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U.S. Private Sector Activity Contracts at Fastest Rate Since May 2020; U.S Families Mourn Loved Ones Lost in Withdrawal; Millions Under Flood Watches, Warnings as Threat Shifts Eastward. Aired 10:30- 11a ET
Aired August 23, 2022 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. Newly released economic data show private sector economic activity in the U.S. fell sharply in August. The contraction happened at the fastest rate since May of 2020.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And as inflation fuels fears of possible interest rate hikes and the possibility of another recession as well, researchers say that black Americans stand to suffer the most because of longstanding disparities and the racial wealth gap.
But as CNN's Ryan Young reports, many black consumers are already taking control of their financial futures.
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RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: How tough have the last two years been?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The last two years have been really tough.
YOUNG (voice over): The pandemic and inflation have hit Americans hard, increasing longstanding disparities in some communities. And African-Americans want the president's attention.
BRIANNA MEMBRES, FOUNDER CEO, SHE EDITS LLC: As middle class black woman, I don't see the push for the black economic community like really exploding.
ELISHA MONIQUE, EVENT ATTENDEE: I think the message is being delivered, but I don't think the message is being captured in the way that we want it to be captured.
YOUNG: Black Americans account for $1.6 trillion of spending power in the United States but often feel ignored.
MATTHEW GARLAND, FOUNDER, EARN YOUR LEISURE: We want ours. We need ours. We need to have access to capital. We want action. We need action. We demand action. YOUNG: Earlier this summer, Vice President Kamala Harris announced new public private initiatives in underserved communities, hoping to kick start major minority investments.
KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: And I believe given the breadth of the financial disparities in our nation, the public and the private sector must join forces to take on these challenges.
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YOUNG: Thousands of African-Americans travel from all over the country to Invest Fest in Atlanta in hopes of learning the keys to financial literacy and starting their own businesses, this at a time when African-American unemployment is nearly twice the national average. Those here tell me creating jobs is a priority.
19 KEYS, EYL NETWORK: The black community has a pre-existing pipeline to prison but we don't have a pre-existing pipeline to wealth.
YOUNG: Film, T.V. Star and Producer Tyler Perry and Steve Harvey helped headline this event, which is all about education and investing. It is the brain child of these four men who helped create Earn Your Leisure, a financial literacy movement focused on helping black Americans.
TROY MILLINGS, FOUNDER, EARN YOUR LEISURE: This is a movement and we call it that very intentionally. We grew up and heard things about the march on Washington and the civil rights movement, and that had its time. But right now, we're in the financial revolution.
RASHAD BILAL, FOUNDER, EARN YOUR LEISURE: We need to figure out how we can attack from the highest level and build our own venture capital funds and have our own private equity firms and do international business. And then we don't actually have to demand a politician do anything. We can force them to do things. We force them to do things by money.
YOUNG: A recent poll found that 55 percent of black and 48 percent of Latino adults say they are currently facing serious financial problems due to inflation. For white adults, it is 38 percent.
DON PEEBLES, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, THE PEEBLES CORPORATION: The wealth disparity was between blacks and whites was greater in 2018 than 1968. But everything we do needs to be focused on advancing opportunity economically.
YOUNG: John Peebles beat the odds. His companies control more than $7 billion worth of investments. He believes African-Americans need more direct investment from the Biden administration.
PEEBLES: I know President Biden. I've known him for many years. He's a very good person. I believe that he is missing the mark on his most loyal and valuable constituency. Because without black voters, he would be a private citizen.
YOUNG: With the midterms losing, Democrats will count on African- Americans to turn out and vote, but many are hoping for a return on their long-term investment.
19 KEYS: Poor people vote, rich people lobby. At the end of the day, if we want to get something done, we got to vote with our dollar.
YOUNG: Ryan Young, CNN, Atlanta, Georgia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HARLOW: Really important piece, Ryan, thanks very much for that.
