President Donald Trump on July 4 signed into law an omnibus reconciliation bill, branded in MAGA propaganda (and much of corporate media) as the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The legislation scraped up just enough votes to narrowly pass in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress, with 51 to 50 votes in the Senate and 218 to 214 in the House.

The focal point of the bill is a $4.5 trillion tax cut, partly paid for by unprecedented slashes in funding for healthcare and food assistance. The wealthiest 10% will gain $12,000 a year from the legislation, while it will cost the lowest-earning 10% of families $1,600 annually. Media addressed the fiscal aspects of the bill, though more often through a fixation on the federal debt rather than looking at the effect of the budget on inequality (FAIR.org, 7/17/25).

But it’s not just a question of money. Many of the bill’s key provisions—including Medicaid, SNAP and clean energy cuts, as well as handouts to the fossil fuel, military and detention industries—will be literally deadly for people in the US and abroad, in both the near and long term.

FAIR’s Belén Fernandez (7/9/25) closely examined the dramatic lack of coverage of the vast expansion of the government’s anti-immigrant capacities. But the deadly consequences of the other aspects of the bill were also remarkably underexplained to the public.

To see how major media explained the contents and consequences of the reconciliation bill to the public before its enactment, FAIR surveyed New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR news coverage from the Senate’s passage of the final version of the bill on July 1 through July 4, the day Trump signed the bill into law. This time frame, when the actual contents of the bill were known and the House was deliberating on giving it an up or down vote, was arguably the moment when media attention was most critical to the democratic process.

‘We all are going to die’

This USA Today article (7/1/25) was one of the more informative in detailing the impact of the bill, but it still fell short of detailing the projected cost in human lives.

While corporate media reported that the finalized bill with the Senate’s revisions would significantly cut healthcare funding to subsidize the tax breaks, they rarely explained the social consequences of such cuts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the bill will reduce $1.04 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next decade. This will strip health insurance from 11.8 million people.

The New York Times (7/1/25), acknowledging these statistics, quoted Democrats who opposed the bill due to “the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid,” and who noted that people will soon “see the damage that is done as hospitals close, as people are laid off, as costs go up, as the debt increases.”

But the outlets in our sample, at this crucial time of heightened attention, failed to mention the most significant consequence of cutting Medicaid: death.

These outlets (New York Times, 5/30/25; NPR, 5/31/25; CNN, 5/31/25;  Washington Post, 6/1/25) had all earlier acknowledged what the Times called Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) “morbid” response to her constituents’ concerns about deaths from Medicaid cuts: “Well, we all are going to die.”

But as the House deliberated on whether these cuts would become law, these outlets failed to reference credible research that projected that the large-scale loss of health insurance envisioned by the bill would have an annual death toll in the tens of thousands. One USA Today piece (7/1/25) did headline that “Trump’s Tax Bill Could Cut Medicaid for Millions of Americans,” but didn’t spell out the potential cost in human lives.

Before the Senate’s revisions, researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health and UPenn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (Penn LDI, 6/3/25) projected that such massive cuts to healthcare would result in 51,000 deaths annually. That number is expected to be even higher now, as the calculation was based on an earlier CBO estimate of 7.7 million people losing coverage over the next decade (CBO, 5/11/25).

‘Harms to healthcare’—not to people

CNN (7/4/25) euphemized life-threatening withdrawal of care as “harm to the healthcare system.”

CNN (7/4/25), in a piece on “Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle,” similarly failed to spell out the dire consequences of the Medicaid cuts. It wrote that low-income Americans would be “worse off” thanks to those cuts, yet it extensively described only the fiscal impacts, as opposed to the costs in life and health, on lower- and middle-class families.

Hospitals would also be “worse off” due to the bill, as it would “leave them with more uncompensated care costs for treating uninsured patients.” This rhetorically rendered the patient, made uninsured by legislation, a burden.

The article quoted American Hospital Association CEO Rick Pollack, who said that

the real-life consequences…will result in irreparable harm to our healthcare system, reducing access to care for all Americans and severely undermining the ability of hospitals and health systems to care for our most vulnerable patients.

But CNN refused to spell out to readers what that “harm to the healthcare system” would mean: beyond “reducing access,” it would cause people to die preventable deaths.

Outlets often seemed more concerned with the impact of the bill on lawmakers’ political survival than its impact on their low-income constituents’ actual survival. The Washington Post (7/4/25), though acknowledging that their poll revealed that “two-thirds [of Americans] said they had heard either little or nothing about [the bill],” made little or no effort to contribute to an informed public. Instead, it focused on analyzing the “Six Ways Trump’s Tax Bill Could Shape the Battle for Control of Congress.”

The New York Times (7/1/25) similarly observed that the Senate Republicans’ “hard-fought legislative win came at considerable risk to their party’s political futures and fiscal legacy.” In another article (7/1/25), they noticed that it was the “more moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans” who “repeated their opposition to [the bill’s] cuts to Medicaid.”

‘Winners and losers’

“Opponents of the bill say the proposed cuts will leave millions of adults and children hungry”; the New York Times (7/1/25) apparently doesn’t know whether that’s true or not.

The Medicaid cuts aren’t the only part of the bill that will result in unnecessary deaths. The bill will cut $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a program that helps low-income individuals and families buy food. CBO (5/22/25) estimated that 3.2 million people under the age of 65 will lose food assistance. This contraction is expected to be even more deadly than the healthcare cutbacks: The same researchers from UPenn (7/2/25), along with NYU Langone Health, projected that losing SNAP benefits will result in 93,000 premature deaths between now and 2039.

SNAP cuts were mostly only mentioned alongside Medicaid, if at all (Washington Post, 7/3/25; New York Times, 7/3/25; CNN, 7/4/25). And when they did decide to dedicate a whole article to the singular provision, they rarely ventured beyond the fiscal impacts of such cuts into real, tangible consequences, such as food insecurity, hunger and death. The New York Times (7/1/25) asked “how many people will be affected,” but didn’t bother to ask “how will people be affected?”

What’s more, according to the Center for American Progress (7/7/25), the bill’s repeal of incentives for energy efficiency and improved air quality “will likely lead to 430 avoidable deaths every year by 2030 and 930 by 2035.”

The New York Times (7/3/25), however, analyzed this outcome as a changing landscape with “energy winners and losers.” It described how the bill will eliminate tax credits that have encouraged the electrification of homes and alleviated energy costs for millions of families. Somehow, the “loser” here (and all throughout the article) is the abstract concept of “energy efficiency” and private companies, not actual US families.

Another little-discussed provision in the bill is the funding for the Golden Dome, an anti-missile system named for and modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome. The bill set aside $25 billion for its development, along with another $128 billion for military initiatives like expanding the naval fleet and nuclear arsenal.

Media, though, did little more than report these numbers, when they weren’t ignored entirely (CBS, 7/4/25; CNN, 7/4/25). The New York Times (7/1/25) characterized these measures to strengthen the military/industrial complex as “the least controversial in the legislative package”; they were “meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.” In utterly failing to challenge $153 billion in spending on a military that is currently being deployed to bomb other countries in wars of aggression and to suppress protests against authoritarianism at home, the media manufacture consent for militarism as a necessity and an inevitability.

Ignorance a journalistic fail

The Washington Post’s headline and article (7/3/25) perfectly exemplified the paradox with today’s media—calling out how “The Big Problem With Trump’s Bill [Is That] Many Voters Don’t Know What’s in It.” Yet it tosses in an unsubstantial explanation about how “it deals with tax policy, border security, restocking the military/industrial complex, slashing spending on health and food programs for the poor—as well as many, many other programs.”

By reducing sweeping legislative consequences to vague generalities and by positioning ignorance as a voter issue rather than journalistic failure, media outlets maintain a veneer of critique while sidestepping accountability.

Featured image: PBS  depiction (7/30/25) of President Donald Trump signing the reconciliation bill. (photo: Alex Brandon/Pool via Reuters.)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Shirlynn Chan.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

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A top official in the Department of Labor this week informed all staff members that they could face criminal charges if they speak to journalists, former employees or others about agency business.

A memo sent Monday by Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff, Jihun Han, and obtained by ProPublica, states that “individuals who disclose confidential information or engage in unauthorized communications with the media may face serious legal consequences.”

Among the ramifications, the memo states, are “potential criminal penalties, depending on the nature of the information and the applicable laws,” and “immediate disciplinary actions, up to and including termination.”

The guidance document went on to say that “any unauthorized communication with the media,” regardless of what information is shared or how it is shared, “will be treated as a serious offense.”

The memo listed laws, regulations and a departmental guide to explain its legal position. Among them was a regulation concerning civil servants’ ethical obligations and a law, the Freedom of Information Act, guaranteeing the public the right to inspect certain public records.

“This message will serve as your only warning,” the memo stated.

The warning comes as current and former Labor Department employees have spoken to the news media about harms they see resulting from the dismantling of portions of their agency, which enforces laws guaranteeing rights to a safe workplace, fair pay and protections against discrimination.

“It’s very chilling,” a Labor Department employee who requested anonymity for fear of retribution told ProPublica. “It’s never a good look when you’re telling people to never talk about what you’re doing.”

Labor Department spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“These types of missives can chill the free flow of information to the press and the public,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “That’s a concern.”

Civil servants do not sacrifice their First Amendment rights by accepting a job with the federal government, but there do exist higher restrictions on what information they can disclose publicly. Government agencies that handle classified information have on rare occasions launched criminal investigations against leakers, but those are typically invoked only when leaks involve classified national security intelligence or protected financial information, Rottman said.

“But normally, disclosures to the press or others would be a matter of employee discipline as opposed to carrying criminal sanctions,” he said.

While the memo raising the possibility of criminal penalties was sent to Labor Department employees, it reflects a common approach by the administration of President Donald Trump to guard against federal government employees speaking to reporters.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, for example, has publicly announced an aggressive pursuit of leakers. Elon Musk, who launched the Department of Government Efficiency, which is at the heart of the shake-up of the federal government, has bragged about his tactics in rooting out leaks at his companies. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has blamed alleged leaks by former Pentagon staffers for reigniting controversy over his use of the Signal messaging app to discuss military operations.

Federal employees at various agencies told ProPublica that an air of suspicion has descended on their workplace during Trump’s second term, with rumors flying of surveillance of rank-and-file government workers. In the Department of Agriculture, for example, a banner temporarily appeared on government computers when employees logged in, telling them that “unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in disciplinary action, as well as civil and criminal penalties.”

Agriculture Department spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Labor Department employee told ProPublica that Monday’s memo felt like the latest attack on a workforce already weathering layoffs, spending freezes and reorganizations.

“It’s been horrible. It’s been a deeply exhausting roller coaster,” the employee said. “It’s very difficult to work when you’re in a constant state of being terrorized by your employer.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Mark Olalde.

First, Milanović explores historical comparisons between the late-nineteenth-century expansion of global markets and trade (what he calls Globalization I and dates from 1870 to 1914) and the globalization of our time (what he calls Globalization II and dates from 1989 to 2020). The search for and exposure of historical patterns are the first steps in scientific inquiry, what Marxists mean by historical materialist analysis.

Unfortunately, many writers — including on the left — take the more recent participation of new and newly engaged producers and global traders, a revolution in logistics, the success of free-trade politics, and the subsequent explosion of international exchange as signaling the arrival of a new, unique capitalist era, even a new stage in its evolution.

Recognizing a growing share of trade in global output, but burdened with a limited historical horizon (the end of the Second World War), left theorists drew unwarranted, speculative conclusions about a new stage of capitalism featuring a decline in the power of the nation state, the irreversible domination of “transnational capital,” and even the coming of a borderless “empire” contested by an amorphous “multitude.”

Countering these views, writers like Linda Weiss (The Myth of the Powerless State, 1998) and Charles Emmerson (1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War, 2013) bring some sobriety to the question and remind us that we have seen the explosive growth of world trade before, generated by many of the same or similar historic forces. Weiss tells us that “the ratios of export trade to GDP were consistently higher in 1913 than they were in 1973.” Noting the same historical facts, Emmerson wryly concludes “Plus ça change”.

Milanović’s recognition of this parallel between two historic moments gives his analysis a gravitas missing from many leftists, many self-styled Marxist interpretations of the globalization phenomenon.

