Tonight:
Charging ahead on Obamacare repeal:
— That amendment doesn't have enough support, though, to go forward.
— So are you doing whip counts now?
— Paying drug users not to reproduce.
And…
The new frontier of carbon capture.
The two main rival leaders in Libya's years-long conflict
have agreed to a ceasefire, following talks held near Paris.
They also committed to work toward holding presidential and parliamentary elections soon—
though no specific date was set.
The meeting between the UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj
and military commander Khalifa Haftar
was hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron:
— Dengue fever has killed at least 296 people in Sri Lanka in an unprecedented outbreak.
The mosquito-born disease has infected more than 100,000 people in the country this year alone.
Health authorities say recent monsoon rains and poor sanitation
have helped create ideal conditions for mosquitoes.
But a Red Cross official said they're also confronting a new strain of the virus that is hard to fight off.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study today
that looked at the brains of 111 former NFL players—
and it showed that 110 of them had CTE,
a degenerative disease believed to be caused by multiple blows to the head.
Symptoms include memory loss, confusion, depression and dementia.
Along with the former NFL players,
researchers also examined high school and college players' brains,
and found that 87 percent of all the study's subjects had CTE.
— There's no more debate about whether or not this is a problem in football.
— In a rare show of bipartisanship,
the House voted overwhelmingly—
419 to 3—
to pass new sanctions against Russia,
and to limit President Trump's ability to lift them.
The sanctions target Russia for its interference in the American presidential election
and also hit Iran and North Korea for their weapons programs.
It's still not certain that Trump will sign the bill,
which includes a provision requiring congressional approval
of any move to get rid of the sanctions.
After bashing his own Attorney General,
in interviews and on Twitter,
President Trump continued to voice his displeasure with Jeff Sessions—
even as he denied leaving him twisting in the wind.
— I told you before,
I'm very disappointed with the Attorney General.
But we will see what happens.
Time will tell.
Time will tell.
— Senator John McCain, battling brain cancer,
returned to the Senate to vote in favor of opening debate on Obamacare repeal.
But then he took the floor to deliver a stern parting warning—
aimed particularly at his own Republican majority:
— Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the internet—
to Hell with them!
I will not vote for this bill as it is today.
It's a shell of a bill right now, we all know that.
We tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors
in consultation with the administration,
then springing it on skeptical members,
trying to convince them that it's better than nothing.
That it's better than nothing?
Whether or not we are of the same party,
we are not the President's subordinates.
We are his equal.
— But McCain's plea won't mean much for how the process plays out.
With the Arizona's Senator's "aye" vote secured,
Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie
to open the next assault on the Affordable Care Act—
over unified Democratic opposition.
But even as they move forward,
Senate Republicans still can't agree on what repeal should look like.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a plan to thread the needle:
jam a modified repeal bill through the Senate,
and then likely move it to what's called "conference committee"—
where Senate and House Republicans would try to work out their differences
and craft some kind of consensus proposal.
That finished product, called the conference report,
would then go back to each chamber for a final vote.
It leaves a huge number of challenges ahead,
but it may be the GOP's only option.
Alexandra Jaffe explains.
— Mitch McConnell is going to give a bunch of Republicans the chance
to offer up their preferred versions of a health care bill.
But what he expects to be able to actually pass is a plan that's way smaller in scope:
it could be as simple as removing some of the Obamacare provisions that Republicans hate most.
Examples:
Getting rid of the law's tax on people who choose not to buy insurance—
known as the individual mandate—
the requirement that employers provide insurance,
and the medical device tax.
If it does pass, that bill,
which people are calling the "skinny repeal,"
could go to the conference committee,
where members of the House and Senate would hammer out the rest of the details—
behind closed doors.
Near-term, this is a smart move:
it takes a lot of the political pressure off of Republicans by giving them more time.
It lets them look like they've earned a win without actually getting much.
But just repealing those taxes,
while leaving the rest of Obamacare in place,
would result in massive premium increases, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And "skinny repeal" doesn't even touch one of the biggest points of conflict for Republicans—
Medicaid, which is how 74 million people in this country access health care.
