biden Archives - APADANA MEDIA

Biden stumps for Hochul in last-minute campaign stop

Apadana Central — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 06:09:12 +0000

President Joe Biden stumped for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York Sunday night – just two days before the midterm elections – at a last-minute stop in a state typically safe for Democrats.

Hochul, who ascended to become the state’s first woman governor in August 2021 following then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation, is locked in a tight race with Republican challenger Lee Zeldin, a congressman from Long Island.

The President leaned heavily into what he called the risks to democracy. He painted Hochul’s opponent as an election denier, saying he and others were “not only trying to deny your vote, they’re trying to deny your right to have your vote counted.”

“We all know it in our bones that our democracy is at risk,” Biden said. “If you all show up and vote, democracy is sustained.”

Biden sought to sharpen the contrast between Hochul and Zeldin on several other fronts as well, highlighting Hochul’s “immediate action to protect patients” in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and painting Zeldin as “all talk” when it comes to combatting crime – an issue that has loomed large in this race.

Biden’s visit to stump for Hochul and other high profile Democrats’ recent rallies for the party’s candidates up and down the ticket underscore the worries among Democratic leaders that a potential GOP wave could extend deep into what’s been one of the country’s bluest states. No Republican has won statewide here since George Pataki secured a third term as governor in 2002.

People in the crowd cheer as President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Sunday evening. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

In remarks introducing Biden on Sunday, Hochul addressed questions about why she and other candidates need late-campaign boosts from the President.

“A lot of you were saying, why is President Biden coming to New York so much?,” Hochul said.
“He’s here tonight because he knows there’s no place better in the entire United States of America than New York,” Hochul said. “Who doesn’t want to come to New York? Of course, he’s here in New York. Of course, he’s here. This is the greatest place to be. So don’t question why someone comes to New York, everybody wants to come to New York.

The post Biden stumps for Hochul in last-minute campaign stop appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Biden heads west in final stretch of the midterms as Democratic governors hold the key for enacting his agenda

Apadana Central — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 13:07:10 +0000

President Joe Biden heads out west on Thursday to stump for Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in what is poised to be one of his final western campaign stops of the midterms, aimed at boosting a key ally locked in one of the marquee gubernatorial races of the cycle.

The president’s visit will underscore the high political stakes for Democrats as they look to keep as many governor’s mansions in their control, in a midterm election that has largely focused on the question of whether Biden’s party will be able to keep control of Congress – and if not, how much it might be able to minimize its losses.

During the trip, Biden will take on Republican-led efforts to challenge his administration’s plans to extend student debt relief to millions of Americans when he travels to Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Thursday, attempting to highlight another policy contrast with the GOP in the closing days of the election.

In an appearance at Central New Mexico Community College, the president will talk about his administration’s efforts to “lower college costs and provide extra breathing room” to student borrowers, a White House official said, while also warning of “disastrous consequences for middle-class American families if Republican officials succeed in their plan to rob tens of millions of borrowers of their opportunity to receive debt relief.”

The president’s student loan forgiveness remarks will come ahead of his appearance at a campaign rally to help boost Lujan Grisham, who is locked in a tough re-election fight against Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Ronchetti in a state the president won by double digits.

It marks the third time in as many weeks that the president has dropped into typically Democratic territory where his party’s gubernatorial nominees are facing tough races.

Last week, the president touted manufacturing investments in Syracuse, New York, alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is in a tighter-than-expected reelection race against Republican US Rep. Lee Zeldin. Hochul will get an additional boost Thursday when she appears with Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a get-out-the-vote event in New York City.

In early October, Biden made his way to Portland, Oregon, where his party’s gubernatorial nominee – Tina Kotek – hopes to retain Democratic control in a close three-way fight for the governor’s seat

“The role of governors in America is increasing exponentially in terms of how the states function and the roles they play,” Biden said at a fundraising event for Kotek.

Debt relief in the spotlight

Biden’s plans for student debt relief has been one of the administration’s moves that Democrats hope will motivate younger voters to get to the polls before next week’s midterm elections.

Nearly 26 million people have submitted their information to the Department of Education to be considered for loan forgiveness, according to the White House, with 16 million applications expected to be approved by the end of the week. But the president’s student loan forgiveness program remains tied up in the courts, creating uncertainty over when or if that relief will ultimately be extended to applicants.

A federal appeals court put a temporary hold on the student loan forgiveness program last month, pausing its implementation while the court considers a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. The Biden administration has argued it should be able to carry out its policy while the appeal plays out.

The administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and conservative groups such as the Job Creators Network Foundation and the Cato Institute.

The president has expressed confidence his plan will be upheld by the courts, predicting student loan borrowers will begin receiving relief within weeks.

Speaking of Republicans, who have argued that the plan is too costly and could make inflation worse, the president said at a campaign rally in Miami Gardens, Florida, on Monday, “They moaned and groaned about it and they challenged it in court, which they’re going to lose.”

Biden will make his latest student debt relief pitch at a community college where more than a third of students are Pell Grant recipients and more than half of students are Latino. The president will also highlight the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides tuition free college for eligible New Mexico residents, the White House official said.

Lujan Grisham, Sen. Ben Ray Lujan and Rep. Melanie Stansbury will be in attendance along with New Mexico Community College President Tracy Hartzler, the official added.

The speech in New Mexico follows a similar event last month when the president traveled to Delaware State University, one of the country’s historically black colleges and universities, to promote his loan forgiveness plan as officials have hoped the issue will motivate young voters heading into the midterm elections.

Governors playing key roles

The results of the Senate and House races next week – and whether the midterms will ultimately hand Republicans control of Congress – will be pivotal in determining what the second half of Biden’s presidency will look like.

With the narrowest of majorities in Congress during his first two years in office, the president has been able to enact some of his most important legislative priorities – from a sweeping infrastructure package to a major health care, tax and climate change bill signed into law just this year. Democrats openly acknowledge that without the House or the Senate in their control, legislative victories will be near-impossible to come by in the next session of Congress.

Still, Democratic officials are also eager to note the outsized roles that governors across the country also play in enacting key pieces of the White House’s agenda.

“When you talk about the Senate and the House, it’s: Do you keep the majority or not?” said David Turner, communications director for the Democratic Governor’s Association. “When you’re talking about a governor, it’s: Is someone going help you move your agenda, especially the popular parts of your agenda, forward?”

And while the political rally that Biden will headline on Thursday will most prominently feature Lujan Grisham, there are also competitive House races in New Mexico that officials hope will stand to benefit significantly from a high-profile visit from the president.

“Even though he’s going to campaign for the governor, he can help and bring energy to the down ballot races,” said one Democratic official close to the White House. “The name of the game right now is how do you get your voters to turn out.”

The post Biden heads west in final stretch of the midterms as Democratic governors hold the key for enacting his agenda appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

What a Republican election superlawyer fears in 2022

Apadana Central — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 05:35:16 +0000

What a Republican election superlawyer fears in 2022

There are some competing elements to the midterm election: Voters may be focused on the economy in 2022, but Republican victories in some states could have the effect of giving power to election deniers.

