Progressives want Biden to stop negotiating with Republicans and embrace budget reconciliation.
The honeymoon period between President Joe Biden and progressives is ending.
Progressive groups, who cheered Biden passing his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus bill through Congress with only Democratic support early on, are growing increasingly frustrated over Biden’s prolonged infrastructure negotiations with Senate Republicans.
A tentative deadline to strike a bipartisan deal by Memorial Day has come and gone. And on Friday, Biden once again spoke to lead Republican negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, with their conversation yielding no deal, according to Capito’s spokesperson. Progressives are frustrated by the pace, and by the White House’s choice to lower the price tag of their $2.25 trillion infrastructure package to try to get GOP support.
“We’re fed up and we want our voices to be heard,” said Evan Weber, the political director for the progressive climate group Sunrise Movement, which staged a protest blocking an entrance outside the White House on Friday afternoon — with dozens of 20-something protesters risking arrest. “Since the election, we’re starting to feel he’s ignoring the very people who put him in office and spending more time talking to the party of insurrectionists who don’t feel he’s president.”
Biden has now proposed shaving over $1 trillion off of his initial price tag on a physical infrastructure package, and proposing a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations in an attempt to placate GOP concerns about raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. Both are signs that the White House is serious about negotiating with Republicans to find common ground — a vow Biden made repeatedly throughout this campaign.
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Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
“The President is engaged in good faith with both parties in Congress to deliver historic infrastructure investments that will drive economic growth, produce the clean technologies of the future and create good-paying jobs,” a White House official told Vox.
But to progressives, the events of the past few weeks are a sign that Republicans are trying to stall while Democrats have a unified majority in Congress, to hurt Democrats electorally in the 2022 midterms. And many are worried that Biden is prioritizing working with Republicans over another campaign promise to get bold things done for the country, including tackling the climate crisis and improving racial equity.
With Republicans signaling they’re unhappy with any new taxation proposals, progressives are still holding out a shred of hope that Democrats will ultimately pass an infrastructure bill via budget reconciliation — a process where they can use only Democratic votes in the Senate.
Progressives have an ear in Biden’s inner circle, especially with White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and they have had some early successes on policy and personnel. But getting Biden to promise something and getting him to actually deliver it are two different things — and it presents their greatest challenge in Biden’s tenure so far.
“Republicans are never going to agree to a deal,” Jamal Raad, co-founder of the progressive climate group Evergreen Action and a former top staffer to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, told Vox. “This is bad-faith negotiating only done to run out the clock on the Biden agenda.”
Climate groups forged an unlikely alliance with Biden. That could be fracturing.
On a sweltering June day, a group of about 60 Sunrise youth activists spread out in front of a White House entrance, blocking cars from going in and out.
Sitting on the hot blacktop pavement, the protesters sang, chanted, and shared stories about how they have been personally impacted by the climate crisis. They yelled into a megaphone, asking Biden to listen to them. There was one problem, though: The president actually happened to be out of town when the Sunrise blockade began.
And Biden, specifically, is whose ear progressives need the most. Unlike his swift legislating with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the president seems more comfortable taking his time on an infrastructure package — even if that makes lawmakers and left-wing groups uncomfortable.
“We’re using this action today to make our demands really clear,” Sunrise advocacy director Lauren Maunus told Vox. “If [Biden] does not respond to those demands, then we’ll be back at the end of June with a lot more people.”
Specifically, Sunrise was demanding a sit-down between Biden and their co-founder Varshini Prakash, who was a member of a climate task force created by the Biden and Bernie Sanders campaigns after Biden won the Democratic primary. The task forces were meant to unite the left and more center wings of the party and create Biden’s agenda in the process.
Prakash and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) were Sanders’s picks for Biden’s climate task force, which also included the president’s top climate officials: US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy. Together, the group came up with an extremely ambitious climate plan, proposing to spend $2 trillion over four years to intertwine climate action with clean energy jobs, and drastically cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“On climate, I think we actually made far more progress than I think I even anticipated,” Prakash told me in an interview last summer, after the task forces had wrapped up. “In large part, that was because many of the advisers on climate on Biden’s side were also equally amenable to ambitious action as people on the Bernie side.”
Biden married his infrastructure and jobs agenda to his climate agenda before he was inaugurated, noting the potential for job growth in the clean energy sector during the presidential campaign. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs,’” Biden said in a July campaign speech announcing his $2 trillion plan.
