Recycling that could become self-sustaining

It's hard to stay enthusiastic about urban recycling when you've seen urban trash haulers just dump your recycling into the same truck with the solid waste.

But industrial recycling may well be an important part of our response to climate change. Instead of proliferating waste, let's hope our eager engineers can figure out how to make money off it.

Such a thing may be underway in north western Nevada, a region fast becoming a tech-industrial hub.  

According to Bloomberg: 

In the scrublands of western Nevada, Tesla co-founder JB Straubel stood on a bluff overlooking several acres of neatly stacked packs of used-up lithium-ion batteries, out of place against the puffs of sagebrush dotting the undulating hills. As if on cue, a giant tumbleweed rolled by. It was the last Friday of March, and Straubel had just struck black gold.

Earlier that day, his battery-recycling company, Redwood Materials, flipped the switch on its first commercial-scale line producing a fine black powder essential to electric vehicle batteries. Known as cathode active material, it’s responsible for a third of the cost of a battery. Redwood plans to manufacture enough of the stuff to build more than 1.3 million EVs a year by 2028, in addition to other battery components that have never been made in the US before.

It’s a turning point for a US battery supply chain that’s currently beholden to China. ... Redwood is attempting to break that stranglehold by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals.

... EVs already have a much smaller environmental footprint than internal combustion cars, even in countries that still get most of their electricity from coal. While the toll of mining the raw materials for batteries is considerable, more than 95% of the key minerals can be profitably recycled.

At Redwood, nothing goes to landfill, and no water leaves the facility except the sanitary waste from sinks and toilets. There are no gas lines; everything is electric. It’s also built for scale, allowing the company to quickly break down a truckload of assorted batteries without manual sorting or tedious disassembly.

Recyclers will eventually need to match the pace of car factories. For example, a Tesla factory just 250 miles away in Fremont, California, produced 560,000 EVs last year — more than one every minute. When it’s time for those cars to be recycled, they will generate almost 10 times as much EV battery material as the entire US market processed last year. If recyclers can handle all of that, they would begin to rival traditional mining operations.

“Once we've changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, and all those minerals are in consumption, we’ll only have to replace a couple percent each year that’s lost in the process,” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer and the former head of powertrain engineering at Tesla. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn't make sense to dig it out of the ground anymore.”

My emphasis. This Bloomberg article goes on to raise the considerable obstacles that battery entrepreneurs could encounter, including reaching necessary scale to supply the new industry, while China may find it in its interest to undercut the costs of their output.  

But it's happening ... and subsidized by the legislation that the Biden Administration squeezed out of Congress to underwrite sustainability. Weird that a government led by a white haired old guy is so forward looking, but there it is.

By way of Bill McKibben.

Credit where credit is due

Here's a postscript to the blog about youth election engagement posted here yesterday.

David Hogg came to national notice in a terrible way: he's one of the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting massacre. With many of his comrades and others, he became one of the organizers of the national March for Our Lives. 

Then he went off to and completed college.

These days he is launching what looks like a movement-oriented youth electoral politics shop which they call Leaders We Deserve, aiming to "build the EMILYs List for young people"  More power to them; needs to be done.

But I wanted to share here Hogg's thoughtful assessment (from Xitter @davidhogg111) of where we've come to in the last four years and of our incumbent and candidate president.

Young people voted for Biden in record numbers here’s the result so far:

• Billions in student debt forgiveness

 • First gun safety bill in 30 years

• Most Climate spending in US history

• Office of gun violence prevention

• Climate Corps

More progress on all the above issues in three years than the past 30. This is not simply because Biden cares about young people it’s because our generation has real power. Biden knows he can’t win without the youth vote- especially young people of color. While he’s limited with a divided congress and a corrupt Supreme Court he’s managed to get more done than any president in decades with razor thin margins.

It can be hard to imagine but Biden was once a young person he was elected to the senate when he was 29. He has over 50 years of experience. When voting what I want most is someone who can deliver and Biden has.

This because he’s done a remarkable job integrating progressives into leadership. When we match the passion of the progressive movement with his experience it’s a recipe for success.

When he was first elected I was very doubtful of how much could really happen I am happy to be proven wrong. If he was doing a bad job, as someone who does not shy away from publicly criticizing the party or president I would tell you. But honestly Biden and especially his incredible staff [have] made it work.

March for Our Lives and many others demanded action, protested and Biden has listened, we aren’t going away but i wanted to give credit where it is due.

Clearly, Hogg is wrestling with the permanent conundrum for honest advocates for major change in a democracy: how do you keep your vision clear and your coalition together while striving for tangible accomplishments on your agenda. Wrestle away! May the force be with you.

"Common sense is not exciting. ... what you just saw was a victory for decency."

This post is hard for me. I come from a generation that learned, early on, if we had a conscience about American power, to distrust anything any president and any governing party might do or claim. The Indochina war of our youth was monstrous. We saw young people our age beaten and killed in the Black Freedom Struggle; we knew that government only grudgingly and under pressure upheld rights for all. We watched the destruction of unionized worker power under Democrats and Republicans alike. We saw global corporate capital crow that we had no alternative but to bow to it.

We did not come up fans of "American democracy" or "the rule of law."

David Rothkopf is a bit younger than I am, and worked the inside track -- in the Clinton Department off Commerce and as a security/foreign policy pundit. I became aware of him as a fierce, sophisticated, conscientious critic of the United States' mid-eastern imperial adventures. Life within the Beltway has given him a fine bullshit detector.

So when Rothkopf can find his way to appreciating the current turn our government has taken, I don't expect to nod in easy agreement. But to my surprise, these days confronting our white nationalist fascists,  I do largely agree with him.

What follows is a David Rothkopf Twitter thread, captured whole:

In '20, @JoeBiden was second guessed by many (me included). He wasn't exciting. Too old school. Talked about healing. Talked about a clear agenda when the other side had little to offer but hate & good TV ratings. And he won decisively despite the skepticism of the "smart money."

For two years, he was derided for reaching out to the other side, for his compromises with the left or with the centrists in his own party, for not be exciting enough. He ignored the Beltway buzz. He did the dullest thing imaginable: he governed.

