Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.

In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.” 

A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth. 

A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February of 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”

Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance. 

The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields,” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefitted, including the planet. 

Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.

Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.” 

Robert Bonnie, the former Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie. 

In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born. 

The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.

The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115. 

In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.”

Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis-mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.  

“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’” 

In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20th. 

When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS. 

The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees. 

Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do. 

“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze. 

“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”

In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “Woke DEI Funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision. 

“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far-right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”

“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program, knew that they were blowing smoke.” 

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While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.

“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”

That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.

Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is a small farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.” 

Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said. 

The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.” 

Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”   

Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter Hannah and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a twenty mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”

Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.

“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seaweed brought fishers, farmers, and scientists together. Trump tore them apart. on Jul 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Individual North Carolina voters Amy Grace Bryant, Rani Dasi, Audrey Meigs, Gabriela Adler-Espino, Larry Repanes, Ralim Allston, Kemeka Sidbury, and Mary Kay Heling, along with the NAACP North Carolina State Conference and the League of Women Voters of North Carolina — represented by attorneys from Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Forward Justice, and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law — filed a motion Tuesday to intervene in United States v. N.C. State Board of Elections.

The lawsuit claims the state is not complying with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), based on alleged missing information in voter registration databases, and seeks to compel a process that requires affected voters to resubmit personal information to remain on the rolls. The state’s failure to collect or preserve the missing information is not the fault of the affected voters, who fully complied with all registration requirements at the time—yet they now risk being removed from the rolls based on the relief being pursued in this case.

The intervenors seek to ensure eligible North Carolina voters at risk of being wrongfully removed from the rolls can participate in elections and are safeguarded from this serious threat to their fundamental right to vote.

Read the motion here.

“I believe in democracy and fighting for human rights. I cannot in good conscience claim to fight for other people’s rights and let my own get taken away,” said Gabriela Adler-Espino, a voter in Craven County who lives abroad with her husband who is in the military. “I did everything I had to do to ensure my vote was valid. What kind of person would I be—and what example would I be setting for my child—if I did not now fight for my own?”

“I felt angry and disheartened,” said Audrey Meigs, a voter from Durham County. “It’s infuriating that I once again have to worry about someone challenging my voter registration.”

“Instead of helping people vote, this administration is trying to block North Carolinians from having their say at the ballot box,” said Deborah Maxwell, president of the NAACP North Carolina State Conference. “We’re speaking out today to stand up for Black voters and our democracy—and to demand that everyone’s right to take part in our elections is protected.”

"Over the past few years, anti-voter forces sought to silence hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, but the League of Women Voters of North Carolina fought back — and voters and democracy prevailed,” said Jennifer McMillan Rubin, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “Now, the Department of Justice is seeking to unlawfully put hundreds of thousands of North Carolina voters at risk of disenfranchisement. Once again, the League won’t back down. We will always fight to protect voters who deserve to have a say in North Carolina elections.”

Background

In late May, the Trump administration sued North Carolina’s State Board of Elections (NCSBE) for violating federal law by allegedly processing incomplete voter registration forms. For years, North Carolina’s voter registration form requested, but did not require, a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Though the form was fixed in 2023 to clarify that this identification information was required, and voters have to verify their identity when presenting to vote, the Justice Department now wants a federal judge to compel the NCSBE, to contact affected voters, obtain their missing info, and update the records.

The real danger of the lawsuit is that eligible voters who are either unable to be contacted or respond in time could lose their right to vote through no fault of their own. These hundreds of thousands of voters have repeatedly faced challenges to their right to cast a ballot despite following the rules at the time of registering. Their eligibility was questioned in an October 2023 administrative complaint; an ongoing August 2024 lawsuit; after the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court race; and now again in this case.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital. “The whole issue of Gaza, with the exception of the president wanting to make it a spa for millionaires, was being overlooked at a time when the infrastructure is absolutely devastated, the people are devastated,” says Watson Coleman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

‘Strongly in sync’

Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

So it really is a cosy setup.

Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

Sheer bribery

Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

QME’s collision with international law

He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Over the course of the following week, more than 50,000 utility workers, with crews from 41 U.S. states and Canada, set about the heroic work to restore power. In some areas, they even transported power poles by helicopter where roads remained impassable. By Saturday, service had been restored to more than 90 percent of the customers who lost power. But some of the remaining outages may prove harder to repair, because they require the complete replacement of technically complex power infrastructure equipment. These repairs “will take potentially many weeks,” said Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesperson.

The unprecedented devastation has brought renewed attention to the problem of ensuring the resilience of America’s power grids in the face of climate change, and to the massive transformation that decarbonization, electrification, and a projected growth in electricity demand bring. Global shortages of crucial electrical equipment like transformers and circuit breakers don’t make that question any easier to figure out.

Electrical equipment and water don’t mix, so heavy flooding presents a serious threat to power grids that aren’t prepared for it. “There has been a dramatic miscalculation of risk factors here,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “So this event is going to have to prompt a wide range of new analysis on the vulnerability of various parts of the power system.”

Among the challenges that western North Carolina will face in rebuilding its grid are its geographic differences from the regions where various solutions have been tested. Norris described the region as “a mountainous area that still has a relatively decent population density.” In low-lying coastal areas that are more accustomed to hurricanes, for instance, some utility companies have begun moving power lines underground to avoid the problems that hurricane-force winds pose. But in Duke Energy’s service area, “you have this really far-flung set of distribution lines going up into the hills and serving different communities,” Norris continued.

Read Next

Hurricane Helene could cost $200 billion. Nobody knows where the money will come from.

Jake Bittle

Last week, an early report from North Carolina congressman Chuck Edwards claiming that 360 substations in North Carolina were “out” because of flooding caused a minor panic among grid experts, who worried that there simply weren’t enough transformers in reserve in the U.S. to rebuild that many substations.

Transformers are the pieces of electrical equipment required to shift an electric current from one voltage to another. They are needed at either end of a transmission line — the massive power lines that transmit electricity at a high voltage between power plants and the lower-voltage distribution lines that power homes and businesses. They are housed in substations, the junctions between the transmission and distribution systems.

It turns out that the crisis wasn’t so dire. Of the 360 substations that were reported down, most “were out because of damage to the transmission system that supplies them with power, not necessarily damage to all those substations,” said Brooks, the Duke Energy spokesperson. But even a handful of destroyed substations is no small matter. At least two sites, the utility has trucked in temporary “mobile substations” that will power nearby communities until the equipment can be repaired.

In normal times, said John Wilson, a vice president at the consulting firm Grid Strategies, it takes over a year to build a new substation from scratch, including drawing up a site-specific design and procuring the equipment. Rebuilding can be a significantly shorter process when the designs are already complete, and utilities keep some amount of equipment in reserve. But the depletion of those reserves would only add to the potential supply chain bottleneck for future crises.

Global demand for transformers is growing, in part because the transition to renewable energy will require many more sites of power generation than the old fossil fuel-powered system — and each new power plant requires its own equipment. With few manufacturers of transformers operating in the U.S., utilities must wait an average of 150 weeks for an order to arrive.

While it’s unclear whether the storm recovery will be directly impeded by the transformer shortage, it may breathe life into solutions that have been recently proposed. In September, the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council recommended that the federal government create a strategic reserve of transformers to bypass the industry’s long lead times. And in a report published in August, Grid Strategies recommended that utilities band together in a collective procurement organization — ideally with federal loan backing — to make large orders and share the costs. “That would help deal with the construction backlog; right now, manufacturers are hesitant to build new factories to build this equipment in the U.S. or North America because they aren’t confident that the market will be there,” said Wilson.

The reconstruction of the power grid in the areas of Appalachia where it was wrecked by Helene will ultimately offer a chance for the utility industry to rethink how the electricity system should be structured. “​​In areas where there could be more extreme weather events like this, it’s going to be more and more difficult to maintain far-flung distribution systems,” Norris said. “And the cost of service is going to rise, and you either have to muddle through that or think about other measures, like undergrounding lines, or trying to bring load into higher degrees of concentration so it isn’t so far-flung, or, obviously, to think more about distributed energy systems and backup power.”

There are ways to build grid resilience that could be implemented on a more local level — although they’re costly. One is the concept of microgrids — local electric grids that are disconnected from the wider power system. Norris said this concept could be extended further by allowing individual homes and businesses to power themselves with rooftop solar when the grid is down. Most solar arrays aren’t configured to produce power when there isn’t a wider grid to feed them into, in order to protect the line workers repairing power lines from a live current. But this can be prevented by a technique called solar islanding, which effectively disconnects the solar array from the grid.

Last week, Duke Energy used one such microgrid, in the flooded resort town of Hot Springs, North Carolina, to keep the lights on downtown for days using only batteries and solar power. For towns like Hot Springs, microgrids could be much more than temporary patches. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene brought devastation — and an opportunity — to Appalachia’s power grids on Oct 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Gautama Mehta.

The acclaimed television host Phil Donahue died Sunday at the age of 88. Donahue’s commitment to bringing major social and political issues to the American public spanned decades, a mission that was perhaps best encapsulated by his platforming of antiwar perspectives during the leadup to the Iraq War. He was fired in 2003 from his eponymous MSNBC talk show for doing so. In 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Donahue about his firing. We play an excerpt from that interview and speak to journalist Jeff Cohen, who served as a senior producer on MSNBC’s Donahue before its cancellation. “Phil was a progressive. He was for peace and justice. He exuded it. It’s what made him tick,” recalls Cohen.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), A Poesia Está Na Rua I [Poetry Is out on the Street I], 1974.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations in 1955, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961 and signed a pact with the European Economic Community in 1972. The United States and Europe worked closely with the Salazar and Caetano governments, turning a blind eye to their atrocities.

Over a decade ago, I visited Lisbon’s Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom, which was a torture site for political prisoners from 1928 to 1965. During this time, tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, communists, and rebels of all kinds were brought there to be tortured, and many were killed – often with great cruelty. The ordinariness of this brutality permeates the hundreds of stories preserved in the museum. For instance, on 31 July 1958, torturers took the welder Raúl Alves from Aljube Prison to the third floor of the secret police’s headquarters and threw him to his death. Heloísa Ramos Lins, the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Portugal at the time, Álvaro Lins, drove by at that moment, saw Alves’ fatal fall, and told her husband. When the Brazilian embassy approached the Portuguese Interior Ministry to ask what had happened, the Estado Novo dictatorship responded, ‘There is no reason to be so shocked. It is merely an unimportant communist’.

John Green (England), Peasants in Beja Demanding Agrarian Reform, 1974.

It was ‘unimportant communists’ like Raúl Alves who initiated the revolution of 25 April, which built on a wave of workers’ actions across 1973, beginning with the airport workers in Lisbon and then spreading to textile workers’ strikes in Braga and Covilha, engineering workers’ strikes in Aveiro and Porto, and glass workers’ strike in Marinha Grande.

Around this time, the dictator Caetano read Portugal and the Future, written by General António de Spínola who was trained by commanders of the fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, led a military campaign in Angola, and was formerly the Estado Novo’s governor in Guinea-Bissau. Spínola’s book argued that Portugal should end its colonial occupation since it was losing its grip on Portuguese-controlled Africa. In his memoirs, Caetano wrote that when he finished the book, he understood ‘that the military coup, which I could sense had been coming, was now inevitable’.

What Caetano did not foresee was the unity between workers and soldiers (who themselves were part of the working class) that burst through in April 1974. The soldiers were fed up with the colonial wars, which – despite the great brutality of the Estado Novo – had failed to quell the ambitions of the people of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The advances made by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were considerable, with Portugal’s army losing more soldiers than at any time since the eighteenth century. Several of these formations received assistance from the USSR and East Germany (DDR), but it was through their own strength and initiative that they ultimately won the battles against colonialism (as our colleagues at the International Research Centre on the DDR have documented).

Mário Macilau (Mozambique), Bending Reality: Untitled (2), from The Profit Corner series, 2016.

On 9 September 1973, soldiers who had been sent to Guinea-Bissau met in Portugal to form the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In March 1974, the MFA approved its programme Democracy, Development, and Decolonisation, drafted by the Marxist soldier Ernesto Melo Antunes. When the revolution erupted in April, Antunes explained, ‘A few hours after the start of the coup, on the same day, the mass movement began. This immediately transformed it into a revolution. When I wrote the programme of the MFA, I had not predicted this, but the fact that it happened showed that the military was in tune with the Portuguese people’. When Antunes said the ‘military’, he meant the soldiers, because those who formed the MFA were not more senior than captains and remained rooted in the working class from which they had come.

In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the ‘necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestation’. This position was rejected by the Estado Novo regime. On 3 August 1959, Portuguese colonial soldiers fired on sailors and dockworkers at Pidjiguiti at the Port of Bissau, killing over fifty people. On 16 June 1960, in the town of Mueda (Mozambique), the Estado Novo colonialists fired on a small, unarmed demonstration of national liberation advocates who had been invited by the district administrator to present their views. It is still not known how many people were killed. Then, on 4 January 1961, a strike at Baixa do Cassange (Angola) was met with Portuguese repression, killing somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 Angolans. These three incidents showed that the Portuguese colonialists were unwilling to tolerate any civic movement for independence. It was the Estado Novo that imposed the armed struggle on these parts of Africa, moving the PAIGC, MPLA, and FRELIMO to take up guns.

Nefwani Junior (Angola), É Urgente (Voltar) [It’s Urgent (to Return)], 2021.

Agostinho Neto (1922–1979) was a communist poet, a leader of the MPLA, and the first president of independent Angola. In a poem called ‘Massacre of São Tomé’, Neto captured the feeling of the revolts against Portuguese colonialism:

It was then that in eyes on fire
now with blood, now with life, now with death,
we buried our dead victoriously
and on the graves recognised
the reason for these men’s sacrifice
for love,
and for harmony,
and for our freedom
even while facing death, through the force of time
in blood-stained waters
even in the small defeats that accumulate towards victory

Within us
the green land of São Tomé
will also be the island of love.

That island of love was not just to be built across Africa, from Praia to Luanda, but also across Portugal. On 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro, a forty-year-old waitress, was working at a self-service restaurant called Sir in the Franjinhas building on Braancamp Street in Lisbon. Since it was the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, the owner decided to hand out red carnations to the customers. When Celeste told him about the revolution, he decided to shut down Sir for the day, give employees the carnations, and encourage the employees to take the carnations home. Instead, Celeste headed to the city centre, where events were unfolding. On the way, some soldiers asked her for a cigarette, but instead, she put a few carnations into the barrels of their guns. This caught on, and the florists of Baixa decided to give away their in-season red carnations to be the emblem of the revolution. That is why the 1974 revolution was called the Carnation Revolution, a revolution of flowers against guns.

