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white house correspondents dinner
Disgust Greets White House Correspondents' Dinner as Israel Kills Journalists in Gaza
"To sit and schmooze with the president while he sends billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to kill their colleagues in Gaza is unethical and immoral."
Apr 27, 2024
On Saturday night, U.S. reporters and government officials—including President Joe Biden—will gather at the Washington Hilton Hotel for the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, a glitzy, humor-filled affair that has faced mounting boycott calls in recent weeks as Palestinian journalists in Gaza are targeted and killed by the Israeli military in appalling numbers.
Earlier this month, dozens of Palestinian journalists urged their American colleagues to spurn the invite-only event "as an act of solidarity with us—your fellow journalists—as well as with the millions of Palestinians currently being starved in Gaza due to the Biden administration's continued political, financial, and military backing of Israel."
One journalist, Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo, has heeded the call.
"I have attended the White House Correspondents' Dinner for the past two years," Hasan, a former MSNBC host, wrote on social media Saturday, hours before the event. "I decided not to attend today's dinner (which, to be clear, is hosted by D.C. journalists not the White House) in solidarity with under-fire Palestinian journalists in Gaza who have called for a boycott."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 97 media workers—92 of them Palestinian—have been killed in Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon since October 7. The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate puts the number higher at 125.
"Israel has killed over 10% of our colleagues," said Shuruq As'ad, director of the Palestine Journalism Hub and supporter of calls to boycott the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is hosted by the White House Correspondents' Association.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), an organization representing more than 600,000 media workers across 146 countries, endorsed the boycott push on Saturday, as did the National Writers Union (NWU).
"More than 100 journalists and media workers have been killed in the past six months of Israel's war on Gaza, backed by the United States government," NWU said in a statement. "As a union of journalists and media workers who strive for truth, we refuse to normalize genocide. Stand with journalists in Gaza and amplify the call for a boycott."
Israel's assault on Gaza, which has been fueled by U.S. weapons and diplomatic support, is the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades. Last year, roughly 75% of the journalists killed globally were killed by Israeli forces.
Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, has lost five family members to Israeli airstrikes, including his 27-year-old son Hamza, who was also a journalist.
"To dine with him as he allows Palestinians to die of starvation by cutting off funding to critical humanitarian aid is despicable."
Press freedom groups have accused the Biden White House of failing to do enough to stop the Israeli military from targeting members of the media, who continue to risk their lives to show the world the devastation Israel is inflicting in Gaza.
"The Biden administration has been all talk when it comes to journalists killed by the Israel Defense Forces," Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said earlier this year. "The Biden administration says it cares deeply about journalists' freedom to cover the war but has failed to demand Israel ensure journalists' safety or hold it accountable when it doesn't."
The New York Timesreported that in addition to the jokes, Biden is "expected to issue a more serious warning at a time when journalists around the world are being jailed or detained more frequently for doing their job."
But it remains to be seen whether the president will mention Gaza journalists specifically.
President Biden will address the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. It’s expected that’ll he’ll mention threats to journalists around the world. Will he mention Israel’s murder of Shireen Abu Aqlah & the scores of Palestinian journalists murdered in Gaza? Probably not. pic.twitter.com/nA6M2t9nK9
— James J. Zogby (@jjz1600) April 27, 2024
Protests are expected outside the dinner's venue, but as NBC Newsreported, "protests inside the event itself are much less common and perhaps unprecedented, given the tight security."
"People involved in organizing the protests said they knew of no plans to try to infiltrate the exclusive invite-only dinner," the outlet added. (Kelly O'Donnell, NBC's senior White House correspondent, is presiding over this year's dinner.)
Sandra Tamari, executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, which helped organize the letter calling for a boycott of Saturday's dinner, said it's grotesque for reporters who claim to be committed to a free press to pal around with members of an administration that is aiding deadly attacks on journalists in Gaza.
"To sit and schmooze with the president while he sends billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to kill their colleagues in Gaza is unethical and immoral," said Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, which helped organize the letter calling for a boycott of Saturday's dinner. "To dine with him as he allows Palestinians to die of starvation by cutting off funding to critical humanitarian aid is despicable."