The American Rescue Plan lifted millions out of poverty and helped stimulate a job boom that now has produced 10 million jobs, a record, more than the last three GOP administrations added up. Record numbers of quality judges were appointed. Executive orders undid Trump's damage.

He made the bold decision to end America's longest war. He passed the largest piece of infrastructure legislation in half a century. He helped tame a pandemic. Critics, even within his own party said, "Don't do too much, don't spend too much, the bond markets won't like it."

But the jobs kept being created. When Putin challenged the decency and the West in Ukraine, Biden led and has been central to NATO and global support for Kyiv that has produced extraordinary results and made all safer. It was all part of restoring American standing worldwide.

He and a disciplined Democratic Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act that also was the biggest piece of environmental legislation in US history. He took steps to reduce healthcare costs for Americans even when zero Republicans supported it.

In fact, with few exceptions, the Democrats passed a rich agenda, that also included the important Chips and Science Act that will help the country compete and create more and better jobs in the future, in the face of constant GOP obstruction.

Still, the savants and pundits said, the Democrats would be crushed in the 2022 elections. The GOP had momentum. Inflation would do Dems in--even though it was a global phenomenon and the GOP was closely linked to its causes from Putin to corporate profiteering.

There would be a Red Wave. Biden was too busy focusing on democracy and protecting the fundamental rights of women and voters when, the GOP talking heads and the bogus polls said what was front and center was inflation and only that and the Dems were doomed.

But Biden stayed laser focused. He said his first act in the new Congress would be to guarantee a woman's reproductive freedom. He made moving, heartfelt speeches about why it is essential to reject the lies, the election deniers, the coup plotters.

The result was the best result for a new president in a midterm election in sixty years, maybe longer. The Democrats held the Senate. It is still unclear how many seats they will lose in the House. But it won't be what was predicted.

... Election deniers running for top posts were rejected. Legislatures were flipped. The Republican leadership is turning on itself.

And Biden's first comments after the election were about the work to come, the governing ahead. Joe's too old. Joe's too boring. Joe's too quick to compromise. Joe's too stubborn. Joe's out of touch. Joe's...just off to the best start of any POTUS in more than half a century.

Left in his wake, defeated by his experience and his wisdom and his determination and his truly exceptional world class team, are the media favorites, the highly rated pundits, the best-selling columnists, the know-it-alls, the fancy insiders.

I could write the same thing about @SpeakerPelosi or @SenSchumer, co-authors of this remarkable record. You could say it about so many members of the united, mobilized Democratic team that this time around weathered the GOP efforts at suppression, ignored their lies & showed up.

You could say it about the Gen Z voters and the women and people of color who saw the threat and made the effort to fight for democracy. You could say it about all of you who have participated in the wholesale rejection of the greatest threat to our system we've seen since WWII.

Common sense is not exciting. But what we just saw was a victory for common sense. Decency doesn't drive clicks. But what you just saw was a victory for decency. Governing is tedious, incremental, arcane. But what you have seen for two years are the benefits of governing.

The conventional wisdom has been wrong about @POTUS @VP @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer @WHCOS, the president's cabinet, @TheDemocrats and their team from day one. Maybe we will learn. Probably we won't. But we can be grateful that they will ignore all that.

We can be grateful that at a perilous moment in US history, they will focus on the work that needs to be done, on the threats we face at home and abroad, and on what matters. And if the past is any indication, they will continue to succeed...against the odds, on behalf of us all.

Oh sure -- there's plenty more to do to enact justice and enhance freedom. But a dose of common decency is to be celebrated.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to thought provoking commentary on the condition our condition is in. 

In the wake of the Dobbs decision which allowed states to ban abortion, Jessica Valenti is observing Republican legislators: "We are dying and they are laughing. How the fuck do you have a conversation about that?"

Sarah Chayes, former NPR journalist and later aid organizer among Kandahar Afghans during American's war:
"So. Ayman al-Zawahiri is killed at last. Ayman al-Zawahiri, mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, successor to Usama bin Laden at the helm of a limping version of the organization we chose to consider an existential threat 20 years ago, launching two ill-conceived wars that left millions of people worse off than they’d been before, tens of thousands of service-members injured, confused and embittered, and a handful of defense contractors immeasurably richer. ... A closure, of sorts, I suppose."

Race and class in the city by the Bay: “To be Black in San Francisco is to be very lonely.” 

Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents and CUNY looks at how race diversity plays among Republican leaders: "The GOP is capable of racial and ethnic inclusion. Jindal and Haley were popular with grassroots Republicans, and so were Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. Mayra Flores, a Mexican American woman elected earlier this year from South Texas, is the congressional GOP’s newest star. But it’s almost always a shared conservative Christianity that allows white Republicans to embrace Black, Hispanic, or Asian candidates. Which means conservative Christianity, which can foster racial and ethnic inclusion can foster religious exclusion at the same time."

Diana Butler Bass, a theologian who writes for and to Christians: "Christians must stand up, speak up, and do good right now. Civil war isn’t funny. We can’t let it happen. We don’t need purity. We need decency. And peaceable community."

Via writer Steven Beschloss, two powerful visions of purpose:  

Liz Cheney: “This is not a game. Every one of us must be committed to the eternal defense of this miraculous experiment called America and at the heart of our democratic process—our elections. They are the foundational principle of our Constitution. Two years ago, I won this primary with 73 percent of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take…"

Joe Biden: “I swore an oath of office to you and to God to faithfully execute the duties of this sacred office. To me, the critical duty—the critical duty of the presidency is to defend what is best about America. And that’s not hyperbole. Defend what’s best about America. To pursue justice, to ensure fairness, and to deliver results that create possibilities—possibilities that all of us—all of us can live a life of consequence and prosperity in a nation that’s safe and secure. That’s the job. Fulfilling that pledge to you guides me every single hour of every single day in this job.”