SCIUTTO: No question.
Well, one year after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, a new survey shows that more than 40 percent of American veterans of the Afghan war are now dealing with trauma from the evacuation. How one organization has tried to help those service members, that's coming up.
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SCIUTTO: This week, we mark one year since the chaotic, damaging withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. You may remember, 13 U.S. service members were killed in a suicide bombing outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26th. We covered it live on this program. For their families, the grief of those lost American soldiers remains tangible.
Earlier this month, Dakota Halverson, the brother of Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui who was killed in that attack at the airport, he took his own life as well. Their mother, Shana Chappell, says, quote, it is like a pain you've never felt before. And I can only imagine.
Well, my next guest is the chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. His group has a new study on the evacuation operation in Afghanistan, and its effect on U.S. veterans of that war. In it, they have found that 41 percent of military community members have reported suffering trauma as a result of it. Jeremy Butler of the IAVA joins me now this morning.
That figure, 41 percent, and I've spoken to another veteran who shared with me privately that he's faced similar trauma in the wake of the withdrawal. Describe their emotions, those emotions of U.S. veterans a year later.
JEREMY BUTLER, CEO, IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN VETERANS OF AMERICA: I think it runs the range. It is still the same emotions that so many were feeling a year ago. It's anger, it's sadness, it's confusion, it's frustration. It's really just -- it is being upset at our government, at our leaders, and, frankly, at our own military, because we left behind the very people that not only supported us, put their own lives in danger, put the lives of their families in danger, but then because of a promise that our government made, our service members all the way up and down the chain of command, from the most junior person to the most senior person, we were telling these people we have your back. We will stand beside you when your service is done, and it is time for you to take yourself and your family to the United States. We will be there for you. And it turns out that that was a complete and total lie and that is perhaps what is getting at the root of the damage, of the moral injury that so many veterans are facing today.
SCIUTTO: I'm sure this is another number that has been striking to me from your survey. Your group estimates that 96 percent of the special immigrant visa applicants, this would be Afghans who served alongside U.S. forces there in Iraq, have been left behind. Of 81,000 visa applications pending as of a year ago, 78,000 remain in that country. Has the Biden administration, has Congress, has the military failed those Afghans?
BUTLER: Absolutely. There is no other way to look at it. We can talk about the number of people that the U.S. did get out during the evacuation, but the stat that you showed is really getting at the root of it
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We got a lot of people out, but, frankly, it was the vast majority of the people that we made that promise to about the special immigrant visa, they are still left behind. They are still there and it is becoming only increasingly challenging to get them out, and, frankly, it is only getting more dangerous for them. Because, now, it is not just the Taliban that is searching for them, it is nature that is coming after them. There is a famine. They are going into incredibly harsh conditions. And if the U.S. continues at the rate of processing special immigrant visa applications, it is going to take 18 years to get through that backlog. Obviously, that's just not going to be acceptable.
And that's why we're calling on the Biden administration and Congress to take two actions, each of them independently, to help solve this. Congress needs to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act and President Biden can take action similar to what we're doing with Ukrainian refugees to bring Afghans to this country, give them parole and get them on a pathway to citizenship.
SCIUTTO: The Afghan Adjustment Act would allow eligible Afghans to remain in the U.S. permanently. That's once they get here, though. What needs to be done now to address this 96 percent, right, this vast majority? And, by the way, I've been working to get a family out myself and running into all the various brick walls one does. How can that be changed?
BUTLER: Yes. And the fastest way is for the president to take action. He can do this. There is something called the Uniting for Ukraine Program that the president stood up, that the government is executing, that has gotten out about 100,000 Ukrainians from a war zone, we can do the same thing for Afghanistan. We can get them out, but we can also take concrete steps to change the way we're processing Afghans.