Portugal’s social revolution of 1974–1975 swept large majorities of people into a new sensibility, but the state refused to capitulate. It inaugurated the Third Republic, whose presidents all came from the ranks of the military and the National Salvation Junta: António de Spínola (April–September 1974), Francisco da Costa Gomes (September 1974–July 1976), and António Ramalho Eanes (July 1976–March 1986). These were not men from the ranks, but the old generals. Nonetheless, they were eventually forced to surrender the old structures of Estado Novo colonialism and withdraw from their colonies in Africa.

Bertina Lopes (Mozambique), Omenagem a Amílcar Cabral [Tribute to Amílcar Cabral], 1973.

Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), who was born one hundred years ago this September and who did more than many to build the African formations against Estado Novo colonialism, did not live to see the independence of Portugal’s African colonies. At the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba, Cabral warned that it was not enough to get rid of the old regime, and that even more difficult than overthrowing the regime itself would be to build the new world out of the old, from Portugal to Angola, Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique to São Tomé and Príncipe. The main struggle after decolonisation, Cabral said, is the ‘struggle against our own weaknesses’. This ‘battle against ourselves’, he continued, ‘is the most difficult of all’ because it is a battle against the ‘internal contradictions’ of our societies, the poverty borne of colonialism, and the wretched hierarchies in our complex cultural formations.

Led by people like Cabral, liberation struggles in Africa not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism and helped bring democracy to Europe. But that was not the end of the struggle. It opened new contradictions, many of which linger today in different forms. As Cabral often said as the closing words to his speeches, a luta continua. The struggle continues.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Le Tung Van of the the Peng Lei House Buddhist Church in Long An province has previously been at the center of allegations of incest, fraud and abusing freedoms. In 2022, he was sentenced to five years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms.” 

The provincial Security Investigation Agency said it launched the new case after receiving reports of Van’s alleged incestuous behavior, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

The new charge also comes a week after two of his defense lawyers were stripped of their membership in the Ho Chi Minh Bar Association – a decision they warned could precede new action against Van.

An attorney who spoke anonymously to Radio Free Asia for security reasons said Van hasn’t been required to serve the 2022 prison sentence due to his old age and frail health.

The attorney added that the new charges announced on Friday were “vague” and appeared to use old evidence.

Police forcibly collected DNA samples from members residing in the Peng Lei Buddhist House Church at least three times in 2021 and 2022, including one occasion where they obtained blood samples in the name of COVID-19 testing.

Days after the church was searched in January 2022, authorities announced the “abusing democratic freedoms” charge against Van. He was accused of taking advantage of religion and philanthropy for their own personal benefit, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Van was also charged with incest and fraud, but these charges were later dropped.  

The complaint was reportedly made by the government-recognized Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, the state-backed religious entity, and a member of the Sangha’s board of directors, according to the commission.

Vietnam maintains strict laws on religious activity that require groups to be supervised by government-controlled management boards. The Peng Lei Buddhist House Church is an independent Buddhist community.

Defense lawyers seek asylum

Van was indicted in June 2022 after authorities accused him of directing other defendants to create videos and write an article that insulted Duc Hoa District Police and the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, according to the commission. The five-year sentence was issued the following month.

Van has appealed his conviction and sentencing, and he’s been under house arrest since then. Authorities have continued to investigate the incest allegations.

In October 2022, one of Van’s defense attorneys, Dang Dinh Manh, criticized the way that blood samples were taken from Van and his family members. 

Samples should adhere to criminal procedural regulations and medical standards and the consent of the individuals or their legal guardians should be obtained, he said.

Van’s lawyers have also criticized authorities for preventing them from meeting with Van and other accused church members.

Last year, Dang Dinh Manh and two other defense attorneys for the church – Nguyen Van Mieng and Dao Kim Lan – sought political asylum in the United States after they received a police summons related to accusations of “abusing democratic freedoms” during their legal defense of Van and the church.

Last week, the Ho Chi Minh Bar Association announced its decision to revoke the membership of Dang Dinh Manh and Nguyen Van Mieng for not paying fees. 

Both lawyers told RFA last week that the decision could pave the way for authorities to take new action in their investigation of the members of Peng Lei Buddhist House Church. 

RFA’s attempts to contact Long An Police at the provided phone number went unanswered on Friday. 

Additionally, RFA was unable to reach anyone from the Peng Lei Buddhist House Church to verify Friday’s state media reports.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Janine Jackson interviewed the New Republic‘s Melissa Gira Grant about abortion access and politics for the December 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has generated well-grounded fear and confusion: states ginning up their own specific laws and attempting to extend them to other states, politicians and pundits attempting to shift opinion through rhetoric—it’s not a “ban,” it’s a “standard.” And what about “abortion tourism”?

Abortion, Every Day (6/29/23)

Combined with horrific emerging stories of women being forced to labor through dangerous complications, it adds up to an unclear but clearly disturbing situation—and to a crying need for reporting with an overt fealty to human rights, rather than a lazy and cowardly both-sidesing of a shifting terrain.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, from Verso, and of A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America, which is forthcoming from Little, Brown. She’s co-director of the film They Won’t Call It Murder, about police murders in Columbus, Ohio, from Field of Vision. And she joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Melissa Gira Grant.

Melissa Gira Grant: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I would like to start by situating a story that some listeners will have heard, about a case in Idaho where the mother of a 15-year-old accused the girl’s boyfriend and his mother of taking the girl across state lines to obtain an abortion. Folks may have heard that prosecutors applied trafficking laws here, but that wasn’t quite right.

But it isn’t that some legislators aren’t trying to criminalize interstate travel for abortions, so we don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. Would you tease out, to the extent that you think it’s meaningful, the bit here about some initial misreporting from the reality of the problem that folks are worrying about?

Melissa Gira Grant: “The story of the post-Roe world is a very fractured story. There’s no single story.” (photo: Noah Kalina)

MGG: Sure. I think it starts with just a real sense of urgency, a legitimate sense of urgency. After years, particularly in feminist media, and for folks who’ve been covering abortion rights for a long time, journalists have been hearing from other journalists that, like, “Roe’s not going anywhere, don’t you worry,” this patronizing thing. And isn’t it sad that now we’re in this moment?

And people who have that expertise are having to deal with this whole national terrain of stories, different things happening in different states to different people. The story of the post-Roe world is a very fractured story. There’s no single story.

But the biggest fear, I think, is that after the Dobbs decision came down in 2022, there would be an increase in the criminal punishment of people seeking abortions, people having abortions, and people helping people have abortions.

And that’s what it looks like is going on in this story in Idaho. It looks like when a mother initiated this criminal investigation into her daughter’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother, it seems like what was seen as a problem was not just that they had had a relationship when she was underage, or that she had run away, or something like that; there’s definitely some of that in the background. The problem that’s identified is they took her across state lines for an abortion.

What makes this unique is that the state in which this happened, Idaho, was the first state after Dobbs to pass a law, creating this crime that never existed before, of abortion trafficking. And it simply means going across state lines to have an abortion. Idaho is almost a zero-access state, but nearby, in Washington and Oregon, you do have the possibility of accessing surgical abortion.

So that sets the stage here, I think, for a lot of confusion, because this girl’s boyfriend and [his] mother, while it looks like they were criminalized for the act of taking her across state lines for an abortion—or simply being the people who, at her request, took her across state lines for an abortion; it’s not entirely clear—they didn’t use the abortion trafficking law against them. They used an existing statute on kidnapping, but mentioned abortion in the news stories that came out about the case.

And so it was very easy for people to say: This is the first use of this law, it’s happening. This thing we were really scared about is happening.

But the reality was a lot more complicated. And we still don’t know all of the facts, but I understand the need to urgently let people know, when the criminalization of abortion is ramping up at the speed that it is.

It’s not the speed of journalism. Journalism needs to be a lot more slow and deliberate than the speed of a criminal punishment system attacking people for having an abortion.

JJ: What we don’t want to be lost, it’s not that there’s no reason to fear prosecutors and politicians using laws and charges that maybe don’t specifically mention abortion, but that still are used to criminalize access to abortion. And you’ve written about that a lot. So it is a larger story, it’s not just an anecdote, it’s a real story about the use of laws, including the Mann Act, which a lot of people will think is a blast from the past, to criminalize abortion access?

New Republic (5/5/22)

MGG: Yeah, this has been going on, even when we had the protections of Roe, you would find examples—groups like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How, reproductive justice lawyers have done extensive research, going back 20 years or so, looking at how people have been prosecuted for their own abortion, even though abortion was legal where they had that abortion.

And there’s lots of charges that can be weaponized in this way, charges related to disposal of fetal remains, for example, in several cases. One that I wrote about, in Georgia in 2015, involved a woman who had taken misoprostol, an abortion-inducing drug. When she went to the hospital seeking care, they reported her, and the police arrested her out of her bed, and charged her with malice murder of the fetus.

She was also charged with using drugs while pregnant. And that’s another common charge that we see, you know, people trying to find ways to punish people for having an abortion, even though, by the letter of the law, they’re not supposed to be able to do that.

And I think, because this is such a complicated question—there’s no one law that’s being used, right? You can’t just look for everybody who’s been charged with “this” crime. It involves getting into this much more political and nuanced story about what prosecutors do with the law, what they think they can get away with, and that’s different in different places.

In the Idaho example that we began with, that prosecutor now is out in the press saying, “Oh no, this has nothing to do with the abortion. The abortion has nothing to do with the case.” Who knows if that’s true or not, but it is good for people to know that this incident didn’t need the abortion trafficking law to result in criminal punishment for this abortion. And I think that’s a nuance that just isn’t coming across in most reporting.

Certainly people who cover the criminal legal system a lot see that all the time. But because that kind of reporting and reporting on abortion are often siloed from one another, we aren’t learning across issues of what it is to deal with a prosecutor in a politicized case, and what power they have with the law that exceeds what many of us might think the law could actually do to us.

JJ: Absolutely. And you noted it as one of many things calling for an “appreciation of the power of storytelling,” of the way that we present these issues to people. And you make a point that we’ve talked about on CounterSpin, which is, if you just read newspapers, you might think of abortion as, like, there’s two sides. It’s an “issue.” We’re going to see who “wins.” And the reality is so much more complicated.

And, in fact, reproductive rights advocates and providers have never believed that Roe was enough to truly protect all people’s ability to access abortion. I mean, the Hyde Amendment itself would tell you that. But they also didn’t think the overturning of Roe was going to shut down all of their work. But the main idea presented by a lot of politicians, and by corporate media, is that abortion comes down to electoral politics or Supreme Court rulings. And that’s just always been misleading, hasn’t it, about where this actual fight is?

MGG: It really says something about mainstream political media’s value of the lives of women, or anyone who has an abortion, how reproductive rights are seen within the broader context of politics in the United States, that this has truly been treated as a separate, special issue that doesn’t have very much to do with people who actually need abortions; it’s mostly about voters, right? Or it’s about the Supreme Court, and what voters think about what’s going to happen at the Supreme Court. It’s about something transactional that has nothing to do with the actual abortion itself.

Maybe that’s because there’s still places in media where there’s a reluctance to even say the word “abortion.” We have a president who’s reluctant to say the word “abortion.” So the reality of what it is to even have an abortion, what that entails, is something that has to be consciously brought into every story about this.

YouTube (7/19/22)

One of the people that I really admire, in how she does this, is Renee Bracey Sherman, who is the co-executive director of a group called We Testify that does abortion storytelling work. That’s how they do their advocacy. And when she testified in Congress earlier this year—or may have been the end of last year, I’m not 100% sure, but sometime since the Dobbs decision came down—in her testimony, she actually verbally gave the instructions for how to use medication for an abortion, how to use misoprostol and mifepristone. So that’s in the congressional record now; that’s on C-SPAN. That is information that could be considered against the law to share in some states. The degree to which information is powerful here, I think isn’t quite fully appreciated.

And what that also means is that every story kind of feels like people are reinventing the wheel, particularly in mainstream outlets. There has been incredible reporting from outlets like Rewire, formerly RH Reality Check; from outlets like Bitch, which is no longer; outlets like Jezebel, which we’ll see—I think they just got revived today, maybe.

There’s been incredible reporting under the umbrella of “women’s media” that has gotten to this nuance, and that was really marginalized right up until the moment Roe was a big story in 2022. Or whenever there’s an election, and abortion becomes a story for five minutes.

So the information is out there; it just needs to become part of the practice, particularly in legacy media, and to realize that this is a story that has implications for people in their day-to-day lives, not just every four years, or when a Supreme Court seat opens up.

Rome News-Tribune (11/16/23)

JJ: Exactly. And I’m just following on from that to say how galled I am by pieces like—OK, this one’s from Steven Roberts. But still, it’s reflective of, I think, a pervasive kind of Beltway media attitude, and it’s a syndicated column, the headline’s “Why the Abortion Issue Matters.”

All right, so already I read “issue,” so I know that my human rights are, first and foremost, a political football, like an “issue” to be considered. And then in the same breath, there’s the idea that somebody needs to have it explained why it matters. Somebody doesn’t understand why it’s important. But then he goes on to explain that why it matters has to do with what’s damaging to Joe Biden, and whether Trump might be able to finesse a new line on abortion.

But I guess what maybe bothered me most was that Steve Roberts says that polls show US public opinion is clear and it’s unchanged. Americans want legal abortion, they want access to abortion. And he then says that, since Roe, “abortion remained an abstraction to pro–abortion rights voters. Their rights were protected and their attitude was complacent.”

Now, I don’t doubt that Steven Roberts had a lot of cocktail parties with some complacent white women. But reporting is not supposed to be, as my mother-in-law used to say, something that happens to or near an editor. You’re supposed to seek out the views of the people who are affected by the things that you’re talking about. And reproductive justice, of course, extends beyond the right to abortion: the right to have a pregnancy, and a child, in a safe, healthy environment.

It just seems like reporting about abortion has so much to do with who they talk to or who they listen to, and that defines their understanding of what the meaning of access to this right means.

And I guess I just want to say, you’re a reporter. What would you like to see more or less of in this coverage?

MGG: One thing that’s maddening about that kind of coverage is it feels like, at its best, when somebody who has that kind of perspective does decide to actually reach outside their small network of friendly sources, and maybe try to contact somebody who works in a clinic, or is a provider, or is involved in some direct way with the provision of abortion, they tend to not treat those people with a lot of respect.

This comes down to who they listen to and who they believe. The best reporting on abortion comes from people who are not treating their sources like a pump that they can just hit at will and get what they need out of them.

The stories I was hearing from people who work in clinics, leading up to Dobbs and immediately after—hearing from reporters they had never heard from before, reporters who wanted to come by in two hours and talk to someone who just had an abortion. I mean, just outrageous stuff that I can absolutely hear an editor telling them, like, “Oh, that would be a great idea.” But it is your job to push back and say, “I don’t know. I think that maybe a better time to interview someone about their personal experience of abortion isn’t an hour after they’ve had one when it might be illegal.”