New York Times columnist and resident explorer of U.S. history Jamelle Bouie is skeptical of third parties in this country. "The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. 'On every issue facing this nation,' they write, 'we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.' "

Historian of Russia and Ukraine Timothy Snyder sees Russia's imperial invasion flailing: "Russia has reached the stage in the war in which it is fighting because not to fight would be embarrassing.  It has reached this stage quickly. ... Our job is incomparably easier than the Ukrainians'.  The Ukrainians have to demonstrate resolution of every kind.  All we have to do to see things as they are, show some patience, and support the democracy that is under attack -- with the right attitude, and the right weapons.  The outcome of the war might well depend upon our capacity to do that."

Jonathan V. Last, Republican anti-Trumper, at the The Bulwark, is tired: 

"Who wants to live like this? Can’t we go back to Republicans trying to pass corporate tax breaks and roll back the regulatory regime while Democrats push to increase social safety-net spending? 

"Bring back the dysfunctional politics of 1980 - 2015! 

"The problem is that exhaustion is part of the authoritarian’s tool kit. They want to exhaust you so that you’ll check out of politics and try to take refuge in other areas of life. And then they take over. 

"Don’t give in to the exhaustion."

 We can't give in to exhaustion. Let's smash the Republican fantasy world in the midterms and beyond. The people of this country can do it.

Some smart advice to politicians

Don Moynihan is a scholar of how government actually works -- and doesn't. At Can We Still Govern?, he argues that Democratic politicians have lost track of how worthy programs they may set up fail in practice. And he suggests how to do better when it comes to cancelling student debt ...

At the broadest level the Obamacare and student loan examples underline that policymakers need to update their basic theories of how political acts generate political returns. In the most simple terms, the standard working theory seems to be: 

    •    Public benefits = recipient gratitude and goodwill 

If policymakers were to think more carefully about implementation, they would revise their working theory to be a bit more complicated: 

    •    Public benefits that are easy to get = recipient gratitude and good will
    •    Public benefits that are hard to get = much less gratitude and goodwill
    •    Promised public benefits that are impossible to get = backlash 

Biden is already going to face some backlash from those opposed to the idea of any type of student loan forgiveness. He should do all he can to avoid it from the people the program is intended to help.

If the Biden administration does cancel some student debt as promised in the 2020 election campaign, can they please demonstrate that they can do it without placing crazy burdens on the people who most need help?

Since the Clinton administration, Democrats have allowed themselves to be bullied by Republicans into creating endless procedural fences around the work of government support for the people. In consequence, too often government is appropriately despised by many recipients. But hardly anyone hates Social Security, or Medicare, or stimulus checks during the early COVID era. Government assistance can be made easy. And easy is the politic course of action.

Do we know where we are going?

The Ukrainians are so brave and so largely admirable. We're so sick of feeling mired in ugly politics -- and literally sick of being sick. Might we be bumbling into war and more war? 

Economic historian Adam Tooze examines the last time the United States utilized what our congress called Lend Lease to aid European good guys in 1939-41. His article is vital history and raises what must be raised. Looking back, we're glad FDR accomplished political wizardry in order to assist Britain. But there is nothing simple about this kind of aid.

In openly declaring our intention to adopt all measures short of war to ensure Russia’s military defeat and in invoking Lend Lease in doing so, we must surely ask ourselves that question, what is our theory of Putin? And beyond Putin what is our model of the escalatory dynamics at work in 2022?

In swathing ourselves in historic garments, are we inviting Putin to do the same? Are we inviting him to fully inhabit the role of the maniacal dictator who can only be crushed out of existence? Are we, as in 1941, crossing the point of no return? Are we, consciously or not, assuming further escalation?

In so doing, are we assuming that escalation will have the same kind of “happy end” that World War II eventually had for the United States in 1945? The kind of “happy end” that makes Lend Lease into a myth shrouded in good feelings - a grand chapter. in the “American story”?

Or, are we, in fact, hoping that 2022 unfolds as 1941 did not? That Putin is not suicidal? That this time the escalation remains confined to Ukraine and Russia? That this becomes, as some American strategists envisioned Lend Lease in 1941, a calculated exercise in using the dogged resistance of a client - then the British now Ukrainians - to attrit a geopolitical antagonist?

Some of our leaders, including ones I'm inclined to credit like Nancy Pelosi, seem a little high on Ukrainian sacrifice and prowess these days. May we not commit to fight a war with Russia to the last Ukrainian ... can Joe Biden find the tight rope and stay balanced? I will say, he seems more prepared for this than anyone we've had in the White House in the last couple of decades.

Joe Biden is not inspiring confidence

I have to admit, I'm not sure I understand why. To me, he looks to be doing a decent job of the work of being president.

Sure there's plenty to criticize: choose your poison. My picks are immigration policy, climate crisis measures, and student loan forgiveness; you've probably got your own. But it seems to me we're seeing high competence where executive branch competence counts: the NLRB, the FCC, the EPA, etc. A ground breaking appointment to the Supremes (that poor long suffering woman!) And Biden seems to be doing a very good job of holding together and leading without domineering in the international effort to support Ukraine's struggle against Russian imperialism. That ain't nothing. In fact that last might be a life or death matter.

Joe Biden seems rather good at the job of President; but evidently, and I can see this, he's not so good at playing a President on TV.

• • •

A couple of data points:

“If America were confronted with a crisis like a war or another pandemic, how confident are you that President Joe Biden would be physically and mentally up to the job.” (NH Journal, April 14-16, 503 registered New Hampshire voters)

Very/somewhat confident: 42%
Not very/not at all confident: 54%

Biden won New Hampshire decisively in 2020, by 7 points, after placing lower in the state’s primary than any other modern presidential nominee. He’s declined there as much as he’s declined anywhere, and this less-than-comfortable question gets at why. The idea that the president could not handle a new crisis, even if his instincts are right, has permeated with swing voters. By a 13-point margin, registered New Hampshire voters disapprove of how Biden is handling “investing in infrastructure,” which Democrats consider a slam-dunk midterm issue, so much so that Biden headed to the state on Tuesday to talk about it. -- David Weigel

[Nevada] voters also indicated that they preferred Trump to Biden on the issue of Ukraine. Forty percent of voters said Trump could handle the situation in Ukraine better. Twenty-nine percent of voters said they preferred Biden. The Nevada Independent

• • •

Is our reaction to Biden just ageism? Are we really addicted to being governed by blowhards? We've got a Republican Party whose entire message is that we should be very afraid of something. And there are real dangers ...