And it leaves us pretty much back where we started—
with no Republican consensus on how to fix health care overall.
Pretty much everyone knows that skinny repeal would be just a first step.
But whether McCain's call for a return to the way things used to be done—
with at least a semblance of bipartisan input—
will have any impact is an unresolved question.
I talked to one of the Senate's most conservative members
about what he thinks could happen next:
Can we chat about the skinny repeal plan?
Does it do enough to bring down premiums or fix any of the issues with healthcare?
— We need to go forward.
The final outcome is still unclear.
We're going to have robust amendments on the floor of the Senate,
if we proceed to the bill,
and I believe we can get to "yes" throughout this entire process—
it's been rocky,
but the key to getting to "yes" is focusing on lowering premiums,
and I think the key to doing that are really two amendments that I introduced:
One, the consumer freedom amendment—
which is critical to unifying Republicans and getting the job done.
The Consumer Freedom Amendment protects your freedom, as you the consumer,
to choose what healthcare you want
without the federal government mandating what you have to buy.
— That amendment doesn't have enough support, though, to go forward.
— So are you doing whip counts now?
— So you still think you can pass it?
— I believe it will be passed into law.
— So just a repeal of those taxes,
that we're talking about when we talk about the skinny repeal,
is not enough for you?
— Look, if that's an initial bill that gets to conference,
that's a step in the journey.
What people care about is the final product.
And what I'm interested in is results.
It's what the American people expect of us.
They've given Republicans majorities in both houses and the White House.
We've gotta deliver.
— As other migration routes have been all but sealed off,
Italy has become the primary point of entry to Europe in the Mediterranean—
and the humanitarian crisis in Italy, in sheer numbers,
is even worse than in neighboring Greece.
This year,
more than 93,000 people have been rescued by boats in Italian waters,
an increase of 17 percent over the same period last year.
Some 9,000 have landed so far this month.
But most people arriving in Italy are not refugees fleeing war in the Middle East;
just two percent are from Syria.
The majority are considered "economic migrants,"
mostly from West African countries like Nigeria and Guinea.
That distinction is important,
because the term "refugee" is legally defined,
and comes with legal status.
But economic migrants,
who may face extreme poverty or violence at home,
often don't qualify for asylum.
Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani reports from Sicily.
— Italy is one of the last EU countries still welcoming in migrants with open arms.
And earlier today, at the port of Pozzallo,
a former fishing trawler operated by a European NGO
brought 419 migrants to shore.
These people were rescued two days ago off the coast of Libya.
They're gonna be taken to a detention center,
where they'll be held for 48 hours or up to a month,
just like the 56,000 other migrants that have already arrived in Sicily this year.
How easy was it for you to get work when you first came to Sicily?
— Italy is in the middle of one of the worst economic downturns it's faced in years,
and Italians are already starting to push back
against the number of migrants the country is having to absorb into its already shaky economy.
We asked the Mayor of Sicily's capital, Palermo,
how concerned he is about the financial implications of the migrant crisis:
— Italy shouldn't be dealing with this problem alone.
There was a burden-sharing agreement in 2015 to relocate migrants throughout EU member states,
but it's been slowly falling apart.
Earlier this month,
the European Commission threatened Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic
with legal action for refusing to take in refugees from Italy.
— At a crisis meeting this month,
the EU offered $40 million to Italy to help it deal with the crisis.
Italy's EU ambassador has threatened to close Italy's ports
if the EU doesn't offer more concrete help.
Today in Rome,
officials are meeting to discuss a code of conduct
to place on NGOs who are operating the search and rescue zones,
and are delivering migrants to ports like this one.
What do you know about this code of conduct?
— If we come across a rubber boat that's sinking,
we have a legal obligation to react to that and save them.
And also, there is already a voluntary code of conduct in place since last year
that most of the NGOs have signed up to.
— I know that our organizations,
the organizations we work with and work alongside,
are professional and have done a really good job at picking up a lot of the burden
that's been left behind as the EU has pulled back its dedicated search and rescue.