There hasn’t been a full appreciation of how people’s ability to speak out about this is going to be shaped by who is worried about the legal consequences of abortion. We are disproportionately probably going to see people in states that have legal abortion access, people who might not fully appreciate the criminal risks that they’re having abortions under, which does include a lot of those white cocktail party women, wherever they live.

It’s a lot, I understand, to ask of the way that news, particularly political news that treats abortion as just an issue that we return to when it’s time to talk about elections or what voters want, but that kind of reporting feels so unnecessary and so out of pace with where we’re at right now.

We need stories about this gap between the rhetoric of politicians, in places like Texas and Montana, about valuing mothers, showing that that’s not actually playing out in the lives of people in those states, who are having huge maternal mortality rates, who aren’t able to get access to childcare, all of these women that they say they’re going to support because they’re taking abortion away from them, but “don’t worry, we’ll support you when you’re pregnant and parenting.”

That support is not showing up. It was never that great before this moment, and it’s not great now.

And those are the people that need more scrutiny. Those are the people who should be held to account. There’s so many attorneys general, there are so many Republican lawmakers, there are so many judges, oh my God, there’s some incredible judges with really consequential abortion cases in front of them right now.

New Republic (9/27/23)

My favorite/least favorite is Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s in Amarillo, Texas. He gets a lot of cases from the right, because he takes 98 to 99 percent of cases that come to his court. So if you are a conservative who wants a favorable ruling, this is your guy.

And he has a case before him right now that could result in mifepristone being essentially delisted from the FDA’s approved drug listings, which would mean that it would be much more difficult to get, and there would be legal pathways to it that would be cut off.

Where is the scrutiny on him? I feel like the frame maybe has to be shifted around now: The story of abortion is about the story of people who are creating harm in the lives of people who now have to fight that much harder to access abortion.

I think that’s the other thing that’s been lost. Abortions haven’t changed. I mean, there are people who have not been able to have abortions as a result of this, but abortions haven’t stopped. They’ve just become less accessible. And I feel like that nuance is also often lost.

It’s, again, this binary of pro-choice or anti-abortion, or however it gets bracketed out. But the reality is, no matter what people’s politics of abortion might be, they’re going to need an abortion, or they know someone who needs an abortion, or has had an abortion. And access is really the much more critical question than politics.

JJ: And I also feel that in your reporting, you’ve worked out or explored the intersectional aspect and the historical aspect that is outside of the frame of the way that a lot of corporate news media are coming to this as, “It’s an electoral politics issue of 2024,” when in fact it’s a deep issue. You’ve connected attacks on women’s reproductive rights to attacks on trans people. There’s a bigger picture going on here, and, just finally, there’s a need for journalism right now.

MGG: Yeah, I think it’s—I’m trying to think of how I could possibly sum that up.

JJ: Please. I don’t know. That’s why I asked you.

New Republic (4/12/23)

MGG: In terms of the history, I love bringing that into my work. I know that that’s certainly not something that everybody can do in their own journalism, but set me up to write about the Comstock Act of 1873, and I will go to town, and I will find a way to bring that into reporting on what’s going on in the present.

JJ: Because it’s meaningful, right? If you’re trying to explain to people how we got to where we are, I don’t feel like history is outside of reporting. You’re trying to tell people how we got to where we are, and that’s crucial.

MGG: And it leaves avenues open to opponents of abortion when those aren’t under scrutiny. One of the reasons I’m writing about the Comstock Act right now is there’s this  legal theory emerging on the right, and among anti-abortion groups, that we already have a national abortion ban in the Comstock Act of 1873, which was never fully taken off the books, and did criminalize using the mail system to mail any instrument that could cause an abortion.

And so they’re testing this out now in places like district courts in Texas. They’re trying to build something that would create precedent, or get it in front of the Supreme Court again, that essentially says we already have this national prohibition on abortion.

That is not getting the coverage—outside of a couple of legal experts who focus on abortion reproductive rights—that it needs. Because it’s complicated; I get it. But I just can see a story like that, in a year, people describing it as like “the law that no one saw coming.” So we could see it coming if we wanted to.

JJ: I’m going to end right there. We’ve been speaking with Melissa Gira Grant. You can find her work, primarily at the New Republic, online at TNR.com. Melissa Gira Grant, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MGG: Thanks for having me.

The post ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

British freelance photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind and her Ukrainian producer Dmytro – who asked to be identified by his first name only for privacy reasons – are sitting at a table in a glass-walled, metal-roofed extension of the restaurant. The pair have just finished eating – their only hot meal of the day after spending hours in the countryside photographing the work of a Ukrainian demining unit. They discuss their reporting projects for the coming days and make appointments.

Suddenly, they hear a sound that Taylor-Lind describes as a “roaring engine getting closer and louder.” She knows instantly that it is a missile. She has heard similar sounds many times over her years reporting in eastern Ukraine, but always from a distance. This time, the weapon seems ominously close.

The Russian attack on Ria Lounge killed 13 civilians and wounded 61, including Taylor-Lind and Dmytro. In a war that has killed thousands of civilians, including at least 15 journalists in the course of their reporting, the attack is a stark reminder of the risks members of the media face to bring the world the news of the conflict and how such risks are hardly diminished when journalists are off duty. With Russia regularly striking civilian infrastructure and targeting locations near and far from the frontline, nowhere in Ukraine is truly safe.

“Everything happened in a split second,” Taylor-Lind told CPJ in an interview six days after the attack, which Russia claimed hit a Ukrainian army target. “I closed my eyes and I leaned forward, thinking that I would throw myself on the ground. While my eyes were closed, I heard a dull thud of the impact, and then I heard the sound of everything shattering and flying, the sound of all the glass breaking, everything coming through the air, and that sound went on for longer than the engine of the missile.”

She believes that the pair were sitting around 10 meters (33 feet) from the point of impact. “I opened my eyes and saw that there was blood on my left arm and leg and I felt that there was blood running down my face. I looked at Dmytro and saw he was bleeding from his head,” she said, an experience that was “incredibly frightening.” She said she felt responsible for Dmytro’s safety as she had hired him to work on her long-term photo project documenting life amid war in eastern Ukraine.

The two had been hit by pieces of glass and wall. Taylor-Lind’s leg, arm, nose, and head were cut and she had a mild traumatic brain injury from the blast wave. Dmytro was hit in the right side of his face, under his eye, and in his head, hand, and leg. He suffered headaches for days.

In the aftermath of the strike, they ran to the basement of the restaurant where local residents with first aid kits tended to their wounds before they managed to drive to the hospital in Dmytro’s badly damaged car. There, doctors stitched Dmytro’s face injury, dressed his head, and cleaned and disinfected Taylor-Lind’s cuts.

“I was incredibly lucky to sustain only light injuries, and am thankful my producer’s injuries were not life-threatening,” Taylor-Lind said. Dmytro’s car, essential for his work, was deemed irreparable by several mechanics. Taylor-Lind’s camera was also broken in the blast.

They weren’t the only journalists at the scene. Polish freelance photographer Wojciech Grzedzinski was also in the restaurant and photographed the aftermath of the strike, he said on Instagram. “It was just like in the movies,” he wrote. “Loud and quiet at the same time. I snuggle under the bench and the table.” Grzedzinski did not respond to CPJ’s message asking whether he was injured in the strike.

Catalina Gómez, a Colombian journalist with the Spanish-language service of French broadcaster France 24 and the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia, told CPJ that she was having dinner at Ria Lounge when the missile hit. She said she was “in shock” but did not suffer any injuries. Nor did her Ukrainian producer, Dmytro Kovalchuk. The pair’s other dining companions fared worse. Sergio Jaramillo, a Colombian parliament member and Héctor Abad, a Colombian writer, were both hurt. Victoria Amelina, a well-known young Ukrainian author, was also sitting at the table. She was severely injured and died days later.

Looking back, Taylor-Lind said she doesn’t want her story to take the attention away from people like Amelina who died that day. Her experience, she said, is sadly not unusual for a journalist covering Ukraine.

“The fact is, we are just two of many media workers injured in Ukraine by Russian attacks in the course of our reporting work.”

Taylor-Lind left Ukraine after recuperating in Kyiv. But she plans to return soon to pick up where she and Dmytro left off – reporting on the war that has upended the lives of so many.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Anna Brakha.

The post Kinsey’s Revenge: What 75 Years Has Brought appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

Progressives Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow are outspoken critics of the bloated defense budget and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Next month, though, both Raskin and Maddow will headline an event sponsored by defense industry giant Lockheed Martin and Palantir, a $26 billion defense contractor founded and chaired by Peter Thiel, the polarizing billionaire and megadonor to Donald Trump.

The appearances by Raskin and Maddow will come as part of TruCon, the conference of the Democratic Party-aligned Truman Center, which runs from June 1 to 4 in Washington, D.C. TruCon’s website describes the conference as an opportunity to see “[t]hought leaders across government, policy, and national security fields speak on the most pressing issues facing America today.”

“Obviously, the real test of integrity is to argue with folks you disagree with, not to cover your eyes and ears and look away.”

For Mark Thompson, a national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, the big question for Raskin and Maddow at the conference will be whether they hold their tough positions against defense contractors. If they don’t speak out, Thompson said, it would indicate that sponsors can buy the silence of their outspoken critics.

“If I were Jamie Raskin or I were Rachel Maddow — what a great opportunity to name these companies and say where they’re coming up short,” said Thompson. “Do you, a company, buy my silence or tacit silence by sponsoring this event? Obviously, the real test of integrity is to argue with folks you disagree with, not to cover your eyes and ears and look away.”

According to a source close to Raskin, the conference sponsors were announced after the member of Congress accepted the invitation. Maddow, Palantir, Lockheed, and Truman did not respond to requests for comment.

At TruCon, sponsors are promised access to influential conference participants, according to promotional materials. “Elevate your brand, connect with your customers, feed your employee pipeline in meaningful, exciting ways,” reads a Truman brochure marketing sponsorship opportunities for the event. The brochure repeatedly references the advantages of aligning a company’s “brand” with the Truman Center and TruCon.

For Palantir and Lockheed, which are listed as the two top sponsors on the event website, that means enjoying high-level recognition and association with prominent progressive and other Democratic Party-aligned figures.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., testifies during the Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee hearing on February 9, 2023.

Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Raskin and Maddow — an honoree and keynote speaker, respectively, at the conference — have both been harshly critical of the defense industry at large and specifically Lockheed and Palantir.

Raskin co-sponsored a House resolution in 2020 denouncing “wasteful Pentagon spending and supporting cuts to the bloated defense budget.” The bill, which did not make it to the floor for a vote, highlighted that “the Pentagon had no way to track replacement parts for the $1,400,000,000,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program” — a Lockheed project widely considered to be the biggest military procurement boondoggle in history.

For Lockheed Martin, the F-35 is only one of the many upsides the company sees thanks to the Pentagon’s enormous expenditures on contractors. Over half of the nearly trillion-dollar defense budget goes to contractors, and Lockheed Martin is the top recipient of Pentagon dollars, receiving about $75 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. That figure amounts to over one and a half times the entire combined State Department and Agency for International Development budget for the same year, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Lockheed derived 73 percent of its net sales from the U.S. government in 2022.

When Lockheed CEO James Taiclet was asked last year about whether his company’s government contracts — as compared to the State Department’s budget — represented a reasonable balance, he deflected, saying simply that “it’s only up to us to step to what we’ve been asked to do and we’re just trying to do that in a more effective way.” It was, he said, “up to the U.S. government.”

The company, however, pours staggering sums of money into influencing the government: Lockheed spent $13 million lobbying the federal government last year. Its biggest area of focus was the defense budget, according to OpenSecrets.

For her part, Maddow has been an even more outspoken critic of Pentagon contractors than Raskin. In March 2011, she told her MSNBC viewers, “Defense spending is untouchable because civilian lawmakers defer so deeply to the military, and to the former military officers laced through the contractor world, that if you squint, you would swear that Congress is some lackey puppet parliament in a country where the government has taken over by a junta.”

Maddow has also denounced Thiel, whom she lit into during MSNBC’s coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention, where Thiel spoke.

Referencing Thiel’s company Palantir, Maddow said, “He also runs one of the biggest surveillance companies in the world that does lots of business with the CIA and the NSA and lots of other government agencies, and mass surveillance is a controversial thing in Republican politics.”

Palantir provided software used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in support of the Trump administration’s controversial detention, deportation, and family separation policies — policies denounced by both Raskin and Maddow. 

Truman doesn’t seem to have concerns about associating with Palantir and Lockheed. Two Palantir employees are on Truman’sadvisory council — Mehdi Alhassani and company Vice President Wendy Anderson — and both of them, alongside Lockheed, are listed as funders in Truman’s most recentannual report. Truman President and CEO Jenna Ben-Yehuda hosted Taiclet, Lockheed’s CEO, for a “fireside chat” last September. The following month, Truman hosted a panel featuring Anderson, the Palantir executive.

The embrace of prominent defense contractors might seem out of step for a group whosewebsite claims it supports “international engagement through diplomacy first and foremost, and by force only when necessary.” Thompson, though, offered a simple explanation for the turn to weapons money.

“It’s typically tawdry but it’s the way business is done in this town,” he said. “If Truman wants to be a player, they have to do events, they need money for events, and they need to barter away their sense of themselves in order to sponsor these events.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Eli Clifton.

Members of Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen) and their attorneys appeared in the Strasbourg, France court for the tribunal's first-ever climate case. Outside the court, activists from the group and from other organizations including Greenpeace held banners and flowers and chanted "bravo" as each woman exited the building, according toSwissInfo.

"We are suing for our human right to life," Lore Zablonier, a 78-year-old from Zurich, toldThe Associated Press outside the court. "With this case, we want to help spur politicians into action a little bit."

As KlimaSeniorinnen's website explains:

Climate change already produces extensive damage. Menacing heatwaves, landslides, and floods will become the norm unless we take immediate action. Scientific insights notwithstanding, Switzerland along with most other countries is not doing as much as is necessary to avert such disasters. Because governments, through their inaction, violate basic rights, more and more people around the globe are taking them to court. What's at stake is a livable future—without climate collapse.

A growing number of climate-related cases are on the docket in courts around the world, from Australia to Sweden to the United States. The European Court of Human Rights will hear at least two more climate cases this year—one filed by a group of Portuguese youth and the other by a Green member of the European Parliament from France.

Switzerland is warming at a rate of more than twice the global mean. According to the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology:

The strong warming has an impact on many other climate indices in Switzerland. For instance, the zero-degree line has climbed substantially, which has resulted in Alpine glaciers losing over 60% of their volume since 1850. It is likely that they will no longer be part of the Alpine landscape by the end of this century. The vegetation period now lasts several weeks longer in the lowlands than it did even in the 1960s. Due to warming, precipitation now falls more often as rain than snow.

In 2021, Swiss voters narrowly rejected a government proposal to tax automobile fuel and airline tickets in a bid to help the country meet its targets under the Paris climate agreement. Switzerland is responsible for about 0.1% of global emissions.

