary powers to limit the supply of fossil fuels that do not require the blessing of Senator Joe Manchin or the entirety of the Republican Party. Biden campaigned on a promise to stop oil and gas drilling on federal land — but since the election has not taken aggressive action to rein in this drilling. In fact, the Biden administration is approving new drilling permits at an astonishing pace.

    “The White House could immediately direct all relevant agencies to stop approvals of new fossil fuel infrastructure, including major new oil and gas pipelines. It could put a halt to fossil fuel exports, including crude oil. These are all common sense executive actions that would demonstrate seriousness in confronting a crisis that President Biden has called an existential threat. Failure to take such actions cannot be blamed on Joe Manchin.”

    Jones recently wrote the piece “‘Compromising’ on Climate Is Horrible Politics, Deadly Policy, and Stupid Economics.”

TODD MILLER, toddmemomiller@gmail.com, @memomiller
    In preparation for the United Nations climate change summit in Glasgow that started on October 31, the White House wrote, “The current migration situation extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into Central America presents an opportunity for the United States to model good practice and discuss openly managing migration humanely, [and] highlight the role of climate change in migration.”

    Author of the book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, Miller responded: “These sorts of statements have become normal for the Joe Biden administration, rhetoric that sounds nice for those concerned with immigrant rights, but divorced from reality and the policies of his administration, as well as strategies in place on the border for decades.”

    Miller co-wrote the new report “Global Climate Wall: How the World’s Wealthiest Nations Prioritize Borders Over Climate Action” for the Transnational Institute. He said: “We showed the United States — the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter — has the world’s largest border and immigration enforcement budget. In this sense, the United States, along with other rich and historically high-emitting countries, have made a heavy investment in border regimes composed of walls, surveillance technology including drones, and armies of border guards, while neglecting commitments to climate financing for poorer and more ecologically vulnerable countries that would be dedicated to adaptation and creating resilience so people don’t have to migrate. The U.S. is spending eleven times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance. In other words, there is no humane ‘managing’ of migration happening.

    “There were 1.3 million people displaced in Guatemala and Honduras due to drought, hurricanes, and floods in 2020—and if they come to the U.S. border they are facing the guns, gates, guards, and prisons. Like greenhouse gas emissions, global border fortification needs to be mitigated. As negotiations begin in Glasgow this week, this needs to be central to climate negotiations going forward.”

    Miller also just wrote the piece “Defund the Global Climate Wall” for The Border Chronicle.

The New York Times reports: “China’s Weapon Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U.S. General Says.”

THEODORE A. POSTOL, postol@mit.edu
    Available for a limited number of interviews, Postol is professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT. He said today:

    1. “The potential of hypersonic vehicles increasing the threat to the United States is essentially zero.

    “The United States is already threatened by ballistic missiles and nuclear armed cruise missiles. Neither of these systems can be defended against. In particular, there is no capability of defending against ballistic missile warheads as the ability to deploy decoys is so simple and the inability of current systems to determine the difference between decoys and warheads is so complete that for all practical purposes it is not possible to intercept ballistic warheads.

    “Cruise missiles can occasionally be intercepted with quick reaction low-altitude defenses surrounding target locations, but the technology for this kind of defense is so limited, that such defenses cannot be used to provide a practical national defense.

    “Thus, the threat of a hypersonic vehicle that is also not subject to meaningful defense does not change offensive nuclear strike capabilities in any meaningful way.

    2. “In the case of the United States, we are blessed with extraordinarily capable space-based early warning systems which have the ability to detect hypersonic vehicles as they descend into the atmosphere and become heated to very high temperatures.

    “We also have the capability to detect the launch and powered flight of ballistic missiles that would accelerate and deploy hypersonic vehicles towards the North American continent. This detection capability does not translate into any significant defensive capability, but it does mean that the United States would have warning that such an attack was underway.

    “It is very difficult to think of a scenario where such an attack was not accompanied by the launch of ballistic missiles, but that is a different matter than what I am currently addressing.

    3. “The early warning situation for countries other than the United States is problematic, and could introduce problematic instabilities with regard to accidental nuclear war.

    “Hypersonic delivery vehicles are launched onto trajectories that do not rise to extremely high altitudes like those associated with ballistic missile warheads.

    “Because the earth is round, the detection of hypersonic delivery vehicles by conventional ballistic missile early warning radars is almost nonexistent because of limitations imposed by the curvature of the earth. There is likely some capability to detect hypersonic vehicles using Over-the-Horizon Backscatter (OTH) radars, which reflect their radar beams off the ionosphere. However, these radars are limited to low frequencies (between 5 and 30 MHz) and depend on being able to reliably reflect radar beams off the ionosphere. The ionosphere is unstable and cannot be used with certainty and therefore potentially limits the utility of these over the horizon radars.

    “This means that countries like Russia (and China), which do not have highly capable space-based infrared detection systems, will have extremely limited or no warning of attack by hypersonic vehicles.

