Joe Biden is promising to “ratchet up the pain” on Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as he speaks in Washington DC about new sanctions imposed Wednesday by the US and its allies.
The president was tearful as he took the stage at North America’s Building trades union legislative conference, talking of the “horrifying atrocities” coming to light in Ukraine.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures from Bucha and outside of Kyiv, bodies left in streets as Russian troops withdrew, some shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs, civilians executed in cold blood, bodies dumped into mass graves, a sense of brutality and humanity left for all the world to see unapologetically,” Biden said.
“There’s nothing less happening than major war crimes. Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable. And together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising the economic cost and ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation.”
We’re closing down this liveblog here after another lively, dare we say frenetic day in US politics. For developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict please turn to our main blog here. Please join us again tomorrow.
Here’s where the day went:
They work in the halls of power, some for decades, serving lunch to the building’s 100 senators and brewing coffee for over-caffeinated staffers.
Today, they are picketing outside the US Capitol, calling on the senators they have served during a pandemic and during an insurrection to help find a solution that would avert massive layoffs.
Senate cafeteria workers are ON THE MOVE! Today, they're organizing a picket line outside the Capitol to demonstrate against layoffs and to call on Senators to support their fight for a fair first contract. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/YZZPERRhxi
Eighty one senate food service workers have been notified that their jobs were at risk, according to UNITE HERE Local 23, which represents them.
Talks are reportedly under way among lawmakers to legislate a fix, at least in the short-term. Ahead of the demonstration, several pro-union, Democratic senators met with workers to show their support, including Bernie Sanders, Catherine Cortez-Masto and Sherrod Brown.
Thank you Senator @BernieSanders for supporting Senate cafeteria workers fighting to protect their jobs and to ensure that their jobs are good jobs! pic.twitter.com/pKRpicxvS8
The workers are not employed by the legislative branch, but by the contractor Restaurant Associates.
After several unsuccessful attempts to organize, a majority of workers agreed to unionize last year, citing years of low wages, poor benefits and a lack of job security. According to the union, only 18% of workers are enrolled in health insurance through the company because it is unaffordable at their current wage scale.
Negotiations with Restaurant Associates are ongoing.
Psaki was asked about new sanctions on Russia imposed by the White House earlier today, including why individuals, including Russian president Vladimir Putin’s adult daughters, were targeted.
“We’ve seen a pattern over time of President Putin and Russian oligarchs stashing assets and resources in the bank accounts and of their family members, so this was an effort to get at those assets,” she said. “That’s why these individuals were sanctioned.
“We’ve seen Russia’s economy collapse by 15%, wiping out the gains made in the last 15 years, inflation is spiking up to 15%. Russia is set to lose its status as a major economy and our objective is to implement those consequences to make it much more difficult for President Putin to fund the war.”
Another question was whether the US could keep up the cost of support for Ukraine – $2.4bn so far since the invasion began – if the prediction by the US joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley that the conflict could last years proved true.
“We have warned that we’re entering a new phase of the conflict that could last for some time. It doesn’t mean it will look exactly the same, or the needs or the resources will be exactly the same,” she said.
“Our focus is on amping up and providing a range of military assistance, the $100m for Javelin [missiles] is a good example, also humanitarian and economic assistance. I can’t make an assessment about sustaining [support] because obviously this war and the needs will change over the course of time.”
Asked what she thought Russia’s “endgame” was, Psaki replied: “They have moved their troops around and repositioned. They haven’t made many airstrikes in the last 24 hours, according to department of defense. We also know that their goal remains weakening Ukraine as much as possible.”
The daily White House briefing is under way almost an hour later than advertised, and press secretary Jen Psaki is taking a dig at Republicans in Congress she says are stalling on a bipartisan push for a Covid-19 relief deal.
The White House wants $22.5bn, and a $10bn funding agreement for vaccines, treatments and tests was reached “in principle” last week between senior Republicans, including the Utah senator Mitt Romney, and Democrats last week.
But that deal appears to have fallen apart following the Biden administration’s decision to end the Trump-era Title 42 immigration policy that blocked refugees at the US southern border because of the pandemic.
Republicans have seized on the apparent contradiction of the administration indicating the pandemic is over at the border while seeking billions of dollars in relief to continue fighting it.
“At every step of the way we’ve provided the details that Republicans have asked for, even when what they’ve asked for has changed in real time,” Psaki said, wielding a binder she said contained 385 pages of information provided to congress.
“The question we have is whether Republicans are acting in good faith… or just playing politics. We know BA.2 is here. We know that it is more transmissible. We know that it is leading to increased cases and we know we’re already seeing an impact on our resources.
“The president knows that we can’t afford inaction in this moment. It’s going to require politicians to stop skirting their responsibility to the American people. Covid is not over.”
The House of Representatives will vote tonight on possible contempt of Congress charges against Donald Trump aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino for their refusal to cooperate with the January 6 investigation.
The bipartisan panel issued subpoenas for Navarro, a trade advisor in the Trump White House, and Scavino, the former president’s deputy chief of staff, to testify earlier this year. Both failed to respond.
Contempt of congress is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and fines of up to $100,000, according to NBC.
The bipartisan inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden has been making significant recent headway. Ivanka Trump, the one-term president’s daughter and adviser, testified yesterday, and her husband Jared Kushner, a former senior White House adviser, appeared before the panel last week.