Time to be talking with voters ... what are people thinking?

Ukraine: let's not do this again ...

Finally somebody has said something I find sensible about the multi-faceted crisis that goes by label "Ukraine." I could have said "Russian imperialism," or "post-Soviet nationalism," or "European Union growing pains," or "Autocracy v. Liberal Democracy," or "U.S. imperial decline," but for now I'll stick with simply with one word: Ukraine. There's a lot to understand and unpack there, and it's far beyond my knowledge.

But I resonate with much of what Michael Tomasky offered in in The New Republic [my emphasis]:

... while there’s a lot we don’t yet know, a clear bottom line for the Biden administration has been etched: Don’t go to war. Period. 

If today’s news turns out to be a temporary respite—or a trick—and Russia does invade, cable news will be a nonstop source of images of the invasion for a few days at least. Russian atrocities and deaths of Ukrainian civilians will be emphasized. American neocons and certain Senate front men thereof, notably Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Marco Rubio—who’s pushing aggression when he’s not apologizing for Donald Trump’s crimes—will get a lot of air time. This last point, incidentally, is one of the key ways in which the mainstream media are failing democracy: If a person can give good blather on foreign policy, TV will anoint that person as an expert, even if he’s gotten everything wrong for a decade or two. ... 

... history records no [U.S. military interventions that were] smashing successes that I can remember. There were, instead, the disastrous quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. And even most of the interventions that were “successes” from a military or intelligence point of view turned out to be disastrous in a broader sense. We engineered a quick coup in Iran in 1954; what happened next? We installed a ruthless pro-American regime that the people finally expelled in 1979, which was replaced in turn with a ruthless anti-American regime that neocon belligerence has helped to transform into a regional, if not global, power—perhaps soon with nuclear weapons capability. ... 

... Getting militarily involved in Ukraine means getting into a war with Russia, crossing the uncrossable Cold War lines that threatened nuclear annihilation. Maybe Putin will back down. But even if he doesn’t, the fight here is solely economic. If Biden once aspired to bring Ukraine into NATO, he gets the situation now. If Putin does go in, and the war caucus starts trying to whip the country into a frenzy, [Biden] had better stick to his nonguns.

Biden has been around enough ugly blocks to know that he can't expect any lasting popular support at home for getting into a direct military confrontation in Eastern Europe. 

It's not hard to be sympathetic toward those Ukrainians who urgently want to become more European. And the U.S. probably owes them at least some reparations for afflicting them with that sleazy, used political consultant, Paul Manafort, whose wiles helped to impose a Russian puppet back in 2010. And there was much to admire (and some things to fear) in the Maidan uprising that tossed that strongman back to Moscow in 2014, leading to the current government structure. But hey, Ukrainians and Europeans are going to have to untangle this as best they can. 

It's unlikely that deep U.S. involvement here can do good. Our track record stinks.

Beyond shameful

A US federal agency is denying humanitarian parole to Afghan refugees ... and apparently running up a tidy profit on their applications.

A press release on December 7 from Jewish Family and Community Services-East Bay, an agency which has helped hundreds of Afghans resettle in the United States over the last decade, tells the sad story:

This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue.

Since [August], thousands of Afghans in communities across the U.S. have been desperate to rescue their loved ones who were left behind. The only legal channel available to most has been the dim hope of humanitarian parole. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.

... USCIS finally [has] began processing these cases – only to deny them.

The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. According to JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien, “Redacted copies of these denial letters began popping up on listservs from immigration attorneys across the U.S. this week. No one has reported receiving a ‘request for evidence,’ as is the norm before USCIS denies a case. Instead, we all got these flat denials.”

... USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.

What does USCIS ask of applicants? “Documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”

JFCS likens this to asking for "a notarized statement from their persecutor."

We know the Biden administration is running scared about immigration. They are terrified of taking political hits for admitting brown people to the country. And the Know-Nothing MAGA faction won't let up on the scare stories.

But show a little guts, Joe! 

Biden did demonstrate some courage by pulling out of Afghanistan. The politically easy play would have been to do what both Obama and Trump did: bluster a bit and try to sweep the failed two-decade war out of view.

But there remain human beings, many of whom thought they might have U.S. protection, who've been left behind to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered. And now some bureaucrats will be allowed to deny them for improper paperwork? This is shameful if not criminal.

We have a long history of struggle over what government is for

It's annoying and dispiriting to watch Republican opposition to President Biden's effort to improve U.S. hard infrastructure. Pretty much everyone agrees roads, bridges, and airports need help, but GOP legislators have received death threats for voting for the Biden plan.

Because the inescapable dividing line in U.S. politics in the mid-19th century was the continued existence and expansion of slavery, it's easy to overlook that support for federally financed "internal improvements" was some of the glue that held together the emerging Republican Party coalition 160 years ago.

The small white master class which ruled states which became the Union-breaking Confederacy wasn't interested in anything that would advance prosperity broadly among small farmers, laborers, and working immigrants. They were doing just fine extracting value from forced slave labor on their plantations. Republicans found a majority constituency by promising to use the federal government to encourage infrastructure building for everyone. There was something from Republicans for the many, even if voters weren't interested in national politics.

The leading planks of the 1860 Republican platform on which Abraham Lincoln ran began by confronting the crisis created by slavery.

That the history of the nation during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph....

That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions...

That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy...

That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom ... 

But that document went on to promise, against the dogmas of the slavocracy, to use government to improve the lives of the people in ways that should seem familiar today:

That appropriations by Congress for river and harbor improvements of a national character, required for the accommodation and security of an existing commerce, are authorized by the Constitution, and justified by the obligation of Government to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

That a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; that the federal government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction; and that, as preliminary thereto, a daily overland mail should be promptly established.

And Republican-led Congresses during the bloody Civil War that followed Lincoln's election proceeded to enact a broad wish list of "improvements" that had been blocked by the slave states, including support for railroads, higher education, and owner-occupied small farms. 