— But as Italy and the rest of the EU keep fighting over what to do with the migrant crisis,
the boats still keep coming.
Today, over 1,000 migrants arrived in Sicily alone.
— Since the 1970s,
at least 45 states have prosecuted women for using drugs while pregnant.
Alabama has one of the country's strictest laws on the subject.
It's been used to prosecute women even before they've given birth.
And one woman in Alabama is on a crusade
to keep drug users from getting pregnant in the first place.
— Everyone knows a drug addict, unfortunately.
So if you know anybody who's using drugs that could get pregnant,
we'll pay them to use birth control.
That's what we do.
— Barbara Harris thinks drug addicts shouldn't have children,
and she's using cash incentives to make sure they don't.
— Nothing positive comes to a drug addict
who gives birth to eight children that are taken away from her.
This is a win-win for everybody.
— Her non-profit, Project Prevention,
pays addicts and alcoholics $300
if they get sterilized or put on long-term birth control.
— It says no left turn here.
— But you're turning right.
— I'm going this way—
Oh, I thought she wanted me to go that way.
— Over the last 20 years,
she's travelled the country in her branded RV
and paid 7,000 people to give up their fertility.
Most of them are women.
She launched Project Prevention after she adopted four babies in four years,
each born to the same drug-addicted mother.
— You've been doing this work for nearly 20 years now.
How have things changed?
— When I first started, the drug of choice was crack.
Now it's switched, and now it's meth and heroin,
and a lot of prescription drugs.
Nothing else has changed—
drugs are still just as bad,
women are still having numerous children,
foster care's still overloaded,
hundreds of thousands of kids are still in need of homes.
— The birth control she offers isn't condoms and pills,
it's IUDs, implants and sterilization.
Those who choose sterilization get a lump sum after the procedure.
Those who go for less permanent options are paid in smaller installments.
Thousands of women have taken her money in exchange for permanent sterilization,
entirely legally.
Project Prevention itself doesn't sterilize addicts,
just pays them—
Harris leaves the procedures to doctors.
She gets anything up to half a million dollars in private donations every year.
— I think if there's anything that everybody can agree on—
the left, the right, and everybody in the middle—
it's that it's not okay to abuse children.
— You think having a child when you're drinking and taking drugs is child abuse?
— Yes.
They say don't even drink caffeine when you're pregnant,
so I don't know how meth could be good for a baby.
— The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
estimates 4.7 percent of women aged 15 to 44
use drugs while they're pregnant.
And more than 32 percent of all children placed in foster care
were removed from home because of their parents' drug or alcohol use.
Harris made the nine-hour trip to Mobile
when she heard about a local woman who had been imprisoned for taking heroin while pregnant.
She doesn't want drug users sent to jail,
she wants them on long-term or permanent birth control.
— How is doing what you do,
without looking at the social causes that create a situation like this,
how is that any more than a Band-Aid on a huge problem?
— It's not a Band-Aid on the problem.
We're dealing with—
we're solving the problem we're dealing with.
We're preventing women who are strung out on drugs and alcohol from conceiving a child.
— Harris targets areas where she thinks addicts will congregate:
like cheap motels, liquor stores and methadone clinics.
It's not even 11 a.m. when she meets 33-year-old Alesia Robinson,
and Robinson already seems high.
She has seven children,
and used during all her pregnancies.
— Can you still get pregnant?
— Yes I can.
— So, have you thought about getting on birth control?
— Yeah.
— Well then, you need to do it. — Let's do it right now.
— We don't do the birth control,
but you need to do it, okay?
Okay, because that's gonna prevent the next heartache, right?
One less worry.
— One less worry.
— It doesn't bother you that, by virtue of what you do,
you're targeting a specific section of the population?
— No, no.
— It doesn't bother you at all.
— No.
— A disproportionate number of people who use your services aren't white.
How do you respond to the claim that you are socially engineering?
— For somebody to hear about what we do and think we're only paying people of color is very racist,
because they're assuming that all drug addicts are people of color and that is not true.
— Is it really informed consent when they're in a chaotic situation?
