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Biden administration

Outgoing Biden Administration Approves Oil And Gas Lease In Alaska

December 11, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. , ,
The approval of plans for an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the outgoing Biden administration on Monday will keep the door open for drilling in the pristine wildlands. The sale, to be held on January 9, will include a smaller portion of the total land that was made available for bidding about four years ago during the Trump administration, reported The Associated Press. “Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is all risk with no reward,” said attorney for Earthjustice Erik Grafe, who has been a leader in litigation to protect the wildlife refuge, in a press release from Earthjustice.

Biden’s Last-Minute Gift To Corporate Lawbreakers

December 1, 2024 Helen Santoro, The Lever. , , , , ,
Less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the Biden Justice Department announced it could be handing corporations a get-out-of-jail-free card, even if they have committed multiple crimes, earned significant profit from their wrongdoing, and failed to self-disclose the misconduct — as long as the companies demonstrate they “acted in good faith” to try to come clean. “Those that make good faith efforts to self-report, even if they do not qualify for a [full prosecution shield], could still receive substantial benefits,” noted the Nov. 22 update.

South African Anti-Apartheid Movement Offers Hope

November 24, 2024 Robert Ross, Mondoweiss. , , , ,
The Biden administration’s insistence to continue arming Israel despite it carrying out what a growing consensus of scholars and human rights organizations are calling a genocide in Gaza has been one of the greatest moral failures in modern American history. While the Biden administration’s approach to the situation has been disastrous, there are legitimate fears that Donald Trump’s second term in office may prove even worse for Palestinian survival, much less liberation. In the wake of these traumatizing times, it is worth looking back at the South African anti-apartheid movement during a similar moment in American history for some hope and guidance.

Despite Biden’s Promise To Protect Old Forests, His Administration Keeps Approving Plans To Cut Them Down

November 17, 2024 April Ehrlich, McKenzie Funk and Tony Schick, ProPublica. , , , ,
On Earth Day in 2022, President Joe Biden stood among cherry blossoms and towering Douglas firs in a Seattle park to declare the importance of big, old trees. “There used to be a hell of a lot more forests like this,” he said, calling them “our planet’s lungs” and extolling their power to fight climate change. The amount of carbon trees suck out of the air increases dramatically with age, making older trees especially important. These trees are also rare: Less than 10% of forests in the lower 48 states remain unlogged or undisturbed by development. The president uncapped his pen, preparing to sign an executive order to protect mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. “I just think this is the beginning of a new day,” Biden said.

Groups Tell Biden To Urge Israel To Allow Media Access To Gaza

October 28, 2024 Sue Udry, Defending Rights and Dissent. , , , , , , , ,
Defending Rights & Dissent and 18 other press freedom and human rights organizations endorsed a call from 64 members of Congress asking the Biden Administration to urge Israel to allow independent access to Gaza for U.S. and international journalists, in the interest of transparency, accountability, and press freedom. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) led the congressional effort. Read our letter to President Biden and Sec. of State Blinken here and below. International media and press freedom groups have called on Israel to allow media into Gaza, but, as a press release from McGoverns office notes: … foreign media remains largely prohibited from entering the region, except for a few controlled trips arranged by the Israeli military. This effective ban on foreign reporting has placed an overwhelming burden on local journalists who are documenting the war they are living through.

US Tries To Entice Israel Into Minimizing Its Attack On Iran

October 26, 2024 Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , , ,
On October 15, two American officials told the Associated Press that they “believed” the White House had gotten assurances from Israel that it would not strike Iran’s oil or nuclear facilities when it launched its eventual retaliation for the October 1 missile barrage that Iran had fired at Israel. The officials’ cautious tone reflected their lack of confidence in Israel’s verbal agreements. Nothing was in writing, and Israel had made no public declaration about limiting its options regarding Iranian targets. Given Israel’s long history of defying and deceiving its credulous benefactor, it’s remarkable that it’s taken this long for Washington to display this kind of caution with Israel’s promises.

Black Muslim Leaders Shun Harris For US President

October 23, 2024 Umar A. Farooq, Middle East Eye. , , , , , , , , , ,
A group of approximately 50 Black Muslim leaders have signed a statement urging Black and Muslim American voters to shun Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the White House and instead back candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel. The new statement, first reported by Middle East Eye, is the latest effort from Muslim community leaders - from imams to scholars, to activists to politicians - telling voters not to choose Vice President Harris in the upcoming November election over her unwillingness to commit to policy changes that would hold Israel accountable for its ongoing war on Gaza and now Lebanon, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese people.