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Climate Campaigners Stage Blockade at White House Correspondents Dinner
"We disrupted the rich and powerful because Joe Biden's approval of deadly new oil and gas projects is killing the planet," said the campaign group Climate Defiance. "We will continue to disrupt until we end fossil fuels."
Apr 30, 2023
Members of the corporate media were greeted by hundreds of climate action organizers Saturday night as they arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.
Youth-led direct action group Climate Defiance staged a blockade of the event to demand that President Joe Biden fulfill his campaign promise to end fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
The protest came weeks after the Biden administration approved Willow, the massive oil drilling project on federal lands in Alaska, and a month after an oil and gas lease sale of 1.6 million acres of offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico went forward.
"The president promised us an end to new leasing on federal lands but failed to deliver. Now, he needs to hear from the voting bloc that delivered him the 2022 midterm elections," said Climate Defiance ahead of the protest, referring to research showing that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 were crucial to Biden's victory in 2020.
According to Pew Research, 62% of young voters support a complete phaseout of fossil fuels.
Climate Defiance is backed by the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit run by climate psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon. The group was joined by organizers from the Sunrise Movement, which has helped push more than 100 Democratic lawmakers to co-sponsor Green New Deal legislation.
\u201cIt was an honor to join forces with comrades from West Chicago to West Virginia and everywhere in between to fight for our planet and future. Thank you @ClimateDefiance for bringing us together. \u270a\ud83c\udf0e\u201d— Sunrise Movement NYC \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement NYC \ud83c\udf05) 1682834158
Documentarian Ford Fischer posted a video of a government vehicle attempting to drive through the protesters before retreating.
\u201cVIDEO THREAD: Tonight, climate activists attempted to blockade the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.\n\nOne government vehicle attempted to drive through the protesters, pausing right in front of them and then hitting the gas again, pushing into them, but then\u2026\u201d— Ford Fischer (@Ford Fischer) 1682834130
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Green New Deal co-sponsor, thanked the demonstrators for the action as he walked past them, and climate scientist Peter Kalmus joined the group at one point, telling them, "You guys are on the right side of history... President Biden is on the wrong side of history [for] expanding the fossil fuels during a climate emergency."
\u201cClimate scientist Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman spoke out at the blockade, telling the activists "you guys are on the right side of history."\n\n"President Biden is on the wrong side of history," he says for "expanding the fossil fuels during a climate emergency."\u201d— Ford Fischer (@Ford Fischer) 1682834130
Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones (D-52) and Justin Pearson (D-86), who were recently expelled from the state House for participating in a gun control protest before being reinstated, also joined the campaigners to say that the interconnected fights "for democracy, climate justice, and an end to mass shootings require a coordinated emergency response."
"We're fighting a system that is trying to put the profits of the gun industry, the profits of the fossil fuel industry, the profits of the for-profit healthcare over the lives of our people," he said. "So we must stand together. We must let them know that if you come for one of us, you come for all of us."
\u201cWATCH: \u201cOur fights for democracy, climate justice, and an end to mass shootings require a coordinated emergency response.\u201d\n\n@brotherjones_ joined @ClimateDefiance outside the #WHCorrespondentsDinner in DC as they fight fossil fuels. \nhttps://t.co/WngL0CM0p5\u201d— The Tennessee Holler (@The Tennessee Holler) 1682819207
"We disrupted the rich and powerful because Joe Biden's approval of deadly new oil and gas projects is killing the planet," said Climate Defiance after the blockade. "We will continue to disrupt until we end fossil fuels."
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Student Loan Debt Is an American Malignancy Born of Ronald Reagan
Forgiving student debt is not a slap at anybody; it's righting a moral wrong inflicted on millions by Reagan and his morbidly rich Republican buddies.
Aug 26, 2022
President Joe Biden just made good on his campaign promise to forgive billions in student debt. Republicans, predictably, have gone nuts.
When you search on the phrase "student debt forgiveness" one of the top hits that comes up is a Fox "News" article by a woman who paid off her loans in full.
"There are millions of Americans like me," the author writes, "for whom debt forgiveness is an infuriating slap in the face after years of hard work and sacrifice. Those used to be qualities we encouraged as an American culture, and if Biden gets his way, we'll be sending a very different message to the next generation."