While multiple states passed laws intended to shore up election security, there’s a legitimate fear that those who believe, without evidence, there is election fraud could intimidate election workers or reject results.

I talked to Ben Ginsberg, the retired lawyer who was for many decades the go-to election law expert for national Republicans.

He has been critical of election denialism and is now working as a co-chair of the nonpartisan Election Official Legal Defense Network to give legal aid to election workers.

I asked about the threats election workers face, how to rebuild faith in US elections and how to square a vote for Republicans with opposition to denialism.

Our phone conversation, edited for length, is below, along with some context I’ve added in parentheses.

The threat of election denialism is still growing

WOLF: You’ve been involved in election law for many decades. You’ve been very outspoken after 2020 about the danger of election denialism. And I wonder if you think the threat is currently growing or diminishing from election denialism?

GINSBERG: Well, there are a lot of election deniers on the ballot. So I think you’d have to conclude from the number that are on, and the way they sort of banded together nationally, that the threat is greater.

The obstacles election officials are dealing with

WOLF: Tell me about your group, the Election Official Legal Defense Network. Millions of people have voted already. What are you seeing so far?

GINSBERG: The group is designed to aid elections officials when they’re under threat of prosecution or lawsuits. Over the course of this cycle, we’ve been far busier than we should be in terms of the number of election officials who are being threatened around the country.

We also know from the election officials we work with that there’s an unprecedented number of open records requests, which takes away time for preparing for the elections – although through perseverance and a lot of hard work, they seem to have gotten things ready for the election.

GINSBERG: There are some states where there are massive challenges to voter registration in particular counties, and so they need to sort through all of those as well.

(For context, read this other story from Schouten: “Conservative activists in Georgia wage campaign to purge voter rolls ahead of November’s election.”)

GINSBERG: But what we’re seeing around the country in real terms as people vote is actually a process that’s going pretty smoothly. That the early voting and absentee voting appears to be up above levels in 2018, last year’s election and even 2020 in some states with the presidential election.

The fear that early vote polling places would be paralyzed by overaggressive poll watchers slowing down the vote has not happened, to what I know.

WOLF: Are you currently getting calls from election officials at the Election Official Legal Defense Network?

GINSBERG: Yes, we are getting calls, but honestly, now elections officials are putting their heads down and getting ready for the election.

The fear is this

WOLF: Is there something that surprised you so far this year or something that you are anticipating or afraid might happen after Election Day?

GINSBERG: My fear is based on only anecdotal evidence so far, which is that groups will not accept the popular vote. … They will proclaim the election fraudulent and rigged and not accept the vote of the people. It’s at the rumor stage at this point, but extremely troublesome, and I think it’s what people are generally watchful for.

Beware of hyped problems

WOLF: Some ways that fear could manifest itself potentially might include refusals to certify elections, perhaps in Pennsylvania. You have counties in Arizona and Nevada that are going to have hand counting, which is not the good-government recommendation. Are there specific places that you have your eye on?

GINSBERG: Well, I don’t think it’s fair to say there are specific places other than where there are the most hotly contested races, especially if that overlaps with the 2020 battleground.

It’s where you anticipate the greatest problems.

Look, it’s a fine line that everyone needs to walk between being prepared for the rumors and the threats that are out there and scaring off people from voting because of those fears.

It is a delicate balance that I think all people involved in elections need to walk at this point, especially the media.

A lot of the things that we get very hyped up about are one incident that’s made into a much greater problem.

You have to be really cautious about hyping things up on the basis of, is it fear as opposed to facts.

One long line vs. systemic long lines

WOLF: What’s an example of a hyping? Something specific.

GINSBERG: Sometimes people in polling places are over-caffeinated. And there can be a heated exchange of words that draws a reporter who then puts out a story about there’s harassment at polling places, where in fact there was one incident in one polling place.

The example where I think many media outlets were guilty has been around long lines, where there are to be sure long lines in some polling places. And so the reports are about long lines and people waiting for too long, when in fact, if they had gone to all the other polling places around the ones with the long lines, they would see there were not long lines – which tells you that there was a particular problem in one polling place.

That is not a systemic problem of people having to wait too long to vote.

Just drill down a second more on that. The classic case is a jurisdiction that has 100 machines and 10 precincts. So, to be fair it gives 10 voting machines in each of the 10 precincts, except three of the precincts have shown far more rapid population growth than the others. So those few precincts will have long lines because the election administrator didn’t move around equipment to accommodate growth patterns in a particular area.

Well, that’s a long line problem, but it’s not a systemic attempt to deprive people of their right to vote.

To be clear, long lines are not OK

WOLF: But you do think long lines are a problem? Nobody should have to wait in a prohibitively long line, right?

GINSBERG: It absolutely is a problem, and it should never happen. The bipartisan Commission on Election Administration that I was a part of in 2013 said that no one should have to wait more than half an hour.

But there is a difference between saying one party or the other is trying to suppress the vote by creating long lines, when it’s one precinct within a jurisdiction where there’s a problem.

(Read more from that report, which was co-chaired by Ginsberg, who worked for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, and Bob Bauer, who worked for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.)

We are now in a tenuous phase

WOLF: These anecdotal issues combined with, you know, a media that’s really amped up and ready to report on stuff, combined with this growing lack of faith in the election system – it seems like we’re in sort of a self-fulfilling cycle that’s eating away at how people view the democratic system. Do you think that’s the case?

GINSBERG: That was a pretty broad statement. I think we are in a particularly tenuous phase right now, largely because of election denialism and not believing votes. In every election there’s going to be a winner and a loser, and sometimes that is breathtakingly tight.

But this country has always been based on the notion that people do accept election results they may not like. To just sort of say, without evidence, that elections aren’t accurate and are rigged does corrode the democracy a great deal.

A group of conservatives, of which I was a part, did a report called, “Lost, Not Stolen,” about every charge that (former President Donald) Trump and his supporters brought in the post-election period of 2020. We dove down into all their pleadings and all the cases.

(Read CNN’s story on the report, “Lost, Not Stolen”: “Prominent conservatives issue report rebutting Trump election claims.”)

GINSBERG: What was blazingly obvious from that deep of a study was that Trump lost those cases not because he didn’t get a day in court, but because he simply had no evidence of fraud and a rigged election. Yet you continue to hear that from candidates in 2022, and that certainly has a corrosive effect on the democracy.

Rebuilding faith in elections will start in schools

WOLF: Do you think there is a larger thing that we could and should be doing as a country to restore faith in elections?

GINSBERG: I think there are a number of things.

To start with, the biggest picture of all, there ought to be more and better civics education in schools so that people actually do understand the system and how it works.