How far today's Republican legislators have fallen from this broad vision of national well-being -- in thrall to financiers, corporate bosses, and conman Donald!

What the Biden administration means ...

Jason DeParle writes about poverty for the New York Times. "Poverty" as a broad descriptive explanation for the suffering around us is not as common as it once was. Why 55 years ago, we embarked upon (and lost?) a War on Poverty. But what is the homeless man sleeping on the street but the end result of an economic and political system which leaves its unlucky members without means to live decently, leaves too many in poverty? Why did local community activists organize food deliveries to women locked in with children during the worst of the pandemic, women trapped in poverty? This country has far too much poverty.

Because poverty has been his beat for a long time, DeParle is stunned by the Biden administration's determination to use its powers to fight poverty, through legislation if possible, but also through deft administrative footwork. Here's a tale:

... A few years ago a Republican Congress ordered a revision of the nutritional standards [for SNAP/Food Stamps] and omitted language that had previously required the revisions to be cost-neutral. This change in legislative instructions, seemingly inadvertent, opened the door to increased aid. Accelerating the nutritional review, the Biden administration issued a new Thrifty Food Plan, which caused an average benefit increase of more than 25 percent. About 42 million Americans—one in eight—will now get more money to buy food, and unlike the other pandemic-era expansions, the increase is lasting. 

As the product of complex bureaucratic machinations, the SNAP increase could easily be described as an embodiment of insider-driven change. But when I talked to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, in August, he didn’t just tout the studies of how quickly the old benefits ran out or the science of apportioning legumes. He talked about the threat that poverty posed to American democracy. “We may have a Constitution and a Declaration of Independence, but if we had 42 million Americans who were going hungry, really hungry, they wouldn’t be happy and there would be political instability,” he said (meaning more instability than already exists). “The safety net is part of how you build a democratic fabric that works. It creates a much more stable and secure country.” Perhaps what he said was obvious, but I don’t recall previously hearing a Cabinet official justifying aid with a reference to democracy’s vulnerability.

Another observation from DeParle:

Even if the safety net shrinks to its pre-pandemic size, and the current statistics become a blip on a chart, it will be a blip to remember. It’s a blip that says high levels of poverty are a political choice, not a fate. ...

That's the choice we are making when we elect even boring Democrats.

EBT is California-speak for Food Stamps/SNAP. You'll find signs like this in every corner store in poor neighborhoods.

The best quit, but there is no alternative but to struggle on

Throughout the Trump travesty, some of us wondered over and over, why didn't people working in the administration just quit when ordered to enforce bad, illegal, and cruel policies? If the federal bureaucracy and the political appointee-management ranks included many individuals of courage and conscience, we sure didn't hear from them. Mostly those who quit (or were used up and forced out) slunk shamefacedly away -- at most to follow up with self-justifying tell-all books.

Unhappily, Biden immigration policies have not changed much since the Trump era. Using the excuse of the pandemic, the administration continues to violate international and U.S. law guaranteeing migrants the right to make asylum claims. Under the law, the U.S. doesn't have to accept them all, but it has to listen to their claims, usually in the person of an immigration judge. Instead, enforcers bar international bridges. As anyone who scans newspapers or twitter knows, the Border Patrol still herds migrants like rogue cattle.

And within our borders, Martha E. Menendez, a scrappy Nevada immigration lawyer, summarizes what she is seeing:

Almost nine months into the Biden presidency, we can all see that very little has changed as far as immigration enforcement. The southern border (the Brown one, as I’ve taken to calling it) remains a humanitarian crisis of our own perpetuation; there have been no significant changes in the number of people in ICE custody, nor has there been any significant change in what their enforcement priorities even are. The enforcement guidelines that were finally released last week are so vague that our next tyrant wannabe dictator will have no problem releasing the ICE dogs on the immigrant community in full force once again. And you can trust that that tyrant is sure to come; they’re already lining up to prove who’s the most terrible, and thus the most deserving of the Republican nomination.

Sure, we'd still take Biden over Trump if that's the choice, but, as the Atlantic put it, Democrats’ Free Pass on Immigration Is Over.

Apparently some of the sort of people that Biden administration has placed in important roles dealing with immigrants and asylum seekers are made of sterner stuff than were the Trump toadies. In only nine months, there have been a couple of loud resignations:

• Daniel Foote, U.S. special envoy to Haiti, wasn't about to be the face of justifying mass deportations of desperate people to the broken country where he served.

“I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,” Foote wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

• And now Harold Koh, an Obama-era State Department lawyer who had returned to government to serve as the top political appointee in the Office of the Legal Adviser, has quit with a blast denouncing Biden's continuation of the Trump policy of claiming under "Title 42" that the coronavirus emergency gives the government the right to ignore migrants' claims under law.

“I believe this administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return . . . individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” he wrote in the memo. ... “Nearly 700,000 people have been expelled under Title 42 since February of this year, and . . . this past August alone, 91,147 were forcibly removed,” he said, citing U.S. government statistics. 

... “I ask you to do everything in your power to revise this policy, especially as it affects Haitians, into one that is worthy of this Nation we love,” Koh wrote to his colleagues.

If we elect Republicans, at this point we're accepting that our experiment in rule of law by democratic majorities is over. The rabid racist know-nothings win. 

If we elect Democrats, we still get political timidity and cruelty, but the democracy -- "we the people" in the historic constitutional phrase -- gets to fight another day.

Some scary soldiers

There's been a lot of noise over the last week about whether the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, had violated the rules and traditions of civilian control of the military and breached political neutrality during the last days of the Trump administration. Milley apparently did assure the Chinese that his Commander in Chief was not about to launch an attack; dozens of officials were aware of this call and, except for Trump loyalists, consider Milley to have been doing his duty.

I'll take the judgment on this subject of former Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. the officer who blew the whistle on Trump's Ukraine shenanigans and lost his career, over a bunch of Republican hacks. He thinks Milley did right, mostly.

But as a leftish-inclined observer of the U.S. military, there are some soldiers who are scaring the shit out of me. In a moment when the white supremacist right is openly plotting with "the former guy" to overthrow American democracy (such as it is), these are the guys who give me the willies. They have been been broadcasting their grievances. Jeff Schogol has the story:

Click to enlarge.