Secondly, Milanović — an acknowledged expert in comparative economic inequality — makes an important observation regarding the asymmetry between Globalization I and II. While they are alike in many ways, they differ in one important, significant way: while Globalization I benefited the Great Powers at the expense of the colonial world, the workers in the former colonies were actually benefited by Globalization II. In Milanović’s words:

Replacing domestic labor with cheap foreign labor made the owners of capital and the entrepreneurs of the Global North much richer. It also made it possible for the workers of the Global South to get higher-paying jobs and escape chronic underemployment…  It is therefore not a surprise that the Global North became deindustrialized, not solely as the result of automation and the increasing importance in services in national output overall, but also due to the fact that lots of industrial activity went to places where it could be done more cheaply. It’s no wonder that East Asia became the new workshop of the world.

While he misleadingly uses the expression “coalition of interests,” Milanović elaborates:

This particular coalition of interests was overlooked in the original thinking regarding globalization. In fact, it was believed that globalization would be bad for the large laboring masses of the Global South — that they would be exploited even more than before. Many people perhaps made this mistake based on the developments of Globalization I, which indeed led to the deindustrialization of India and the impoverishment of the populations of China and Africa. During this era, China was all but ruled by foreign merchants, and in Africa farmers lost control over land — toiled in common since time immemorial. Landlessness made them even poorer. So the first globalization indeed had a very negative effect on most of the Global South. But that was not the case in Globalization II, when wages and employment for large parts of the Global South improved.

Milanović makes an important point, though it risks exaggeration by his insistence that because Globalization II brought a higher GDP per worker, the workers are better off and exploited less.

They may well be better off in many ways, but they are likely exploited more.

Because he forgoes a rigorous class analysis, he assumes that gain in GDP per worker goes automatically to the worker. Most of it surely does not; if it did, capital would not have shifted to the Global South. Instead, most of the GDP per capita goes to the capitalist — foreign or domestic. Capital would not migrate to the former colonies if it garnered a lower rate of exploitation.

But engagement with manufacturing in Globalization II, rather than resource extraction or handicraft, certainly provides workers in the former colonies with greater employment, better wages, and more opportunity to parlay their labor power into a more advantageous position — a fact that nearly all development theorists from right to left should concede.

Structural changes in capitalism — the rapid mobility and ease of mobility of capital, the opening of new lower wage markets, a revolution in the means and costs of transportation — have shifted manufacturing and its potential benefits for workers from its location in richer countries to a new location in poorer countries, creating a new leveling between workers in the North and South.

Denying or neglecting this reality has led many leftists — like John Bellamy Foster — to support the “labor aristocracy” thesis as a reason to ignore or demean the potentially militant role of workers in the advanced capitalist countries. As one of the strongest voices in support of the revolutionary potential of the colonial workers and peasants, Lenin was scathingly critical of elements of the working class who were indirectly privileged by the wealth accumulated from the exploitation of the colonies. Those “labor aristocrats” constituted an ideological damper on the class politics of Lenin’s time (and even today), but by no means gave a reason to deny the class’s revolutionary potential. Certainly, the ruling classes of the Great Powers employed that relative privilege and many other ploys to further exploit their domestic workers to the fullest extent and discourage their rebellion.

Bellamy and others want to deny the revolutionary potential of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries in order to support the proposition that the principal contradiction today is between the US, Europe, and Japan and the countries of the Global South. Bellamy endorses the Monthly Review position taken as far back as the early 1960s: “Some Marxist theorists in the West took the position, most clearly enunciated by Sweezy, that revolution, and with it, the revolutionary proletariat and the proper focus of Marxist theory, had shifted to the third world or the Global South.”

While frustration with the lack of working-class militancy (worldwide) is understandable and widespread, it does not change the dynamics of revolutionary change — the decisive role of workers in replacing the existing socio-economic system. Nor does it dismiss the obligation to stand with the workers, the peasants, the unemployed, and the déclassé wherever they may be — within either the Great Powers or the former colonies.

Just as revolutionary-pessimism fostered the romance of third-world revolution among Western left-wing intellectuals in the 1960s, today it is the foundation for another romantic notion — multipolarity as the rebellion of the Global South. Like its Cold War version, it sees a contradiction between former colonies and the Great Powers of our time as superseding the contradiction between powerful monopoly corporations and the people.

Of course, richer capitalist states and their ruling classes do all they can to protect or expand any advantages they may enjoy over other states — rich or poor — including economic advantages. But for the workers of rich or poor states, the decisive question is not a question of sovereignty, not a question of defending their national bourgeoisie, or their elites, but of ending exploitation, of combatting capital.

The outcome of the global competition between Asian or South American countries and their richer Western counterparts over market share or the division of surplus value has no necessary connection with the well-being of workers in the sweatshops of the various rivals. This is a fact that many Western academics seem to miss.

Thirdly, Milanović clearly sees the demise of Globalization II — the globalization of our time:

The international wave of globalization that began over thirty years ago is at its close. Recent years have seen increased tariffs from the United States and the European Union; the creation of trade blocs; strong limits on the transfer of technology to China, Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” countries; the use of economic coercion, including import bans and financial sanctions; severe restrictions on immigration; and, finally, industrial policies with the implied subsidization of domestic producers.

Again, he is right, though he fails to acknowledge the economic logic behind the origins of Globalization II, the conditions leading to its demise, and the forces shaping the post-globalization era. For Milanović, globalization’s end comes from policy decisions — not policy decisions forced on political actors — but simply policy preferences: “Trump fits that mold almost perfectly. He loves mercantilism and sees foreign economic policy as a tool to extract all kinds of concessions…” Thus, Trump’s disposition “explains” the new economic regimen; we need to look no deeper.

But Trump did not end globalization. The 2007-2009 economic crisis did.

Globalization was propelled by neoliberal restructuring combined with the flood of cheap labor entering the global market from the “opening” of the People’s Republic of China and the collapse of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Cheaper labor power means higher profits, everything else being the same.

With the subsequent orgy of overaccumulation and capital running wildly looking for even the most outlandish investment opportunities, it was almost inevitable that the economy would crash and burn from unfettered speculation.

And when it did in 2007-2009, it took trade growth with it and marked “paid” on globalization.

As I wrote in 2008:

 As with the Great Depression, the economic crisis strikes different economies in different ways. Despite efforts to integrate the world economies, the international division of labor and the differing levels of development foreclose a unified solution to economic distress. The weak efforts at joint action, the conferences, the summits, etc. cannot succeed simply because every nation has different interests and problems, a condition that will only become more acute as the crisis mounts…

“Centrifugal forces” generated by self-preservation were operant, pulling apart existing alliances, blocs, joint institutions, and common solutions. Trade agreements, international organizations, regulatory systems, and trust greased the wheels of global trade; distrust, competition, and a determination to push economic problems on others threw sand on those wheels.

Anticipating the period after the demise of globalization, I wrote in April of 2009:

To simplify greatly, a healthy, expanding capitalist order tends to promote intervals of global cooperation enforced by a hegemonic power and trade expansion, while a wounded, shrinking capitalist order tends towards autarky and economic nationalism. The Great Depression was a clear example of heightened nationalism and economic self-absorption.

The aftermath of the 2007-2009 Great Recession was one such example of “a wounded, shrinking capitalist order.”  And predictably, autarky and economic nationalism followed.

The tendency was exacerbated by the European debt crisis that drove a wedge between the European Union’s wealthier North and the poorer South. Similarly, Brexit was an example of the tendency to go it alone, substituting competition for cooperation. Ruling classes replaced “win-win” with zero-sum thinking.

The pace and intensity of international trade has never recovered.

While Milanović does not attend to it, this cycle of capitalist expansion, economic crisis, followed by economic nationalism (and often, war) recurs periodically.

In the late-nineteenth century, the global economy saw a vast restructuring of capitalism, with new technologies and rising productivity (and concomitant rises in rates of exploitation).The era also saw what economists cite as “a world-wide price and economic recession” from 1873 to 1879 (the Long Depression). In its wake, protectionism and trade wars broke out as everyone tried to dispose of their cheaper goods in other countries, only to be met with tariff barriers.

The imperialist “scramble for Africa” — so powerfully described by John Hobson and V. I. Lenin — raised the intensity of international competition and rivalry, while generating the foundation for economic growth and global trade with newly acquired colonies. This is the period that Milanović characterizes as Globalization I. A further aspect and stimulus of the rebirth of growth and trade was the massive armament programs mounted by the Great Powers. The unprecedented armament race — the “Dreadnought race” — served as an engine of growth, while exponentially increasing the danger of war (from 1880 to 1914 armament spending in Germany increased six-fold, in Russia three-fold, in Britain three-fold, in France double, source: The Bloody Trail of Imperialism, Eddie Glackin, 2015).

One could argue, similarly, that the 1930s were a period of depression and economic nationalism, following a broad, exuberant economic expansion. And as with the pre-World War I Globalization I, the contradictions were resolved with World War.

Is War our Destiny after the Demise of Globalization II?

Certainly, the historical parallels cited above suggest that wars often follow pronounced economic disruptions and the consequent rise of economic nationalism, though we must remember that events do not follow a mechanical pattern.

Yet if history is a great teacher, it certainly looks like the mounting contradictions of today’s capitalism point to intensifying rivalry and conflict. A March 24 Wall Street Journal headline screams: Trade War Explodes Across World at a Pace Not Seen in Decades!

The article notes that the infamous Smoot-Hawley (tariff) Act of 1930– a response to the Great Depression– was only rescinded after the war.

It also notes — correctly — that tariffs are not simply a Trump initiative. As of March 1, the Group of 20 have imposed 4500 import restrictions — up 75% since 2016 and increased 10-fold since 2008.

The World Trade Organization, responsible for organizing Globalization II has failed its calling. As the WSJ reports:

In February, South Korea and Vietnam imposed stiff new penalties on imports of Chinese steel following complaints from local producers about a surge of cut-price competition. Similarly, Mexico has begun an antidumping probe into Chinese chemicals and plastic sheets, while Indonesia is readying new duties on nylon used in packaging imported from China and other countries.

Even sanctions-hit Russia is seeking to stem an influx of Chinese cars, despite warm relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Russia in recent weeks increased a tax on disposing of imported vehicles, effectively jacking up their cost. More than half of newly sold vehicles in Russia are Chinese-made, compared with less than 10% before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

As tensions mount on the trade front, rearmament and political tensions are growing. War talk mounts and the means of destruction become more effective and greater in number. The US alone accounts for 43% of military exports worldwide, up from 35% in 2020. France is now the number two arms exporter, surpassing Russia. And, in over a decade, NATO has more than doubled the value of weapons imported.

European defense spending is expanding at rates unseen since the Cold War, in some cases since World War II. According to the BBC, “On 4 March European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced plans for an €800bn defence fund called The ReArm Europe Fund.”  Germany has eliminated all restraints on military spending in its budget. Likewise, the UK plans to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP in the next two years, while Denmark is aiming for 3% of GDP in the same period (growth rates consistent with those of the Great Powers before World War I, except for Germany).

Dangerously, centrist politicians in the EU are beginning to see rising military spending as a boost to a stuttering economy. As military Keynesianism takes hold, the possibility of global war increases, especially in light of the shifting alliances in the proxy war in Ukraine.

Even more ominously, Europe’s two nuclear powers — France and the UK — are seriously discussing the development of a European nuclear force independent of the US-controlled NATO nuclear capability.

At the same time, the incoming chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced readiness to supply more NATO powers with a nuclear capacity.

As war cries intensify, the EU Commission has issued a guidance that EU citizens should maintain 72 hours of emergency supplies to meet looming war dangers.

Of course, the continually escalating wave of tariffs, sanctions, and hostile words directed at The People’s Republic of China by the US and its allies threatens to break into open conflict and wider war, a war for which the PRC is quite understandably actively preparing.

As with previous World Wars, it is not so much — at this moment — who is right or wrong, but when the momentum toward war will become irreversible. Another imperialist war — for, in essence, that is what it would be — will be an unimaginable disaster. No issue is more vital to our survival than stopping this momentum toward global war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

The Associated Press called the race for Trump early Wednesday morning, ending one of the costliest and most turbulent campaign cycles in the nation’s history. The results promise to upend U.S. climate policy: In addition to returning a climate denier to the White House, voters also gave Republicans control of the Senate, laying the groundwork for attacks on everything from electric vehicles to clean energy funding and bolstering support for the fossil fuel industry.

“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” Trump said during his victory speech, referring to domestic oil and gas potential. The CEO of the American Petroleum Institute issued a statement saying that “energy was on the ballot, and voters sent a clear signal that they want choices, not mandates.”

The election results rattled climate policy experts and environmental advocates. The president-elect has called climate change “a hoax” and during his most recent campaign vowed to expand fossil fuel production, roll back environmental regulations, and eliminate federal support for clean energy. He has also said he would scuttle the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which is the largest investment in climate action in U.S. history and a landmark legislative win for the Biden administration. Such steps would add billions of tons of additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and hasten the looming impacts of climate change.