I think it has become incumbent on local election administrators to, with a great deal of transparency, explain – especially to the election doubters, which is a very hard thing – but to explain to the election doubters all the safeguards that are in the system so that elections aren’t rigged and stolen.

The argument against a national voting standard

WOLF: I’ve heard the diffuse nature of American elections described as a feature because it makes them harder to influence. There are different laws in every state. It also makes US elections a lot more confusing. And people in some states have different access to democracy than others. Do you think there should be a more uniform national voting standard?

GINSBERG: I think what you just said is an overstatement. The country has been built forever on federalism and the idea that control of elections should be local. That’s what the Constitution says.

But to take it another step back, when we did the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, it was me and Bauer as the two people with party affiliations. We talked to a great number of election officials … and what the election professionals drummed into us was the notion that one size does not fit all. That that simply doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work between different states because the states are different. It doesn’t even work for the same communities within the same state.

Elections will function best if there is local control, with perhaps a bit more uniformity in terms of machines used in a state and ballot design. And allocation of voting machines amongst them, but I think a federal standard would not work and is a thoroughly bad idea.

People are mostly not voting on election denial in this election

WOLF: I can imagine from your perspective you’d prefer Republican majorities in the House and Senate. But there is this root of election denialism that’s also behind a lot of what the GOP is running on. How do you square a political preference with the saving democracy mission that you’ve taken on?

GINSBERG: Me personally?

WOLF: Yes.

GINSBERG: I think the principle of elections is what’s really important. I think your question’s premise is a little bit wrong, because election denialism was more an ante that Republicans needed to win a primary. If Democrats do poorly, it’s because they responded so ineptly really on the economy, but maybe also on crime and immigration.

This election is in some races a referendum on election denial, but not every race.

I think it’s a black mark on the Republican Party if election denial continues to play as great a role as it does in the party, but I don’t think that’s why voters are voting.

Will GOP victories next month give new power to denialism?

WOLF: Let me put it a different way. Do you worry that Republicans winning majorities in the House and Senate and governor’s races will give new power to election denialism?

GINSBERG: I think it’s not the US Congress where that power will come from. Governors in some states, depending on what their powers are in that state – if Doug Mastriano wins in Pennsylvania and appoints the secretary of state, that’s really powerful.

There are other states where the secretary of state runs independently and the governor doesn’t play as large a role. But the question of election denialism is secretaries of state, to an extent, but also down at the county and local level, which are much more going to impact the issue of election accuracy and reliability.

Questioning one race on a ballot is questioning the entire ballot

WOLF: A lot of the election coverage this year is nerve-wracking, but it sounds like you’re relatively optimistic about this election so far.

GINSBERG: I would say I am wary but hopeful about this election.

What I have found is that election administrators are rising to the challenges, but there are greater challenges. And we’ve not had an election before where one political party has made as part of its kind of internal platform, election denial.

And I think that’s not very well thought out, because if you don’t believe in elections, then Republicans’ own elections are subject to challenge.

I don’t know what they think happens if they refuse to certify a governor’s race because they think there was fraud. That same fraud permeated all their ballots. The people in the state legislature who think they’re going to rule the roost, in fact, would also have tainted elections.

WOLF: And just to be clear, that’s hypothetical fraud and hypothetical taint.

GINSBERG: Yeah. If they make the allegations and try and say a governor’s race or a senator’s or congressional race is fraudulent – people mark ballots for multiple races at one time, including state legislative races. So, if there is fraud in one race, there has to be fraud in every race on the ballot – which throws potentially every race into doubt.

The post What a Republican election superlawyer fears in 2022 appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Florida police cameras show August arrests for perceived voter fraud

Apadana Central — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 06:34:18 +0000

Florida police cameras show August arrests for perceived voter fraud

Newly obtained police body camera video shows Tampa Police officers arresting confused and stunned convicted felons for allegedly voting illegally in the 2020 election.

“I voted, but I ain’t commit no fraud,” Romona Oliver can be heard saying on police body cam video obtained from the Tampa Police Department. “I got out. The guy told me that I was free and clear to go vote or whatever because I had done my time,” she said. Oliver’s attorney says she received a voter registration card and thought she was eligible to vote.

The videos, first reported by The Tampa Bay Times, provide a fresh glimpse into a far-reaching state operation earlier this summer to crack down on supposed voter fraud.

On August 18, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested 20 individuals accused of illegally voting in the 2020 election. He unveiled the charges at a celebratory news conference at the Broward County Courthouse, where he was flanked by police officers and state Attorney General Ashley Moody.

“As convicted murderers and felony sex offenders, none of the individuals were eligible to vote,” DeSantis said.

“They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyway,” DeSantis said at the time. “That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.”

Mark Rankin, a Tampa-based attorney, who is representing Oliver pro-bono, told CNN that Oliver served almost 20 years in state prison for a conviction for second degree murder.

“She served her time and got out. And she got out around the time that Amendment 4 was passed, which affected the rights of felons to vote. Her understanding was that felons had their rights restored.”

Rankin says Oliver was approached at the bus stop one day on the way to work by someone registering voters, and she told them she was a felon. The person then told Oliver that she could fill out the form and if she was eligible, she would get a voter registration card and if she wasn’t eligible, she wouldn’t get the card.

Oliver received a voter registration card in the mail. She went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office later to get a new driver’s license and was sent an updated voter registration card with her new address, according to Rankin.

“She was twice told by the State of Florida and the local Supervisor of Elections, ‘Here’s your voter registration card. You are, as far as we’re concerned, legally eligible to vote.’ And so she voted and she was shocked when she was arrested.”

“She was shocked and upset because she thought her rights had been restored by the amendment. She didn’t know any different. And the State of Florida, she believed, was telling her that she was eligible to vote. And now she’s had the rug pulled out from under her. She never would have voted if she knew that she was ineligible,” Rankin said.

Oliver pleaded not guilty to the illegal voting charge and has a trial set for December in Hillsborough County. County records show she was released on her own recognizance the same day she was arrested.

The Tampa Police Department conducted arrests on behalf of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the originating agency for the investigation, a police department spokesperson told CNN.

CNN also reached out to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, which was involved in some of the arrests.

The arrests marked the first public demonstration of the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security, a controversial new investigative agency created this year and championed by DeSantis to probe voting irregularities. Created under a sweeping bill passed this year to overhaul voting in Florida, the office was given a staff of 15 to initiate probes and allowed DeSantis to assign 10 state law enforcement officers to help investigate election crimes.

But almost immediately after the state announced the charges, questions began to surface about the arrests and whether the individuals knew they were violating the law when they cast a ballot.

According to state law, it is the job of the Florida Department of State to “identify those registered voters who have been convicted of a felony” and “notify the supervisor and provide a copy of the supporting documentation indicating the potential ineligibility of the voter to be registered.”

In the five counties where there were arrests, the local supervisor of elections office told CNN that the state did not inform the arrested individuals that they were ineligible to vote.