Read more about the 6 January inquiry here:
Joe Biden spoke ebulliently of the nascent success of labor organizing at the world’s biggest corner store – Amazon.com – in the wake of the historic victory in New York by a group of workers who voted last week to form a union.
“By the way, Amazon here we come,” the beaming US president said after he took the stage at North America’s building trades union legislative conference in Washington, DC, and spoke earlier.
The vote at a warehouse in the New York city borough of Staten Island victory marked the first successful US organizing effort in the company’s history.
Organizers have faced an uphill battle against Amazon, which now employs over one million people in the US and is making every effort to keep unions out.
“Watch! Watch!” Biden said, to sustained clapping, cheering and whistling from the venue packed with union leaders this afternoon.
It’s worth noting that the established unions don’t impress Chris Smalls, the ordinary American-turned-working class hero who started to organize in earnest after he was laid off when he led a walk-out at his Amazon warehouse in March 2020 to protest unsafe conditions in the coronavirus pandemic, and capped his efforts with the milestone union vote.
In a talk with the Guardian yesterday he lamented how much noise the unions had made over the years about organizing at Amazon without achieving any such thing, while independent efforts by the workers had got to the yes vote.
But Biden was also celebrating the bigger picture of union power, saying that unions built the middle class of America and afforded members the dignity of decent jobs in terms of pay and conditions.
“When was the last time the ‘trickle down’ economy trickled down to someone you know?” he asked the conference floor.
“We are going to rebuild the backbone of America, the middle class, the working people and try to unify the people – that’s been the hardest thing, you cannot have a democracy function unless we have consensus,” Biden said.
This is Smalls.
The US attorney general Merrick Garland has tested positive for Covid-19, hours after presenting a press conference at the justice department to announce actions against “Russian criminality.”
Garland, 69, is not experiencing any symptoms, but asked to be tested on Wednesday afternoon after learning he may have been exposed to the virus, according to a report on CNN.
Fears are growing that the Gridiron dinner at the Renaissance hotel in Washington DC on Saturday, which Garland attended, may turn out to be a super-spreader event. Democratic congressmen Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro, and the commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, have all announced positive Covid-19 tests after attending the dinner.
Garland, who is vaccinated and boosted, presented this morning’s briefing alongside the FBI director Christopher Wray, and other justice department officials. There is no confirmation yet if Wray has also taken a Covid-19 test.
Covid-19 update: the commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and assistant House speaker Katherine Clark have been added to Washington DC’s coronavirus roster, following earlier news that the Democratic California congressman Adam Schiff had tested positive.
The Hill reports that Raimondo and Clark, a Democratic representative for Massachusetts, are both in quarantine after their own positive tests. Raimondo and Schiff were attendees at the Gridiron dinner in the capital on Saturday, according to reports, joining hundreds of other politicians, journalists and Washington insiders who heard the Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu brand Donald Trump “fucking crazy” in a roast.
Another politician at the dinner, the Texas Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro, tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.
Raimondo is experiencing “mild symptoms,” according to a commerce department statement, and will work at home for at least five days.
Clark did not attend the Gridiron dinner, Politico reported. Both she and Raimondo are vaccinated and boosted, the Hill said.
Joe Biden said sanctions already imposed would “likely wipe out” at least 15 years of Russia’s economic gains, and praised the private companies who had unilaterally withdrawn from Russia.
“We’re going to stifle Russia’s ability for its economy to grow for years to come. Folks, this is the United States taking additional steps in lockstep with our allies and partners to raise economic pressure on Putin,” the president said.
“Corporate America is stepping up, McDonald’s, Exxon, they’ve left the Russian market on their own accord. Six hundred of them, think about that, the private businesses choosing to leave Russia rather than risk being associated with Putin’s brutal war.”
Biden also listed other steps the US and allies were taking, including steeper financial sanctions and the provision of weapons and security equipment for Ukraine to defend itself.
“The ban on investment is going to make sure that new money can’t come into Russia to replace what’s left,” he said, adding that revenue-generating state owned companies would be added to list of enterprises cut off from business dealings with the US.
These sweeping financial sanctions follow our action earlier this week to cut off Russia’s frozen funds in the United States to make debt payments.
Read more: https://t.co/4aA2jMA1rc
Turning to individual sanctions on Russian elites, Biden noted: “Think about the incredible amounts of money these oligarchs have stolen. These oligarchs and their family members are not allowed to hold on to their wealth in Europe and the US and keep these yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, their luxury vacation homes, while children in Ukraine are being killed, displaced from their homes every single day.
“Finally, we’re continuing to supply Ukraine with the weapons resources they need. Today I signed another package to send more Javelin missiles, those shoulder mounted missiles that can take out tanks and armored vehicles.
“We won’t be able to advertise every piece of security we give… but advanced weapons and ammunition are flowing in every single day.”
Joe Biden is promising to “ratchet up the pain” on Russia and its president Vladimir Putin as he speaks in Washington DC about new sanctions imposed Wednesday by the US and its allies.
The president was tearful as he took the stage at North America’s Building trades union legislative conference, talking of the “horrifying atrocities” coming to light in Ukraine.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures from Bucha and outside of Kyiv, bodies left in streets as Russian troops withdrew, some shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs, civilians executed in cold blood, bodies dumped into mass graves, a sense of brutality and humanity left for all the world to see unapologetically,” Biden said.
“There’s nothing less happening than major war crimes. Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable. And together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising the economic cost and ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation.”