“This is a dark day,” Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “Donald Trump was a disaster for climate progress during his first term, and everything he’s said and done since suggests he’s eager to do even more damage this time.”

During his first stint in office, Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the 2016 international climate accord that guides the actions of more than 195 countries; rolled back 100-plus environmental rules; and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. While President Joe Biden reversed many of those actions and made fighting climate change a centerpiece of his presidency, Trump has pledged to undo those efforts during his second term with potentially enormous implications — climate analysts at Carbon Brief predicted that another four years of Trump would lead to the nation emitting an additional 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide than it would under his opponent. That’s on par with the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan. 

One of president-elect Trump’s primary targets will be rolling back the IRA, which is poised to direct more than a trillion dollars into climate-friendly initiatives. Two years into that decade-long effort, money is flowing into myriad initiatives, ranging from building out the nation’s electric vehicle charging network to helping people go solar and weatherize their homes. In 2023 alone, some 3.4 million Americans claimed more $8 billion in tax credits the law provides for home energy improvements. But Trump could stymie, freeze, or even eliminate much of the law. 

“We will rescind all unspent funds,” Trump assured the audience in a September speech at the Economic Club of New York. Last month, he said it would be “an honor” to “immediately terminate” a law he called the “Green New Scam.” 

Such a move would, however, require congressional support. While many House races remain too close to call, Republicans have taken control of the Senate. That said, any attempt to roll back the IRA may prove unpopular, because as much as $165 billion in the funding it provides is flowing to Republican districts. 

Still, Trump can take unilateral steps to slow spending, and use federal regulatory powers to further hamper the rollout process. As Axios noted, “If Trump wants to shut off the IRA spigot, he’ll likely find ways to do it.” Looking beyond that seminal climate law, Trump has plenty of other levers he can also pull that will adversely affect the environment  — efforts that will be easier with a conservative Supreme Court that has already undermined federal climate action. 

Trump has also thrown his support behind expanded fossil fuel production. He has long pushed for the country to “drill, baby, drill” and, in April, offered industry executives tax and regulatory favors in exchange for $1 billion in campaign support. Though that astronomical sum never materialized, The New York Times found that oil and gas interests donated an estimated $75 million to Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee, and affiliated committees. Fossil fuels were already booming under Biden, with domestic oil production higher than ever before, and Vice President Kamala Harris said she would continue producing them if she won. But Trump could give the industry a considerable boost by, for instance, re-opening more of the Arctic to drilling. 

Any climate chaos that Trump sows is sure to extend beyond the United States. The president-elect could attempt to once again abandon the Paris Agreement, undermining global efforts to address the crisis. His threat to use tariffs to protect U.S. companies and restore American manufacturing could upend energy markets. The vast majority of solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, for example, are made overseas and the prices of those imports, as well as other clean-energy technology, could soar. U.S. liquified natural gas producers worry that retaliatory tariffs could hamper their business. 

The Trump administration could also take quieter steps to shape climate policy, from further divorcing federal research functions from their rulemaking capacities to guiding how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies and responds to health concerns. 

Trump is all but sure to wreak havoc on federal agencies central to understanding, and combatting, climate change. During his first term, his administration gutted funding for research, appointed climate skeptics and industry insiders, and eliminated several scientific advisory committees. It also censored scientific data on government websites and tried to undermine the findings of the National Climate Assessment, the government’s scientific report on the risks and impacts of climate change to the country. Project 2025, the sweeping blueprint developed by conservative groups and former Trump administration officials, advances a similar strategy, deprioritizing climate science and perhaps restructuring or eliminating federal agencies that advance it.

“The nation and world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” Rachel Cleetus, the policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “The science on climate change is unforgiving, with every year of delay locking in more costs and more irreversible changes, and everyday people paying the steepest price.”

The president-elect’s supporters seem eager to begin their work. 

Mandy Gunasekara, a former chief of staff of the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first term, told CNN before the election that this second administration would be far more prepared to enact its agenda, and would act quickly. One likely early target will be Biden-era tailpipe emissions rules that Trump has derided as an electric vehicle “mandate.”  

During his first term, Trump similarly tried to weaken Obama-era emissions regulations. But the auto industry made the point moot when it sidestepped the federal government and made a deal with states directly, a move that’s indicative of the approach that environmentalists might take during his second term. Even before the election, climate advocates had begun preparing for the possibility of a second Trump presidency and the nation’s abandoning the global diplomatic stage on this issue. Bloomberg reported that officials and former diplomats have been convening secret conversations, crisis simulations, and “political wargaming” aimed at maximizing climate progress under Trump — an effort that will surely start when COP29 kicks off next week in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“The result from this election will be seen as a major blow to global climate action,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations climate chief from 2010 to 2016, in a statement. “[But] there is an antidote to doom and despair. It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth“

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The massive consequences Trump’s reelection could have on climate change on Nov 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis' program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work, a way to do it that seemed safe.

The solution for Garcia was a visa program that promised to benefit both migrating workers in desperate need of livable wages and U.S. farms in desperate need of affordable labor. But in many ways, the benefits to workers have remained a gamble while for farmers they're guaranteed.

Roth is a special case, a farmer and also a politician. For him, the program has served a dual purpose. It’s ensured the success of his business by providing a steady stream of workers. And it’s made it easier for him to adopt a harsher political stance on immigration at a time when he feels his party demands it.

Roth didn’t mention it on the House floor or broadcast it to his constituents, but the visa program made his farm mostly impervious to the provisions he’d rallied against in the past. As anxiety gripped communities of undocumented people and many of their employers, Roth Farms was going to be just fine.

The visa program turned out to be a lifeline for Roth. When Garcia reached for that same lifeline, it failed him.

Roth Farms dates back four generations to the late 1940s, but Rick Roth didn’t grow up thinking the family business would be his future. When he went off to Emory University in 1970 to study math, he figured he’d find himself working an office job, somewhere far from any fields.

“I thought, ‘Man, I'm too smart to be a farmer.’” But Roth said a mix of marijuana and malaise sent him off track. After he was placed on academic probation, he came home and asked his father to put him to work on the farm. To Roth’s surprise, he liked it. He was assigned easy jobs, like driving truckloads of radishes to the packing house. Though he’d often mess up basic tasks or show up late and hungover, his father’s workers knew that he could be the boss someday, and they treated him accordingly. Roth knew it, too. He also knew that if he went to work at some company, he’d start at the bottom, and there was no guarantee how far up he’d make it. Here, he had a clear path to the top.

Roth returned to Emory, finished his degree, and then came back to Roth Farms. His father gave him more responsibility, and within a few years he was overseeing harvest operations. With his crew leaders’ guidance, he’d earned his father’s respect and sensed that this might be permanent, that the farm could actually be his.

Sooner than he expected, it was. In 1984, his father had a heart attack. Two years later, he died. Roth still tears up, 40 years later, recalling his loss.

For a decade, the farm grew and prospered. Then, Roth faced his first major challenge. Back then, almost all of the farm’s workers were Black. But as the workers began aging out of farm labor, it was becoming harder to find new people to take their place. Though Roth had found reason to continue his father’s lucrative profession, he realized with some consternation that the people he employed in low-wage field jobs didn’t raise their own children to follow them: “No farmworker raises their kids to be farmworkers.”

Other Belle Glade farms were responding to the worker shortage by hiring newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Roth Farms hired a new Latino crew leader to help bring them in. By the end of the 1990s, “half of our employees working in seasonal jobs probably were illegal,” Roth said. “Everybody knew that.”

The immigrant workers Roth hired were young, strong and plentiful, and they were willing, he has said, to work for less money than Americans. That assumption brought trouble. By the late 1990s, nearly all of his workers were Latino, and in 1999, a group of nine of them filed a class action lawsuit against Roth for racial and national origin discrimination. They alleged that they earned up to $1.50 less per hour than the small remaining Black crew of a dozen or so workers. Roth at the time denied that any wage disparities were based on race.

The two sides reached a settlement, with Roth Farms agreeing to pay $124,000 to cover the additional wages the workers alleged they were owed. Roth declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As the farm continued to benefit from a fairly steady stream of workers from Mexico, Roth became convinced that those workers should be entitled to legal status. He felt that farms like his couldn’t just keep on hiring undocumented immigrants forever, or at least they shouldn’t have to. He began making treks to Washington, D.C., to advocate for an easier path for undocumented workers to become legal ones.

The bills that would have done that didn’t pass. But Roth kept up his advocacy efforts, reiterating that U.S. citizens would never return to farm work, even with higher wages, and that without immigrant workers, the U.S. would need to begin importing more food.

In 2011, Florida lawmakers began deliberating a series of bills modeled after a recent Arizona law that would make it a crime to be undocumented in Florida, allow police to check people’s immigration status and crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. The Arizona law, and similar ones in Alabama and Georgia, played out as anticipated. Workers left. Fields of vegetables rotted.

One of the Florida bills also would have required private employers to run all hires through E-Verify, the system for checking legal work status, and imposed fines on companies that employ undocumented immigrants. In response, Roth intensified his public opposition. Those bills failed.

When Congress later that year considered the Legal Workforce Act, including an E-Verify requirement, Roth again spoke against it, telling the Palm Beach Post: “This is a repetitive job for people who don't speak the language. These people pick the crops for other people who have air-conditioned jobs.”

Generations of Garcia’s family members had worked on farms, but he didn’t grow up thinking it was an inevitability. He wanted to go to college, maybe even become a doctor.

He was in high school when he met Enriquez, who was 15 at the time and a guest at his cousin’s wedding. She was struck by how serious he was, and how smart. No matter her question he had an answer.

Enriquez’s parents were strict. She liked to go out, much more than Garcia did, but she could only meet him in public with her parents in tow, at community gatherings or the annual festival celebrating the town’s patron saint. Otherwise, he could come to the family’s house.

By the time Garcia moved in with Enriquez and her parents, when she was 18 and he was 20, he’d had to give up on going to college. There was no money for that. He went to work in a local dairy, then to the fields and the vegetable packing houses.

A year after he moved in, Garcia and Enriquez married. He didn’t want to start a family too soon, though. He wanted to save up for a house of their own. They made it three years. A house was still a distant possibility, but Garcia took the pregnancy as the best news.

The baby was 6 months old when Enriquez became convinced that something wasn’t right. Isaac was not developing the way he should. She started to look for help. Eventually, she brought Isaac to a private doctor, who said the baby needed to see a neurologist.

That one appointment was nearly a week’s salary. The neurologist scheduled a scan of the child’s brain. Enriquez and Garcia cobbled together what they could, figuring that it was just enough to pay for the scan and cover the bus fare to the facility for her, Isaac and his godmother, who wanted to come along. But when they got there, the scan was more than they were expecting, and more than they had. Isaac’s godmother came up with the remainder, but they were left with no money to get home. They found a bus willing to let them pay the fare at the destination. On the way, Enriquez called a friend to meet the bus and lend her the fare.

The more stressed her husband got, the quieter he became. And in the weeks after the scan, he said very little. He was also working constantly. The neurologist had explained that Isaac had cerebral palsy, which meant he would need a speech therapist, physical therapy and a nutritionist. The rehab facility was an hour and a half away by bus. The therapy sessions cost 1,200 pesos, or about $60, every week. The most Garcia could bring home each week, working as much overtime as he could, was 2,000 pesos. Typically it was more like 1,500.

Just as they got help covering the cost of Isaac’s treatment, he was diagnosed with a second condition, autism. The new medication cost more than what they’d been spending to manage his cerebral palsy.

The need for Garcia to go north was no longer merely important. It was urgent. He turned to his wife and said: “I have to find another solution.” And that’s when the H-2A visa came up.

After years of lobbying against various laws, Roth began to wonder if he could do more for farmers by joining the Legislature rather than fighting it. In 2016, he announced his run for a Florida house seat.

Not long after Roth won his race, Donald Trump entered the White House. Roth wholeheartedly supported Trump, but he would soon find that the president’s immigration agenda created a new problem for his farm. “With Donald Trump, there were not a lot of illegals coming to America,” Roth acknowledged, which aligns with the low numbers of immigrants who crossed the border during much of the former president’s first year in office. “We started to have to say, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’”

For a time, he did what he’d always done: He fought actions that would harm undocumented workers and their employers. He voted against a 2019 E-Verify bill pushed by DeSantis. But he was more quiet about his opposition, he said, refraining from the strong language he’d previously used. The bill died in committee.