DeSantis continued to defend the arrests and in a later news conference blamed some local election offices who, he said, “just don’t care about the election laws.”

But the Office of Election Crimes and Security wrote a letter to an elections supervisor that the individuals voted illegally “through no fault of your own.” The letter, obtained by CNN, was sent on August 18 by Pete Antonacci, who served as the first director of the Office of Election Crimes and Security until he died September 23 after a medical episode at the Florida state Capitol.

The arrests captured in police body cam footage also are illustrative of the confusion that still surrounds a successful 2018 constitutional amendment in Florida to restore the voting rights of some felons that had completed their sentences.

The constitutional amendment, approved overwhelmingly by voters in a statewide referendum, said people convicted of murder and certain sex crimes were not eligible to have their rights restored.

But the law that implemented the constitutional amendment specified that an ineligible felon who erroneously votes is in violation of the law if they “willfully submit any false voter registration information.” State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican and the sponsor of that legislation, has said on social media that most convicted felons have no intent to break the law.

After the Tampa Bay Times published the body cam video, Brandes tweeted from his verified account, “Looks like the opposite of ‘willingly,’” and he suggested that state will struggle to prove its case in court.

“I hope they have the courage to drop charges or go to trial and produce evidence of willful intent,” Brandes wrote.

The post Florida police cameras show August arrests for perceived voter fraud appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

US unions are better off, but still a long way from their former might

Apadana Central — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 10:15:42 +0000

In Joe Biden, organized labor has the most pro-union president since at least Lyndon Johnson, or perhaps ever, depending upon who you ask.

And unions are actually more popular now than they’ve been since their heyday. A survey by Gallup released last week found that 68% of respondents have a positive view of unions — the best reading for that question dating back to 1965, and up from only 48% in 2009. Younger workers are even bigger backers of unions, with 77% of those 34 and younger having a positive view.

“I think because of the pandemic, the country has taken a second look at unions and they like what they see,” said Tim Schlittner, communications director for the AFL-CIO union federation. “Workers are finding power in each other. And this is a moment of great opportunity for the labor movement to build on this momentum and grow our ranks.”

There is also a generally more positive environment for workers today, with more job openings than job candidates resulting in rising wages in many sectors of the economy. But despite that, the very union-friendly administration and growing popularity, 2021 was once again a tough year for the nation’s unions — which represent only a small sliver of US workers and are having trouble growing their numbers.

“US unions are in a much weaker position than they were in the 50s, 60s, 70s,” said Alexander Colvin, dean of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School. “There’s opportunities now to revitalize, but it’s an opportunity, not a reality yet.”

US union membership near record low

Unions ended 2020 with less than 11% of workers in their ranks, roughly half the share of US workers than in 1983 when the Labor Department started tracking the figure.

And although that percentage was up slightly from a year earlier, that’s only because non-union workers lost their jobs at a slightly higher rate during the pandemic than unionized workers. The number of union members actually fell slightly in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available.

The picture is somewhat better in the public sector, where roughly one-of-three government workers, such as teachers, police or fire fighters, are members of a union. But in the private sector only 6% of workers are unionized. And changing that in a meaningful way is obviously going to be difficult.

The biggest recent setback was likely the failed attempt to win an organizing election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Less than 30% of employees at the warehouse voted earlier this year to be represented by the union.

Union supporters claim this is a sign that the rules are stacked against them in attempts to organize businesses.

“There is a much higher share of workers who would want a union in their work place,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that gets 17% of its financial support from labor unions. “What the Amazon (AMZN) vote shows is how broken the system is.”

Push for labor law reform

Unions are making a major push for a reform of labor laws through the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, that union supporters say will level the playing field on representation votes. The legislation was recently renamed to add the name of Richard Trumka, the outspoken and charismatic president of the AFL-CIO who died a month ago.

The legislation would allow for fines of up to $50,000 against employers who are found to have violated employees’ rights during an organizing campaign, such as firing them for supporting an organizing effort. The bill also allows the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order an employer to recognize a union if it finds that management interfered with the election and a majority of employees have signed cards indicating they support a union.

But despite the fact that the legislation has passed the House and is co-sponsored by nearly all the Democrats in the Senate, it will be difficult to get it passed without eliminating the filibuster. Supporters are more hopeful parts of the bill can be included in budget measures that require only a simple majority of the Senate to pass.

Opponents of the measure say despite the difficulty of passing the law, they are concerned that parts of the legislation will come to pass in the Democrat-controlled Congress. Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which fights efforts to require employees to pay union dues if they object to doing so, said despite unions representing only a tiny minority of workers, they still wield tremendous power in Washington.

“They have power out of all proportion to their numbers,” he said. “They’re a political force. To say the deck is stacked against them is just not true. They have the Democrats in their back pocket.”

What Biden’s win meant for unions

The wins that President Biden has provided to unions have been low-profile but important, including putting union friendly appointees in charge of the NLRB.

Among the decisions the board will make soon is whether or not there will be a new unionization vote at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama. Last month an NLRB hearing officer agreed with union objections to several of the actions that Amazon management took during the previous vote, and recommended a new election.

Among the first day moves that Biden made upon taking office on January 20 was firing Peter Robb as general counsel of the NLRB, a powerful position little known outside of labor law circles.

Robb, a longtime management-side lawyer, most notably served as the lead attorney in the watershed case after President Ronald Reagan fired the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, a move widely seen as a catalyst for management assault on unions.

Upon being named general counsel by President Donald Trump in 2017, Robb said he was committed not only to protecting the rights of employees to engage in union activities, but also the “rights of employees to refrain from such activities.” Union opponents such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation saw him as their champion. His replacement, Jennifer Abruzzo, had previously been a union lawyer.

Biden has since named additional members to the NLRB, giving Democrats control of the board.

“There’s a lot of stuff decided by the NLRB in terms of how labor law works that doesn’t get a lot of attention,” said Colvin. “It makes a big difference when you go from a pro-management to pro-union.”

Opposition to Biden among rank-and-file

Despite the alliance between union leadership and many Democrats, 40% of voters from union households voted for Trump in the 2020 election, according to polling from Roper.

That’s down only slightly from the 43% who voted for Trump in 2016, and roughly the same as the proportion who voted for Republican presidential candidates in the other elections this century. The AFL-CIO, which surveyed union members as opposed to voters from union households, estimates that 37% voted for Trump in each of the last two elections.

“That chasm between union officials and their agenda and the agenda of rank-and-file across the country are getting wider and wider,” Mix said.

News | Apadana Media

The post US unions are better off, but still a long way from their former might appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

The Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan has sparked fears of an al Qaeda and ISIS revival

Apadana Central — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 07:54:50 +0000

In the February 2020 agreement reached with the US in Doha, the Taliban pledged to prevent al Qaeda and other terror groups from using Afghan soil. Last week, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid repeated the promise. “No death will be caused to anyone outside of Afghanistan … we will not allow anyone to use Afghanistan against them.”