    “These threats to ground-based early warning radars and command posts will not materially add to the already serious threat to ground-based early-warning systems posed by stealthy cruise missiles (which are no longer limited due to the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty). The introduction of hypersonic vehicles will not change this currently dangerous situation as long as the numbers of such vehicles are relatively small and their accuracy does not begin to approach that of what is already achievable with ballistic and cruise missiles at this time. Nonetheless, there would certainly be some additional concern in countries that depend only on vulnerable ground-based warning systems that hypersonic vehicles could be used to attack ballistic missile early warning radars and key command-and-control installations as precursors to larger attacks.

    “In summary, the introduction of hypersonic vehicles into the arsenals of the major countries may not introduce significant threats to nuclear stability that do not already exist unless they become numerous enough and sufficiently accurate to pose a credible zero or short-warning attack threat to the command-and-control and early warning systems of countries like Russia and China. Since ballistic missiles are far more accurate and versatile for purposes of large-scale attacks, it is probable that the countries demonstrating hypersonic vehicle capabilities will not deploy them in any significant numbers.

    “As such, hypersonic vehicles are almost certainly an activity aimed at getting the attention of other countries by demonstrating technological prowess, as they will have little or no meaning in terms of adding significant nuclear-strike capabilities.”

The UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) begins on Oct 31 in Glasgow, Scotland.

Hundreds of peace and environmental organizations have announced an event on November 4 in Glasgow.

They are demanding that militaries be included in climate agreements.

Over 400 organizations and 20,000 people have signed a petition at COP26.info addressed to COP26 participants: “Stop Excluding Military Pollution from Climate Agreements.”

The group World BEYOND War states: “The U.S. military is one of the biggest polluters on earth. Since 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million cars on the road.” The group adds that the Pentagon is “the largest institutional consumer of oil ($17B/year) in the world, and the largest global landholder with 800 foreign military bases in 80 countries. By one estimate, the U.S. military used 1.2 million barrels of oil in Iraq in just one month of 2008. One military estimate in 2003 was that two-thirds of the U.S. Army’s fuel consumption occurred in vehicles that were delivering fuel to the battlefield.”

Speakers at the event on 4 November will include: Stuart Parkinson of Scientists for Global Responsibility UK, Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition, Alison Lochhead of Greenham Women Everywhere, Jodie Evans of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Tim Pluta of World BEYOND War, David Collins of Veterans For Peace, Lynn Jamieson of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and others to be announced. There will also be music by David Rovics.

“Our purpose here begins with making people aware of the problem,” said David Swanson, executive director of World BEYOND War. “Imagine a limit on dangerous items you can carry on airplanes that makes an exception for nuclear weapons. Imagine a diet that limits your calories but makes an exception for 36 gallons of ice cream an hour. Here the world is all gathering to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions that make an exception for militaries. Why? What possible excuse is there for that, unless killing people in the short term is so important to us that we’re willing to kill everyone in the long term. We need to speak up for life, and soon.”

“War and militarism are amongst the unnamed enemies of our ecosphere,” said Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition. “The U.S. military is the biggest single consumer of oil on the planet, and the last two decades of war have polluted on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a scandal that military emissions are being excluded from the discussion. If we want to end warming we need to end war.”

“War is obsolete. There is no doubt, the quicker we get rid of it, the quicker we improve the climate,” added Tim Pluta, World BEYOND War Chapter Organizer in Asturias, Spain.

Contacts:
David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, david@worldbeyondwar.org
The following will be going to Glasgow:
Nancy Mancias, CODE PINK, nancymancias@codepink.org
Tim Pluta, inhatim17@gmail.com

The Institute for Policy Studies has several experts available to speak about the negotiations on the Hill. The group states: “Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to forge an agreement on President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to address our country’s pressing human and climate change needs. The social investments in the deal, including universal pre-K, expanded child tax credits, paid leave, and Medicare expansion, have the potential to be the most consequential for workers, children, and seniors since the 1930s. The agreement could also be historic on the revenue side, with a path-breaking tax on billionaires gaining momentum as one of the key options to pay for these vital public investments.

“But a handful of conservative Democrats are pushing to water down the president’s proposals, and they hold enormous power in a Congress where their party holds only a razor-thin majority.”

Among the analysts available are :

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. The author of the new book, The Wealth Hoarders, Collins is a veteran fair tax advocate who has made headlines this year for his work tracking the explosion of billionaire pandemic wealth.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. She testified earlier this year before the Senate Budget Committee on inequality in the U.S. and has written extensively on the tax and investment proposals on the budget negotiating table.

Anderson and Collins have just published an analysis of the billionaire tax in play on Capitol Hill.

Karen Dolan directs the IPS Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project. She can speak about the child tax credit and other anti-poverty measures in the bill, the political dynamics on Capitol Hill, and the relationship between safety net funding and social movements.

Contact:
Olivia Alperstein, olivia@ips-dc.org
Robert Alvarez, robert@ips-dc.org