(Image: Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology)

A verdict in the suit filed by KlimaSeniorinnen is expected next year.

"Should we win... a better climate policy will help less the lives of senior people than those of our children and grandchildren," explained plaintiff Elisabeth Stern.

"Are we older women victims? Yes, in the sense of being personally affected and at increased health risk from increasing temperatures," Stern added. "But we are also highly competent agents of change. Because our climate complaint for the first time puts the European Court of Human Rights in the situation to comment on the climate protection measures of a member state. And on the question of whether climate action to protect citizens is a fundamental human right."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB):

• It was a bailout
• Donald Trump was the person responsible.

The first point is straightforward. We gave a government guarantee of great value to people who had not paid for it.

We will get a lot of silly game playing on this issue, just like we did back in 2008-09. The game players will tell us that this guarantee didn’t cost the government a penny, which will very likely end up being true. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t give the bank’s large depositors something of great value.

If the government offers to guarantee a loan, it makes it far more likely that the beneficiary will be able to get the loan and that they will pay a lower interest rate for this loan. In this case, the people who held large uninsured deposits at SVB apparently decided that it was better, for whatever reason, to expose themselves to the risk by keeping these deposits at SVB, rather than adjusting their finances in a way that would have kept their money better protected.

This would have meant either parking their deposits at a larger bank that was subject to more careful scrutiny by regulators, or adjusting their assets so that they were not so exposed to a single bank. They also could have taken ten minutes to examine SVB’s financial situation, which was mostly a matter of public record.

For whatever reason, the bank’s large depositors chose to expose themselves to serious risk. When their bet turned out badly, they in effect wanted the government to provide the insurance that they did not pay for.

This brings us to the second point; this is Donald Trump’s bailout. The reason this is a bailout is that the government is providing a benefit that the depositors did not pay for. It also is, in effect, a subsidy to other mid-sized banks, since it tells their depositors that they can count on the government covering their deposits, even though they are not insured and the bank is not subject to the same scrutiny as the largest banks.

This is where the fault lies with Donald Trump. It was his decision to stop scrutinizing banks with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion that led to the problems at SVB.

Prior to the passage of this bill, a bank the size of SVB would have been subject to regular stress tests. A stress test means projecting how a bank would fare in various bad situations, like the rise in interest rates that apparently sank SVB.

If regulators had subjected to SVB to a stress test, they would have almost surely recognized its problems. They then would have required it to raise more capital and/or shed deposits.

But Trump pulled the regulators off the job. This is wrongly described as “deregulation.” It isn’t.

Deregulation would mean both eliminating the scrutiny of SVB and ending insurance for the bank. (In principle that would mean ending all deposit insurance, not the just the insurance for large accounts that is at issue here.)

What happened in 2018 was effectively allowing SVB to still benefit from insurance without having to pay for it. It is comparable to telling drivers that they don’t have to buy auto insurance, but will still be covered if they are in an accident. Or, perhaps a better example would be telling a restaurant that it is covered by fire insurance, but it doesn’t have to adhere to safety standards.

It is dishonest to describe this as “deregulation.” It is the government giving a subsidy to the banks in question. It is understandable that the banks prefer to describe their subsidy as deregulation, but it is not accurate.

Anyhow, this bailout is the Donald Trump bailout. He touted the 2018 bill when he signed it. We are now seeing the fruits of his action.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dean Baker.

• Commitment to Standards and Transparency of Methodology
  5.2 The applicant selects claims to check based primarily on the reach and importance of the claims, and where possible explains the reason for choosing the claim to check.
• Commitment to an Open & Honest Corrections Policy
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IFCN is Meta (Facebook)’s fact-checking partner since 2020.

The Alt News report documented 17 instances of misinformation published by Dainik Jagran between January 2021 and July 2022 and pointed out that six of these 17 erroneous reports had not been corrected or updated.

Refusing to fact-check false claims by political leaders and propaganda outlets is just one of the ways in which Jagran Media’s Vishvas News, an IFCN signatory, violates the global body’s code of conduct. An Alt News report | @ArchitMeta @shinjineemjmdrhttps://t.co/85sgy2kwa7

— Alt News (@AltNews) February 21, 2023

Three days later, Vishvas News responded to our report in an article titled ‘Fact Check: Alt News Report Presents False, Misleading Claims And Distorted Facts‘.

There are a few things to note about the response:

A. It makes no mention of the two principal allegations brought by us against Vishvas News regarding violation of the IFCN code of conduct, let alone countering them.

B. Alt News pointed out in its report that six of the 17 erroneous stories published by Dainik Jagran, Vishvas News’s sister concern, were not updated with corrections. The response says “After being pointed out by Alt News, three stories were rectified as per the Corrections Policy and established SOPs.”

C. The response says there was no misinformation in the three other stories. However, it takes up only one of those for an explanation as to why Dainik Jagran stands by its report (a story on ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans being allegedly raised in Jharkhand). There is no mention of the other two.

D. Alt News had said that it could not find whether corrections had been made to two stories published in Dainik Jagran’s print edition. The response says that a corrigendum had been published in the Prayagraj edition for one of those (headline: Woh cheekhta raha, lathiyan barasti rahi) on the very next day of its publication.

E. It says that there was no misinformation in the other print story flagged by Alt News (headline: Assam mein baar aayi nahi, layi gayee thi). It then ‘examines the veracity’ of the related Alt News story where we had said that the Assam floods were being unjustifiably communalized by the media.

It is worth noting that Alt News had reached out to Bharat Gupta, the CEO of MMI Online Limited, and Rajesh Upadhyay, editor-in-chief and senior vice president at Vishvas News, multiple times before publishing the February 20 article. However, there was no response from either of them.

Vishvas News’s Defence of Two Dainik Jagran Stories

Assam Floods Story

In the February 20 analysis, under the subhead ‘Communalization of 2022 Silchar floods in Assam’, Alt News said, “While reporting on the Assam floods in June, NewsX called the flooding in Silchar ‘flood jihad’ and blamed Assam’s Muslim community for the disaster. Hindi media outlet Dainik Jagran didn’t use the phrase ‘flood jihad’ but its report in July, 2022 stated, “There are signs of a deep conspiracy behind this.”

Responding to this, Vishvas News stated, “Citing reports of other media houses on the Assam floods, Alt News has cited Dainik Jagran’s July 2022 news report and accused it of giving a communal colour to the floods.”

We had examined the Dainik Jagran’s July 7, 2022 report because —

• The headline claimed that floods were deliberately brought in Assam. The words were not within quotation marks, which suggests that this was the newspaper’s finding, and not someone else’s opinion
• It said, “There are signs of a deep conspiracy behind this” before mentioning the names of four Muslim persons arrested for allegedly breaching an embankment in their village. This suggests that the floods were a communal conspiracy. Readers should note that according to the story, the reasons behind breaching the dyke were still being looked into at the time of the writing of the article.
• The report conveniently ignores the fact that the Assam chief minister and the Kachar police super had gone on record refuting any ‘communal conspiracy’ behind the floods. Both of them made the statement on Wednesday, July 6.

Based on the statements of the CM, police and subject experts, Alt News had concluded, “… on May 23, the irrigation department sent a complaint to the concerned police station about the alleged breaching of the Betukandi embankment which is less than 10 km away from Silchar. The town of Silchar was submerged in water unlike “ever before in its history” around June 19. In the first week of July, four Muslim men were arrested for allegedly breaching the embankment. Local reporters said that the embankment was damaged in May to relieve water logging. More than a month after this incident, Assam’s Chief Minister called the flooding in Silchar a “man-made” disaster. Several media outlets then added an anti-Muslim spin by reporting that the floods were a part of the “larger controversy”. Instead of reporting on the nuances of the calamity, media outlets and journalists dubbed the incident “flood Jihad” to blame the Muslim community for the floods in Silchar. It is unfortunate that the reports were carried at a time when communal tensions have flared up in several parts of the country.”

The Alt News report can be read here.

Pakistan Zindabad slogan in Jharkhand

In the February 20 analysis of how Dainik Jagran frequently put out misinformation, Alt News said, “A video shot during the nomination of Mukhiya candidate Shakir Hussain in Dokidih panchayat of Giridih district in Jharkhand went viral with the claim that slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ were raised in the nomination rally. Dainik Jagran published an article on April 23, 2022 in this regard with the headline “गिरिडीह में पाकिस्‍तान जिंदाबाद के नारेबाजी मामले में मुखिया प्रत्‍याशी को भी भेजा गया जेल, 50-60 अज्ञात पर केस”… Jagran claimed that while sloganeering, Pakistan Zindabad slogan was raised and repeated several times consecutively. Nobody raised any objection. Alt News had contacted local residents of Dokidih who said that ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans were not raised during the procession. Alt News also watched the video carefully in slow motion and analyzed the video in detail. We concluded that slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ were not raised but ‘Shakir Hussain Zindabad’ slogans were raised during the nomination procession of Shakir Hussain, the Dokidih Mukhiya candidate of Giridih district of Jharkhand. Jagran ran the story without verifying the facts.”

Responding to this, Vishvas News said, “In our investigation, we found that it’s not Dainik Jagran’s report but Alt News’s claim that is contrary to facts and is an attempt to hide developments that ensued after “Pakistan Zindabad” slogans were raised.”

Interestingly, Vishvas News neither independently verified the video in question nor pointed out the supposed ‘flaws’ in Alt News’s analysis of the video. Instead, they added a disclaimer, “We would like to inform the readers that the Giridih matter is sub-judice. Our aim is not to influence the court proceedings in any manner.”

Vishvas News’s rebuttal of Alt News’s findings stands on a statement of the defence counsel. They have said, “According to April 27, 2022, report in Dainik Jagran’s Giridih edition, defence advocate Prakash Sahai said in the court, “During the nomination-filing (for the village pradhan election), some people raised slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’. However, those people were outsiders and the candidate Shakir was sitting in his vehicle. This is not a case of sedition or of hurting someone’s sentiments.”

Alt News reached out to Sahai on February 24. He categorically denied the claim made by Jagran. He said, “I never said in court that some people raised slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.”

Sahai added that since Shakir Hussain was booked under section 124A (sedition), he made a reference to the iconic ‘Balwant Singh vs State of Punjab’ verdict in the court in defence of his client, in which some people were accused of chanting ‘Khalistan Zindabad’, after which they were charged with sedition. When the Supreme Court heard the matter, it did not consider it as sedition.

Coming back to the viral video in question, Shakir Hussain’s lawyer Sahai told Alt News, “Dainik Jagran has misinterpreted my argument. While arguing for bail for Shakir Hussain, I said my client isn’t even accused of raising anti-India slogans. I then said, if for the sake of argument it is assumed that such slogans were raised even then he can’t be charged with sedition based on the legal precedence. More crucially, my client was inside the car.”

So, the claim by Dainik Jagran, that “defence advocate Prakash Sahai said in the court, “During the nomination-filing (for the village pradhan election), some people raised slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.” is false. Vishvas News’s defence of the Jagran story, too, stands on a false claim.

When Alt News did the story (it can be read here) where we said Pakistan Zindabad slogans were not raised, multiple local sources told us that ever since the video had gone viral, Dainik Jagran journalists took keen interest in the matter and tried to influence police proceedings. This appears to be consistent with Jagran’s article that was published on April 21, 2022. This report had a sub-heading after the first paragraph which said, ‘Based on Dainik Jagran’s initiative, raid was launched at night’ (दैनिक जागरण की पहल पर रात में ही चलाया गया था छापेमारी अभियान). The report mentioned that after the initiative by Dainik Jagran, Shakir Hussain and others were arrested at midnight.

A day after Alt News published the report on February 20, Dainik Jagran edited their report heavily. The above-mentioned sub-heading was tweaked and the phrase ‘Based on Dainik Jagran’s initiative’ was omitted. Under this sub-heading, the original story said that after the video had gone viral, Dainik Jagran contacted concerned administrative officials, after which they noted the seriousness of the matter and took action. While updating it, this entire section underlining the involvement of Dainik Jagran was removed.

While the story was updated, Dainik Jagran did not mention why the sub-heading and the section mentioned above were changed or removed. This is again a violation of IFCN’s dictum of ‘Commitment to an Open & Honest Corrections Policy’ (Older Report, Updated Report).

Moreover, all five accused in the case got bail in the sessions court on May 12. This detail has been conveniently ignored in the updated version of Jagran’s report and in Vishvas News’ rebuttal to Alt News fact check.

To sum it up, not only has Vishvas News failed to independently verify the video in question, both the Dainik Jagran story and the Vishvas News response to the Alt News report stand on a ‘statement’ by the defence counsel which he never made in court.

Using its privileges as a Facebook fact-checking partner, Vishvas News marked Alt News’s post sharing the February 20 article as ‘partly false’. The notice was later removed.

The post Violation of IFCN norms: Vishvas News response evades key charges brought by Alt News appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Archit.

Striking Frame Group workers meet for a report back on negotiations with management in Bolton Hall in 1973.
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries

Democracy has a dream-like character. It sweeps into the world, carried forward by an immense desire by humans to overcome the barriers of indignity and social suffering. When confronted by hunger or the death of their children, earlier communities might have reflexively blamed nature or divinity, and indeed those explanations remain with us today. But the ability of human beings to generate massive surpluses through social production, alongside the cruelty of the capitalist class to deny the vast majority of humankind access to that surplus, generates new kinds of ideas and new frustrations. This frustration, spurred by the awareness of plenty amidst a reality of deprivation, is the source of many movements for democracy.

Habits of colonial thought mislead many to assume that democracy originated in Europe, either in ancient Greece (which gives us the word ‘democracy’ from demos, ‘the people’, and kratos, ‘rule’) or through the emergence of a rights tradition, from the English Petition of Right in 1628 to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. But this is partly a retrospective fantasy of colonial Europe, which appropriated ancient Greece for itself, ignoring its strong connections to North Africa and the Middle East, and used its power to inflict intellectual inferiority on large parts of the world. In doing so, colonial Europe denied these important contributions to the history of democratic change. People’s often forgotten struggles to establish basic dignity against despicable hierarchies are as much the authors of democracy as those who preserved their aspirations in written texts still celebrated in our time.

Coronation Brick workers march along North Coast Road in Durban, led by a worker waving a red flag.
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, a range of struggles developed against dictatorial regimes in the Third World that had been put in place by anti-communist oligarchies and their allies in the West. These regimes were born out of coups (such as in Brazil, the Philippines, and Turkey) and given the latitude to maintain legal hierarchies (such as in South Africa). The large mass demonstrations that laid at the heart of these struggles were built up through a range of political forces, including trade unions – a side of history that is often ignored. The growing trade union movement in Turkey was, in fact, part of the reason for the military coups of 1971 and 1980. Knowing that their hold on power was vulnerable to working-class struggles, both military governments banned unions and strikes. This threat to their power had been evidenced, in particular, by a range of strikes across Anatolia developed by unions linked to the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK), including a massive two-day demonstration in İstanbul known as the June 15–16 Events that drew in 100,000 workers. The confederation, established in February 1967, was more militant than the existing one (Türk İş), which had become a collaborator with capital. Not only did militaries move against socialist and non-socialist governments alike that attempted to exercise sovereignty and improve the dignity of their peoples (such as in the Congo in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Ghana in 1966, and Chile in 1973), but they also moved out of the barracks – with the bright green light from Washington – to quell the cycle of strikes and worker protests.