In recent years, the Taliban has kept al Qaeda in check. Edmund Fitton-Brown, who leads the United Nations Monitoring Team on Afghanistan, noted in an interview with CTC Sentinel 2019 that the Taliban had “shown an iron self-discipline in recent years in not allowing a threat to be projected outside the borders of Afghanistan by their own members or by groups who are operating in areas they control.”

Western — and not only Western — intelligence agencies worry that discipline may begin to fray, for a variety of reasons. For a start, the Doha process is dead; facts on the ground mean the Taliban don’t need to play nice. There is continuing evidence of close ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda affiliates. The Haqqani Network, which straddles both groups, is now highly influential in Kabul. And as they emptied out prisons across Afghanistan, Taliban fighters set free hundreds of al Qaeda operatives.

As former CIA counter-terrorism officer Douglas London told CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen, “Those folks are force multipliers for the Taliban, and they are likely to regroup [with] what is left of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

US President Joe Biden has argued that the threat from al Qaeda has metastasized to places like Africa and Yemen. “There’s a greater danger from ISIS and al Qaeda and all these affiliates in other countries by far than there is from Afghanistan,” he said last week.

Senior military officers seem less convinced. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, acknowledged in a recent briefing, according to a US Senate aide, that groups like al Qaeda could reconstitute in Afghanistan in less than the two years previously estimated by the defense officials.

Al Qaeda’s leadership and ideological core remains in the mountains along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The US Defense Department said last year that al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), “maintains close ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan, likely for protection and training.”

That analysis was supported by the UN Monitoring Team on Afghanistan, who reported in June that “large numbers of Al-Qaida fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan,” estimating that the terror group has a presence in 15 of the country’s 34 provinces.

The report added that “Al-Qaida maintains contact with the Taliban but has minimized overt communications with Taliban leadership in an effort to ‘lay low.'”

Even so, Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says, “The idea that the Taliban would simply jettison such supporters after a glorious victory handed to them by God seems to miss a pretty fundamental point about the organization.”

The same applies to the Haqqani Network, which has several high-profile positions among the Taliban leadership. The UN report said that “contacts between al-Qaida and the Haqqani Network—including the Taliban’s deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani—remain particularly close. They share long-standing personal relationships, intermarriage, a shared history of struggle and sympathetic ideologies.”

It is difficult to see these being shredded now that the Haqqanis are so influential in Kabul.

Prominent among them is Khalil al-Rahman Haqqani, seen last weekend meeting elders from across Afghanistan. Based at the Interior Ministry, he has been involved in negotiations with the Taliban’s opponents in the Panjshir Valley and has become an important powerbroker in Kabul.

The US Rewards for Justice program has a $5 million reward for his apprehension, saying he “has also acted on behalf of al-Qaida and has been linked to al-Qaida terrorist operations.”

Asked by Pakistani journalist Azaz Syed this week whether the Taliban could offer reassurances to neighboring countries about militant groups on Afghan soil, Haqqani would only say: “We want peace among all the Muslim countries, my advice is peace.”

‘Over-the-horizon capability’

One question is to what extent US intelligence gathering in Afghanistan will be impaired now that it has no presence on the ground.

President Biden has downplayed the risk, saying on August 16: “We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region.”

But there’s no substitute for eyes and ears on the ground , whatever satellite and surveillance technology offers.

US Defense Department spokesman Admiral John Kirby said last week the US did not think the number of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan was exorbitantly high but cautioned that “our intelligence-gathering ability in Afghanistan isn’t what it used to be because we aren’t there in the same numbers that we used to be.”

CIA Director William Burns had testified before Congress earlier this year that neither ISIS nor al Qaeda in Afghanistan had the capability to launch attacks inside the United States but said “when the time comes for the US military to withdraw, the US government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish. That’s simply a fact.”

Even if the Taliban were prepared to rein in al Qaeda and other groups, their ability to do so is far from certain. Last month Ken McCallum, director of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, spoke of the risk of “ungoverned spaces” emerging in Afghanistan.

An effective insurgency doesn’t necessarily translate into an effective government in a country of mountains, poor roads and many competing constituencies.

ISIS and the Taliban: Mutual loathing

While the Taliban’s connections with al Qaeda endure, both groups loathe ISIS, which has tried to establish a foothold in Afghanistan. The ISIS branch known as IS Khorasan (IS-K) has a presence in eastern provinces such as Nangahar and Kunar, but it has been diminished by Taliban attacks.

However, Abdul Syed, a researcher and author on militant movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan, says that through devastating attacks in Kabul and Jalalabad, IS-K “has transformed to a new shape for a long battle in Afghanistan.” He told CNN that it enjoys support from radical Salafists in several provinces.

Some captured IS-K fighters were being held at a prison outside Kabul, which the Taliban overran as their offensive on Kabul accelerated. There are unconfirmed reports — denied by the Taliban –that their fighters killed at least one senior IS-K detainee, Abu Umar Khurasani.

According to one regional counter-terrorism source, upwards of 100 and perhaps many more ISIS prisoners escaped two jails near Kabul that in the chaotic days leading up to the fall of Kabul and have avoided re-arrest.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that the threat of ISIS in Afghanistan is “acute” and “persistent.” It was the risk of suicide attacks by IS-K that led the US to establish alternative routes to Kabul airport and stick to the August 31 deadline to end the evacuation.

Intelligence estimates put the number of IS-K operatives in the low hundreds, but a war of attrition waged by the Taliban has failed to extinguish the threat.

ISIS has scoffed at the Taliban victory, describing it as delusional and saying in its weekly online publication al Naba that “The victory of Islam will not come via hotels in Qatar nor the embassies in Iran and China.”

IS-K leader Shahab al-Muhajir may hope to attract disenchanted jihadis from other groups if the Taliban is seen to “deal” with the West.

There are other groups that see Afghanistan as a haven and pose a more regional threat.

Parts of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which have carried out dozens of attacks in their home country, have deep connections with their brethren in Kabul. Abdul Syed, who has studied the Pakistani Taliban in depth, notes that the fall of Kabul resulted in around 800 TTP prisoners being freed, including the group’s deputy emir. The TTP renewed their oath of allegiance to the Taliban and exhorted their members to follow in the footsteps of their Afghan counterparts.

“The ascendance of Afghan Islamists next door will only embolden radicals at home,” Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, wrote in Foreign Affairs.

“Efforts [by Pakistan] to force the Taliban’s hand might result in violent blowback, with Pakistani Taliban attacking targets inside Pakistan.”

China is anxious about Uighur jihadis using eastern Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks inside the restive Muslim province of Xinjiang.

In recent months, according to intelligence sources and former Afghan officials, Uighurs belonging to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) have been in evidence in the province of Badakhshan, which shares a mountainous border with China.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar last month that ETIM was an “international terrorist organization,” and said the Taliban should “completely sever all ties” with the group.