It was around that time that Roth, along with his son, who’d taken over the day-to-day operations of the farm, found a fix. It was available to only a sliver of the state’s employers: an agricultural visa program called H-2A.

The program, which allows the U.S. farming industry to bring in foreign laborers on a temporary basis, had been around in some form since the 1940s. But until recently Roth had little need for it – his workers, documented and not, came back every year. Plus, he had considered the program’s requirements to pay more than the minimum wage and cover the cost of transportation from Mexico and housing in Belle Glade too expensive. But, like many other farmers who’d struggled with labor shortages, he came around to it. The program could dependably deliver legal workers. H-2A visa certifications have increased fourfold in the last decade, and nowhere are there more of these workers than in Florida.

“H-2A,” Roth said, “was really the only choice.”

When Florida’s anti-immigration SB 1718 came around in 2023, Roth had an almost entirely H-2A workforce — which made it easier for him to support legislation that purported to push out undocumented workers. As for how to explain his change of heart to constituents: “Given the border crossing that’s going on, we did need to send a strong message,” he said. “If you're illegal, don't come to Florida. We're gonna make it tough on you.”

But some of his constituents couldn’t help but get a different message: “We’re going to make it tough on your workers.” They told Roth that the law itself, not the far-away border crossings, posed the immediate threat to their livelihoods.

Eventually, the potential for the law’s harm began to sink in. Weeks after his vote for SB 1718, in the summer of 2023, Roth showed up at meetings across his district on a campaign of damage control. “I apologize to you for this bad bill,” he told a group gathered at a local church, with the help of a Spanish interpreter.

Roth made numerous statements in public and private meetings that the law is predominantly political, intended “to help a governor run for president.” He said it had been laced with “purposeful loopholes” to protect employers from too much harm. For one, it doesn’t apply to small businesses with fewer than 25 workers. But chief among the loopholes, Roth said, is that the E-Verify requirement doesn’t extend to undocumented immigrants who already have jobs. “If you like your job, keep your job,” he’s become fond of saying.

Roth admits that, even today, he may have longtime workers who are undocumented. When workers in his own packing house started asking questions about the law, he said he “instructed all my management what to say, and I just told them very clearly, ‘This new bill that you're hearing all this talk about does not apply to workers that already have a job.’”

The full impact of SB 1718 is still not clear. Its E-Verify provisions did not take full effect until July. For some employers, it’s made life more difficult. “I can’t grow,” said Mark Baker, who owns a 40-year-old landscape and plant nursery in Delray Beach. He lamented that he can’t use the H-2A program, since his workers aren’t temporary. “I want to open another office, but I can’t because I can’t even staff the office I have.”

Despite having voted to crack down on immigrants in Florida, Roth maintains he still supports broader immigration legalization and insists it’s up to Washington to take action. He also admits he thinks such a fix is far off. What he knows for sure is that for farms like his, H-2A is working, that it incentivizes workers to come here the right way — with the assurance that worker and farmer alike will be protected.

That September 2023 morning started like so many others. Enriquez caught the bus to take Isaac to physical therapy. This time her husband came along. They stopped to eat something on the way back home, then Garcia collected the bags he had packed.

If he was nervous or frustrated or scared, he didn’t show it.

Garcia’s parents picked up the three of them to drive Garcia to the bus station. It would be tortuous for him to be away from his family, but the consolation was that the job would only last five months. It was dusk when they got to the bus stop, and they couldn’t linger. It was unsafe to be out in the dark. They hugged him tight. “Take care of our boy,” he said.

Garcia spent the following days sorting out paperwork with a labor subcontractor who specializes in recruiting Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. He knew a little about where he was headed: Belle Glade. His wife’s aunt had immigrated to a nearby town years earlier. Once he arrived, he visited with her before settling into his barracks-style lodging near the sugar cane fields, which happened to be just a few miles from Roth’s fields. Garcia texted his wife that he would try his best to get some rest that night, since he would start work in the morning.

The following afternoon, Sept. 13, 2023, Enriquez was just getting back from taking Isaac to therapy when someone called from Florida. It was a woman from the company that had hired Garcia. Her husband was fine, the woman said. He had fainted in the fields, she explained, which was something that happened from time to time, because of heat nearing 90 degrees. But no, he couldn’t talk to her right then. He was still unconscious. The woman gave Enriquez the name of the hospital where he was recovering.

As soon as they hung up, Enriquez called her aunt, who headed to the hospital. But when she arrived, she was told that Garcia had been transferred, to Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the hours that followed, the calls to Enriquez accelerated. Amid all the ringing and buzzing, someone arranged that night for a video call so she could see her husband. He still hadn’t woken up. She spoke softly to him, trying to hold back her panic over the cables and tubes that crisscrossed his body, including one helping him breathe.

It was very early the next morning when the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez’s permission to resuscitate her husband. The words instinctively came to her — yes, save him — and she sprang into action. She realized she would need to somehow quickly cross the border to get to her husband. It seemed as if one minute, she was handing off Isaac to her mother and the next she was 900 miles away at the border crossing at Matamoros, Garcia’s mother by her side.

The two women had to wait on the Mexican side of the bridge for several hours. As they sat outside in the middle of the night, the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez to agree to resuscitate her husband. Again she said yes.

The nurses ventured one more question. In the event of a third resuscitation, would Enriquez have the same answer? Her husband was no longer well, they said. He was suffering. Enriquez weighed the pain in her soul. No, she said. Not a third time.

The border crossing took all day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to ask so many questions to approve the two women for the humanitarian permit. Hours passed. Enriquez was aware that authorities kept trying to reach people at the hospital to confirm her husband’s condition.

Finally, the permits were approved. As the two women left the CBP building in Brownsville, Texas, an official saw them out, holding open the door. It would be the first time either woman had crossed into the United States. All the man said was, “I’m very sorry.”

Roth had heard about the death of a worker on a nearby farm. He said it was sad. He also said one of his first thoughts was one of worry, about what state or federal agencies would do in response. “It's a big deal that somebody died,” Roth added. But “the government tends to overreact.”

In late 2023, Roth returned to Tallahassee to serve his final session in the Florida House before he termed out. He has plans to run for state Senate in 2026. Among the last bills he co-sponsored as a member of the House was one that would prevent local governments in Florida from implementing workplace heat protections.

It was introduced in reaction to a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would have required water, breaks and shade for outdoor workers. Roth had joined a chorus of business groups pushing forcefully to ban the local labor ordinance. “I’m a little bit insulted that some government bureaucrat thinks they need to help me take care of my employees,” he told a local Fox affiliate.

Roth had supported a bill four years earlier to require heat protections for student athletes, but he rejected the idea that Florida should impose protections for workers. He told ProPublica that employers don’t need state or local government to require safeguards, since employers already have every incentive to protect their workers. Given the shortage of workers across the state, he said, “do you really think they're not taking care of their employees?”

He also pointed out that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration already regulates workplaces, including fining those that don’t offer heat protections. And ultimately, he said, it’s the responsibility of workers and their crew leaders to make sure they’re not putting themselves at risk. On his own farm, he said, workers know when they need to take breaks.

On March 12, 2024, days after the Florida Legislature passed the anti-heat protection bill, OSHA revealed the findings of its investigation into Garcia’s death. It determined that the Belle Glade company that hired Garcia and other H-2A workers to local farms had failed to adequately protect workers from the heat.

“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure,” the OSHA area director said in a statement. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”

For McNeill Labor Management Inc.’s failures to protect Garcia and to report his death to the government, OSHA issued the company a fine of less than $28,000.

Owner Shannon McNeill told ProPublica that his company, which employs 700 mostly H-2A workers at the height of operations, provides workers with all of the protections that safety advocates call for, including water, shade and breaks. He also said that the company is now easing new hires more slowly into full-day shifts, a practice that OSHA already recommended. But he is contesting OSHA’s determination that the company is responsible for Garcia’s death.

McNeill Labor Management had paid for Garcia’s body to be returned to Mexico and his funeral expenses. On a morning in July, before a heavy rain set in, Nohemí Enriquez left her son with her mother near the church in the town of Pueblo Nuevo and drove out of the town center to visit her husband’s grave in a small, orderly cemetery. The flowers she placed there on her last visit had become dried and shriveled. She took them from the vase and threw them away, angry at herself for not bringing fresh ones. And then she prayed. “For those I love and who loved me,” his gravestone read.

One week earlier, on July 19, Roth was in the audience as Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee about “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” He promised to deliver on a commitment to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Roth, a party delegate from Florida, had spent the day before dancing and laughing on the floor with other delegates, as well as shedding a few tears. “It was very emotional for me when Trump came out,” he said.

Asked a week later if the mass deportations would do harm to the agricultural industry in Florida, he responded with confidence that Trump would not actually engage in an indiscriminate mass deportation program. But even if that did happen, he said, there will always be a supply of H-2A workers waiting. “We'll figure it out,” he said. “We'll get more.”

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

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In one of its most direct and sweeping warnings to date, the Biden administration told Israeli government officials on Sunday that if they did not improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza in the next 30 days, the U.S. could reevaluate its military support, which has flowed largely without pause for more than a year.

In a letter to Israel’s ministers of defense and strategic affairs, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said they were writing to “underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.” The letter was first reported by Israeli media and confirmed Tuesday by the State Department’s top spokesperson.

Last month, ProPublica detailed how the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded this past spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. Those experts determined that weapons sales should be halted under a U.S. law, known as the Foreign Assistance Act, that requires the government to cut off military aid to a country that is blocking humanitarian efforts.

Blinken rejected their findings and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not arbitrarily blocking aid. After the U.S. government raised concerns, the Israelis promised to allow more aid to flow.

Those pledges do not appear to have been met. According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts in the past year. The amount of aid has dropped by more than 50% since the spring. Israelis halted imports to Palestinian civilians, denied or impeded 90% of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza last month, and imposed onerous new requirements for trucks carrying critical supplies, the letter says.

When asked about ProPublica’s previous reporting in September, Blinken told morning news programs he had evaluated input from several sources and made a decision that the Israelis weren’t deliberately blocking the aid. “We found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance,” he allowed. “We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.”

The State Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment Tuesday, but in a press conference, agency spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the letter was the latest effort to pressure the Israelis to address the crisis and that their improvements in the spring did not last. “The levels have not been sustained,” Miller said. “We are going to respond to events as they happen.”

“We know that it’s possible to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” he added.

Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned in protest earlier this year, said Sunday’s letter is a “clear acknowledgement that the administration knows” the Foreign Assistance Act is being violated. “This,” she added, “renders Israel ineligible to receive American weapons or security assistance.”

Responding to a similar criticism, Miller said, “We believe it’s appropriate to give them another 30 days to cure the problem.”

The humanitarian crisis has reached a critical stage, experts warn. The United Nations and other aid groups have become increasingly vocal about the deteriorating situation ahead of the winter. And an Al Jazeera documentary released in late September showed how Palestinian children had died of malnutrition.

On Monday, an Israeli military unit said it had allowed 30 trucks through a crossing in northern Gaza. “Israel is not preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, with an emphasis on food, into Gaza,” the unit wrote. “Israel will continue to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, while simultaneously destroying Hamas’ military and governance infrastructures.” A spokesperson for the Israeli government did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the letter, Blinken and Austin make several specific demands of the Israelis, including allowing a minimum of 350 trucks per day through the four border crossings and opening up a fifth. They also warned the Israelis to not force civilians to evacuate from northern Gaza to the south.

“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures,” they wrote, “may have implications for U.S. policy.”

In addition, they called for a new channel to discuss civilian deaths. “Our engagements to date have not produced the necessary outcomes,” they wrote. At least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli operations since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack last year, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, an agency in the Hamas-controlled government.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Brett Murphy.

Rwanda is holding a week of commemorations to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a period of around 100 days in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias while powerful countries, including the United States, stood by and refused to stop the mass killings. Shortly after the genocide, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame took power and has since ruled Rwanda with an iron fist, leading a harsh crackdown on the press and opposition groups. We look back at the 1994 genocide and discuss the country’s trajectory since then with two guests: Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton, and Noël Zihabamwe, a survivor of the genocide whose parents were killed during the violence in 1994 and whose brothers were disappeared by the Kagame regime in 2019. Zihabamwe now lives in Australia and runs the African Australian Advocacy Center.

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

Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

The Law of Unintended Consequences establishes that actions can have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. This is something that Israel’s Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu should have remembered before launching an offensive against Hamas that has cost so far more than 31,184 lives –most of them innocent women and children– without achieving his objective.