— That's between them and the doctor.
He has to decide whether he thinks they're able to get birth control.
Nobody has a right to force feed any child drugs
and then deliver a child that may die or may have lifelong illnesses—
nobody has that right.
— I think it was some kinda flyer or something,
and all I remember is the number was 1-888-30-CRACK.
— A memorable number.
— Yeah.
For someone, yeah, who is an addict, yeah.
You can't forget it.
— Tina Boyd is a Project Prevention client who was sterilized eight years ago.
She's been clean since 2012,
but most of her life has been spent using drugs—
including when she was pregnant with her sons,
Joey and Michael.
— Do you think that your drug use has affected them long-term?
— I know it has, it's affected Joey.
— In what way?
— He has a receptive and cognitive delay.
He doesn't understand a lot.
They said that he'll probably have to live with someone the rest of his life.
Which, hopefully, will be me.
I love you, that's my baby.
— I love you too.
— After Joey was born,
Boyd took Harris's cash in exchange for getting an IUD,
but then Boyd decided to have another baby.
After Michael was born addicted,
she went back to Project Prevention to get paid for sterilization.
— Do you ever have any second thoughts?
— No.
— Not even when your youngest son says he wants a little sister?
— Could you have it, and then I'll give it back to you?
I can't.
I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.
— Just listening to you, it makes me feel like you have…
you… don't believe in yourself.
— I believe in my limitations.
God forbid, if you guys had bought drugs with you…
I can't say that I wouldn't have sniffed 'em out.
And I don't want to live like that.
I don't want my children to have to live like that.
— Would you like the ability to be able to do things differently?
— Oh God, yes.
Are you kidding? Yes, everything.
Everything.
Everything.
— Barbara Harris's greatest impact is in perpetuating
really destructive and cruel myths about pregnant women and their children.
— Lynn Paltrow heads up the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
She's been a critic of Barbara Harris's work for over 20 years:
— You're assuming every woman that's a drug addict is looking for treatment,
they're not!
— Paltrow works with Mary Barr,
a social justice advocate, former addict,
and mother who used drugs when she was pregnant with both her kids.
— I have two children who are incredibly healthy,
were born healthy.
They are 26 and 25, and they're very, amazingly, successful.
— If you had met Barbara during the height of your addiction,
what would you thought of that offer?
— I would have taken it,
because $300, you know, and all at once—
that meant, for me, three nights of sleeping indoors.
— Paltrow says it's the world the children of addicts are born into
that leaves them so disadvantaged,
not the substances they were exposed to.
— When you talk to the medical researchers,
the great news is that none of the criminalized drugs
cause unique, permanent, terrible damage.
Three percent of all women give birth to babies that have what are called serious birth defects.
None of that has anything to do with the criminalized drugs.
— Do you think Barbara Harris has quite a static view of addicts and addiction,
that once you're an addict you're always an addict?
— Yes, and she's not the only one.
When somebody was telling me I couldn't be a productive mother,
and that my children would be born, you know, disabled or something,
I mean, wow.
I believed that.
— The biggest threats to our children
have nothing to do with what any individual woman did or didn't do.
It has to do with poverty, the lack of access to health care.
It has to do with the stress created by racism.
— Do you not think that addicts might deserve a second chance and that,
by promoting sterilization, you're denying them a second chance?
— Well, we don't promote sterilization.
That's their choice.
They got strung out,
they decided they wanted $300 to sterilize themselves.
And if it's a decision they regret,
it was a decision they made—
just like prostituting and ending up with AIDS.
Because I watched how my children suffered and had to withdraw from drugs when they were born.
So no, I wasn't thinking about the women—"these poor women."
I was thinking, "My poor children."
— This is all very straightforward for you, isn't it?
It's very simple.
— To me, it is.
Nobody who disagrees with what we're doing
has yet to give me a logical, rational reason
why a drug addict or an alcoholic should get pregnant.
And I always say to them,
if you believe that strongly that these women should keep conceiving children,
then you should step up and adopt the next one born.