Pantucci says that China’s pre-eminent concern is that Afghanistan will become a base for such groups. So far, he says, the Taliban have largely provided “rhetorical assurances” about Uighurs who might try to use Afghan territory to plot against Beijing.

Morale booster

At the very least, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has boosted morale among al Qaeda sympathizers. One message widely distributed on jihadi forums hailed August 15 as a monumental day that had shown “what was taken by force can only be recovered by force.”

Likewise, al Qaeda’s most influential affiliate — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — celebrated the Taliban’s victory as the beginning of the Muslim nation’s advance towards “sovereignty, breaking the shackles of dependence and slavery, getting rid of tyrants and expelling the invaders from Muslim lands.”

And the local al Qaeda affiliate — al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent — was similarly effusive, praying that the “Islamic Emirate” in Afghanistan would become a “shield” for Muslims everywhere.

The UN Monitoring Team’s report in June concluded that al Qaeda “stands to benefit from renewed credibility on the back of Taliban gains.”

And it said it was “impossible to assess with confidence that the Taliban will live up to its commitment to suppress any future international threat emanating from Al-Qaida in Afghanistan.”

Even if current al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri is sick — as many analysts believe — and out of touch, al Qaeda may not have to look far for his successor. The Western intelligence community sees Egyptian al Qaeda veteran Saif al-`Adl as the likely choice to succeed the ailing Zawahiri.

He currently lives next door in Iran.

Pantucci believes the Taliban “will do what is required to be politic and try to establish their state, but fundamentally they believe the victory was given to them by Allah. Why should they turn on their allies who fought with them?”

News | Apadana Media

The post The Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan has sparked fears of an al Qaeda and ISIS revival appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Analysis: Biden’s presidency is under scrutiny as never before over Afghan chaos

Apadana Central — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 04:01:56 +0000

A defiant Biden on Wednesday rejected criticism of his leadership, as he battled the most significant self-inflicted drama of a term that he won by promising proficient government and to level with voters.

“I don’t think it was a failure,” the President said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, referring to a US pullout that sparked scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to, and falling to their deaths from, US evacuation planes.

The President had repeatedly pledged the withdrawal from the country’s longest war would be orderly, deliberate and safe and that there were no circumstances that Afghanistan would suddenly fall to the Taliban.

But in the ABC News interview he changed tack, saying there was no way the US could have left without “chaos ensuing” and that such scenes were always baked into the decision to get all troops out this year.

Biden is failing to adequately explain why he so badly failed to predict the swift collapse of the Afghan state. And his credibility has been sullied because his confident downplaying of the risks of the withdrawal has been repeatedly confounded by events. Seven months into his term, Biden no longer gets credit simply for not being Donald Trump.

The President spoke to ABC News after details emerged from a high-level Pentagon briefing that appeared to confirm the US never had sufficient troops left in Afghanistan to facilitate the orderly, deliberate withdrawal Biden had promised. And the deeply awkward session in which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the nation’s top military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, spoke to reporters also left open the grave possibility that the US military would be unable to rescue all American citizens and potential Afghan refugees before it departs for good.

Biden’s defensiveness, imprecision and apparent changes of position hardly project confidence or competence during an extraordinarily sensitive crisis on hostile foreign soil. Anytime a commander in chief does not appear in control or is in denial of obvious developments is a moment that threatens to inflict political damage.

A changed presidency

The atmospherics around a White House that was on a roll have shifted in a matter of days.

Just over a week ago, Biden was taking a victory lap for his unlikely feat of passing a bipartisan infrastructure deal in the Senate and also ramming a $3.5 trillion spending framework through the chamber. As the pandemic rebounds, his July Fourth partial declaration of independence over the virus looks like a “Mission Accomplished” moment, even if the reluctance of millions of Americans to get vaccinated has fueled its spread.

He has given Republican foes their clearest opening of a presidency in which he has been a hard political target. It may well be, if the rest of the evacuation goes smoothly, that Americans will buy Biden’s argument that the chaos and collapse of Afghanistan proves the US should have left long ago.

But the GOP is seeking to bolster impressions of incompetence by hammering Biden over the pandemic, rising inflation and record southern border crossing attempts to foster a narrative of political decay. In close elections like next year’s midterms, unflattering impressions that take hold among voters can be disastrous. Biden’s appeal lies in his candor and competence. Both are taking a hit.

The President’s image abroad is also taking a beating. His goal of reviving US relations with allies after declaring “America is back” following the Trump administration have been complicated by dismay over the possibility that interpreters and other workers who helped US troops over 20 years could be left behind to face reprisals from the Taliban.

Questions Biden must answer

Despite Biden’s efforts to portray the current situation as a simple choice between staying in Afghanistan and fighting a never-ending war, the President is not being held to account for the mistakes of the three previous administrations, whose missteps turned the war into an American failure. The Trump administration especially left Biden with some tough choices in a strategy that left the US with a skeleton garrison and poisoned relations with Kabul by negotiating with the Taliban behind the government’s back.

The issue is not even over the President’s decision to leave a war that long ago lost public support.

Instead, he is being asked to answer for things that were in his power to influence: the poorly planned evacuation effort, the failure to speed up visa processing for thousands of Afghans and the missed opportunity to get US citizens out earlier.

As that pressure mounts, the President raised the possibility in the ABC News interview that the effort could stretch beyond August 31, his previous deadline.

“We’re going to do everything in our power to get all Americans out and our allies out,” Biden said.

The operation at Kabul airport is cranking up, with hundreds of people leaving on flights from the US armed forces and those of other nations. But CNN reported that some of those hoping to leave were being stopped at Taliban checkpoints, reflecting the extent to which US evacuations rely on the forbearance of an enemy force.

At the Pentagon news conference, Milley and Austin inadvertently revealed the deficiencies of the US evacuation.

They said there were insufficient forces at the airport to keep its perimeter secure and to venture behind enemy lines to collect Americans or allied Afghans as they shelter from the Taliban in Kabul and elsewhere.

“We don’t have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people,” Austin said.

Austin also said US forces would try to “deconflict” the situation with the Taliban to “create passageways for them to get to the airfield.” But he also admitted he didn’t have enough forces to do much more.

“I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul,” he said.

Milley revealed that a lack of resources was also behind the decision to shutter the vast former US base at Bagram airfield further out of Kabul, in comments that implicitly confirmed that the forces were never in place to assure Biden’s vow for an orderly withdrawal.

“If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had,” he said.

“So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made.”

Both Milley and Austin, a retired general, appeared deeply uncomfortable at the news conference.

“This is a war that I fought in and led. I know the country. I know the people. And I know those who fought alongside me,” Austin said.

“We have a moral obligation to help those who helped us,” he added. “I feel the urgency deeply.”

With the Taliban celebrating an extraordinary victory over the United States, they may lack an incentive to orchestrate clashes with US forces confined to the airport. But the extent of the group’s patience is unclear. And there are no guarantees its extremists will not hunt down Afghans it sees as US collaborators before they can escape to the airport.