Recently, after having passed the 150-day mark of the war, the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy asked the questions that every Israeli should be asking themselves: “Are we better off now than on October 6, 2023? Are we stronger? Safer? Do we have greater deterrence? Are we more popular? Prouder of ourselves? Are we more united? Better in any way?” Levy’s answer to all these questions is: “unequivocally no.”

More than 11,500 children have been killed. And yet, the Israel Defense Forces continue to be supplied with arms, while pitifully scant food is provided for almost two million Palestinians, trapped in an inferno that not even Dante could have imagined. How can we become so morally blind that we are unable to see the tragic absurdity of this situation?

Who is profiting from this situation? Only the forces of evil and destruction. Despite pressure from Israeli families to stop the war and bring the hostages home, Netanyahu has shown his unwillingness to hear the advice and pressure from his main ally and has decided to continue the attacks on Gazans despite increasing international pressure and condemnation. The cost of this policy has been enormous.

At the beginning of the conflict, Israel had widespread international support, but this support has quickly eroded because most of the world sees that what is happening in Gaza as a humanitarian nightmare.

As Thomas L. Frieman (not exactly a friend of Hamas) has written, “I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinians civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.”

This doesn’t faze Netanyahu, whose own political survival rests on the continuation of the war, a course of action that will certainly affect President Biden’s political future. Only now, after several months of unceasing attacks on civilians, homes and infrastructure, have President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris been vocal on the Palestinians’ urgent need for food and medical care, needs that are totally unsatisfied.

Undaunted, Netanyahu mocks international criticism for his actions. “Reports this week that Israel plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes in Maale Adumin, Efrat, and Kedar fly in the face of international law,” said in a statement Volker Türk, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights responding to the Israeli government latest settlement expansion plans.

Türk also said that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by “effectively transferring civilian population of Israel to the occupied territory while displacing the Palestinian population from their land. Such transfers amount to a war crime that may engage the individual responsibility of those involved.”

The U.N. report also says that the policies of the current Israeli government appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the state of Israel. “The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state,” said Türk.

Alon Pinkas, an Israeli diplomat and writer, wrote recently in Haaretz about the ongoing conflict in Gaza, “…what do we expect from our leaders? To set a course for the nation, based on moral clarity. To display the ability to set priorities, define choices, highlight opportunities and persuade you, the people, that the benefits outweigh the risks, that the pros outnumber the cons, that the future holds promise and that this will all be done with utmost responsibility, care, caution and seriousness. I leave it to you to decide whether this is the case.” Based on these criteria, Netanyahu has been a resounding failure.

Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his intention to totally eliminate Hamas. He has gained, instead, increasing condemnation for his policies and widespread and renewed demands for a two-state solution to the conflict.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

A diplomatic cable sent Monday from the U.S. Embassy in Israel offers an unusually candid assessment of the humanitarian situation in Rafah, a southern city in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

The cable, written by officials with the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, warns about the potential effects of an all-out Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians, driven south by Israeli evacuation orders, are sheltering from Israel’s war on Gaza.

“A potential escalation of military operations in within Southern Gaza’s Rafah Governorate could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response, multiple relief actors have warned USAID’s Levant Disaster Assistance Response Team,” the cable says.

“Ahead of the proposed military operation, the impact of hostilities has stretched the capacity of Gaza’s health system beyond its limit.”

In its “Key Points,” the cable says, “An offensive in Rafah would likely block the entry and transport of fuel and life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout the enclave, rendering critical infrastructure inoperable and leaving people in Gaza without food, medicine, shelter, and water.”

Though highlighting the consequences of an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, the cable also includes a more subtle warning: Rafah is well past the point of crisis — with Israeli bombs already raining down.

“As of mid-February relief actors had reported escalating panic and increased breakdown of social order in Rafah amid an uptick in aerial bombardment,” the cable says. The communique stresses that Gaza’s health system is already in a dire state: “Ahead of the proposed military operation, the impact of hostilities has stretched the capacity of Gaza’s health system beyond its limit.”

Marked “sensitive but unclassified,” the cable was sent Monday morning from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem’s Office of Palestinian Affairs to State Department officials in Washington, with copies sent to, among others, the National Security Council, secretary of defense, and the CIA.

The cable comes as calls were growing for the Biden administration to oppose an Israeli offensive in Rafah and, more broadly, orchestrate a ceasefire in the war that, since October 7, has seen about 2,000 Israelis and 30,000 Palestinians killed.

Asked about the cable, the State Department did not immediately responded to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for USAID said the agency doesn’t comment on internal documents and pointed to a remarks made last week by Samantha Power, the agency’s administrator, in the West Bank. “The United States has been clear that we cannot support a campaign in Rafah without a credible plan to protect civilians who are living there,” Power said. “And we have seen no credible plan to move these people who are in Rafah to safety, to get them adequate shelter, and to relocate the humanitarian operations.”

“No Viable Evacuation Options”

On February 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to prepare evacuation plans for Rafah in anticipation of a ground offensive. But there’s nowhere for civilians to go, a point acknowledged in the diplomatic cable.

“At present, there appear to be no viable evacuation options for the 1.5 million in Rafah,” says the diplomatic cable.

Over half of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are currently sheltering in the environs of Rafah, which has swelled to more than seven times its normal population, the cable notes. The Rafah Governorate, the southernmost of four regions of the Gaza Strip, covers about 25 square miles, which the cable says is roughly the same size as Syracuse, New York, with its 150,000 people.

Palestinians from other parts of Gaza fled south as the Israel Defense Forces began its military campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attacks. Israel said it opened evacuation corridors, though reports of fighting along the routes was routine.

As internally displaced people, or IDPs, passed through the governorate north of Rafah, according to the cable, they were forced to leave their belongings behind.

“In Southern Gaza’s Khan Younis Directorate, the IDF have repeatedly screened and stripped IDPs of most of their possessions,” the cable says, adding that Palestinians “spent months” acquiring basic necessities in Rafah, such as blankets.

The memo warns that while some people want to make the dangerous trip back to locales further north in Gaza, “a large portion of those residing in Rafah, including elderly populations, exhausted IDPs, and those with reduced mobility, would likely remain in the governorate during the potential military operation due to lack of viable alternatives, heightening the risk of mass casualties.” 

“The World Wants Us to Die”

A full-fledged ground offensive in Rafah could have devastating consequences for humanitarian aid throughout the Gaza Strip. Since the October 7 attacks, the Gaza Strip only has two operational border crossings — both in the Rafah Governorate.

Rafah borders the Sinai Peninsula and is home to a crossing with Egypt. The governorate also has a crossing with Israel, called Kerem Shalom.

In a section of the diplomatic cable titled “Rafah Offensive to Halt All Humanitarian Aid to Gaza,” the authors wrote, “A military operation in Rafah may restrict humanitarian assistance from entering the governorate and hinder relief actors stationed in Rafah from reaching people in other areas of the enclave.”

“A military operation in Rafah may restrict humanitarian assistance from entering the governorate and hinder relief actors stationed in Rafah from reaching people in other areas.”

Rafah is already the site of an ongoing Israeli bombardment. The area has been pounded by airstrikes for weeks. Following a set of Israeli airstrikes in Rafah that killed at least 13 people in February, the Biden administration said that it did not constitute a “full-scale offensive.”

“It is not our assessment that this air strike is the launch of a full-scale offensive happening in Rafah,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. He added that “we do not support a full-scale military operation there going ahead.”

The U.S. is unaware when the full-scale operation might happen. “As of March 1, GoI” — government of Israel — “officials have not indicated a specific timeline for the potential military operation,” the cable says.

The cable quotes aid partners on the ground in Gaza, one of whom warned that transiting out of Rafah had become difficult and dangerous because of highly congested roads: “Another partner noted hopelessness among its staff who reported, ‘the world wants us to die.’”

Update: March 5, 2024, 10:59 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include comment from USAID made after publication.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

In Dnipro, locals brought flowers, toys, and other items to the ruins of the building that was destroyed in the January 14, 2023, missile strike. Six of the killed were children, while dozens were injured in the strike, which occurred on a weekend when many residents were in the building.

Although Moscow denies targeting civilians since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian missiles, drones, and rockets regularly strike residential buildings and civilian infrastructure across the country.

Meanwhile, Zelenskiy’s office said the president will travel to Davos on January 15 to meet with security officials representing 81 countries and international organizations who are in the resort town to discuss his 10-point “peace formula.”

“In the course of the visit, the president will meet with the presidents of both houses of parliament, party leaders, and the president of Switzerland, take part in the World Economic Forum and hold a series of bilateral meetings,” his office said.

Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskiy’s office, had arrived in Davos and addressed the gathering, held one day ahead of the opening there of the World Economic Forum. It was the fourth international meeting to discuss the Ukrainian “peace formula.”

Meanwhile, Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskiy’s office, addressed a gathering of security officials representing 81 countries and international organizations in Davos, one day ahead of the opening there of the World Economic Forum. It was the fourth international meeting to discuss the Ukrainian “peace formula.”

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, who co-chaired the talks with Yermak, told a news conference that Russia should eventually be brought in to such talks, but he added that the time was not right for that yet.

"We will need to find a path to include Russia in the process. There will be no peace without Russia having its word to say," Cassis said. "But this does not mean -- quite the contrary -- that we should just be depressed and sit there and wait for Russia to do something. Every minute that we wait, dozens of civilians in Ukraine are killed or wounded. We have no right to wait forever.”

Participants said the Davos sessions are focused on criteria needed to end the fighting, bring about withdrawal of Russian troops, achieve justice for crimes committed during the war, and to prevent a restarting of the conflict in the future, according to AFP.

In a post on Telegram, Yermak said he briefed delegates “about the consequences of recent massive rocket attacks by Russia on Ukrainian cities.”

“A simple cease-fire will not be the end of Russian aggression in Ukraine,” Yermak wrote, “but will only give the aggressor a pause to accumulate strength. This is definitely not the way to peace. The Russians do not want peace. They want dominance.”

Yermak echoed remarks earlier by Cassis stating that it was important that China – an ally of Russia – participated in any future peace formula talks.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang is scheduled to lead his country’s delegation to Davos later this week.

Asked if Zelenskiy would meet Li, Yermak told reporters, "Let's see."

Zelenskiy last year presented his 10-point peace formula that includes the withdrawal of Russian forces and the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, among other things.

Also on the diplomatic front, France's new foreign minister, Stephane Sejourne, stopped in Berlin on January 14 following his visit to Kyiv, meeting his German counterpart and reiterating both nations’ commitment to aid Ukraine for as long as required.

"We are in full agreement...that we must support the Ukrainians for as long as necessary," Sejourne told a news conference alongside German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

Baerbock said Germany and France would remain "on the side of Ukraine as long as necessary, until Russia has withdrawn from Ukrainian territory."

She warned, however, that Russian President Vladimir Putin "does not want to stop" and "is not stopping" his war with Ukraine.

The meeting of the two European Union powerhouse nations comes as the bloc is scheduled to hold a gathering on February 1 in an effort to unblock the 50 billion euro ($54.8 billion) Ukraine aid package that has been vetoed by the right-wing leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban.

The Kherson region military administration on January 14 reported 103 artillery strikes overnight, in addition to hundreds of mortar shells and drone attacks. Twenty-eight shells reportedly fell in the city of Kherson. Six civilians were reportedly injured in the strikes.

In its daily briefing on January 14, the Ukrainian General Staff reported 61 combat incidents in the previous 24 hours, with particularly heavy fighting around the Donetsk regional city of Avdiyivka. In recent weeks, Russian forces have been fighting to surround the city and dislodge Ukrainian defenders.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

“The Serpent’s Eggs or Repetition of History”. Dry and oil pastel on paper. Jean Wyllys, 2023.

Lula’s new mandate got off to a rocky start. When sworn in on 1 January this year, he vowed to rebuild a country in “terrible ruins”. But it wasn’t just ruins he had to deal with. There were things that lay in waiting, many serpent’s eggs to be hatched in different nests within the administration he would be taking over. Yet instead of a coherent stance that would take consequences into account, it seems that Lula has decided to rest on his laurels as a pragmatist and deal maker, which means selecting piecemeal actions and consorting and making compromises with people who are set on undermining what he says he stands for. His election pledges of macroeconomic growth, tackling inequality and hunger, increased minimum wage and wealth taxes, combatting poverty, state-funded social housing, and reining in deforestation (net-zero deforestation), and illegal mining look good against a Bolsonaro background but they could only work within a comprehensive human rights framework which would have to include the grave global situation of ecocide. In a country where the parallel reality of social media overshadows everything as a kind of fake mass-based democracy, Lula’s achievements one year on don’t fit well with the promise he held out.