Once in power, these wretched regimes, dressed in their khaki uniforms and the finest silk suits, drove austerity policies and cracked down on any movements of the working class and peasantry. But they could not break the human spirit. In much of the world (as in Brazil, the Philippines, and South Africa), it was trade unions that fired the early shot against barbarism. The cry in the Philippines ‘Tama Na! Sobra Na! Welga Na!’ (‘We’ve had enough! Things have gone too far! It’s time to strike!’) moved from La Tondeña distillery workers in 1975 to protests in the streets against Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship, eventually culminating in the People Power Revolution of 1986. In Brazil, industrial workers paralysed the country through actions in Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul (industrial towns in greater São Paulo) from 1978 to 1981, led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (now Brazil’s president). These actions inspired the country’s workers and peasants, raising their confidence to resist the military junta, which collapsed as a result in 1985.

A group of striking textile workers demand an extra R5 per day at the Consolidated Textile Mill in February 1973.
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries

Fifty years ago, in January 1973, the workers of Durban, South Africa, struck for a pay rise, but also for their dignity. They woke at 3 am on 9 January and marched to a football stadium, where they chanted ‘Ufil’ umuntu, ufile usadikiza, wamthint’ esweni, esweni usadikiza’ (‘A person is dead, but their spirit lives; if you poke the iris of their eye, they still come alive’). These workers led the way against entrenched forms of domination that not only exploited them, but also oppressed the people as a whole. They stood up against harsh labour conditions and reminded South Africa’s apartheid government that they would not sit down again until class lines and colour lines were broken. The strikes opened a new period of urban militancy that soon moved off the factory floors and into wider society. A year later, Sam Mhlongo, a medical doctor who had been imprisoned on Robben Island as a teenager, observed that ‘this strike, although settled, had a detonator effect’. The baton was passed to the children of Soweto in 1976.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Chris Hani Institute comes a memorable text, The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa (dossier no. 60, January 2023). It is memorable in two senses: it recovers an almost lost history of the role of the working class in the fight against apartheid, in particular the Black working class, whose struggle had a ‘detonator’ effect on society. The dossier, beautifully written by our colleagues in Johannesburg, makes it hard to forget these workers and harder still to forget that the working class – still so deeply marginalised in South Africa – deserves respect and a greater share of the country’s social wealth. They broke the back of apartheid but did not benefit from their own sacrifices.

The Chris Hani Institute was founded in 2003 by the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Chris Hani (1942–1993) was one of South Africa’s great freedom fighters, a communist who would have made an even greater impact than he did had he not been assassinated at the end of apartheid. We are grateful to Dr Sithembiso Bhengu, the director of the Chris Hani Institute, for this collaboration and look forward to the work that lies before us.

As this dossier went to press, we heard that our friend Thulani Maseko (1970–2023), chairperson of the Multi-Stakeholders Forum in Swaziland, was shot dead in front of his family on 21 January. He was one of the leaders of the fight to bring democracy to his country, where workers are at the forefront of the battle to end the monarchy.

When I reread our latest dossier, The 1973 Durban Strikes, to prepare for this newsletter, I was listening to Hugh Masekela’s ‘Stimela’ (‘Coal Train’), the 1974 song of migrant workers travelling on the coal train to work ‘deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth’ to bring up wealth for apartheid capital. I thought of the Durban industrial workers with the sound of Masekela’s train whistle in my ear, remembering Mongane Wally Serote’s long poem, Third World Express, a tribute to the workers of southern Africa and their struggles to establish a humane society.

– it is that wind
it is that voice buzzing
it is whispering and whistling in the wires
miles upon miles upon miles
on the wires in the wind
in the subway track
in the rolling road
in the not silent bush
it is the voice of the noise
here it comes
the Third World Express
they must say, here we go again.

‘Here we go again’, Serote wrote, as if to say that new contradictions produce new moments for struggle. The end of one crushing order – apartheid – did not end the class struggle, which has only deepened as South Africa is propelled through crisis upon crisis. It was the workers who brought us this democracy, and it will be workers who will fight to establish a deeper democracy yet. Here we go again.

The post It Was the Workers Who Brought Us Democracy, and It Will Be the Workers Who Establish a Deeper Democracy Yet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/it-was-the-workers-who-brought-us-democracy-and-it-will-be-the-workers-who-establish-a-deeper-democracy-yet/feed/ 0 367536 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/05/how-the-new-year-brought-death-destruction-and-darkness-to-kyiv/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/05/how-the-new-year-brought-death-destruction-and-darkness-to-kyiv/#respond Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:19:25 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-new-year-christmas-celebrations-war-missiles/ Ukrainians find little to celebrate during the most difficult winter holidays the country has ever seen

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Kateryna Semchuk.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/05/how-the-new-year-brought-death-destruction-and-darkness-to-kyiv/feed/ 0 362219 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/03/how-jan-6-brought-frontier-violence-to-the-heart-of-u-s-power/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/03/how-jan-6-brought-frontier-violence-to-the-heart-of-u-s-power/#respond Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:33:11 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=417878

“The battle between good and evil has come now.”
— Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate

1A legion of horribles

In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:

A legion of horribles … wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners … one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.

I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel’s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, “passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.” The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.

These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I’ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I’d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I’d been at a previous “Stop the Steal” rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I’d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn’t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn’t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America’s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I’d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.

A woman draped in an American flag near a broken window in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic — if it’s a real revolution — then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.

I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from “Blood Meridian,” I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There’s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White’s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are “shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.”

“They came dressed for chaos,” read the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, “in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.” Other writers noted the “seditionist frontiersmen” and “revolutionary cosplayers” and “Confederate revivalists.” The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was “not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.” No — the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.

The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.

2Technophilia

A rioter filming with an iPhone is seen in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

Five days after January 6, a writer who uses the pen name John Mosby, after a famous Confederate guerrilla, posted an essay about the attack online. It began with a question he said a friend had asked him that day: “Ever see a government starting to totally lose control and just flail ineffectually?”

Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend’s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America’s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on “Mountain Guerrilla,” Mosby’s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America’s decline and eventual collapse.

Two aspects of Mosby’s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once wrestled with this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky-citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. “To an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to “the mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,” Fairlie noted. “Call it, then, by another name … but the fact will remain.”

The modern blend of America’s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it — and from the blunter attempts at power grabs in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes, is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad. He derides the idea that America’s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 “The Hubris of Technophilia.”

Secondly, in Mosby’s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn’t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (“I could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn’t see smoke billowing out the windows.”) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.

What you’re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power — the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business — lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind … They’re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They’re not in control in Afghanistan. They’re not in control in Iraq. They’re not in control in Syria. … Hell, they’re not even really in control in Washington, DC.

If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn’t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties. Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror and pushed them for domestic remedies, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived disinformation board and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.

Mosby’s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America’s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd’s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right’s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton’s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which gave conservatives an ultimatum: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an “American Caesar” to rescue the country from its liberal masters. “Certainly, our choice in the early 21st century — if we have a choice — is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote. “Don’t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former — or being willing to learn from it.”

3Freaks vs. squares

Jake Angeli, a self-described QAnon shaman, confronts police officers in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

Let’s consider a different moment when protesters massed in the heart of Washington, D.C, the crowd stretching out by the tens of thousands. There are militants in helmets among them, along with the frumps and strivers of the middle classes in jeans. And then there are the freaks. They have come decked out in various costumes, including furs and animal skins. These are the legions of the anti-war left, assembled for their October 1967 march on the Pentagon.

In “The Armies of the Night,” his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. “They came walking up in all sizes,” he wrote, “perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.” He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, “Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.”

With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called “the authority” behind the version of America that he called “technology land,” where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange, and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.

Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. … this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority … were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.

The movement’s power, the book suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space and 7,500 windows. “[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,” Mailer wrote, rejoicing that “politics had again become mysterious.”

In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt — because the event, he wrote, was one “that the authority could not comprehend.”

One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.

The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy’s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It’s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when he recounts standing in the men’s room of a popular nightspot and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson’s arm: “A very gross tableau,” he writes, that makes him wonder if a “young stockbroker type” might walk in and see them. “Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life — forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”

During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution.” Now it’s the new right reaching for magic — black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies of pedophiles, in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often seem to go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin horse paste, and God, and bleach. The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.

4How to destroy a democracy

A man wearing a helmet and tactical vest listens to a speech by President Donald Trump during the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

I recently was reading one of the books to which liberals flocked in the Trump era — actually, even more on-brand, I was listening to the audio version while buying groceries in the middle of a weekday. It was “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale. Stanley details contemporary problems that can be understood as aspects of fascist politics: male chauvinism, unreality, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of an imagined race or ethno-centric history, attempts to divide people into “us” and “them.” He also expands the discussion to other traits of U.S. conservatism: being against abortion, for example, or paternalistically regressive. He writes that a 2016 tweet by Mitt Romney — in which Romney called Trump’s sexist comments on the “Access Hollywood” tapes “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters” — evokes the Hutu power ideology behind the Rwanda genocide, suggesting that Romney’s description of women “exclusively in traditionally subordinate roles” supports the paradigm of “the patriarchal family in fascist politics.” Academics who advocate for so-called “great books” programs centered on the works of white Europeans, he warns elsewhere, citing a “Mein Kampf” passage on the supposed dominance of Aryan cultural heritage, are at risk of finding themselves in the company of Hitler.

I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh as a foil, are the undermining of “expertise” and attempts to create a climate in which “experts have been delegitimized.” Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh’s attacks on all sources of information that ran counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America have used Trump’s specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn’t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police. However inadvertently, broad defenses of elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we’d be better off dismissing.

The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that’s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or eroded the rule of law, or indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies, or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we’d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.

Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of the foremost scholars of that country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” and while imperialism alone didn’t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics,” she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who’d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. “Self-deception is the danger par excellence,” she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: “One sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision-makers’ had been let loose in Southeast Asia.”

These decision-makers were taking direction from Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some detractors saw the “problem solvers” and their technocratic counterparts across government as dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’ critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it — and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire’s unwitting supporters.

If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame … [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can’t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can’t even see it.

5A Meandering Energy

Protesters swarm the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

In June, I traveled to a town called Eureka, just shy of the Canadian border in the pines of northwest Montana, and stopped at a cluster of storage units off the main road. At the entrance to one of them, Dakota Adams, 25, the eldest child of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, took out a ring of keys and opened the padlock to the roll-up door. Inside, amid belongings piled halfway to the ceiling, were remnants of the many years his father had spent preparing for the revolution: rifle cases, old ammunition boxes, helmets, recruiting flyers, smoke grenades. Adams waded through the pile, dug around for a bit, and lifted up a camouflage vest heavy with bulletproof plates. “Ah,” he said. “My childhood body armor.”

Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he’d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called “deprogramming,” during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had belonged to his father: “The Coming Battle,” by M. W. Walbert; “Firearms for Survival,” by Duncan Long; “Rawles on Retreats and Relocation,” by James Wesley Rawles; “Tracking Humans,” by David Diaz; “Boston’s Gun Bible,” by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn’t find it, he was sure that “The Reluctant Partisan,” one of John Mosby’s books, was also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” and “How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.” The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He’d recognized that “a meandering energy” is on the loose in America, Adams said. “People want structure and they want to feel a part of things.”

“The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

Maybe there’s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much darker fate. That’s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He has been credited with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike — and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer noted; the AFL-CIO even released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result. History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society — including corporations and the center-right — is aligned against it: “The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there’s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place — to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it. It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.

This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it’s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I’d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I’d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?

The protagonist in “Blood Meridian” is a nameless, wandering youth called “the kid,” who is traveling with Captain White’s company when it’s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier’s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White’s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; “this man of learning,” as he’s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the Judge says. “War endures.”

Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. “You’re the one that’s crazy,” he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge’s arms, smothered “against his immense and terrible flesh.” When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Mike Giglio.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/03/how-jan-6-brought-frontier-violence-to-the-heart-of-u-s-power/feed/ 0 361667 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/higher-interest-rates-only-brought-more-pain/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/higher-interest-rates-only-brought-more-pain/#respond Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:10:50 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/341565
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Joseph Stiglitz.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/higher-interest-rates-only-brought-more-pain/feed/ 0 356538 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/laos-china-railway-12052022173402.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/laos-china-railway-12052022173402.html#respond Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:47:15 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/laos-china-railway-12052022173402.html A year ago, a U.S.$6 billion high-speed railway was completed between Laos and China amid much fanfare and hopes that it would fuel exports from Laos and spur growth in the impoverished, landlocked country.

But one year later, most of the trade has been one-way: from China, which exports machinery, auto parts, electronics and consumer goods, sources in Laos tell Radio Free Asia. Laotian exports, hindered by China’s strict COVID policies at the border and other structural barriers, have made up just a small fraction by comparison.

“The Laos-China train carries a lot of goods from China to Laos but only a few [goods] from Laos to China, mainly because of the Chinese zero-COVID policy,” a Lao transport official told RFA. 

Passengers, too, say train service has been far from ideal. Laotians say they face difficulties buying passenger train tickets, which must to be done in person at rail stations. People often waited in long lines for up to six hours, forcing some to pay others to stand in line and buy tickets, though these middlemen charge high markups for their service.

The anecdotal evidence seems at odds with reports from state-run media on both sides of the border. Laos’ Vientiane Times said the railway boosted exports during its first year of operation and helped to revive tourism in Laos, meeting a need for travel between Vientiane and the northern provinces.

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that about 2 million metric tons of goods, most of which was cross-border freight, had been shipped both ways along the Lao section of the railway to date, and nearly 1.3 million passengers had traveled along the route.

Part of ‘Belt and Road’

A centerpiece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative of state-led lending for infrastructure projects to tie countries across Asia to China, the railway began operating on Dec. 3, 2021, running between Kunming in China’s Yunnan province and Laos’ capital of Vientiane.

The Lao section of the railway handles an average of two trains each way daily, covering 254 miles and 10 passenger rail stations from Boten on the Chinese border to Vientiane. 

Structural problems have contributed to the imbalance. Many Laotian companies are not set up to ship their products by train to China. For example, many ship their goods in small quantities, not large enough to be shipped in train containers.

Rubber, cassava, minerals and potash can be transported by train, but fresh produce like bananas and watermelons still must be transported by truck across the border, the official said.