This is, to be charitable, bullsh*t. Forgiving student debt is not a slap at anybody; it's righting a moral wrong inflicted on millions of Americans by Ronald Reagan and his morbidly rich Republican buddies.
When you invest in your young people, you're investing in your nation.
Student debt is evil. It's a crime against our nation, hobbling opportunity and weakening our intellectual infrastructure. Any nation's single biggest asset is a well-educated populace, and student debt diminishes that. It hurts America.
Student debt at the scale we have in America doesn't exist anywhere else in the rest of the developed world.
American students, in fact, are going to college for free right now in Germany, Iceland, France, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, because pretty much anybody can go to college for free in those countries--and dozens of others.
Student debt? The rest of the developed world doesn't know what you're talking about.
Student debt largely didn't exist here in America before the Reagan Revolution. It was created here in the 1980s, intentionally, and we can intentionally end it here and join the rest of the world in again celebrating higher education.
Forty years on from the Reagan Revolution, student debt has crippled three generations of young Americans: over 44 million people carry the burden, totaling a $1.8 trillion drag on our economy that benefits nobody except the banks earning interest on the debt and the politicians they pay off.
But that doesn't begin to describe the damage student debt has done to America since Reagan, in his first year as governor of California, ended free tuition at the University of California and cut state aid to that college system by 20 percent across-the-board.
After having destroyed low-income Californians' ability to get an education in the 1970s, he then took his anti-education program national as president in 1981.
When asked why he'd taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said--much like Ron DeSantis might today--that college students were "too liberal" and America "should not subsidize intellectual curiosity."
Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America "brats," "freaks," and "cowardly fascists." As The New York Timesnoted at the time, he then added:
"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement!"
Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.
That's how it works--at a minimum--in many developed nations; in many northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.
Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.
As soon as he became president, Reagan went after federal aid to students with fervor. Devin Fergus documented for The Washington Post how, as a result, student debt first became a widespread thing across the United States during the early '80s:
"No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid. Spending on higher education was slashed by some 25 percent between 1980 and 1985. ... Students eligible for grant assistance freshmen year had to take out student loans to cover their second year."
It became a mantra for conservatives, particularly in Reagan's cabinet. Let the kids pay for their own damn "liberal" education.
Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, told a reporter in 1981:
"I don't accept the notion that the federal government has an obligation to fund generous grants to anybody that wants to go to college. It seems to me that if people want to go to college bad enough then there is opportunity and responsibility on their part to finance their way through the best way they can. ... I would suggest that we could probably cut it a lot more."
After all, cutting taxes for the morbidly rich was Reagan's first and main priority, a position the GOP holds to this day. Cutting education could "reduce the cost of government" and thus justify more tax cuts.
Reagan's first Education Secretary, Terrel Bell, wrote in his memoir:
"Stockman and all the true believers identified all the drag and drain on the economy with the 'tax-eaters': people on welfare, those drawing unemployment insurance, students on loans and grants, the elderly bleeding the public purse with Medicare, the poor exploiting Medicaid."
Reagan's next Education Secretary, William Bennett, was even more blunt about how America should deal with the "problem" of uneducated people who can't afford college, particularly if they were African American:
"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime," Bennett said, "you could--if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
These various perspectives became an article of faith across the GOP. Reagan's OMB Director David Stockman told Congress that students were "tax eaters ... [and] a drain and drag on the American economy." Student aid, he said, "isn't a proper obligation of the taxpayer."
This was where, when, and how today's student debt crisis was kicked off in 1981.
Before Reagan, though, America had a different perspective.
Both my father and my wife Louise's father served in the military during World War II and both went to college on the GI Bill. My dad dropped out after two years and went to work in a steel plant because mom got pregnant with me; Louise's dad, who'd grown up dirt poor, went all the way for his law degree and ended up as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Michigan.
They were two among almost 8 million young men and women who not only got free tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room, board, and books. And the result--the return on our government's investment in those 8 million educations--was substantial.
The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes' Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune:
[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.
When people have an education, they not only raise the competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.