As the person now most responsible for the world’s biggest rainforest, the Amazon, Lula represented a last, if not the last chance for saving it, and hence the planet, if only he had dared really to challenge the whole system that has brought Earth to the brink of five main tipping points: collapse of huge ice sheets in Greenland, demise of the West Antarctic, thawing permafrost, death of coral reefs, and slowing of the ocean current known as the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, with all the catastrophic cascade effects involved as these systems and others are so closely interconnected. Coming after the nightmare of the Bolsonaro government, he seemed to be about the only politician in the world with the apparent moral and diplomatic stature to try to use his geopolitical power in the service of truly universal human rights. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons—after all he is an old man—he didn’t accept the big challenges of a new radical leadership that might have helped to lift global politics out of the morass it’s in.

The morass gave its first menacing sign, on the domestic front, with the orchestrated attack on the country’s legislative, executive, and judicial headquarters in Brasília on 8 January 2023, deliberately referring back to the attack on the US Congress two years earlier. But there’s a crucial difference. The US military declared its commitment to democracy, at least within the USA. This isn’t exactly the position of Lula’s defense minister, José Múcio Monteiro, whose relationship with the military is very friendly. And this particular military is one with deep roots in more than twenty years (1964-1985) of military dictatorship, unpunished crimes, and recent cossetting by Jair Bolsonaro, an unashamed admirer of the dictatorial regime who appointed military personnel to key positions of the civilian administration. It was no surprise that, in January, the Armed Forces allowed protesters to camp in a military security area and protected them from arrest, which then fuelled coup rumors in the social networks.

With the attack on the Planalto Palace, Múcio notoriously said he was trying to “rein in” the plotters—who were calling for military intervention that would usher in a new military regime—by throwing fuel on the fire and persuading Lula to use the so-called GLO (Law and Order Assurance), a legal device that allows the president to call for an operation “conducted by the Armed Forces” and whose uses, especially under previous PT governments, has encouraged the military’s re-emergence as a principal actor in the Brazilian political sphere. And it’s still biding its time.

The far-right attacks were well organized and must also be seen as part of an international movement, as trumpeted by the symbolism of 8 January. There was no hiding the pally coziness of the Brazilian and US far right, with Steve Bannon, friend of the Bolsonaro family, guiding the political process in Brazil for the last ten years. The aim in Brasília was to get at least a million demonstrators to do as much damage as possible so the army would be called in to restore order (read: crush democratic institutions). And the attackers were brought to Brasília in buses paid for by donors in ten states, notable among them big names in the agribusiness sector. Those who didn’t travel to Brasília blocked fuel supplies and supermarket supplies, trying to create chaos through scarcity of essential products, as happened in Chile in September 1973.

Jair Bolsonaro may be barred from running for office until 2030, and he may be keeping a low profile while he’s facing criminal investigations but Bolsonarismo is alive and well in forms that aren’t easy to pinpoint and combat. Some spring from the self-described “Hate Cabinet”, an “ecosystem of lies” mainly run by his son Carlos, with a key aim of preparing for his 2022 election campaign against current president Lula, which draws on old violence and keeps creating new forms. It still exists, but not officially. Its financiers include a lot of people connected to agribusiness, mining, timber trafficking, and illegal deforestation in the Amazon and many of its employees, creators of content, were actually employed by the executive branch.

Not unrelated with the Hate Cabinet is the traditional media which, in turn is in cahoots with the evangelical churches. For example, the openly Bolsonarista Record TV, broadcasting to the whole country belongs to Edir Macedo, head of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who wants to create a “theocratic state”. Its hate speciality is demonising Afro-Brazilian religions like Umbanda and Candomblé, Jews (“Christ-killers”), Catholics (“devil worshippers”), Protestants (“false Christians”), and Muslims (“demonic”). Then there are TV channels like SBT, and the cable news channel Jovem Pan. The evangelical churches, accounting for more than 30% of the population are also using the pulpit to spread Hate Cabinet narratives. These churches especially in Rio de Janeiro, are associated with narco-Pentecostalism and paramilitary groups that, in some neighbourhoods, control gas distribution, cable TV, and even public transport.

The federal government is prioritizing its Brasil Sem Fome program, and of course it’s a basic, important measure when one Bolsonaro legacy was a population where 58% faces food insecurity in some or other degree, and 33% classified as having the most severe degree of “technical hunger”. This isn’t just a consequence of the pandemic, but also an absence of agrarian reform, a systematic dismantling of public policy, and rising food prices, all of which can be connected with fake news activity, especially disseminated racism because hunger disproportionately affects women, the Black population, rural dwellers and residents of the northern and northeastern areas, so 65% of households headed by dark-skinned individuals are living with food insecurity resulting from gender, racial, class relations and, in general, structural racism underpinned by constant misinformation and hate speech. So, if hunger is to be tackled effectively, all its causes must be identified and combatted, which would involve coherent public policies, fighting misinformation and its propagators, vocal and financial, regulating information in the social media to prevent the circulation of false information and hate speech, promoting culture, and the digital inclusion of Brazilians in such a way as to satisfy the “desire for truth”. It also requires prosecution of fake news propagators, which means strengthening the weakened executive and judicial branches of government, as well as restoring dignity to the heavily attacked institutions, Congress, and Supreme Court.

Brazilian professor David Nemer describes the relationship between misinformation and hate and how the enemy, often in racist guise, must be constructed. Without hate, misinformation isn’t so effective “But with a lot of hate, it goes very far, so it’s not surprising that far-right groups believe in white supremacy. It’s always demonizing minorities. They always have to build this enemy with that. Without the enemy, they don’t exist.” And now, the enemy has extended to Lula, the Supreme Court, and Congress. “They need all these enemies, because otherwise they just have no one. And they’re constantly building new enemies, because it’s the only way to keep their base motivated.” Fascists hate complexity because it challenges simplistic systems where Bolsonaro’s fanatical minister for Women, Family, and Human Rights (sic) Damares Alves can pronounce, “Boys should be dressed in blue and girls in pink”. Things must be kept pink and blue, black and white, which means hierarchies, primitive labeling, and always the exclusion of some.

In the creation of a parallel reality as a decoy against the real reality, misinformation meets ideology in the figures with interests to protect and the power of propagation: fossil fuel magnates, industrialists, big farmers and beef barons, armament profiteers, services moguls, big-time criminals, and so on. They are physically (and morally) destroying the country so they need to legitimise their rapacity, basically with arguments of a God-governed meritocracy with the help of ultra-fundamental religions, patria, family values (or control of reproduction), and unbridled freedom to snatch (resources and land) and then protect (by arming the predatory population) for themselves what they call private property, with all the drastic environmental effects entailed. As these effects worsen, violence against the dispossessed and protestors will only become more routine.

This is a culture war that reveals the shaky foundations of Lula’s alliance with the right and centre right to approve public policies. He may be confronting some of its sorties but he’s ignoring the war that could be the undoing of any progressive policies he has to introduce because they aren’t strong enough to stand alone. Some symptoms of the systemic disease are that all the accusations and charges against Bolsonaro, including crimes-against-humanity haven’t stopped him and his supporters; the Free Brazil Movement or Brazilian “Tea Party” is going strong; an evangelical senator Magno Malta accuses teachers of eroticising the curriculum, harking back to 2018 elections against present Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad who was accused of planning to distribute baby bottles with penis-shaped teats (however bizarre, and however false, these things stay in the system that wasn’t broken with Lula’s election); and constant attacks on the educational system which, fighting the culture war through terror, include armed violence against teachers upholding women’s rights. It’s a war that’s devastating people’s lives.

The recent underpinning of the assault on democratic institutions was the notorious Lava Jato (Operation Carwash) case in which messages released by a hacker via Intercept revealed that Judge Sergio Moro (later to become Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice), prosecutors, and journalists colluded to jail Lula for corruption for political reasons. Accordingly, the mainstream media systematically connected representative politics and corruption and, in the process, created political polarisation and contempt for democratic institutions, as well as paving the way for the election victory of the extremist outsider Bolsonaro in 2018, thanks to his prior creation of a digital communication network that spewed out hatred and rage. But worse, hate speech now came to be hatched within the very institutions that were supposed to protect against it. Lava Jato didn’t go away.

Apart from the cultural strife Lava Jato has seeded, the instigators have political and economic clout so, in July this year, the Supreme Court, excluded all evidence obtained in plea deals from 78 executives of Latin America’s biggest engineering and construction company Odebrecht—the one with a busy bribery division that paid out more than $780 million to government officials and political parties all around Latin America and the Caribbean, and at the heart of Lava Jato—which now has the turning-over-a-new-leaf name of Novonor, and has thus hindered the ongoing Lava Jato corruption inquiries. Connected or not connected with the Lava Jato machinations, the state oil company Petrobras has given Novonor the so-called “full category”, which allows a company to bid for any contract it offers. With coincidental and certainly ill-conceived timing, Lula’s government is moving to allow oil exploration in a zone of mangroves and coral reefs where the Amazon meets the Atlantic Ocean just a few months after he promised at COP27 that his future government policies would be shaped by the climate crisis. Now Brazil, also with new rigs in the offshore presalt region is set to become the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Broken promises don’t exactly inspire faith in a coalition government that looks like a bit like a highwire act in a gale. And they don’t set the ethical example that’s required to discredit fake news.

A year after his election win, Lula’s government is looking schizophrenic with a management that presents one face internationally and another completely different one inside the country, and also in what Lula says and what Lula does. For example, addressing other South American leaders in a summit he called last August in the city of Belém (where he plans to hold COP30 in 2025), he promised “to haul the Amazon out of centuries of violence, economic ‘plundering’ and environmental devastation and into ‘a new Amazon dream’”. Yet, he ignored a direct message dated 28 July from Chief Raoni Metuktire, inviting him to an Indigenous summit with 54 leaders of different Indigenous peoples living in all six Brazilian biomes (Amazon, the Cerrado, the Caatinga, the Pantanal, the Atlantic Forest and the Pampa) to discuss issues such as the demarcation of and expulsion of invaders from Indigenous lands, the cancellation of carbon credit contracts involving Indigenous peoples, the rejection of the marco temporal, the “Time Limit Trick infamously arguing that Indigenous peoples who could not prove they occupied their land when the current Constitution was signed (5 October 1988) had no right to have the land officially mapped and protected. Chief Raoni and the other leaders understood that their situation requires more than vague promises, and also that its effects are worldwide. “We are very concerned about the territorial situation not only of the indigenous peoples who inhabit the Amazon region, but also of the other regions of Brazil and the world.” If to countries in the Global North, the Lula government looks as if it’s committed to significantly reducing greenhouse gases and deforestation in the Amazon, as well as protecting Indigenous peoples, this isn’t clear to the Indigenous peoples themselves.

Compared to the previous government the Lula government may represent a significant step forward. It has achieved some reduction in deforestation and illegal mining in Indigenous lands, mainly due to repressive actions by the federal police, and the violence against Indigenous people wrought by rural agribusiness militias and criminal organizations engaged in illegal trafficking of wood, gold, and cocaine is more under control. But not much and not permanently. And what are environmentalists to make of his extravagant delegation of 1,337 or more than 2,000 members at Cop28 (depending on who you read, but the biggest, anyway) where his energy minister, Alexandre Silveira announced that Brazil aims at having a closer alliance with OPEC (which, of course, opposes an end to fossil fuels). The plan is to take Brazil from eighth to fourth place among petroleum producers. In Riadh he claimed he wants to turn Brazil into the “Saudi Arabia of green energy” (whatever that might be) in ten years.

This is how Lula wants to position himself as a global leader against climate change. Moreover, on 13 December, a day after COP28 ends, Brazil auctioned hundreds of oil drilling blocks, many near the mouth of the Amazon. “Green” Lula is pinning his hope on a guaranteed world demand for oil to maintain the lifestyles of the rich and powerful. In the first year of his new mandate, Brazil’s GDP has grown by 3.1%, well above the average predicted for Latin America as a whole. Yet basing this growth on fossil fuel production can only continue the old history of dispossession and exploitation that has caused the inequality and poverty he wants to combat.