Since May, a Space Force lieutenant colonel has claimed that the military’s diversity and anti-extremism training are rooted in Marxism; a Marine lieutenant colonel became a lightning rod for openly critiquing military leadership over the Afghanistan withdrawal while in uniform; an Army lieutenant colonel has tried to resign just short of retirement because he believes that requiring troops to be vaccinated for COVID-19 is an “unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical order”; and a Navy commander has gone on Fox News to promote conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines.

It's not so much disaffected generals who might decide to go full fascist that worry me. It's mid-career officers like these. Many a fascist coup has counted on junior officers.

These soldiers have spent nearly twenty years fighting wars for which their civilian political leadership has never been able to define an attainable mission. They have watched people they know die -- for what? Then the pols have pulled them back -- and sometimes sent them right back into the crucible again. And when they come home, they are not treated as heroes. The country is oblivious to their efforts and wants to forget their wars. No wonder they are pissed -- and from the point of view of their superiors they present a discipline problem.

Schogol adds: 

Officers at that rank are above the company commander level, but not at the point where they have a star on their collar. Getting there is no small feat either, but it’s also an odd position in that field-grade officers aren’t quite “high ranking” but they have just enough rank so that people notice when they act out in public.

... The unanswered question remains: Why is the Defense Department facing an epidemic of O-5s who are embracing the “YOLO” philosophy in their careers.

One reason could be that officers at that paygrade are at a point in their careers where they may have “buyer’s remorse” about some of the decisions they’ve made along the way, said retired Army Col. Bob Wilson, who served on the National Security Council in 2016 and 2017.

“You’re at 17, 18 years; you’ve kind of chosen your lot in life, and you may not be super happy with it – a kind of middle-age kind of thing, mid-life thing,” said Wilson, a fellow with the New America think tank’s International Security program.

... However, one of the things that makes these recent incidents significant is that so many senior(ish) officers have so publicly ignored the military’s sacred commitment to maintain good order and discipline. 

“You just have to ask yourself: What is going on?” Wilson said. “Are we picking the right people for leadership positions? Are we educating people enough? That’s my concern. We have to be adaptive as a force. We have to be able to absorb information and uncertainty and make the best decisions possible for the mission and the people we’re responsible for. And you’re watching arguably senior people with a lot of training and experience invested in them, and they’re just being idiots on social media, on old school media...."

The U.S. military is Schogol's beat. He's not looking for it to go rogue. 

But I almost wonder whether Joe Biden took the out-of-the-ordinary step of putting a retired general, Lloyd Austin, in charge of the Defense (War) Department because such a leader might have a better handle on reining in this sort of politicized insubordination. Civilians need that.

I do think among the symptoms of a gathering right wing storm, military indiscipline is one of the more ominous ones.

That's over -- for now

 

Joe Biden did the right thing in Afghanistan.

“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

This morning I got into it on an open thread and wrote this:

Afghanistan has been a shit show from day one. Now we're seeing some of it. We were wrong (practically, morally, and legally) to respond to 9/11 by failing to apply international criminal law to evil actors and thinking we had to use our hammer (the military).

Biden is having to carry the burden of making visible what has been implicit since 2002 at the latest. We had no business trying to remake that country. Ugly scenes -- but remember that the people of the US long ago gave up caring so long as their kids weren't among the casualties. 

Like Joe Biden, I'm sticking to my stance on this one. Since the beginning of this blog in 2005, I've probably written 50 posts about this aimless, fruitless campaign. I've reported on dozens of reporters' books. I've written about opium; I've written about women and education; and I've written about apparently boundless stupidity in Washington and a succession of military commands. This never worked and it was never going anywhere good.

Many more Afghans will suffer. Many already have. That reality comes as a physical injury to the Afghans and a moral injury to those of our forces who tried. 

But it's over.

Paul Waldman warns we can't be expected to have learned our lesson.

Just as before, there will be an effort to unlearn Afghanistan’s lessons so its mistakes can be repeated.

... We’re so convinced of our own benevolent intentions that we can’t wrap our heads around the idea that people in the rest of the world see us not as a force of altruism and liberation but as a global hegemon imposing its will and maintaining its control, so often indifferent to the death and dislocation it causes. They do not trust our motives, they do not share our confidence, and they often view our own history with a clearer eye than we do.

... One day — and it won’t be too long — another president will come along and tell us that morality and national security demand that we launch yet another invasion to add to our long list.

“By god,” he’ll say, “we’ve kicked the Afghanistan syndrome once and for all.”

The photo is from a protest in Pakistan in 2001.

What we can do; how we get through doing it

The lived reality of a warming climate is terrifying. Drought, rising seas, hurricanes, burning forests ... it's all too much for most humans to take in, which helps explain how we came to build a civilization which ensures it will happen. So, we did just that and it's happening.

David Roberts is the clearest explainer of climate science and climate policy that I know of. So I'm going to share here what he says is the Main Thing we could and should be doing to avert the worst.

Clean electrification is the entrée. Everything else is a side.

How can the US hit net-zero emissions by or before 2050, a goal shared by almost every Democrat and, at least rhetorically, by some Republicans? ...

... while different climate models disagree about which policies and technologies will be needed to clean up remaining emissions after 2030, virtually all of them agree on what’s needed over the next decade. It’s clean electrification:

1. clean up the electricity grid by replacing fossil fuel power plants with renewable energy, batteries, and other zero-carbon resources;

2. clean up transportation by replacing gasoline and diesel vehicles — passenger vehicles, delivery trucks and vans, semi-trucks, small planes, agricultural and mining equipment, etc. — with electric vehicles; and

3. clean up buildings by replacing furnaces and other appliances that run on fossil fuels with electric equivalents.

Or as I summarize it: electrify everything!

Clean electrification is the entrée. If you decarbonize electricity, transportation, and buildings, you’ve taken out the three biggest sources of emissions in virtually every country. The technologies and policies we need to do it exist today, ready to deploy. 