Laotian companies also encounter barriers at the Chinese border, including getting through red tape and paperwork, as well as import tariffs, the official said.

“The Chinese are very strict about our goods, especially at the border,” he said. 

An official at the Ministry of Public Works and Transport said that Lao officials are working with the railway company and their Chinese counterparts to improve the service by simplifying the process of renting containers for the transport of goods and by reducing wait times at stations.

Mobile app

To address problems with buying tickets in Laos, the railway company began selling passenger tickets online this week via a mobile app.

“It has been difficult to buy the train tickets because they were not available online. That’s why there are a lot of middlemen, scalpers and scammers. They buy tickets then sell them to others at higher prices,” said a businessman in Vientiane, who often travels on the train.

A tour guide in Luang Prabang, one of the stops along the train route, complained that his customers must arrive at the train station early and wait outside for hours in hot or rainy weather. They also have no access to a restroom because the station opens only an hour before the train arrives, he said.

One passenger told RFA on Monday that the railway company should have developed and rolled out the ticket-purchasing app before passenger services were offered for convenience and to eliminate paying middlemen who jack up rail ticket prices.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya for RFA Lao. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/laos-china-railway-12052022173402.html/feed/ 0 355544 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/30/migrant-workers-still-paying-off-debts-that-brought-them-to-qatar/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/30/migrant-workers-still-paying-off-debts-that-brought-them-to-qatar/#respond Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:53:40 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/migrant-workers-still-paying-off-debts-that-brought-them-to-qatar/ Migrant workers took loans to work on the World Cup. For many, their creditors are waiting when they return

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Arafat Ara.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/30/migrant-workers-still-paying-off-debts-that-brought-them-to-qatar/feed/ 0 354311 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/22/this-world-cup-is-brought-to-you-by-abused-migrant-workers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/22/this-world-cup-is-brought-to-you-by-abused-migrant-workers/#respond Tue, 22 Nov 2022 23:02:00 +0000 https://inthesetimes.com/article/world-cup-qatar-labor-abuses-migrant-workers
This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Saurav Sarkar.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/22/this-world-cup-is-brought-to-you-by-abused-migrant-workers/feed/ 0 352985 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/fuck-that-how-street-protests-and-youth-activism-brought-kenneth-mejia-to-power-in-los-angeles/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/fuck-that-how-street-protests-and-youth-activism-brought-kenneth-mejia-to-power-in-los-angeles/#respond Thu, 17 Nov 2022 18:30:46 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=414527

On election night in Los Angeles last week, as it became clear that Kenneth Mejia, a 32-year-old activist and accountant, had been elected the city’s controller in a landslide, his campaign manager, Jane Nguyen, told a group of young campaign volunteers who had been criticized for taking part in protests during the campaign that she had their backs.

Mejia, the first Filipino American elected to citywide office in Los Angeles, ran an innovative campaign that made use of old and new media, including educational billboards with bar charts showing how the city’s spending on policing compares to other priorities, and TikTok videos featuring the candidate dancing with Gen Z volunteers or in a Pikachu costume. But the campaign was powered by harnessing the energy young activists usually pour into protests — and redirecting it into electoral politics.

WHAT?!?! Where did this billboard come from telling all of Los Angeles where our budget priorities are?!

It's like whoever put it up wants Angelenos to know where their taxes are being spent!

Olympic & Crenshaw pic.twitter.com/TjF4XzEM88

— Kenneth Mejia, CPA (@kennethmejiaLA) August 23, 2022

A longtime housing justice organizer with the LA Tenants Union, Mejia was first inspired to run for office by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which had also convinced some veterans of protest movements like Occupy Wall Street that it might be possible to bring about change through electoral politics.

After three unsuccessful races for Congress since then — first as a Sanders-aligned Democrat, and then as a Green Party candidate — Mejia set his sights on the city controller’s office and assembled a campaign team made up almost entirely of fellow organizers and activists. That included Nguyen, who got into local politics through homelessness advocacy in 2018, when she co-founded a group to campaign for a homeless shelter and services in her Koreatown neighborhood. She then did graphics work for the successful City Council campaign of Nithya Raman, who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in 2020.

In her election night speech to volunteers last week, Nguyen spoke of “the harm and the pain that some of you had to endure because you dared to volunteer for this campaign,” and accused Mejia’s opponent, outgoing LA City Councilmember Paul Koretz, of running “one of the dirtiest campaigns that I have ever seen.” (Koretz’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“It wasn’t enough, she said, “just to drag Kenneth’s name through the mud, they had to viciously attack some of the youngest members of our team for daring to speak out. We’ve been asked over and over again, ‘Do you denounce the actions of your volunteers?’ ‘Do you condemn them for protesting — for disrupting a meeting?’

“Here’s what I have to say about that,” Nguyen said. “I mean, fuck that!”

Kenneth Mejia’s campaign manager @theglowingstars has a message:

“it wasn’t enough that th they had to drag kenneth’s name through the mud, they attacked some of the youngest members of the campaign for daring to speak out. Here’s what I have to say about that: FUCK THAT!” pic.twitter.com/jtm0a5miqy

— People’s City Council - Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) November 9, 2022

“We will never apologize for confronting and challenging power,” Nguyen continued, after cheers and chants of “Fuck that” died down. “We will always stand by and fight alongside those demanding a better way of life from people in power. And when Kenneth is in office, I will hold him accountable to that.”

The Koretz campaign, in an email to his supporters, had indeed attacked Mejia, Nguyen, and their young volunteers for taking part in protests, and for what Koretz called “deeply disturbing behavior,” like disrupting a city council meeting, which he compared to “the January 6 Capitol insurrection.”

The homepage of Koretz’s campaign website also prominently featured an image of Mejia at a housing protest and a link to a separate website devoted to collecting opposition research about Mejia and his campaign volunteers, called TruthAboutMejia.com.

A screenshot of the campaign website for Paul Koretz, a Los Angeles City Councilmember who ran unsuccessfully for the post of city controller.

Photo: via KoretzforLA

Along with screenshots of Mejia’s past online comments in support of defunding the police, and criticism of Democrats including Joe Biden, that site denounced activism by young Mejia campaign volunteers — like the climate activist Sim Bilal, who disrupted a mayoral forum in March by shouting insults at the subsequently disgraced Councilmember Kevin de León. The site also denounced the Mejia campaign for urging volunteers like Kyler Chin, an 18-year-old web designer and Sunrise Movement organizer, to attend protests aimed at stopping the Los Angeles City Council from banning homeless encampments near schools this summer.

But Mejia and Nguyen, who first met at a housing protest in front of a councilmember’s home, were never likely to distance themselves from volunteers who share their faith in the importance of disrupting the status quo by taking to the streets.

In fact, the candidate and his campaign manager even attended one of the raucous protests against the City Council’s anti-camping ordinance in August, and trolled Koretz by posting a photo of themselves inside the chamber during a public comment period before activists disrupted the meeting.

“Almost all of our volunteers consist of activists and organizers,” Nguyen told me by phone from Los Angeles this week. “We don’t have consultants on our team, who are professionals. We have activists who are already on the ground doing the work of advocating for their community.”

“So what activists do is they protest and sometimes they engage in disruptive protest, including disrupting a mayoral forum or disrupting a City Council meeting or protesting at politicians’ houses,” Nguyen said. “One of our values is holding powerful people accountable, and so Kenneth has never disapproved or condemned our volunteers for their actions.”

“We are community organizers,” Mejia said on Wednesday in an interview with Spectrum News. “We had over 1,200 volunteer sign-ups; we knocked on over 110,000 doors; we were very good with social media, thanks to our Gen Z team members,” he added.

Appearing with one of his pet corgis, who played a prominent role in the campaign’s ads, Mejia explained that he had used the billboards, charting the city’s spending, to show that he was already effectively doing the work of the controller by auditing the city’s finances and educating the public about how their tax money was being spent.

NEW: LA's new city controller Kenneth Mejia threw out the playbook and recruited Gen-Z volunteers to help shape his campaign strategy with TikTok videos, Corgis and informative billboards.

"We are community organizers. We are professionals, too. And we like to have fun." pic.twitter.com/mqjwIoMoAb

— Kate Cagle (@KateCagle) November 16, 2022

Rather than distance himself from the city’s protest culture, as his opponent and several of the city’s Democratic clubs had demanded, Mejia’s campaign made his experience as a protest leader central to his argument that voters could trust him to keep an eye on the city government.

A biographical campaign video released in late 2020 started with an analysis of how much money the city spends policing peaceful protests, and featured images of Mejia marching with a placard at one protest, shouting through a bullhorn at another, and banging on a drum at a third.

Nguyen explained to me that the campaign’s first and most eye-catching billboard, a bar chart showing how massive the Los Angeles Police Department budget is compared to spending on other departments, came out of her work doing graphics for the People’s Budget LA, an alternative city budget produced in 2020 by a coalition of activists led by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

About two weeks before George Floyd’s murder, Nguyen said, as the City Council was getting ready to approve the city budget, Black Lives Matter LA brought activist groups together to prepare to fight for a reduced LAPD budget, in part by producing an analysis of what the city was spending.

“I was really interested in that because I saw that the LAPD budget took up half of the unrestricted revenue, and it left so very little for homelessness and housing,” Nguyen told me. While combing through the fine print, she noticed that the mayor only reported the LAPD’s operating budget, which was about $1.7 billion, obscuring that the real total, including pension payments and other costs, was more than $3 billion.

“I just found it mind-blowing that no one knew how big the LAPD budget was,” Nguyen recalled. So she set out to produce a bar chart comparing what the city spent on policing to housing, emergency management, and other departments. “That visualization really radicalized so many people, including myself, and it paved the way for a lot of our campaign on defunding the police,” Nguyen said.

If we #DefundThePolice, LA would have $3 billion to spend on real public health and safety solutions, such as rent cancellation to prevent homelessness, food, housing, jobs programs, childcare, clean air and water, public transit, and so much more. #PeoplesBudgetLA #CareNotCops pic.twitter.com/qIfjWfqlis

— Jane Nguyen (@theglowingstars) May 29, 2020

Essentially the same graphic, displayed on billboards around the city, brought a wave of attention, and helped secure the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times for Mejia’s campaign to convince voters that what the city controller’s office needed was an activist accountant.

In August, Mejia told Bolts magazine that one of his main goals as controller will be to audit the city’s sweeps of homeless camps and the criminalization of homelessness. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps — and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” Mejia said. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

Nguyen, who will be Mejia’s chief of staff when he takes office in December, told me that she doesn’t expect to keep protesting while working in government. “We’ll be able to hold elected officials and the city government accountable in a different way, and hopefully in a more powerful way,” Nguyen told me, “using the power of audits, and compelling departments and city officials to provide us with documentation.” Mejia, she added, will be “using his platform to publicize his audits and, as someone from an organizing background … mobilize people to pressure their elected officials to act.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Robert Mackey.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/fuck-that-how-street-protests-and-youth-activism-brought-kenneth-mejia-to-power-in-los-angeles/feed/ 0 351679 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/supreme-court-poised-to-strike-down-affirmative-action-in-cases-brought-by-conservative-activist/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/supreme-court-poised-to-strike-down-affirmative-action-in-cases-brought-by-conservative-activist/#respond Tue, 01 Nov 2022 13:58:59 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=906eb6c0827d572bdc8f8f5a160bfb28
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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The majority-conservative Supreme Court appears poised to strike down race-conscious college admissions decisions, after hearing arguments Monday against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs argued the admissions process discriminates against white and Asian American applicants by giving priority consideration to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. The decision could jeopardize affirmative action initiatives implemented after the Civil Rights Movement to give more equal opportunities to people disadvantaged by centuries of racial discrimination and the legacy of slavery. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, says his organization investigated the allegations against Harvard and found no discrimination but rather that “allowing race to be considered benefited Asian Americans.” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, says rescinding affirmative action programs risks harming students of color and will dramatically decrease the racial diversity that has shown to benefit colleges.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/supreme-court-poised-to-strike-down-affirmative-action-in-cases-brought-by-conservative-activist-2/feed/ 0 346972 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/news-channels-show-old-unrelated-video-as-clip-of-cheetah-brought-to-india-from-namibia/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/news-channels-show-old-unrelated-video-as-clip-of-cheetah-brought-to-india-from-namibia/#respond Thu, 22 Sep 2022 08:13:42 +0000 https://www.altnews.in/?p=129618 On September 17, cheetahs brought from Namibia were released at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Since then, social media users and media outlets have been circulating a video...

The post News channels show old, unrelated video as clip of cheetah brought to India from Namibia appeared first on Alt News.

]]> On September 17, cheetahs brought from Namibia were released at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Since then, social media users and media outlets have been circulating a video of a cheetah describing it as one of the animals from Namibia that Prime Minister Narendra Modi released at the Kuno National Park.

The Times Now news channel aired the visual in one of its programmes, claiming that this was the first footage of the cheetahs as they returned to India 70 years later. (Archived link)

Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav shared the video of the cheetah and wrote, “Everyone was waiting for its roar, but it turned out to be more like a cat.” (Archived link)

सबको इंतज़ार था दहाड़ का… पर ये तो निकला बिल्ली मौसी के परिवार का. pic.twitter.com/O6CcygRfpg

— Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) September 17, 2022

Dainik Bhaskar also ran the video as footage of cheetahs brought from Namibia. (Archived link)

Similarly, Congress leader and MLA Virendra Choudhary, News18 journalist Priyanka Kandpal, The Economic Times, The Lallantop, The Quint, The Quint Hindi, News18, Latestly, Live Hindustan, etc. also amplified this clip as the introduction of cheetahs to India.

Click to view slideshow.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a keyword search on YouTube. This led us to the original video uploaded on a channel named Adventure with Creature on February 14, 2022. This means that the video is not recent at all.

We also performed a reverse image search using a frame taken from this video, and found the original video uploaded on November 29, 2021 on a YouTube channel named The Wildcat Sanctuary.

Alt News cannot confirm how old this video is and where it is from. At the same time, it is clear that the clip is at least nine-month old and has nothing to do with the group of cheetahs that were recently brought to India from Namibia.

To sum it up, a number of politicians and media outlets shared an old video of a cheetah, claiming that it was the first visual of the cheetahs recently brought to India from Namibia.

 

The post News channels show old, unrelated video as clip of cheetah brought to India from Namibia appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/news-channels-show-old-unrelated-video-as-clip-of-cheetah-brought-to-india-from-namibia/feed/ 0 335328 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/06/dogs-of-war-how-saving-animals-in-ukraine-brought-me-back-to-life/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/06/dogs-of-war-how-saving-animals-in-ukraine-brought-me-back-to-life/#respond Wed, 06 Jul 2022 18:05:57 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=bc4de461070ae7d8eba9a8769bd822b9
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/06/dogs-of-war-how-saving-animals-in-ukraine-brought-me-back-to-life/feed/ 0 313120 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/26/morocco-journalists-targeted-by-authorities-are-brought-to-justice/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/26/morocco-journalists-targeted-by-authorities-are-brought-to-justice/#respond Sun, 26 Jun 2022 18:37:05 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=304087 According to Amnesty International, Moroccan journalist Omar Radi is being tried today after nine months of illegal pretrial detention amid great concerns about the impartiality of the trial. The organization is calling on Moroccan authorities to release Omar Radi from detention, withdraw all accusations related to his journalist activities, and ensure a fair trial of all parties. “There is no reason to detain Omar Radi for the past nine months. We seek his release. Omar Radi faces years of court harassment by the authorities due to his brave journalism. And this trial is the latest attempt to silence him, “said Amnesty International, Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa, Amnesty International.