US ‘Would Not Consider’ Israel Arms Embargo Over Forced Starvation

October 17, 2024 News Desk, The Cradle. , , , , , , , , , ,
The US government’s special envoy for West Asian humanitarian issues, Lise Grande, told the heads of over a dozen aid organizations that Washington “would not consider withholding weapons from Israel for blocking food and medicine from entering [Gaza],” according to informed sources who spoke with POLITICO. “She was sort of saying, with certain allies, we can’t play bad cop,” an aid official who attended the 29 August meeting said, adding that Grande made it clear Israel is part of a “tight circle of very few allies” that Washington “will not oppose, nor will it hold anything back that they want.”

Arab States Are Coming Together To Prevent A Regional War

October 12, 2024 Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
In a welcome, but under-reported, development last week, Arab states from the Gulf Cooperation Council reportedly “sought to reassure Iran of their neutrality” in the brewing conflict between Iran and Israel. The stance was expressed by Arab ministers to their Iranian counterparts at a meeting last week in Doha. It was not a formal, public declaration, but rather a commitment expressed in the meetings directly. Initially, reports—particularly the main one from Reuters on which much of the other reporting was based—also said that the Gulf states had explicitly stated that they would forbid the United States from using their airbases to attack Iran, although more recent and updated reports have mysteriously omitted this point.

Powerlessness

October 8, 2024 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. , , , , ,
Let us begin with some facts of the cold, hard kind concerning conditions in Gaza and the West Bank after a year of terrorist Israel’s daily assaults on the Palestinian populations in both places. These statistics derive from a World Bank report issued this month, “Impacts of the Conflict in the Middle East on the Palestinian Economy.” They cover conditions through March; we can confidently conclude things have since worsened. “Eleven months into the conflict in the Middle East, the Palestinian territories are nearing economic freefall, amidst a historic humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip,” the report begins.

The Year After Al-Aqsa Flood

October 6, 2024 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , , , , , , , ,
Iran’s missile attacks on Israeli military targets were the result of a year of provocation. Months of restraint ended when Israel escalated its war on the rest of the region in Lebanon. Showing that its willingness to commit cruel acts knows no bounds, Israel detonated hundreds of electronic pagers and handheld radios to kill and injure thousands of people. The atrocity was followed by the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah which also killed hundreds of civilians. While Iran’s leadership is portrayed as a group of deranged terrorists, it is Israel and the U.S. who worked together to ethnically cleanse Gaza before turning their attention to Lebanon.

What Are The Biden Administration’s Motivations In The Middle East?

October 5, 2024 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
Days after Israel began its attacks on Lebanon, Politico reported that White House officials had privately told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that it would support his military push against Hezbollah. That push led to an Iranian missile attack on Israel, which Netanyahu has vowed to avenge. Once again, the region seems to be teetering on the verge of a large-scale war. Why is Biden administration supporting such actions and what does the U.S. hope to gain? Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a non-resident fellow with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, about U.S. motivations in the region, Biden’s consistent support for Israel, and how the administration’s Iran policy has made things worse.

US Food Insecurity Rate Rose To 13.5% In 2023

September 10, 2024 Michael Long and Lara Gonçalves, Counter Punch. , , ,
The official U.S. food insecurity rate rose to 13.5% in 2023 from 12.8% in 2022, according to data the U.S. Department of Agriculture released on Sept. 4, 2024. That means more than 1 in 8 Americans – about 47 million people – couldn’t get enough food for themselves or their families at least some of the time. This is a significant increase from a recent low of 10.2% in 2021. Food insecurity grew in the two years that followed due to a sharp decline in government benefits, including money for groceries from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the program that pays for students to get lunch and breakfast for free at school.

Legal Experts: US Unilateral Economic Sanctions Violate International Law

August 13, 2024 National Lawyers Guild International Committee. , , ,
New York, NY — A new letter from legal groups, legal scholars, and attorneys calls on the Biden administration to end the use of broad unilateral economic sanctions, noting their civilian harms and illegality under international law. The letter, sent to the White House today, is signed by 38 organizations and 200 individual attorneys, including dozens of legal scholars. The letter notes that, 75 years since the signing of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the collective punishment of civilian populations as a war crime, “collective punishment is a standard practice of US foreign policy in the form of broad, unilateral economic sanctions, such as those imposed on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.”

Even The US Propaganda Machine Can’t Whitewash Biden’s Sordid Record

July 24, 2024 Ammiel Alcalay, Middle East Eye. , , ,
In the long shadow of the First World War, one of the greatest titles for an epochal work - Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford - definitively marked the final acts of the British empire, that hung on for decades until coming to total demise in, of all places, Yemen. In the same period, TS Eliot, the transplanted American, put it a little differently: “This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper.” Perhaps the current American equivalent would be “no gas left in the tank”, or “end of the line”. Unfortunately, no well-known enough North American cultural figures come to mind who might be able to describe this particular moment.
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