Lula is internationally lauded as a democrat and defender of human rights, which he is, at least selectively, when compared with other political leaders. In an enthusiastically applauded speech at the UN General Assembly last September, Lula defended BRICS, which he said came into being as a result of the “immobilism” of the IMF and the UN itself, and welcomed its expansion to include Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia. If this is an “alternate world order” or a “more diverse scenario from an economic, political and geopolitical perspective” as Lula claims, human rights issues, including racial equality and women’s rights which he touts at the UN, will be swept under the carpet, even now when Brazil has been elected to the UN Human Rights Council. It’s unlikely that Brazil will speak out against abuses by BRICS members like the mass killings by Saudi border guards of Ethiopian immigrants and asylum seekers at the Yemen-Saudi border; or Iranian abuse of women’s and Kurdish rights; and China’s draconian repression of dissent, or abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet; or Russian crimes in Ukraine and its part in international fake news production; or grievous attacks and all the abuses against ethnic and religious minorities in India; and attacks on women’s and LGBTi rights in the BRICS countries. Human rights must be universal because if “human” isn’t a universal category, then some humans will automatically become “less-than-human”. If they aren’t universal, they aren’t human rights but the privileges of some.

In Brazil, due to its “coalition presidentialism” with the conservative and even reactionary right as the majority in the National Congress, the Lula government has also avoided dealing with issues of civil rights and individual freedoms. Some advances have been made with regard to rights and representation of people officially classified as preto (black) and pardo (brown) but the Ministry of Racial Equality all but ignores discrimination suffered by Asians, Gypsies, people of Syrian or Lebanese descent, and other Latin Americans. There’s a Women’s Ministry, but abortion is still a crime and sexual and reproductive rights are very much conditioned by other social factors like race, class, and economic status, as well as the powerful homophobic propaganda apparatus of evangelical groups, who can’t be seen as separate from big business and militia groups.

Even as itself a victim of fake news and other programmed digital disinformation, the Lula government has so far not presented any comprehensive plan to tackle the phenomenon at its roots, where the rot in the whole political system resides, incubating more problems. The government’s selective politics, product of deal making with incompatible political accessories is reflected in the disparate functioning of his ministries. The ministries of Communication, Science and Technology, of Education, and the government’s Communication Secretariat, don’t communicate and neither have they separately drafted any proposal that would lead the National Congress at least to discuss limiting the role of Big Tech in extraction, control, and abuse for nefarious purposes of user information. The ministries are political islands exploited by the interests of the parties with old inglorious histories that make up the government.

A quick look at the array of people responsible for the first physical attacks on Lula’s government comes together in a kind of identikit portrait of the system Lula won’t confront in either the domestic or international framework, the real enemy of the ideals he professes, namely a fairly criminal version of neoliberalism: 1) far right extremists, representing economic and political power or, in part, the beef, bullets, and Bible lobby, a global as well as domestic movement; 2) politicians within Lula’s administration like the putschist federal police chief Anderson Torres, and defence minister, José Múcio Monteiro; 3) the security apparatus (armed forces, police, military police, militia); 4) militia with links to illegal deforestation, mining, land-grabbing, fishing, and drugs with impunity guaranteed in higher echelons of power (as the continuing assault on the Yanomami people and their land illustrates only too well); 5) urban militia groups, for example those that control more than half of Rio de Janeiro and are now moving into real estate; 6) the powerful Bolsonaro supporters in the southern and southeastern states of Paraná, Minas Gerais and São Paulo; and 7) the lords of the subworld of Internet which conserves the fascism of the past while erasing the country’s memory of its history, a lawless realm where everything is “immaterial”, where discourse is about war, and politics has no place.

Marcus Junius Brutus knew, in the words Shakespeare gave to him, that “a serpent’s egg / Which hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous”. Some 2067 years on, the system is ridden with destructive mischief, hatching here and hatching there, in hidden and not-so-hidden nests. Instead of taking it on as a whole, selective, disjointed politics is, in the end, aiding and abetting it. A few moments of applause for rousing words in the UN won’t change anything. It looks as if any changes Lula’s government makes will be like putting a Band-Aid somewhere, anywhere, on a body politic coursing with venom. If only, instead of Brazil’s grandiose display at COP28, Lula and Brazil’s Indigenous leaders would meet with the West Papuan independence leaders, custodians of the world’s third largest rainforest, authors of the Green State Vision and quietly work out with them how they could bring into being, together and with others, this coherent plan for what the world could be, rather than merely tinkering with what already is. Then, yes, Lula could be the bold visionary politician he has sometimes shown signs of wanting to be.

The post Brazil, Now What? The Serpent’s Eggs or Incubating Consequences appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jean Wyllys – Julie Wark.

The post #19 – Economic Consequences of US Gun Violence “Far Costlier” Than Previously Known appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

Over the last three years, the Biden-Harris Administration has made historic investments in clean energy through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, and today announced more than $6 billion in funding to strengthen grid resiliency, advance environmental justice, and help mitigate flood risk. These investments are crucial for reaching our climate goals, but deeper and more drastic emissions reductions are required by the United States, and globally, or the impacts of the climate crisis will become increasingly more severe and widespread.

In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous released the following statement:

“The alarm clock on the climate crisis has been blaring for years, and today’s assessment makes clear our leaders can no longer continue to hit the snooze button. This should serve as a massive wake-up call for all who remain willfully ignorant of the impacts of this looming disaster–especially those in the halls of power who appear eager to turn a blind eye to the evidence before them. The assessment shows that this crisis threatens us all, will continue to cost us billions of dollars a year, and confirms that the degree to which this looming catastrophe might worsen remains entirely in human hands. We will decide our own fate, and the time of inaction or half-measures must end. Steep reductions in methane and carbon dioxide emissions, along with a rapid buildout of clean energy and electrification, is the only path forward to avoid the very worst of this. The United States must lead by example, and COP28 can be the stage upon which we show the world that we take this threat seriously and will act boldly.”

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

Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office – OGL 3

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the British government, the leadership of the main opposition party and the media and corporate apparatus are standing in absolute lockstep with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, even as 100s of thousands of Brits take to the streets across the United Kingdom (UK) calling for an immediate ceasefire and justice and peace for the Palestinians. This lockstep support for Israel was highlighted on the world stage once again on Friday 27^th October as the UK abstained in the vote on a resolution at the UN General Assembly Special Session. The resolution, put forward by Jordan, called for the bare minimum of an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce”.  An abstention from the UK to this resolution at this point, as the killing, maiming, forced transfer and arrest of Palestinian civilians, in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, reaches a scale previously not seen since the Nakba, was not a neutral act. It was an act of continued diplomatic and political cover for Israel’s government and armed forces to commit abhorrent mass war crimes. Alongside this political support, our navy remains stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to “reinforce regional stability and prevent escalation”.

This British alliance with Zionism and the Israel it created, has held firm from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Israel’s violent formation in 1948 to today. Even as Britain fled Palestine and its responsibilities in 1948, allowing war to break out in the process and the Nakba (Catastrophe) to befall the Palestinians, and as its empire faded, Britain has continued to play a cynical and deadly role in the region.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was issued as follows by the British government;

“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

What is often lacking in the debate over what the true meaning of this declaration was, is the understanding that Britain had no moral or legal right to make the declaration in the first place. By 1917, Britain had reached the zenith of its empire in terms of land and people that it illegitimately ruled over in a brutal and exploitative manner. At the end of World War One, Britain took over control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, and neighboring areas including modern-day Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This empire, and British rule in Palestine, was illegitimate not only because it was opposed by the local people subject to British rule, but in addition, the newly created and rather shaky, League of Nations, a pre-cursor to the United Nations, mandated Britain to grant self-government and independence to Palestine as soon as possible. Within the mandate, The Balfour Declaration was included, but the mandate and The League of Nations did not authorize Britain to give Palestine over to another invading force, which is what Zionist leaders clearly portrayed it as, to the indigenous population.  It is important to note that Zionism was the most widespread of a number of responses from the Jewish community to the obscene and deadly institutional anti-Semitism they had faced in Britain and Europe for hundreds of years. Anti-Semitism which culminated in the German Nazi-led, and Europe-wide, Holocaust of the Jewish people in Europe.

The Palestinians rose up against this taking of their homeland by the UK and Zionists throughout the 1920s and through a sustained revolt during the 1930s, including the mass use of non-violent tactics including but not limited to demonstrations and General strikes and violent resistance through attacks on Zionist population centers and against British forces.  Many of the ‘emergency’ laws the British authorities introduced and used to violently break the revolt were kept by Israel after its formation and are used to punish the Palestinians for any kind of resistance, most of which continues to be in the form of non-violent resistance, to the internationally recognized illegal occupation and resulting apartheid of the Palestinian people and their land.

The reasoning within the apparatus of the British Empire during this time to support Zionism was varied. The British Prime minister at the end of World War One, David Lloyd George, was one of many Christian Zionists who supported the Balfour Declaration and the concept of Zionism. This view was often mixed in with the virulent anti-Semitism which was widespread within the British establishment. Other establishment figures wanted to punish and split the Arabs for their daring to stand–up to Britain, in trying to assert their independence post WW1 again alongside the racist treatment of non-white peoples under the British Empire. Others supported Zionism for geopolitical reasoning in protecting Britain’s increasingly huge but fragile empire, in particular, to protect Britain’s rule over India, ensuring a land and sea corridor to India from Egypt through the Suez Canal, through which a huge amount of international and British trade and military flowed through. Keeping Palestine under British rule and/or under an allied Zionist rule would serve to protect these sea and land routes.

Following the creation of Israel and the resultant planned ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948, Britain continued to ally with Israel from the Suez crisis to the acquiescence on the continued and constantly morphing repression of the Palestinians within Historic Palestine/Israel. In the present day, Britain is one of the biggest arms exporters in the world, and despite lofty talk and British law regulating human rights in relation to arms controls, 100s of millions of arms sales continue to flow to Israel. Alongside this, regular naval and air combined exercises continue to take place and a strengthened framework between the two countries over security, defense, technology and trade, was signed only this year.  There can be no doubt about the strength of the alliance between modern Britain and Israel. This alliance of weapons, equipment, military know-how and the political and diplomatic cover of the relationship are used to enforce the occupation and apartheid of the Palestinians and the horrors we are now witnessing.

In response to this current and now clear attempt at genocide, our current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “We want you to win”. This was said and backed up, even after it was clear the violent action being taken by Israel was directly targeting the civilian population with the collective punishment of cutting off fuel, electricity, food, water and medical supplies in Gaza, whilst killing and maiming thousands of civilians using advanced UK-supplied weaponry and equipment. Win what exactly Mr Prime Minister? What is going to be won?  Certainly no long-term security or peace for Israelis, they are destroying the people and the place they call home and turning them and world against them, and for the Palestinians if Israel must win, what must they lose, absolutely everything? Their lives, their houses, their remaining land, their very existence as a people and culture?

Any person committed genuinely to peace should know there is only one route to peace, justice and security, which is equal rights for all the peoples currently living from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, a right of return to the Palestinians expelled from their homeland and an agreed upon justice and compensation process for the mass war crimes committed by Israel. Any war crimes committed by Hamas towards civilians, should also be included in this process.

A Palestinian friend watching with horror and fear for what is happening to their people recently told me, “I am so angry at your government saying that they will not ask Israel to stop bombing and that they are defending themselves. I hate the UK government, I hate it so much. They were the reason behind the occupation of my land and now they are supporting the murderers of my people”.

Knowing their history, watching what is unfolding and the suffering being endured under this mass and incomprehensible violence, tell me why Palestinians, a people filled with courage, hope, and a longing for peace, why shouldn’t they hate the UK government?

I urge fellow people in the UK to think about, ask questions, demand answers to this unquestioning alliance with Israel and what it means for our country and most importantly for the Palestinians.  We owe it to Palestinians to stand up for their rights as full human beings in our world, especially now. We must continue to demand on the streets and online, that our government and Members of Parliament from all parties, the whole establishment, change position and call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the occupation and apartheid.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonathan Woodrow Martin.

U.S. President Joe Biden, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, addresses the attacks in Israel in Washington, D.C., on October 7, 2023.

The recent explosion of violence in and around the Gaza Strip, triggered by a Hamas assault that killed hundreds of Israelis, including scores of civilians, has drawn the U.S. back into a region from which the Biden administration has spent years trying to pivot away from. The U.S. has reportedly begun to move naval assets into the Mediterranean to provide support for Israel’s military operation against Gaza, a full-scale invasion that will likely take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

The new outbreak of intense violence represents a total failure of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. The administration has centered its regional policy on the expansion of the “Abraham Accords,” a set of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and regional Arab countries. It is an effort in which President Joe Biden has sunk much resources and political capital.