But most of the people who have a problem with what we're doing,
they would never consider adopting one of these children.
So if you're not part of the solution,
you're part of the problem.
— A new climate study out today estimates that significant human carbon emissions
actually began more than 100 years before scientists previously thought.
That could move the tipping point for irreversible temperature rise even closer.
One of the primary causes of human-driven climate change is industrial farming.
But a new form of agriculture could reverse that trend:
underwater groves of carbon-eating kelp.
— So you can see, it's way down below the surface.
It's about eight feet.
Okay! So here's our kelp.
This, you know, for a fisherman, it's kind-of weird to grow plants.
But this is the future.
So—fertilizer, fertilizer, food.
— And then you get the good stuff.
— That's what we should be chanting—
"Fertilizer! Food!"
— A few years ago,
Bren Smith lost his oyster business to Hurricane Sandy.
The storm wiped him out.
So, the lifelong fisherman started looking for a crop that could withstand a storm
and landed on kelp—
a type of seaweed that's popular in Asia, but that hasn't caught on in America.
Today, he spends most of his time evangelizing the crop he says could feed the planet and heal our oceans.
— What are the benefits of kelp farming, specifically?
— We soak up five times more carbon than land-based plants.
We filter nitrogen out of the water column.
We function as an artificial reef so all these species can come and hide and thrive.
We're storm surge protectors for most local communities.
— Does that help prevent ocean acidification,
or help kinda mitigate it?
— Yeah, so too much carbon in our waters is creating acidification.
So we capture that carbon and essentially sell it as food.
— Do you get as much pleasure out of this,
or is it more the figuring out the business from the environmental side that excites you?
— No, this is boring.
This is like arugula farming.
I can't go to the same bars anywhere when I'm going to tell my story,
like, "I went out and cut off some kelp," you know?
— A recent World Bank study found
that a network of kelp farms spanning just under 5 percent of the U.S.' oceans
could remove the carbon equivalent of almost 95 million cars from the ocean each year.
To get that going,
Bren started a nonprofit called Greenwave,
which helps entrepreneurs start their own kelp farm—
using his own as a model.
And according to Bren, there's money to be made:
in a single season,
a farmer with a 10-acre plot of water can grow 200,000 pounds of kelp,
that can then be sold for $1 a pound.
Even though kelp is good for the environment,
people aren't rushing to put it on their dinner plate—
and, strangely, that's something Bren relates to.
— Culturally, I haven't shifted.
I eat at the gas station most nights.
I'm not a foodie.
I'll get there, but that cultural piece of a fisherman of, like, hunting, killing,
and eating bad food is still with me.
— But you do eat this?
You eat this on a regular basis?
— Uh… no.
— No?
Why not?
— My wife eats it.
I mean, I'm not a sea-vegetable guy.
— Sure, sure.
You like killing things.
— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I farm it.
The chefs will figure out how to get people to eat it.
— Alright.
So you're fighting against yourself—
you're fighting against people like you.
So how do you do that?
How do you convince yourself to eat this on a regular basis?
— Well, I mean, there is a trajectory, right?
Kale had a trajectory—
where it started, it was sort-of the exclusive, the celebrity chef world,
and then it moved into, really, a middle class mainstay.
I think we're gonna make kelp the new kale.
I just don't wanna oversell, saying, "Oh, everyone's going to eat this tomorrow."
— High-end restaurants in New York, however, have been serving Bren's kelp for years now.
And his biggest client, Google,
offers kelp to 6,000 employees at its New York City cafeteria.
— The goal of transitioning to a new economy isn't just job creation,
isn't just, like, creating call center jobs.
It's creating jobs,
creating a life that you can still sing songs about.
— But you think people are still going to sing songs about this?
— It's gonna move much more into, like,
what the arugula farmers sing—
which I have no idea what they sing, right?
Maybe it's acapella, I have no idea.
But never underestimate the power of self-direction, of agency.
If I fail out here, it's okay.
And no one tells me what to do—
I can tell anybody fuck off, and that's a fisherman.
— That's VICE News Tonight for Tuesday, July 26th.
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