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Indeed, the reason progressive groups are getting anxious about infrastructure negotiations is that Biden’s infrastructure plan is also his climate plan; it would invest billions in new tax credits for clean energy, contains a clean electricity standard, and has $174 billion in funding to collectively speed up production of electric vehicles (EV), user rebates to help purchase them, and money to install 500,000 EV charging stations around the nation’s roadways. Democrats and climate groups are keenly aware that time is running out to take action; the climate prognosis for the planet is looking increasingly dire if countries keep emitting carbon at their current pace.
“When Miami is going underwater or California catches fire again, no one is going to be thinking, ‘Well, at least we got some Republican votes on that infrastructure package,’” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media and a co-founder of the climate group 350.org. “Biden’s legacy depends on his ability to go big on climate, not dither around the edges.”
The flip-side dynamic that progressive groups are frustrated by now is that infrastructure was always going to be the area the Biden administration saw as having the most potential for bipartisan compromise with Republicans. Infrastructure has for years been the subject on which Republicans and Democrats believed they could come to an agreement, because it traditionally encompasses boring but essential needs like roads and bridges.
The White House is obviously aware, as well, of numerous polls showing that voters favor bipartisanship in Congress, and want both parties to have input into a bill. A recent Morning Consult poll found 85 percent of voters saying it was very or somewhat important for legislation to have bipartisan support, and 62 percent saying they disagreed with the idea that politicians seeking bipartisan support was a waste of time.
The very fact that Biden added so much of his climate agenda into his infrastructure plan, plus a proposed $400 billion to bring down long-term care costs and raise wages for home health aides, who are largely women, including women of color, greatly expanded the definition of infrastructure. Progressive groups are now warning Biden that he can’t abandon the coalitions of youth voters and people of color who helped get him elected — and also deliver visible, noticeable results through a big bill.
“Going small on climate is a political trap because it means you sacrifice some of the most visible, popular parts of the clean energy transition: more charging stations, solar panels on rooftops, a Civilian Climate Corps that puts tens of thousands of people to work,” Henn said. “We know the GOP and fossil fuel companies are going to blame Democrats for the inevitable collapse of the fossil fuel economy. The best way to combat that narrative is to have a big, visible clean energy program.”
Negotiations between Biden and Republicans are reaching a critical point
Biden and a group of Senate Republicans led by Capito have been trading infrastructure counteroffers for weeks. Yet another talk between Biden and Capito on Friday afternoon saw no final deal; instead, they agreed to essentially check back in on Monday. But if talks flounder or yield a smaller bill, some Democrats on Capitol Hill are itching to go it alone.
“We move as quickly as we can on going big, we move as quickly as we can on negotiations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Vox recently. “At some point, if they won’t go where we believe the country needs to go and where the country seems to want to go, then we take off.”
The White House has already cut its initial $2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal by more than $1 trillion, and proposed significant changes to the taxation plan to pay for the infrastructure plan.
The GOP group, meanwhile, has added less than $100 billion in new spending to its initial proposal. The latest Republican plan totals $928 billion but is proposing just $257 billion in new spending, and repurposing the rest of the infrastructure money from unused American Rescue Plan funds. On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden wants to see Republicans propose more money specifically for electric vehicles and rebuilding veterans hospitals.
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Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“There are areas where the president has priorities where he’d like to see more,” Psaki said. She said that even though Biden is continuing to talk to both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, “there are some realities of timelines” being driven by certain congressional committees. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is expected to mark up a five-year surface transportation infrastructure bill this coming week, which contains elements of Biden’s American Jobs Plan.
Still, progressive groups are telegraphing their disappointment, especially after the Senate GOP filibustered a bill for a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill — a violent event led by supporters of President Donald Trump targeting lawmakers of both parties.
“It’s hard to argue Republicans are good faith negotiations when they couldn’t pass that.” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, told Vox of the commission bill. “Democrats are attempting to govern, and Republicans have their eyes on 2022 and 2024 and are seeking to get back into power.”
Plant-based food has come a long way, but we still don’t have a stretchy, melty cow-free cheese.
Two years ago, Beyond Meat became the first plant-based food startup to go public. Its shares surged 163 percent on its first day and today it’s valued at $9 billion, with shares now worth about five times their original value.
Since then, analysts have wondered which major plant-based food company would go public next. Late last month, they found out: Oatly, the Swedish maker of oat-based milk, yogurt, and ice cream.
Oatly’s stock didn’t quite skyrocket like Beyond’s, but by the end of the company’s first day of trading, it was valued at about $12 billion. Now, Oatly is valued at $14 billion, over 50 percent more than Beyond’s valuation of $9 billion. Though Beyond and other high-tech vegan meat producers get much more attention than companies that make plant-based milks, Oatly’s valuation says a lot about the state of the plant-based food industry — namely, that plant-based milk has reached a point of maturation in the market that’s even more advanced than plant-based meat.