This position of powerlessness, in which the US is at the whim of a ragtag militia, is hard for many Americans to accept, especially those who served in uniform.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, had harsh words for the position in which the United States now finds itself in Kabul.

“Now we are in a position where we are disgracefully begging the Taliban for permission to save Americans,” Kinzinger told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

An ‘America First’ moment

Events of the last few days have done more than damage Biden’s reputation for competency. They have also exposed as never before the cold-eyed calculation behind a foreign policy that includes some elements of the “America First” approach of Trump.

On Tuesday, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said it was heartbreaking that Afghan women and girls would now face repression under the Taliban. But he indicated the President chose that option over more US blood being shed in Afghanistan.

All presidents face impossible choices. And Biden is honoring his duty to protect Americans. But his chosen course and failure to speed up processing of Afghan refugees months ago, despite warnings from veterans and members of Congress, call into question his commitment to civilians who trusted the US.

Biden’s harsh criticism of the Afghan Army has been particularly poorly received abroad and may damage his ability to wield US soft power.

The President argued with reason last week that US forces should not have to fight a war that Afghan soldiers refuse to wage. But in blaming Afghans he ignored savage losses of life among armed and police forces built with US dollars, which far exceed US casualties.

His stance fueled anger in Britain’s House of Commons on Wednesday, in a debate in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced a backlash because of his association with the US President.

Tom Tugendhat, a member who served with the British Army in Afghanistan, lambasted the US President’s comments.

“To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with, to claim they ran. It’s shameful,” Tugendhat said. “Those who have never fought for the colors they fly should be careful about criticizing those who have.”

News | Apadana Media

The post Analysis: Biden’s presidency is under scrutiny as never before over Afghan chaos appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Biden administration taps Richard Cordray as student loan chief

Apadana Central — Mon, 03 May 2021 22:17:28 +0000

Biden administration taps Richard Cordray as student loan chief | National Media Agency in Michigan

National Media Agency in Michigan | Apadana Media

The appointment puts Cordray, a progressive ally and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, at the center of a heated debate over whether the federal government should cancel some student debt.

The Biden administration has faced pressure from several Democratic lawmakers to cancel $50,000 per student loan borrower. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has expressed support for canceling $10,000 per borrower, and has also indicated that he believes Congress should make changes through legislation, which would be harder to undo.

Cordray has close ties to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is leading the push to cancel $50,000 in student debt. Warren spearheaded the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration and Cordray was tapped as the agency’s first director.

“I’m very glad he will get to apply his fearlessness and expertise to protecting student loan borrowers and bringing much needed accountability to the federal student loan program,” Warren said in a statement Monday.

She had called for the resignation of Trump administration holdover Mark Brown, the former chief operating officer of federal student aid. He stepped down earlier this year.

Cordray has been vocal about how he believes student debt is having a negative effect on the broader economy.

“The weight and the anxiety of student loans not only take a huge emotional toll but also hold young people back, making them less willing to take risks, such as switching jobs or professions, moving to a new place, or starting a business rather than earning a steady paycheck,” he wrote in his book, “Watchdog.”

During Cordray’s tenure at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he made it a priority to protect student loan borrowers. The agency secured more than $480 million in debt forgiveness for borrowers who had taken out loans to go to Corinthian College, a now-defunct for-profit college. It also sued Navient, one of the biggest federal student loan servicers, for allegedly processing payments incorrectly. Navient has denied the allegations and the lawsuit is ongoing.

Cordray battled endless calls for his firing after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. Cordray remained at the helm until November of that year, stepping down several months before his term was set to end. His departure was widely thought to be in preparation for his 2018 Ohio gubernatorial run, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking member of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in a statement Monday that she is “skeptical that a failed Democrat politician, who has a history of getting consumed by politics instead of caring for consumers, has the capability and serious character required to carry out the duties” of the position.

In a statement announcing Cordray’s selection, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona pointed to Cordray’s “strong track record as a dedicated public servant who can tackle big challenges and get results.”

“I am thrilled that Richard Cordray will be joining the Department of Education as the Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid. It is critical that students and student loan borrowers can depend on the Department of Education for help paying for college, support in repaying loans, and strong oversight of postsecondary institutions,” Cardona said.

Cordray will face a backlog of debt forgiveness applications from borrowers who claim that they were defrauded by their colleges. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos allowed more than 200,000 of these claims, known as borrower defense to repayment, to pile up as she sought to rewrite the policy. Processing stalled, leaving some people waiting throughout the entire Trump administration to hear whether they’re eligible for debt relief.

During her tenure, DeVos also changed the forgiveness calculation, resulting in only partial debt relief for eligible borrowers depending on their current incomes. The Biden administration has already reversed that policy, delivering an additional $1 billion in relief to 73,000 people.

There is currently a pause on all federal student loan payments, a Covid relief benefit put in place by Congress last year and extended by the Biden administration though September.

The administration has also waived a paperwork requirement during the pandemic for borrowers with disabilities to receive approval for loan forgiveness. But borrower advocates say much more could be done to help these borrowers, like automatically discharging their debt.

The post Biden administration taps Richard Cordray as student loan chief appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

With Iran, Biden Can’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:15:46 +0000

News Agency in MI | A staff member positions an Iranian flag on a stage after a group picture during the Iran nuclear talks at Vienna International Centre in Austria on July 14, 2015. Why any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the existing deal.

News Agency in MI | Apadana Media

Last week, Iran announced that it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent at its underground Fordow facility. This step is a serious escalation in a long-running crisis—but, even more ominously, it is also a threat. Iran is apparently signaling that if the 2015 nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action —is not salvaged in the weeks after U.S. President-elect Joe Biden takes office, it will further ramp up its nuclear program to strengthen its hand ahead of any future negotiations. Under these circumstances, any new agreement would likely be worse than resuscitating the current deal.

In spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts, the Iran deal has not collapsed completely. In 2018, the administration ceased providing Iran with promised sanctions relief. In response, Iran gradually ramped up its nuclear program, breaching the deal’s limits on uranium enrichment. Nonetheless, Iran hoped that President Donald Trump would lose the 2020 U.S. presidential election and a new Democratic administration would want to reenter the deal. Accordingly, Tehran did not withdraw or restart its plutonium program. It has continued to accept exceptionally intrusive monitoring of its ongoing nuclear activities. And it could reverse its ongoing noncompliance quickly and easily. If Biden can provide Iran with the sanctions relief it was promised, he can likely reassemble the deal (to which all the other signatories are still committed).