Republican policies of starving education and cranking up student debt have made U.S. banks a lot of money, but they've cut America's scientific leadership in the world and stopped three generations of young people from starting businesses, having families, and buying homes.
In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill's educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.
In other words, the U.S. government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.
In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon, and reshaped science.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln knew this simple concept that was so hard for Reagan and generations of Republicans since to understand: when you invest in your young people, you're investing in your nation.
Jefferson founded the University of Virginia as a 100% tuition-free school; it was one of his three proudest achievements, ranking higher on the epitaph he wrote for his own tombstone than his having been both president and vice president.
Lincoln was equally proud of the free and low-tuition colleges he started. As the state of North Dakota notes:
Lincoln signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, giving each state a minimum of 90,000 acres of land to sell, to establish colleges of engineering, agriculture, and military science. ... Proceeds from the sale of these lands were to be invested in a perpetual endowment fund which would provide support for colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts in each of the states.
Fully 76 free or very-low-tuition state colleges were started because of Lincoln's effort and since have educated millions of Americans including my mom, who graduated from land-grant Michigan State University in the 1940s, having easily paid her minimal tuition working as a summer lifeguard in Charlevoix.
Every other developed country in the world knows this, too: student debt is a rare or even nonexistent thing in most western democracies. Not only is college free or close to free around much of the world; many countries even offer a stipend for monthly expenses like our GI Bill did back in the day.
Thousands of American students are currently studying in Germany at the moment, for example, for free. Hundreds of thousands of American students are also getting free college educations right now in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, among others.
Republican policies of starving education and cranking up student debt have made U.S. banks a lot of money, but they've cut America's scientific leadership in the world and stopped three generations of young people from starting businesses, having families, and buying homes.
The damage to the working class and poor Americans, both in economic and human terms, is devastating. It's a double challenge for minorities.
And now President Biden has eliminated $10,000 of student debt for low-income people and up to $20,000 for those who qualified for Pell Grants.
The official Republican response came instantly, as USA Today reporter Joey Garrison noted on Twitter:
"The @RNC on Biden's student loan debt cancellation: 'This is Biden's bailout for the wealthy. As hardworking Americans struggle with soaring costs and a recession, Biden is giving a handout to the rich.'"
Which is particularly bizarre. "Wealthy" and "rich" people--by definition--don't need student loan forgiveness because they don't have student loans. How gullible do Republicans think their voters are?
Just like for-profit health insurance, student loans are a malignancy attached to our republic by Republicans
Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter that student loan forgiveness was "completely unfair." That's the same Republican congresswoman who just had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven, and happily banked the money without a complaint.
Republican members of Congress, in fact, seem to be among those in the front of the debt-forgiveness line with their hands out, even as billionaires bankroll their campaigns and backstop their lifestyles.
As the Center for American Progress noted on Twitter in response to a GOP tweet whining that "If you take out a loan, you pay it back":
Member ---- Amount in PPP Loans Forgiven
Matt Gaetz (R-FL) - $476,000
Greg Pence (R-IN) - $79,441
Vern Buchanan (R-FL) - $2,800,000
Kevin Hern (R-OK) $1,070,000
Roger Williams (R-TX) $1,430,000
Brett Guthrie (R-KY) $4,300,000
Ralph Norman (R-SC) $306,250
Ralph Abraham (R-AL) $38,000
Mike Kelly (R-PA) $974,100
Vicki Hartzler (R-MO) $451,200
Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) $988,700
Carol Miller (R-WV) $3,100,000
So, yeah, Republicans are complete hypocrites about forgiving loan debt, in addition to pushing policies that actually hurt our nation (not to mention the generation coming up).
Ten thousand dollars in debt forgiveness is a start, but if we really want America to soar, we need to go away beyond that.
Just like for-profit health insurance, student loans are a malignancy attached to our republic by Republicans trying to increase profits for their donors while extracting more and more cash from working-class families.
Congress should not only zero-out existing student debt across our nation but revive the post-war government support for education--from Jefferson and Lincoln to the GI Bill and college subsidies--that the Reagan, Bush, Bush II, and the Trump administrations have destroyed.
Then, and only then, can the true "making America great again" begin.
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