According to a report recently published by the Plant-Based Foods Association and the Good Food Institute, two organizations that advocate for plant-based foods, plant-based milk alone accounts for 35 percent of the total plant-based foods market, worth $2.5 billion to plant-based meat’s $1.4 billion. Plant-based milks don’t just dominate the plant-based food sector, they also take up a sizable portion of retail milk sales — 15 percent overall, and 45 percent in natural food stores.
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SPINS, The Plant Based Foods Association, The Good Food Institute
Oatly’s sudden rise since it came on the US market in 2016 has helped drive this growth. Almond milk sits at the top of the plant-based milk category, but oat milk recently pushed soy milk out of second place, thanks to Oatly and big brands like Silk (owned by Danone) and Chobani following Oatly’s lead with a range of oat-based dairy products.
In fact, Starbucks, which started using Oatly products last year in select US stores and rolled it out nationwide earlier this year, says its share of orders that use plant-based milk jumped from 17 to 25 percent after it introduced Oatly.
These shifts from traditional to plant-based dairy are important in the fight against climate change, as traditional dairy is an especially resource-intensive sector. According to a 2018 University of Oxford study, any way you slice it, cow’s milk uses much more land and water and emits far more greenhouse gases than any plant-based milk. For example, almond milk gets a bad rap for being water-intensive, but cow’s milk requires about 70 percent more water to produce, emits more than twice as much Co2, and requires more than 15 times as much land. Compared to almond milk, oat milk uses much less water but a little more land.
On top of the environmental impact of traditional dairy, most dairy cows, at least in the US, are raised in factory farms.
Yet despite the popularity of plant-based milks, they haven’t quite made a dent in taking the cow out of dairy, their raison d’être. Some farmers do say plant-based milk is affecting their bottom line, and a late 2020 report that was funded by the United States Department of Agriculture found that “increased sales of plant-based alternatives are negatively affecting households’ purchases of cow’s milk” but that it’s “not a primary driver.”
There are a lot of factors that affect dairy production and consumption, and adoption of alternatives is just one of them. But in order for plant-based startups to become a primary driver in displacing conventional dairy, stealing market share from the milk shelves of the supermarket isn’t enough. Oatly and its competitors need to figure out how to make a great alternative for another dairy product: cheese.
Milk sales are plummeting, but there are more cows than ever
Some vegan advocates say that “dairy is dying” (or already dead), in part because of the United States’ decades-long decline in milk consumption coinciding with the rise of plant-based milk.
Many dairy farmers are indeed hurting, but plant-based milks aren’t the biggest culprit — it’s Big Dairy, which has been consolidating and squeezing out small farmers, one of several factors that caused 11,000 dairy farms to shutter between 2014 and 2019. The pandemic only hastened this trend, as major dairy customers — schools and restaurants — closed down, resulting in farmers across the country dumping millions of gallons of milk. Seven percent of US dairies closed in 2020.
But dairy is far from dead: The number of dairy cows in production has increased slightly in the past decade, and they’re producing more milk — more efficiently — than ever.
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Tim Ryan Williams/Vox
This can be explained, in part, by Americans’ love for cheese; per capita cheese consumption has risen 25 percent since the early 2000s, which is one factor that has kept milk production high, since it takes nearly 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. (Butter consumption is rising even faster, and it takes more than 21 pounds of milk to make one pound of butter.)
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Tim Ryan Williams/Vox
There are plant-based cheese alternatives on the market, and they generally fall into two categories. The first are the pricey, fermented wheels or tubs of spreadable cheese, often made of nuts, seasonings, and cultures (and sometimes oils, gums, and starches), which have managed to impress the taste buds of omnivorous food critics. Bigger brands like Miyoko’s Creamery, Kite Hill, and Treeline Cheese dominate this first category, but there are dozens of smaller, artisanal outfits like the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and Rebel Cheese in Austin.
The second category consists of the bags of shredded or sliced mozzarella or cheddar, often made with oil and potato starch or cornstarch, which don’t melt and stretch (or taste) the way cheese from cow’s milk does. The problem is best summed up by the joke about how a vegan’s house burned down and the only thing that didn’t melt was their cheese.
But Americans eat a lot of shredded and sliced cheese, and the vegan versions haven’t improved much since I last heard that joke some years ago (though if you’re curious, I suggest giving Violife, Field Roast, and Follow Your Heart products a try). And even though the plant-based food industry has grown rapidly in the past few years, its startups loaded with billions in investment, no company has come close to making a “breakthrough” shredded or sliced cheese product akin to the Beyond or Impossible burger — or a carton of Oatly — that can bring in curious omnivores.