Independent journalist Omar Radi is known for his criticism and exposure to corruption in Morocco’s human rights records. He was frequently harassed by authorities in court for journalism and activism. In March 2020, he was sentenced to four months with suspended sentence for a tweet sent the previous year to curse a judge for an unfair trial and imprisonment for Hilak ELRif activists. In June 2020, Amnesty International published a report revealing that Omarradi’s phone was attacked by NSO Group’s sophisticated spyware in a way that could only be obtained from authorities. On June 24, two days after the report was published, Omar Radi was first summoned for cross-examination by the Casablanca Criminal Investigation Bureau. He was later summoned at least eight more times and cross-examined for hours each time, initially only suspected of being foreign-funded in relation to intelligence agencies. Rape was alleged after his colleague sued Ledesk magazine that Omarradi attacked her on the night of July 12, 2020. The Casablanca lower court has studied for his journalistic work and international NGOs, and rape and sexual assault, all accusations that Omar Radi violently denied. On the same day, he was taken to Wanghua Tea Prison. Allegations of sexual violence should always be seriously and appropriately investigated. However, in recent years there have been several cases of sexual offences being brought against vocal critics of the Moroccan government, including independent journalists and activists. In 2019, a Moroccan court of appeal sentenced Taoufik Bouachrine, publisher of Akhbar elYoum, one of the country`s last opposition newspapers, to 15 years in prison for sexual assault against several women. In its opinion about this case, the United Nations` Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that his trial was marred by dueprocess violations and considered that Bouachrine`s detention forms part of a ” judicial harassment attributable to nothing other than his investigative journalism.” Another prominent journalist, from the same newspaper, Akhbar el Yaoum, Hajar Raissouni, was sentenced in 2019 to one year in prison under charges of “abortion” and “having sex outside of marriage.” The defense witness in the rape case against Omar Radi, independent journalist Imed Stitou, who was present in the same flat at the time of the incident, and who has corroborated Omar Radi`s version of the facts, was later indicted as an accomplice of rape. Background Omar Radi is an investigative journalist and activist from Morocco. He is a founder and journalist at Le desk, an independent Moroccan publication. He has worked with national and international media companies such as Atlantic Radio, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, Telquel and Lakome. Omar’s work focuses on the relationship between political research and political and economic power in Morocco.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/26/morocco-journalists-targeted-by-authorities-are-brought-to-justice/feed/ 0 304087 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/13/meltdowns-have-brought-progressive-advocacy-groups-to-a-standstill-at-a-critical-moment-in-world-history/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/13/meltdowns-have-brought-progressive-advocacy-groups-to-a-standstill-at-a-critical-moment-in-world-history/#respond Mon, 13 Jun 2022 22:07:43 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=399475

Everyone acknowledged that Zoom was less than ideal as a forum for a heartfelt conversation on systemic racism and policing. But the meeting was urgent, and, a little more than two months into the Covid-19 lockdown, it would have to do.

During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.

On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium” — one of the details we know because it was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that focuses on social justice advocacy.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sign the American Rescue Plan Act on March 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

“My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife.”

“There are wins to be had between now and the next couple months that could change the country forever, and folks are focused on stuff that has no theory of change for even getting to the House floor for a vote.”

The Sunrise Movement protests inside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to advocate that Democrats support the Green New Deal, in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 10, 2018.

Photo: Michael Brochstein/LightRocket via Getty Images

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaks at a conference at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images

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Mark Rudd, chair of Students for a Democratic Society, talks to reporters as Columbia University students protest on April 25, 1968.

Photo: Dennis Caruso/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Demonstrators protest the murder of George Floyd in Barcelona, Spain, on June 7, 2020.

Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images

Sen. Bernie Sanders departs with members of his staff in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2015.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

“Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

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Activists participate in a rally to mark Earth Day in Washington, D.C., on April 23, 2022.

Photo: Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP

“They don’t think what we’ve been doing for decades has worked. Wanting to burn it down is not irrational.”

If every callout leads a mob to shoot first and ask questions later, we get what we have today. If the callout is examined soberly and judiciously, only those with merit get a hearing.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

On Sunday, March 13, Brent was shot dead in the city of Irpin while covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the second journalist killed since Russia launched its assault on February 24.  Juan Arrendondo, a U.S. reporter working with Brent, was injured in the Irpin attack, underscoring the dangers facing those trying to cover this war.

Brent and his brother, Craig, worked as the Renaud Brothers, and together they won seemingly every broadcast award possible, from the Peabody for “Last Chance High” (2014), about a Chicago high school for troubled youth; two duPont-Columbia University journalism awards, one in 2012 for a moving look at how Partners in Health helped children injured in the Haiti earthquake; another the following year for “Vanguard: Arming the Mexican Cartel,” a riveting exploration of how American gun dealers fueled drug cartel murders in Mexico,

The awards told one story, their work ethic told another. They were always working on the next project.

The Renaud brothers were from Arkansas, graduates of Central High School in Little Rock. That sense of being rooted in a place where the trauma of race had scarred a nation resonated in their work. “Brent really valued people,” said Jeff Newton, a journalist who worked with Renaud often over the last 10 years. “Brent didn’t see war as people killing other people.  He was focused on the suffering. ‘I have to record the suffering,’ he would say.”

Brent and Craig Renaud began their professional career working with journalist Jon Alpert; and their breakthrough film, “Dope, Sick, Love” (2005) for HBO followed two heroin addicts eking out an existence on the streets of New York.  The brothers’ extraordinary access, gained over years, explored the love between two souls in trouble – the love between individuals even in the midst of a drug war.

That film was one of the first documentaries recorded using the small digital cameras which have now become ubiquitous. When “Dope, Sick, Love” aired, the Renauds were already filming “Off to War,” an intimate look at the 39th Infantry Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard and their families.  The three-hour, 10-part series followed the soldiers from Clarksville, Arkansas, from basic training to their deployment to Iraq, explored their burgeoning disillusionment there, and showed the disorienting process of returning from war. It was one of the earliest documentary explorations of the impact of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) – and its cost to society.

Brent went to Ukraine to film a series on the global refugee crisis for TIME Studios. He was supposed to have been gone before the war broke out, but once it did, he remained committed. Brent had 20 years’ experience working in conflict zones; he had taken one of the first courses started by RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues), the organization writer Sebastian Junger founded after photographer Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. Several friends said they had been involved in helping Renaud find local producers or contacts in Ukraine, but by the time they reached him he had already found someone.

Both brothers had been active in pointing out the security issues facing a news environment where freelancers have to navigate dangerous situations. In a 2013 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Brent’s brother Craig pointed out that “the most obvious benefit of being backed by a major news organizations is that if something goes wrong and you are kidnapped or in need medical evacuation, you at least have some bit of hope that they might help you out.”

Those who knew him say they are certain Brent would have been wearing his helmet and a flak jacket with the word “PRESS” when he went out on Sunday. That’s part of the drill for every reporter who has worked in hostile environments. But following the drill is no guarantee of protection. Brent got hit in the neck and bled out before he could reach the hospital.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by June Cross.

On February 2nd, eagle-eyed pro-China activist Arnaud Bertrand revealed that WEghur Stories, a podcast “working to create a conversation within and about the global Uyghur diaspora” that has been aggressively promoted on Facebook and Spotify, is funded by Washington’s French diplomatic mission—and that John Bair, its co-creator, co-host and producer, is a former CIA operative.

No trace of Bair’s deep-state background can be detected from the podcast’s website, where he is merely referred to as a former “foreign policy analyst, political speechwriter, and narrative consultant.” However, his LinkedIn profile—which characterizes him as a “narrative development” specialist—reveals an eight-year stint with the Agency from 2004 to 2012, the first seven of which were spent as an intelligence officer.

Since then, he has enjoyed a colorful, diverse career in a number of fields, serving as ghostwriter for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and foreign policy and national security adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s in 2020, which overlapped with a three-and-a-half year spell at Threat Pattern LLC.

The latter company uses CIA “intelligence and counterintelligence analysis techniques to protect corporate brands and assets.” Trade outlet Intelligence Online describes the firm as “a CIA and Wall Street alliance”—in March 2015, Michael Sulick, the Agency’s long-time Clandestine Service Director, joined as senior partner.

Bair, moreover, sits on the board of Foreign Policy for America, a D.C.-based advocacy group founded in the weeks following the 2016 presidential election, “as a home for Americans who support principled American engagement in the world.” In other words, to shill for empire after the victory of Donald Trump, in the event his isolationist, anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail turned out just to be hot air—which it did, of course.

Lately, he has worked as content director for Thresher, a company offering corporate clients a range of products combining “signal-rich proprietary data, AI-powered technology, and world-class expertise to help decision makers understand China.” Thresher claims to rely on “the best technology the world has to offer, incubated at Harvard and leveraging innovations from Silicon Valley.”

Deep-state liberal performing arts collective

Since January 2014 too, Bair has been part of The New Wild, “a multidisciplinary art lab that brings together artists, writers, scholars, and technologists in a rigorously collaborative environment to create large-scale theater, opera, and spectacles.”

It is as part of this group that Bair produces WEghur Stories, and wrote Tear a Root from the Earth, an elaborate musical about the legacy of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan that has been performed at theaters across America. Additionally, he served as communications director for Everybody Is Gone, an immersive “art installation and performance” seeking to provide “reparative spaces to the Uyghur community” and “counteract the Chinese government’s objectives.”

Little information on The New Wild can be derived from its website—there isn’t even a means of contacting the troupe—although its “collaborators” section is intriguing, for behind the handsome hipsteriffic headshots often lurk deep-state backgrounds.

For example, Jessica Batke, creator of Everybody Is Gone and Tear a Root from the Earth’s music director, was previously a foreign affairs research analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

She currently serves as senior editor of the opaquely funded ChinaFile, where she manages its China NGO Project, and has published numerous bizarre, scaremongering stories about Beijing subsequently picked up by the mainstream media.

In late January, for example, Batke authored a report framing as sinister a network of youth centers across China, at which attendees can, among other things, have their umbrellas repaired and watch showings of The Dark Knight for free. This while earning “points” for showing “respect for their elders and family, righteousness and trustworthiness, pleasure in helping others, hard work, and thrift in running their household affairs” that can be redeemed for essential products in supermarkets.

The Wall Street Journal was widely ridiculed for presenting this mundane youth engagement program as a malign, insidious Communist Party plot “to quietly [insert] itself into everyday life” in China.

Johnny Walsh, a cellist who co-authored Tear a Root from the Earth and composed its score, is a veteran U.S. foreign policy apparatchik currently occupying a senior post at intelligence cutout USAID, while Nicolas Benacerraf, director and scenographer, is an academic studying “advertising as a means of theatrical population control,” and its relevance to “political theater,” in his spare time.

New Wild founder Marina McClure—a theater director “who grew up internationally,” with an extensive dramatic résumé and virtually no social media presence—has since 2019 received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. government’s regime-change arm, which financed the production of Everybody Is Gone.

The NED has since 2004 funded propaganda operations surrounding the purported Uyghur genocide to the tune of millions annually, bankrolling a nexus of advocacy groups, human rights NGOs and media operations to further the controversial narrative, among them right-wing, anti-communist separatists, in order to discredit and ostracize China.

All along, the U.S. has frequently clashed with Uyghur militants in Afghanistan.

It is surely no coincidence the NED wellspring began flowing the year after publication of The Xinjiang Problem, authored by Graham E. Fuller, former vice chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and CIA station chief in Kabul, and academic S. Frederick Starr, a distinguished Eurasian fellow with the American Foreign Policy Council, a neoconservative Beltway think tank.

“It would be unrealistic to rule out categorically American willingness to play the ‘Uyghur card’ as a means of exerting pressure on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation,” they wrote. “Many of China’s rivals have in the past pursued active policies in Xinjiang and exploited the Uyghur issue for their benefit…The possibility cannot be excluded from any survey of possible longer-range futures for the Xinjiang issue.”

Elsewhere in the text, the authors acknowledged that Uyghurs were in contact with Muslim groups outside Xinjiang, and “some of them have been radicalized into broader jihadist politics in the process, a handful were earlier involved in guerrilla or terrorist training in Afghanistan, and some are in touch with international Muslim mujahidin struggling for Muslim causes of independence worldwide.”

There is reason to believe the U.S. may be providing covert support to these same militants. In 1999, a CIA operative was recorded as saying:

The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia [emphasis added].

“We love the CIA,” Ben Affleck writes

Intriguingly, John Bair’s biography on The New Wild website notes that, after his lengthy run as an intelligence officer, he served in the CIA’s entertainment liaison office, which consults directly with TV, streaming and movie productions. Via this mechanism, Langley exerts enormous, insidious and little-known influence over a wide variety of popular culture, influencing scripts and narratives in its own malign interests.

During this time, the résumé notes, Bair served as consultant on several high-profile projects, including the 2012 movies Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. This is striking, for production of those films was heavily influenced by Langley, creating a truly extraordinary situation in which two pictures vying against each other for numerous industry awards that year were both effective CIA propaganda infomercials.

Argo tells the real-life tale of the CIA rescuing six American diplomats who evaded capture during the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, via the cunning connivance of dispatching operatives to the Iranian capital under the guise of scouting for shooting locations for a sci-fi movie.

It was a story the Agency had wanted someone to adapt for the silver screen for some time—in December 2007, an essay by Tony Mendez, who led the daring operation, outlining the experience was published on a section of the CIA’s website which regularly suggests possible storylines writers and producers should pursue.

In Argo, Mendez was played by Ben Affleck, who also directed the movie. Email exchanges between the actor and CIA liaison office during the production process unearthed by academic Matt Alford speak to an extremely chummy and affectionate rapport, with actors and production staff receiving rare private tours of Langley, and being provided with exclusive archive photos. All Agency personnel identities are redacted in the emails, although there are many written by and mentioning names short enough to be “John Bair.”

“We would love, in brief, to film a quick bit walking through the lobby, something in the parking lot and a wide shot of the building as an establishing shot,” Affleck wrote to the CIA in one missive. “We love the Agency and this heroic action and we really want the process of bringing it to the big screen to be as real as possible.”