So I'm looking into an electric hot water heater ... and urging you to subscribe to David Robert's Substack: Volts.

• • •

Matt Yglesias is down on the Sunrise Movement and climate hawks generally for raising a public howl against perceived inadequacies in the climate elements in the Biden administration's infrastructure proposals. 

Is it [the "bipartisan" fig leaf] the most amazing bill in the universe? Of course not. But it’s a good bill. And if passing it on a bipartisan basis makes moderate senators feel happy, that’s great. And if Republicans tank a bipartisan bill and that makes moderate senators feel angry at Republicans, that’s great. But instead, climate groups seem to have decided they want to try to sink the bill from the left, on the theory that Biden is a “coward” and the bill doesn’t address climate issues. ... the idea that this bill does not contain climate measures is just clearly false.

... Will that solve climate change? No. Should it cause everyone to shut up about the issue and never press for anything new? No. But should it induce a crowd of protestors to come to the White House and get mad at Joe Biden for not addressing climate change? That’s absurd. 

Yglesias is a fine policy dissector but he's missing how norm changing politics works in our fractious dispersed polity. It goes something like this:

• Outsiders think up the unthinkable. Here are some novel ideas: Black people are just as human as white people. Or gay people should be able to get married. Or the society is going to have to find new energy sources and cut out fossil fuels. 

• Neither political party wants much or even anything to do with the radical idea. It might upset some portion of their existing coalition. Because the Democrats really do have a big tent and some understanding of their need to get bigger, the novelty gradually gains a foothold on the fringes of "mainstream" politics.

• If the novelty can be made popular, mostly by the outsiders who first brought it forward, Democrats may incorporate it in their broad program. That's nice.

• If the Dems have power -- and that's rare -- they may try to advance their recently adopted idea. The path will not be easy because our government system makes nothing easy. Some of the original outsiders may be drawn inside, but their influence will continue to depend on agitation from the outsiders. 

And so you get people who never experienced themselves as anything but outsiders picketing outside the White House. It's how they know to make progress; it has worked, sort of, in the past; what else are they supposed to do?

The only way to get them away from the White House is to give them something else to do to win what must be won. I'm pretty sure they've already figured that out and set up periodically on Joe Manchin's lawn. Climate hawks are actually very smart. But thwarted terror and passion can turn very sour.

Where Yglesias is right is that climate warriors can't win with just dramatic messaging. They need to organize a much more sizable fraction of the electorate for whom climate action is their first and foremost demand from government. The climate is doing its part to arouse such masses; most of us want to be able to keep living where we live now, reasonably comfortably. It's climate hawks job to be available to people to connect the dots and organize ever greater numbers of us to afflict our politicians. 

As Roberts explains, the technologists know what to do. The Democrats have gotten to the place where they want to get it done. And it's still true it won't happen without a push from perennial outsiders.

What's with Joe Biden?

Rebecca Traister, one of the best journalists around, has done it again -- announced what should have been our conventional wisdom but which had been unsaid. 

In a long, smart article about why the Biden presidency seems so much more novel, more unexpected, and more leftish, than many of us dared hope, she offers this: 

[Felicia] Wong [president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute] put it more simply. “He’s so old,” she said, “that it turns out he’s actually pre-neoliberal.”

Biden came of age politically among vestiges of the New Deal coalition. He — like some of the other septuagenarians who really have been thanklessly agitating for reform over decades, including 78-year-old [Rep. Rosa] DeLauro, 79-year-old Sanders, and 74-year-old Barbara Lee — has a lived frame of reference for the fact that Democrats are capable of doing things differently. It’s just that since the 1980s, they’ve chosen not to.

This rings profoundly true to me. Politically, I too am of that pre-neoliberal political generation. I think it is the job of government to rein in greed, to control the cupidity, cruelty, and stupidity of an unconstrained market system. 

I always knew that Ronald Reagan was a carnival barker for the wealthy, for the racists, for robber barons who would destroy our inheritance in land and water. I mean, what else is someone who launched his presidential campaign with a states rights speech in Neshoba, MS, the site of some of the Civil Rights-era's most grisly murders of workers trying to register Black voters? What else is a California governor who claimed that trees cause air pollution?

Reagan normalized a lot of crap. Biden's administration is not only trying (fitfully) to clean up after Trump's incompetence and corruption -- his people are also trying to replace the perversion of government function that came in with Reagan. 

Sometimes an old codger has something to offer, so old it feels new again.

Just what is security, anyway?

Erudite Partner is at it again: 

The Real Welfare Cheats Are War Profiteers

We’re squabbling over Social Security, while the government lavishes infinitely more money on the arms industry.

There's a lot right about this Biden administration, but like all governments since World War II, it takes for granted that the weapons budget must go up, up, up -- and how to pay for Social Security should be a recurring conundrum.

Immigration courts: those who know paint a dismal picture

It looks like a courtroom -- but that's not really the truth.

William Hanrahan had been a prosecutor and a state judge before he took on managing the federal immigration court in San Francisco. He lasted 14 months before quitting in frustration. If we needed more testimony to the travesty legal process that the so-called immigration courts perform, he's eager to offer the sad facts.

Hanrahan said he encountered a “soul-crushing bureaucracy” that he found shockingly unlike the regular American legal system. After little more than a year in the job, he called it quits this month, frustrated, he said, with a system run by the U.S. Department of Justice and subject to its political whims, a top-down management style that throttled innovation and slow-walked modernizing reforms, and a disconcerting proximity to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys who act as the court’s prosecutors.

... Ultimately, Hanrahan said, it’s the immigrants themselves seeking a chance to stay in the U.S. who are left bearing the burden of the disorganization. The unusual management of the immigration courts by the Justice Department means judges are ultimately hired by and answerable to the attorney general, who is the nation’s top prosecutor and a political appointee, usually with a policy agenda.

... “I just thought I was going to actually be a judge,” Hanrahan said. “They’re not real courts. When I first started, I truly felt like a stranger in a strange land. ... It was not consistent with my training and experience as a judge.”