Not yet, anyway.
The future of animal-free cheese
The absence of great shredded and sliced plant-based cheese could be a problem of demand or innovation, or both.
Meat gets much more attention for its ecological and animal welfare harms than cheese, to the point where nearly a quarter of Americans say they are trying to cut back. But you don’t hear much about people trying to reduce their cheese intake, even though globally, the dairy sector emits more greenhouse gases than all meat sectors (except beef), and most dairy cows, at least in the US, are factory-farmed.
On the innovation side, it’s simply much harder to replicate stretchy, melty cheese made from cow’s milk than the soft, spreadable varieties.
“Achieving the stretchy quality and texture consumers expect from harder cheeses upon melting has proven challenging to date, which is why soft plant-based cheese may be more prominent,” Dr. Priera Panescu, a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute, told me over email.
Ryan Pandya, the CEO and co-founder of Perfect Day — a food technology startup based in Berkeley, California — shared a similar sentiment with Wired, explaining, “The melty, stretchy thing is absolutely the most challenging holy grail thing to do. Because there’s only one protein known to man that does this, and it’s casein.”
Through precision fermentation, which is used to make specific proteins, enzymes, or vitamins, Perfect Day has developed a microflora (fungi) that converts sugar into whey, another protein in milk, for its ice cream products. The company says it’s also working on cheese but doesn’t have plans for the shredded or sliced varieties in the near future.
Real Vegan Cheese, a nonprofit, open-science research project — quite rare in a field of venture capital-backed startups — is going for the “holy grail” of cheese by adding the genes for casein to yeast and other microflora, and then adding plant-based fats and sugars. New Culture, based in San Francisco, is also working to replicate casein, using microbial fermentation, similar to Perfect Day’s approach, to make shredded cheese. The company plans to launch its first product in late 2023.
When asked about the lack of stretchy plant-based cheese, Panescu said that “academic researchers are working to address these challenges by using biological interventions, optimizing more flexible, well-assembled plant-based proteins, and applying mechanical texturization processes.”
One of those researchers is Alejandro Marangoni at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. According to Marangoni’s research, zein — a protein found in corn — is an overlooked tool in the search to make plant-based alternatives to animal products. Most companies making shredded and sliced plant-based cheese use starches and gums for the melt and stretch effects, but zein could be a better route. When hydrated and heated above a certain temperature, it forms a “flexible, bendable mass which may be pulled, stretched, and sculpted,” sharing “melting characteristics with cheddar cheese.”
Motif FoodWorks, a food tech startup based in Boston that has received investment from the major dairy company Fonterra, recently signed an exclusive licensing deal to use a unique food processing technology Marangoni developed using zein.
Motif’s CEO, Jonathan McIntyre, told me their newly acquired tech will enable them to make a stretchy, gooey vegan cheese that’s better than what’s currently on the market. “This technology doesn’t solve all problems in plant-based cheese,” he said, and that “there are other aspects, like mouthfeel and creaminess” that they’re using other tools to address.
McIntyre isn’t yet sure whether Motif will develop its own products, work with a dairy company to make a plant-based product, or partner with an existing plant-based cheese company to upgrade its own, but he does envision it being used on nachos and, of course, pizza. You can see it in action below or here.
Given all the hype around plant-based food, it may come as no surprise that there are dozens more startups racing to make convincing cheese alternatives — but Impossible Foods isn’t one of them. While it is developing Impossible Milk, a spokesperson told me the company won’t be selling Impossible Cheese anytime soon.
Then there’s Oatly, which recently told Bloomberg it’s making “good progress” on developing oat-based cheese products, though its CEO didn’t specify what kinds. Given the $1.4 billion the company raised from last month’s IPO, it seems like it should have the resources to raise the bar on plant-based cheese, and a devoted customer base who will likely be curious enough to give it a try.
The social network says the former president will receive a two-year ban following his actions surrounding January 6.
Donald Trump’s Facebook ban will last at least two years, the company announced on Friday. Facebook said that the former president’s actions on January 6, which contributed to a violent mob storming Capitol Hill and staging an insurrection that led to five deaths, “constituted a severe violation of our rules,” and that it was enacting this policy change as part of a new approach to public figures during civil unrest.
Facebook added that the two-year sanction constitutes a time period “long enough” to be a significant deterrent to Trump and other world leaders who might make similar posts, as well as enough to allow for a “safe period of time after the acts of incitement.” However, Facebook still has not made a final decision about the future of Trump’s account. The company said that after two years, it will again evaluate whether there’s still a risk to public safety and potential civil unrest.