In return for its assistance, the CIA was provided with multiple drafts of the script—Langley was very taken with the writer’s efforts, with one entertainment liaison office representative commenting, “the Agency comes off looking very well, in my opinion, and the action of the movie is, for the most part, squarely rooted in the facts of the mission.”

Upon release though, Argo was widely criticized for its historical inaccuracies, such as determinedly diminishing Canada’s prominent role in the mission, falsely charging that the British embassy refused to help the diplomats, and fabricating whole-cloth a daring runway escape scene.

Neglecting to highlight how the CIA’s 1953 coup had helped destroy Iranian democracy and provoke the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it was also harshly condemned for universally depicting Iranians—with the exception of a single character—as rabid, aggressive, violent, moronic and possessed of surging anti-Western animus. This did not prevent the movie from securing three Academy Awards though, including Best Picture.

“Grossly inaccurate and misleading”

Zero Dark Thirty dramatizes the CIA’s decade-long worldwide manhunt for Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks, culminating with the Navy SEAL team raid on his secret compound in Pakistan in May 2011.

The film generated even more controversy than Argo, due to its depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and false implication that they were fundamental to locating the al-Qaeda chief, with even the CIA’s then-acting chief Michael Morrell expressing grave concern about this fundamental aspect of the narrative.

A bipartisan group of senior U.S. senators—including notorious war hawk John McCain—were so outraged by it that they wrote a joint letter to Sony Pictures, Zero Dark Thirty’s distributor, slamming the movie as “grossly inaccurate and misleading,” and declaring the company had a “social and moral obligation” to make categorically clear torture played no role in bin Laden’s location.

The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s torture program, declassified two years later, confirmed that “the vast majority of intelligence” which helped track down the al-Qaeda chief was not only “originally acquired from sources unrelated” to the program, but “the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior [emphasis added] to the CIA subjecting the detainee to enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The enormous and unprecedented support provided to Zero Dark Thirty by not only the CIA but the Pentagon was well-publicized at the time of its release, although it would be some time before internal documents revealing in detail how its narrative was directly shaped by deep-state interests were declassified.

Among the tranche was an internal memo describing how the film’s writer consulted directly Agency representatives—which may well have included Bair—on the script over four separate conference calls. In turn, they dictated what should be changed or even removed from the screenplay, in order to protect Langley’s image.

For example, a spy “[firing] a celebratory burst of AK-47 gunfire into the air” at a party, and the use of a dog during an interrogation, were both cut, the latter because “such tactics would not be used by the Agency.”

Interestingly though, the filmmakers were moreover explicitly told to stick to torture techniques already in the public domain—suggesting they may have been made party to classified information, and the CIA did not want that leaking out.

Curiously, the aforementioned Senate report also reveals that the CIA had been planning to “publicly attribute” the operation to the success and efficacy of the torture program two months before its execution, with the Agency’s Office of Public Affairs specifically deployed for the purpose. After the raid, the CIA “engaged the media directly in order to defend and promote the program.” Was Zero Dark Thirty the product of this perverse propaganda push?

Whatever the truth of the matter, the relationship between the CIA and the filmmakers over the course of Zero Dark Thirty’s production was so concerningly intimate and intensive that it triggered three separate internal investigations, probing lavish gifts to Agency operatives, possible granting of classified material to the studio, and more generally the ways in which Langley engaged with the entertainment industry.

A number of ethics violations were identified, and various processes reformed, but no one was prosecuted or fired.

Bair had left the CIA by the time of the film’s release, and long prior to the investigations being launched, after just one year in the liaison post. It is unclear if he was pushed in advance of potential censure, or left of his own accord, and it remains an open question what he was doing and where over the 18-month gap following his departure and next stated role on LinkedIn.

Still, it can only be considered utterly grotesque that an individual so intimately involved in the production of clandestine state propaganda demonizing the Islamic world and justifying the unspeakable criminal excesses of the War on Terror—to say nothing of whatever evils he himself may have perpetrated over his intelligence career during the same period –now plays the public role of a committed friend and humanitarian protector of Uyghur Muslims within and without China.

As the New Cold War grows hotter every day, we can expect its cultural component to become correspondingly turbocharged.

Theater-goers are an ideal target audience for anti-China propaganda—overwhelmingly liberal, educated, wealthy, and influential opinion formers, their support for or acquiescence to dangerously rising tensions with Beijing provides absolutely crucial grease for the imperial war machine’s ever-churning wheels.

Unlike Washington’s battle against Soviet Communism though, this time around the CIA does not have to rely on covertly co-opting academics, authors, creatives and musicians—there are clearly enough creatively minded veteran deep-state operatives out there who can be relied upon to faithfully execute the West’s informational assault on global perceptions regarding China in a variety of innovative ways.

First published at Covert Action Magazine.

The post The Uyghur Podcast Brought to You by a CIA Torture Propagandist first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kit Klarenberg.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/11/the-uyghur-podcast-brought-to-you-by-a-cia-torture-propagandist/feed/ 0 281215 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/03/how-nzs-parliament-anti-covid-protest-was-brought-to-an-end/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/03/how-nzs-parliament-anti-covid-protest-was-brought-to-an-end/#respond Thu, 03 Mar 2022 19:45:52 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=71161 By Sharon Brettkelly, co-host of RNZ’s The Detail

After 23 days, the occupation at Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament was finally brought to a chaotic and violent end. The Detail talks to two reporters who were there as it all unfolded.

---

Torn tents, burnt trees and a scorched lawn were all that remained on Wednesday night of the 23-day protest on Parliament grounds.

That morning, when the operation to clear the occupation began, RNZ’s Charlotte Cook and Stuff’s Thomas Manch had arrived before daybreak.

Even before the first clashes erupted between the police and protesters, there was a sense of tension.

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“We had some suspicion that something was going to happen,” says Manch.

“You don’t get 500 police officers in a city without people noticing.”

For an hour it was quiet, but the protesters seemed agitated.

They knew something was up, too.

Noticed some signals
“They’d been talking about it on their channels, they’d noticed some of the signals that we’d noticed,” says Manch.

Protest security guards were communicating on their walkie-talkies and flashing strobe lights in the faces of the reporters.

“And then the police helicopter was in the air, that was the start of it, that was the beginning,” says Manch

Cook watched police officers come out of the back of Parliament, march past Lambton Quay and along Stout Street. The protesters were yelling.

“They were upset, they knew something was going to happen but what that looked like they weren’t sure”.

There were moments when both Cook and Manch feared for their safety.

Cook was nearly caught in the crossfire when protesters were hurling orange traffic cones at the police.

Aggressive agitators
Manch says aggressive agitators, who were pushed away from the frontline by other protesters, turned on him and the Stuff visual journalist filming it.

“We were mobbed out of the protest site by a group of people who were very angry, very threatening and very aggressive.”

It was when Cook watched people standing in front of police cars and throwing whatever objects they could find that she knew the aggression and conflict would escalate.

The clashes continued for more than 14 hours as protesters and riot gear-clad police pushed up against each other again and again.

Manch watched as the police made their way towards Parliament, picking up tents as they went.

“They would advance, claim a bunch of the territory, clear it out with a forklift and then they would move again,” he says.

Cook says the last 23 days have left her in shock.

“It feels like such a distant memory that the Parliament forecourt and grass area were green and luscious — it was the kind of place you want to take your shoes off and rub your toes in the grass.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/03/how-nzs-parliament-anti-covid-protest-was-brought-to-an-end/feed/ 0 278937 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/02/her-story-brought-down-alaskas-attorney-general-a-year-later-she-feels-let-down/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/02/her-story-brought-down-alaskas-attorney-general-a-year-later-she-feels-let-down/#respond Wed, 02 Mar 2022 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.propublica.org/article/her-story-brought-down-alaskas-attorney-general-a-year-later-she-feels-let-down#1271115 by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

More than a year after the acting Alaska attorney general suddenly resigned, the criminal investigation into his alleged sexual contact with a teenager decades ago is not complete, and two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have billed for less than two weeks’ time.

Nikki Dougherty White told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica in January 2021 that Ed Sniffen began an illegal sexual relationship with her in 1991 when she was a 17-year-old high school student and Sniffen was the coach of her school’s mock trial team. Sniffen was 27 years old at the time.

Under Alaska law, it is a felony for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old if the adult is the minor’s coach. (In most other cases, the age of consent in Alaska is 16.)

Former acting Alaska Attorney General Ed Sniffen. (National Association of Attorneys General)

Sniffen resigned as the Daily News and ProPublica were preparing an article about the allegations.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who appointed Sniffen to the role, has said through a spokesperson that he was unaware of the allegations against Sniffen until the newsrooms began investigating White’s story. The governor then directed incoming Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor to “appoint a special outside counsel, independent of the Department of Law, to investigate possible criminal misconduct by Mr. Sniffen.”

Billing records obtained by the Daily News and ProPublica show two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have spent a combined total of 70.5 hours investigating the matter. As of Feb. 11, the state of Alaska had spent about $19,500 of a budgeted $50,000 on the investigation.

White, who has cooperated with the investigation, says she’s tired of waiting for answers.

“I feel like the state’s letting me down,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a high level of interest from the government in getting this right.”

A spokesperson for the state Department of Law referred questions to the independent prosecutor and said the department “is not involved in this investigation in any way and has no input or influence over the timing or status.” The special prosecutor, Gregg Olson, said this month that he cannot proceed until he receives a final report from the Anchorage Police Department.

“I anticipate that the investigation is near its conclusion,” said Olson, a retired state prosecutor who worked in the office of special prosecutions and as the district attorney in Bethel and Fairbanks. “But I don’t make any conclusions, form any opinions about a case until the investigation is complete.”

The Anchorage Police Department declined to answer questions about the investigation, which according to Olson is being handled by a detective within the Crimes Against Children Unit.

Sniffen has turned down repeated interview requests and, through his attorney, Jeffrey Robinson, would not say if he has cooperated in the investigation. Neither Olson nor the Department of Law spokesperson would say whether Sniffen has cooperated.

“Mr. Sniffen disputes any allegation of wrongdoing, and out of respect for the process undertaken by Mr. Olson, declines to comment any further,” Robinson wrote in an email.

One Resignation Followed Another

Dunleavy appointed Sniffen to the attorney general position on Jan. 18, 2021, pending confirmation by the state Legislature. Sniffen was a longtime attorney for the Department of Law’s consumer protection unit but was unfamiliar to many Alaskans until he was named as the replacement for Attorney General Kevin Clarkson.

Clarkson had resigned in August 2020 after the Daily News and ProPublica revealed that he had sent hundreds of personal text messages to a junior state employee. (In his resignation letter, Clarkson acknowledged errors in judgment but characterized his texts to the woman as “‘G’ rated.”)

When Sniffen resigned, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law said the new attorney general had determined that it would have been a potential conflict of interest for one of the state attorneys who had been working for Sniffen to investigate the case, and the state would “contract with special counsel to ensure an independent and unbiased investigation into any possible wrongdoing.”

That was 397 days ago.

The Department of Law originally selected former sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Gernat to oversee the case. Gernat said at the time that she did not know Sniffen personally and was not a current or recent state employee.

Potential witnesses told the Daily News and ProPublica they were contacted for interviews in the first six months of 2021, and White said the investigation seemed to be moving swiftly.

White and her attorney, Caitlin Shortell, said they held multiple Zoom meetings with Gernat, providing additional details and the names of other potential witnesses.

“One thing that we heard from Rachael Gernat was that this case is astonishingly well corroborated despite the fact that it happened so long ago,” Shortell said. “That it is more well corroborated than cases that happened last month.”

Shortell said she doesn’t know what remains to be done in the investigation and that as far as she knows, “almost all of the witnesses were able to be contacted.”

But on June 8, 2021, while still under contract with the Department of Law, Gernat applied for a job within the agency.

“Based on that inquiry, I was replaced as the special prosecutor,” she wrote in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “This replacement was to avoid any appearance of bias and to ensure the confidence in the neutrality of the special prosecutor.”

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Olson replaced Gernat as special prosecutor a month later, on July 12, 2021. Gernat had worked 49 hours on the case.

The next day, Gernat emailed White’s attorney to inform her of the change, noting that the “investigation itself is coming to a conclusion.”

To White and her attorney, there has appeared to be little movement in the case since Gernat’s departure.

“It’s been months and months of nothing but radio silence,” White said. “It’s difficult to have gone through first the article, and then to go through the three intense interviews with the Anchorage Police Department, and then to have multiple calls with the previous prosecutor.”

“And I feel like now it’s just kind of gone into this void of nothing,” she said.

Olson said that after his initial request for the police to take additional steps in the investigation, he has been waiting too.

“Honestly I personally would have hoped that I was going to get this case, get the report, make a decision and move on,” he said. “I’m still waiting for that. Hopefully, it will happen soon.”

Compelled to Speak Out

In 1991, when, according to White, she and Sniffen began a sexual relationship on a high school trip to New Orleans, the Alaska Legislature had recently changed state law to ensure that educators and other authority figures could not legally have sex with teenagers under their care or influence. The legislation was seen as closing a loophole that had been revealed two years before when an Anchorage teacher and newspaper columnist was charged with having a sexual relationship with one of his 17-year-old students. A judge at the time found there was no law against the relationship.

The Legislature amended the sexual abuse of a minor law in 1990 to make it a crime for a teacher, coach, youth leader or someone in a “substantially similar position” to engage in sexual activity with someone who they are teaching or coaching and who is under the age of 18.

That law took effect on Sept. 19, 1990, according to state law library records. A substantially similar version remains on the books today.

State prosecutors have used the law to file criminal charges against 12 people over the past five years, according to sex crimes data provided by the Alaska Court System.

One of the most recent cases, filed June 8, 2021, involves a village public safety officer accused of having sex with a high school student who had asked for a ride home from a party. The officer was 27 years old at the time; the alleged victim was 17.

Alaska State Troopers learned of the alleged crime when the VPSO confessed to another law enforcement officer and that officer reported the case as required by state law, according to charges filed in state court. The former officer has pleaded not guilty.

Another two cases resulted in convictions, two were dismissed and seven are awaiting trial.

Under current Alaska law, there is no statute of limitations on felony sexual abuse of a minor, although Gernat said at the time of her appointment that it can depend on the severity and timing of the offense. In one 2016 case, an Anchorage jury found a man guilty of sexually abusing a 16-year-old while acting as an authority figure, for abuse that occurred in 2005.

Asked if he had concluded whether any statute of limitations might apply to allegations against Sniffen, Olson said only, “I have not made any final legal determinations in the case.”

White said she does not regret going public with her story despite the delays. She is Athabascan and Alaska is her home state, she said, and when she heard Sniffen had been named as the state’s top law enforcement officer, she felt compelled to speak out.

“This means a lot to my family and I wouldn’t have been able to sit by and say, ‘Oh I just need to let this go,’” she said. “If Clarkson was drummed out for text messages to an adult woman, I felt that Sniffen had absolutely zero business sitting behind the desk of the attorney general.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News.

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