... “Every day that [their] case is pending is a cloud of uncertainty over their futures,” Hanrahan said. “You can’t make plans, you can’t buy a house, you might not be able to get married. Having children, all the kind of the daily decisions of life, the future is just held in abeyance, it’s got to be really distressing. And then of course the effect on the children, the children who are American citizens, not knowing whether dad’s going to be deported.”

... Biden has changed the court’s top leadership, but the political control and micromanaging policies that confoundingly tie judges hands remain intact, Hanrahan says. “I did hold out hope that there would be some change with the Biden administration, but I did not see any indication whatsoever of the fundamental organization of the agency changing,” he said.

... “These [migrants] are not the people I was dealing with in my criminal rotation in the circuit court, these are not people doing bad things to other people, by and large,” he continued. “These were people out in the hallway cuddling their children and reading stories to them waiting for their cases to be called. There are people that were working long hard days at really tough jobs, jobs that most Americans wouldn’t take for low wages, they were paying taxes but getting very little in return.”

Representative Zoe Lofgren is pushing a Congressional overhaul of the immigration court system. She wants the courts removed from Justice Department authority.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association --  some of the few people with an intimate acquaintance and an overview of the system -- say it's time for structural change. They propose a three part reform:

• Create an Independent Immigration Court. To operate in a balanced and fair manner, the immigration courts must be separate and independent from DOJ. Congress should pass legislation creating an independent, Article I immigration court. 

• Restore due process. Congress should ensure that DOJ and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) reverse policies that rush cases at the cost of due process and encourage them to rescind policies that unduly restrict access to asylum and other forms of relief. 

• Support the right to counsel. Having legal counsel is the single most important factor in ensuring migrants get a fair day in court and in ensuring due process. Congress should pass legislation guaranteeing appointed counsel and access to counsel, and fund Executive Branch programs that support the right to counsel.

Early evidence suggests the Biden administration is unlikely spend its small store of legislative capital on these measures, but justice advocates can't stop pushing. Lives are at stake.

Make immigration courts into real courts

During the Trump presidency, I found myself making lists of changes in laws, in government structures, in entrenched policies, that a responsible successor should be working for. And that a responsible activist might be agitating for.

This rapidly became a long and expanding list: penalties for violating the Constitutional emoluments clause (that is, the prohibition on taking bribes); new barriers to politicizing the Department of Justice; automatic sunsets on Presidential emergency declarations; reining in the pardon power; enforcement of the Hatch Act prohibiting campaigning on the government dime, etc. and so forth. (People who actually know a lot about this, a bi-partisan pair of former Presidential lawyers, Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, have actually written the book: After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. No, I haven't read it and likely will not have time to.) 

Scratches on a bench in a San Francisco immigration courtroom

But nothing on my list seemed more urgent than fixing the immigration court system. Many of us in San Francisco had a chance to see this kangaroo process in action in the early days of the Trump regime. Concerned citizens filled hearings where unfortunate inmates of Jeff Sessions' Justice Department immigration lock-ups learned their fates and the fates of their often mixed-status families. It was hard to tell often whether the subjects of these cases understood much through the online video-conferencing interviews and stumbling translation.Some hearings seemed merely cruel and perfunctory. Some judges did their best to decide cases compassionately within the constraints of the law. But that was the exception.

But ultimately the Attorney General of the moment (first Sessions and later Bill Barr) was the judges' boss. He made the rules about how they were allowed to apply the intricacies of immigration law. That's not how real courts work.

Now the New York Times editorial board is on the case:

Immigration Courts Aren’t Real Courts. Time to Change That.

... If the goal was to empty the United States of all those asylum seekers, Mr. Trump clearly failed, as evidenced by the huge backlog he left Mr. Biden. But the ease with which he imposed his will on the immigration courts revealed a central structural flaw in the system: They are not actual courts, at least not in the sense that Americans are used to thinking of courts — as neutral arbiters of law, honoring due process and meting out impartial justice.  

Nor are immigration judges real judges. They are attorneys employed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is housed in the Department of Justice. It’s hard to imagine a more glaring conflict of interest than the nation’s top law-enforcement agency running a court system in which it regularly appears as a party. 

The result is that immigration courts and judges operate at the mercy of whoever is sitting in the Oval Office. How much money they get, what cases they focus on — it’s all politics. 

That didn’t used to be such a problem, because attorneys general rarely got involved in immigration issues. Then Mr. Trump came along and reminded everyone just how much power the head of the executive branch has when it comes to immigration. 

The solution is clear: Congress needs to take immigration courts out of the Justice Department and make them independent, similar to other administrative courts that handle bankruptcy, income-tax and veterans’ cases. Immigration judges would then be freed from political influence and be able to run their dockets as they see fit, which could help reduce the backlog and improve the courts’ standing in the public eye. Reform advocates, including the Federal Bar Association, have pushed the idea of a stand-alone immigration court for years without success. The Trump administration made the case for independence that much clearer. ...

The Democratic Congress has an array of urgently necessary legislation before it. They will receive almost no cooperation from any Republicans now that GOPers have become pure anti-democratic insurrectionists. But this reform would be a tremendous signal about what kind of country this aspires to be, affirming that this is a nation of laws capable of compassionate care for immigrants. Congress and the Biden administration need to go there.

We need Biden's "American Jobs Plan" and probably much more

I can't get over the picture of our current employment situation described in recently compiled economic statistics. It's becoming all too clear who is being left behind in our effervescent post-pandemic recovery.

In March, for example, the overall economy added back 916,000 jobs. Only 7,000 went to workers with high school diplomas but no college degree. [My emphasis.]

... Horrigan’s research has shown that both minority females without college degrees and white males without college degrees are having the hardest time finding work again.

... The problem for policymakers, Madowitz says, is there’s been a lot of thinking in the past decade about how to help men in blue-collar industries, but there’s been little thinking about how to help women in the service sector who suddenly might need to change careers.

This isn't the most intuitive graph, but it highlights what's amiss:

People with college degrees, and even with 2 year college experience, are getting back to work.

People without college are not yet getting call backs. Many such people were "essential workers" during pandemic lock downs, doing work that kept society going. But similar workers who were forced out during shut downs are not yet finding new and renewed employment.