If he fails, Tehran will almost certainly escalate its violations. It probably won’t try to build a nuclear weapon (although the possibility it might is reason enough to preserve the deal). Instead, Iran will likely opt to scale up its nuclear program—by developing better centrifuges, installing more of them, stockpiling ever-greater amounts of enriched uranium, and perhaps even enriching to higher levels. In short, Iran will pick up exactly where it left off in 2013 when its nuclear program was first constrained by the Joint Plan of Action, the less comprehensive predecessor to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran will likely try to use its ramp-up to pressure the United States into negotiating an end to sanctions. Because of all the additional leverage at Tehran’s disposal, any new deal—if one is ever reached—will likely have to tolerate more nuclear activity in Iran than is currently permitted.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

Advocates of holding out for a better deal argue that enhanced economic sanctions will drive Iran to make further concessions.

The problem is that Tehran has a greater capacity than Washington to escalate the crisis. Despite the current U.S. maximum pressure campaign against Iran, Iranian oil sales are back on the rise. Even maintaining the current level of economic pressure will be a challenge for the United States as Iran becomes more adept at circumventing sanctions and international support for them continues to wane. By contrast, without the 2015 deal in place, Iran could expand its nuclear program dramatically, without needing to cross the nuclear threshold.

If the idea of a competition in leverage feels speculative and abstract, the basic problem faced by the United States should be familiar from labor disputes. Managing the Iran crisis involves offering Tehran economic and security benefits in return for its not conducting certain nuclear activities. Managing a labor dispute, likewise, involves offering workers improved pay and conditions in return for their not striking. In both cases, the shape of any deal is determined by the relative leverage of the two sides.

To increase their leverage—and thus drive a harder bargain—unions may try to make the threat of a strike more credible. A classic tactic is for workers to vote to authorize a strike unless their negotiators can reach an acceptable agreement. This approach often proves effective, because it places the onus for averting a strike onto management, which can then feel pressured into making significant concessions.

In a similar way, Iran’s parliament recently sought to empower Iranian negotiators by passing a law that would prohibit international inspections and require an expansion of Iran’s nuclear program unless sanctions relief is forthcoming (enriching uranium to 20 percent is the first step in the implementation of the law). This law isn’t yet part of a dash to the bomb. But it is a signal that Iran is moving closer to the nuclear threshold and making the threat of a acquiring a nuclear weapon more credible.

As for the hope that the United States can win a competition in leverage by ramping up sanctions, its experience of playing—and losing—that game against North Korea should temper expectations. There are, of course, many differences between Iran and North Korea (starting with the fact that the former does not have nuclear weapons). However, the case does exemplify how enhanced capabilities translate into enhanced leverage—even as economic sanctions are progressively tightened

Over the course of last 40 years, North Korea has advanced its nuclear capabilities by amassing ever-larger amounts of plutonium, developing an enrichment program that “stunned” the U.S. weapons scientist who saw it, and conducting periodic long-range missile and nuclear tests. The result was that each of the deals concluded by the last four U.S. administrations was less restrictive than the previous one.

The Clinton’s administration’s Agreed Framework created a comprehensive road map for freezing and eliminating North Korea’s plutonium program. The George W. Bush administration’s deal provided for splashy “disablement” activities—including the televised blowing up of a reactor cooling tower—but was vague about next steps. A short-lived deal reached by the Obama administration in 2012 sought to freeze various North Korean nuclear and missile-related activities without requiring anything to be dismantled. And the hortatory summit declaration signed by Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump contained no concrete commitments whatsoever. (A nuclear and missile test moratorium trumpeted by U.S. officials was a unilateral gesture made months earlier.)

A senior North Korean diplomat once noted that, “the time that has been lost [in dealing with us] has not been beneficial to the” United States. If the Iran deal falls apart, the time lost will be similarly detrimental to U.S. interests. Biden is absolutely right, therefore, to indicate that the United States will reenter the Iran deal (rather than hold out for something better), if Iran comes back into compliance with its restrictions.

The post With Iran, Biden Can’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.

Iran works on uranium metal for reactor fuel

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 07:14:13 +0000

News Agency in Battle Creek MI | Apadana Media

Iran has been accelerating its breaches of the nuclear deal in the past two months amid heightened tensions with the US.

Iran also plans to enrich uranium to 20 percent, a level it last reached before the 2015 deal, at its Fordow site buried in a mountain [File: Hamid Forutan/EPA]

Iran has started work on uranium metal-based fuel for a research reactor, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog and Tehran said on Wednesday, in the latest breach of its nuclear deal with six significant powers as the country presses for a lifting of US sanctions.

Kazem Gharib Abadi, Iran’s representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), confirmed the country has started working on the fuel, saying everything has been reported to the agency.

“Agency inspectors visited the factory where the fuel will be produced three days ago,” he said.

“From a technical standpoint, this puts Iran among advanced countries in producing new fuels.”

Iran works on uranium metal for reactor fuel | News Agency in Battle Creek

A handout picture released by Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization shows the interior of the Fordow Uranium Conversion Facility in Qom, in the north of the country [File: Handout/Atomic Energy Organization of Iran via AFP]

Iran has been accelerating its breaches of the deal in the past two months. Some of those steps were required by a law passed in response to the killing of its top nuclear scientist in November, which Tehran has blamed on its arch foe Israel.

They are also, however, part of a process started by Tehran in 2019 of committing breaches in response to US President Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal and his reimposition of US sanctions that the deal lifted in exchange for restrictions on the country’s nuclear activities.

The moves raise pressure on US President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office next week and has pledged to return the US to the deal if Iran first resumes full compliance. Iran wants Washington to lift sanctions first.

“[IAEA] Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi today informed IAEA Member States about recent developments regarding Iran’s plans to conduct R&D activities on uranium metal production as part of its declared aim to design an improved type of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor,” the IAEA said in a statement.

The agency issues ad hoc reports to member states when Iran commits a new breach of the deal, though it declines to call them breaches, leaving that call to parties to the 2015 accord.

The deal specifically imposes a 15-year ban on Iran producing or acquiring uranium metal, a sensitive material that can be used in the core of a nuclear bomb.

The IAEA’s confidential report to member states, obtained by Reuters news agency, said Iran had indicated it plans to produce uranium metal from natural uranium and then produce uranium metal enriched up to 20 percent for fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor.

The deal also says that can only happen in small batches and in consultation with parties to the deal after 10 years.

Separately, Iran also plans to enrich uranium to 20 percent, a level it last reached before the 2015 deal, at its Fordow site buried in a mountain, and it started that process last week.

It had so far only gone as far as 4.5 percent, above the 3.67 percent limit imposed by the deal but still far short of the 90 percent that is weapons grade.

US intelligence agencies and the IAEA believe Iran had a secret, coordinated nuclear weapons programme that it halted in 2003. Iran denies ever seeking nuclear weapons and says its aims with nuclear energy are entirely peaceful.

Iran told the agency on Wednesday, however, that “there is no limitation on [its] R&D activities” and “modification and installation of the relevant equipment for the mentioned R&D activities have been already started” at its Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant in Isfahan, the IAEA report said.

News | Apadana Media

The post Iran works on uranium metal for reactor fuel appeared first on APADANA MEDIA.