We need more opportunities for Afghans to connect with U.S. Consular Services so that their applications can be processed. We need more what we call lily pads so that we can get Afghans out of the country, so that they can be processed somewhere safely. And we just need to keep talking about this and raising awareness about all the programs that exist for Americans to support all of this at the same time. They need to reach out to Congress, and they can work with the many refugee resettlement groups that are working to provide homes here in the U.S. for these Afghan allies.
SCIUTTO: Yes. Those lily pads so important because there is no U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, so they can't pick up their visa in Afghanistan to get out of the country first, which is no small thing.
I wonder, does the assassination in Kabul of Ayman al-Zawahiri give you and other veterans some confidence? Because as I understand it, part of the frustration and the trauma, right, is that you went to war, right, you saw your brothers and sisters fall there to fight terrorism, part of the mission there. Does that give some confidence that the U.S. can continue to fight that war from outside the country?
BUTLER: I mean, I think it is a mixed bag. Because, yes, it shows that we can do that, but it also shows that the Taliban very much went back on their word and are harboring these fugitives that they said they wouldn't. So, while, yes, we can take the strikes, we also know that there is a very much vindication of the argument that the Taliban can't be trusted.
SCIUTTO: Yes. Jeremy Butler, you're doing great work. I know it is a real challenge for many of the veterans you serve. We wish you and we wish the best of them as well.
BUTLER: Thank you, Jim, I appreciate it.
HARLOW: Well, the record flooding in Dallas has turned deadly. Rainfall has reached once in a century levels. In another part of the state, though, the severe drought has led to a discovery of a 100 million years making. What are those? We will tell you after a quick break.
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SCIUTTO: Millions of people across the south are under flood watches today, as the same system that dumped several inches of rain on Dallas moves east. The city received a summer's worth of rain in just one day.
HARLOW: Let's go to our colleague, Chad Myers, he joins us from the CNN Weather Center with this extreme weather. Floods, interestingly, some of them turning deadly, are just one part of this story.
CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Absolutely. I mean, we have what was a historic drought across parts of Texas, now being maybe not broken but certainly dented a little bit, and then the heavier rainfall now moving into Louisiana, parts of Mississippi, even into southern parts of Arkansas, the orange here and the yellow area, the likeliest area to get hit by something that could flash flood today.
There is the rainfall, there is New Orleans down here, most of the rain is to the north of you, along the area, along the front, just south of Memphis and then sliding into Montgomery and Birmingham and even into parts of Georgia. That's where that rain system is going.
This is what the rainfall will likely look like when you pile it all up today, two to four inches in the orange zone. But there was much more than that yesterday across parts of Texas and Shreveport, all the way even into western Fort Worth, nine inches of rainfall in 24 hours. There was one spot in East Dallas that so far reported 15. They're going to check that out because that would be close to a 1 in 500-year event. That would be a very big event.
But here is what Texas was going through, a historic drought. 93 percent of the state was in drought, 62 percent in the worst two categories, extreme and exceptional. So, what did that do? That brought all of the rivers down. That made all of the farming and ranching nearly impossible, without trucking in water and certainly trucking in food, because nothing was really growing.
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While the water going down in the rivers, something else was being exposed, dinosaur prints, dinosaur prints.
Now, these are not recent. These are 113 million years old in dinosaur valley, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. And so they know that these were here. There is a state park there. But with the water being so low, they were actually able to find more. They found a herbivore, plant eater, and found a similar relative to a T-Rex, a meat eater. So, we don't know which one won, but I have a pretty good idea.
SCIUTTO: Wow. That's remarkable, extremely well preserved.
MYERS: Yes, it is a stone. It is limestone. This isn't like mud or silt. This is going to be here forever.
HARLOW: We're so excited over here in New York that I was telling our stage director, Mike, 113 million years old, and I can't wait to tell my son about this one. We read dinosaur books tonight. Chad, thanks very much.
Thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow morning right here. I'm Poppy Harlow.
SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto. At This Hour with Kate Bolduan starts right after a quick break.
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