“We know that any penalty we apply — or choose not to apply — will be controversial. There are many people who believe it was not appropriate for a private company like Facebook to suspend an outgoing President from its platform, and many others who believe Mr. Trump should have immediately been banned for life,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in a blog post, later adding: “The Oversight Board is not a replacement for regulation, and we continue to call for thoughtful regulation in this space.”
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Facebook
The announcement comes after Facebook’s oversight board, a group of policy experts and journalists the company has appointed to handle difficult content moderation questions, decided to uphold the platform’s freeze on the former president’s account. In May, the board ruled that Facebook should not have banned Trump indefinitely and would have to make a final decision within six months. The board also said that Facebook would have to clarify its rules about world leaders and the risk of violence, among other recommendations.
“The Oversight Board is reviewing Facebook’s response to the Board’s decision in the case involving former US President Donald Trump and will offer further comment once this review is complete,” the board’s press team said in response to Facebook’s Friday announcement. Later in the day, the board said in a statement it was “encouraged” by Facebook’s decision, and will monitor the company’s implementation.
Facebook now says it will fully implement 15 of the oversight board’s 19 recommendations. It also responded to the board’s demand that it provide more detail on its newsworthiness exception, a policy that Facebook has used — though rarely — to give politicians a free pass to post content that violates its rules. Now, Facebook says it will label posts that receive those exceptions, and will treat politicians’ posts more like those from regular users.
This set of decisions from Facebook has major implications not just for Trump’s account but also for national politics in the United States in the foreseeable future. At the same time, they signal that the company has remained steadfast in maintaining its power to decide what politicians can ultimately post to the platform. Facebook is providing more details about the rules it could use to punish politicians who violate its community guidelines, potentially increasing transparency. Still, it’s Facebook that has the final say over enforcement, including what’s considered newsworthy and remains on the platform versus what violates its community guidelines and gets removed.
Facebook still decides who gets a free pass from its rules
In Friday’s announcement, Facebook said it would change one of its most controversial policies: an allowance for content that breaks its rules but is important enough to the public discourse to remain online, often because it has been posted by a politician. Some call this the “newsworthiness exception” or the “world leader exception.” Now, Facebook is changing the rules so that the exemption seems more transparent and less unfair. But the company is still preserving its power to decide what happens the next time a politician posts something offensive or dangerous.
Trump was the inspiration for this exemption, which Facebook first created in 2015 after the former president (then a candidate) posted a video of himself saying Muslims should be banned from the United States. The newsworthiness exception was formally announced in 2016 and has long been controversial because it creates two types of users and posts: those who have to follow Facebook’s rules and those that don’t, and can post offensive and even dangerous content.
In 2019, the company added more detail. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communication, said that Facebook would presume anything a politician posted to its platform would be of interest to the public, and should stay up — “even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules” — and as long as the public interest outweighed the risk of harm.
The policy also presumably serves as a convenient shield for Facebook to avoid getting into fights with powerful people (like the president of the United States).
For all the controversy and confusion it has produced, Facebook says the newsworthiness exception is rarely deployed. In 2020, Facebook’s independent civil rights audit reported that Facebook had only used the exception 15 times in the previous year, and only once in the US. Facebook amended its previous statement to the oversight board on Friday, saying it has only technically used the standard once in regard to Trump, over a video Trump posted of one of his 2019 rallies. Despite rarely being the beneficiary of the policy, the oversight board said back in May Trump’s account suspension meant Facebook should respond to the ongoing confusion.
Now, Facebook says politicians’ content will be analyzed for violations of its community guidelines — and weighed against the public interest — just like any other user. While that means the formalized global leader exception is gone, much of what actually remains up and off Facebook remains where it started: in Facebook’s hands.
Facebook won’t study how the platform contributed to January 6
In the aftermath of the deadly January 6 insurrection, many have pointed to the role social media platforms, including Facebook, played in exacerbating the violence. Critics of Facebook have said the insurrection showed how Facebook shouldn’t just reflect on its approach to Trump’s account, but also to the algorithms, ranking systems, and design feature choices that could have helped the rioters organize.
Even the Facebook oversight board, an independent body set up by Facebook to serve as a sort of court for litigation of the company’s most difficult content moderation decisions, recommended Facebook should take such a step. Earlier this week, allies of the Biden administration urged the company to follow that guidance and conduct a public-facing review of how the platform might have contributed to the insurrection.
Facebook has ample reason to believe their platform contributed to the events of Jan. 6. At a minimum they have an obligation to conduct a full, independent, thorough investigation, and to publish the results. It’s the least they should do.
— Katy Glenn Bass (@KGlennBass) June 4, 2021