The de facto premise behind the accords, initiated under former President Donald Trump and led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was to “solve” the Israel–Palestine conflict by simply ignoring the Palestinians and treating their conditions as irrelevant. This weekend’s events show that this approach, premised on Palestinian invisibility, has now collapsed. Indeed, the expectation that Palestinians would simply resign themselves to a slow death, an assumption evidently carried forth by Biden, was never realistic.

Rockets fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza as an Israeli missile launched from the Iron Dome defense missile system attempts to intercept them over the city of Netivot in southern Israel on October 8, 2023.

“If you pay attention to their public statements, every government in the Middle East has been saying for years that you need to pay attention to the Palestinian issue and that it cannot be ignored,” said Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. “The Biden administration’s policy has been to simply ignore the tragic situation on the ground, perhaps more than any other administration. It’s deliberate ignorance that has had very devastating consequences.”

Days before the conflict began, speaking at a public event on September 29, national security adviser Jake Sullivan praised the administration’s Middle East policy, stating that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

“The ignorance and hubris it took to make a statement like that is stunning,” said Munayyer.

There have been long warnings that conditions in the Gaza Strip were a ticking time bomb. Gaza’s residents have lived under permanent siege for over a decade and a half, without the prospect of a diplomatic process anywhere on the horizon — let alone a solution. Their desperation had been building for years prior to the present war. Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom had never left Gaza in their lives, have organized several large protest marches toward the Israel-run border fence in recent years. They were met with indiscriminate gunfire from Israeli forces that killed civilians as well as medical personnel — as well as indifference by the international community, which carried on in the aftermath of the killings with business as usual.

In the meantime, the U.S. has sat on the sidelines as diplomatic off-ramps were proposed — and floundered. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wrote a letter in Hebrew to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking him to take a “calculated risk” in agreeing to a long-term truce with Hamas. The truce would have led to an end to Hamas rocket fire against Israel, in exchange for the reestablishment of economic infrastructure on the territory. Although some aid reached Gaza, Netanyahu ultimately rejected the entreaty for a broader truce. The U.S. did not apply any notable pressure on Israel to pursue this or other possible openings.

The U.S. government under both Trump and Biden administrations has remained AWOL in the years since and left the situation in the territory to fester, while U.S. diplomats spent time in distant Dubai and Riyadh dreaming up splashy new economic and political agreements to sell as successes to domestic audiences. Under Biden, the U.S. has devoted little effort to seeking even tactical détente, let alone peace, between Israel and the Palestinians, preferring instead to continue the Trump administration’s approach of ignoring the Palestinians to seek quid pro quo diplomatic deals between Israel and foreign Arab and Muslim countries with whom Israel has no direct conflict.

Even as the massive bloodshed began around Gaza this week, with Hamas militants massacring Israeli civilians and Israel apparently indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip, the administration has rushed to try and salvage its approach to the region. The New York Times reported on Sunday that top Biden aides were scrambling to “reaffirm their commitment to the idea of potential normalization of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.” This shoddy simulacrum of real diplomacy — which inevitably requires resolving tough differences between enemies — has now collided with horrifying reality in Gaza and southern Israel.

A resident looks at cars burning after a rocket attack in Ashkelon, Israel, on Oct. 7. 2023.

Precise numbers of the dead are unclear, as the Israeli government carries out a campaign of airstrikes and prepares for a ground offensive that it says is aimed at ending Hamas’s ability to conduct military operations in the future. But conservative estimates say that hundreds of both Palestinians and Israelis are already dead. It is almost certain that the toll will rise in the weeks ahead, particularly among Palestinian civilians, as the campaign inside Gaza gains steam.

Palestinians, Israelis, and officials of neighboring states have long tried to warn of the impending calamity that is now playing out. They warned that the rotten status quo in Gaza was close to producing a new and bloodier conflict. The Biden administration is not primarily responsible for the horror now taking place. But given the U.S.’s pivotal role in the region, it undoubtedly deserves a large share of the blame. A conflict that sat upon several major civilizational, religious, ideological, and racial fault lines deserved real diplomatic resources and attention from the U.S., rather than the pursuit of vanity projects focused on winning points in domestic politics. Once the bloodshed eventually stops, it is unclear how much may be left to salvage.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

That’s what happened to restaurant owners on 19th street in Yangon’s Latha township when representatives of their local ward administration office called them in on Wednesday and warned them to sell the goods or face the consequences, the owners and officials told RFA Burmese.

The military controls businesses that produce and distribute several alcoholic brands in the country, including Myanmar Beer, Mandalay Beer, Black Shield Beer, Mandalay Rum, Army Rum, Andaman God and Dagon branded alcohols, as well as various soft drinks. 

It also makes and sells Red Ruby and Premium Gold branded cigarettes.

“They told us to sell Myanmar beer, rum and cigarettes produced by their military factories in our restaurants, just like other products we sell,” said one owner who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal.

“They warned us not to discriminate against their products and threatened to take action against those who don’t sell them,” the owner said. “Nobody [from the junta] has come to inspect our restaurants on 19th street yet, but I heard that they did so at restaurants in rural locations.”

It was not immediately clear how authorities intend to punish those who ignore the order.

On the flip side, rebel groups fighting the military, which took control of the government in a 2021 coup, have warned merchants not to sell military-owned brands – saying they would seize and destroy them if discovered. 

The General Strike Coordination Body, which organizes boycotts of the military, has also urged the people not to use the products.

The pressure from both sides would seem to put merchants in a bind.

Bid to beat sanctions?

The campaign appears to be the latest bid by a cash-strapped junta to earn money in the face of crushing international sanctions over its repressive rule.

According to the owner, the warning was issued in line with a campaign led by Interior Minister Lieutenant General Yar Pyae to regain market share for beer, liquor and other goods produced by the military throughout the country.

The junta has issued orders to police stations and municipal offices in all states and regions to force shopping centers, stores, shops and restaurants – including those in the junta’s base of power, the capital Naypyitaw – to sell its products, a member of the ward administration in Yangon’s North Okkalapa township told RFA.

He said his office had been assigned to “check if the shops and restaurants sell the military-produced goods and submit a paper report by 6:00 p.m. every day.”

The junta has yet to release any information about the campaign or what kind of action it might take against those who boycott the military’s products.

Translated by Kyaw Min Htun. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The headlines on climate catastrophes are becoming more informative as they become more ominous. For years the media headlines have been describing record floods, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes and other fossil-fueled disasters of an abused Mother Nature. The immediate human casualties are devastating.

Very recently, the headlines have been steering us toward what happens in the aftermath of natural disasters in afflicted regions around the world.

The Washington Post yesterday front-paged a huge headline “Climate-Linked Ills Threaten Humanity,” followed by the sub-headline: “Pakistan is the epicenter of a global wave of climate health threats.” The reporters opened their long analysis with almost biblical language: “The floods came, and then the sickness.”

The record heat wave and flooding that left one-third of Pakistan under water have unleashed “dark clouds of mosquitoes” spreading malaria. Food supplies were reduced by drenched fields unable to grow crops. The article depicted a world map with color-coded measures of dangerous heat waves. The Indian sub-continent is registered as having one of the longest annual heat-intense periods. Over 40 million Pakistanis will endure dangerous heat for over six months a year “unless they can find shade… Extreme heat, which causes heatstroke and damages the heart and kidneys” is just one consequence.

Dengue fever surged in Peru. Canadian wildfires poured smoke and particulates into the U.S. triggering asthma attacks. Famine lurks in East Africa’s worst drought in 40 years, while contaminated water takes its toll on many diseases, especially horrifying for infants and young children.

Another consequence recorded by the Post with the headline “Amid Record Heat, Even Indoor Factory Workers Enter Dangerous Terrain” in Asia. Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, led by Dr. Sidney Wolfe, was a pioneer in petitioning OSHA to issue regulations to protect workers against extreme heat (See: https://www.citizen.org/topic/heat-stress/). Corporate OSHA stalled. Then the Biden Administration proposed modest regulations that are facing corporate opposition and years of delay by corporate attorneys.

Until overturned by a Texas court, Governor Greg Abbott overrode some ordinances that were passed in large Texas cities requiring drinking water breaks for construction workers laboring under 100-degree temperatures.

Abbott, arguably the cruelest governor in the United States – unless Florida Governor Ron DeSantis out-snarls him – thought he could get away with this bit of brutishness. After all, he is in Texas, where the oil and gas lobby (Exxon Mobil Et al.) is pushing to increase North American exploration, production, and burning of these well-documented omnicidal sources of global warming and climate violence.

The oil, gas and coal industry’s tentacles have encircled a majority of the 535 lawmakers in Congress to shield and maintain huge tax subsidies behind the industry’s lethal drive for increased production. Its marketeers see their profitable circular death dance intensify as hotter days lead to higher air conditioning loads.

Running berserk with their bulging profits, these giant energy companies worldwide are forging a suicide pact with an abused Mother Earth. The projections for what climate eruptions will do to humans and the natural world continue to be underestimated. The realities each year exceed scientists’ predictive models.

With no other driving value system than short-term profits, these artificial entities or companies, and corporations controlling different dangerous technologies, cannot be allowed equal justice under the law with real human beings driven by other far more important life-sustaining and morally enhancing values. For over 2000 years, every major religion has warned about subordination by the merchant class of civilized values. The great “soft energy” or renewable energy prophet and physicist, Amory Lovins, put this critical declaration in modern, secular language when he wrote: “Markets make good servants, but bad masters.”

Our Constitution never once mentions “corporation” or “company” – it only speaks of “We the People” and “persons.” Our national charter needs amending to deal with big corporations, which in turn requires a mass movement. Since ravaging corporations impact people with indiscriminate harm, not caring whether the victims are liberals or conservatives, the political prospect for a decisive left/right coalition is as auspicious as ever.

The pressure for such a coalition is growing daily. Insurance companies, citing climate disaster claims, are skyrocketing homeowners and auto insurance premiums, or worse, either redlining areas or altogether pulling out of some states such as Florida. Some coastal areas will soon be private insurance deserts, requiring entry by state-run insurance coverage, at least for reinsurance purposes.

Overpaid insurance company CEOs are starting to demand bailouts without even guaranteeing coverage for consumers.

Faster and faster, the second, third and fourth waves of after-effects of these man-made natural disasters will become all-enveloping punishers of societies that are failing to head off the looming dangers, now maturing into evermore desperate states of living.

On Capitol Hill, a domestically paralyzed Congress only comes together every year to hoopla its bipartisan mega-billion-dollar additions to the bloated, unaudited Pentagon budget – taking over half of the entire federal government’s operating budget. Congress regularly gives the Generals more than they request.

Meanwhile, back home, tens of millions of hard-pressed American workers have given up on themselves securing a government that works for them, instead of for short-sighted, greedy corporations. These Americans continue to ignore the historically validated truth – no more than one active percent of the citizenry, representing the majority public opinion, can quickly make a large majority of those 535 Congressional Senators and Representatives fight first and foremost for the public interest.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Very recently, the headlines have been steering us toward what happens in the aftermath of natural disasters in afflicted regions around the world.

The Washington Post yesterday front-paged a huge headline “Climate-Linked Ills Threaten Humanity,” followed by the sub-headline: “Pakistan is the epicenter of a global wave of climate health threats.” The reporters opened their long analysis with almost biblical language: “The floods came, and then the sickness.”

The record heat wave and flooding that left one-third of Pakistan under water have unleashed “dark clouds of mosquitoes” spreading malaria. Food supplies were reduced by drenched fields unable to grow crops. The article depicted a world map with color-coded measures of dangerous heat waves. The Indian sub-continent is registered as having one of the longest annual heat-intense periods. Over 40 million Pakistanis will endure dangerous heat for over six months a year “unless they can find shade… Extreme heat, which causes heatstroke and damages the heart and kidneys” is just one consequence.

Dengue fever surged in Peru. Canadian wildfires poured smoke and particulates into the U.S. triggering asthma attacks. Famine lurks in East Africa’s worst drought in 40 years, while contaminated water takes its toll on many diseases, especially horrifying for infants and young children.

Another consequence recorded by the Post with the headline “Amid Record Heat, Even Indoor Factory Workers Enter Dangerous Terrain” in Asia. Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, led by Dr. Sidney Wolfe, was a pioneer in petitioning OSHA to issue regulations to protect workers against extreme heat. Corporate OSHA stalled. Then the Biden Administration proposed modest regulations that are facing corporate opposition and years of delay by corporate attorneys.

Until overturned by a Texas court, Governor Greg Abbott overrode some ordinances that were passed in large Texas cities requiring drinking water breaks for construction workers laboring under 100-degree temperatures.

Abbott, arguably the cruelest governor in the United States – unless Florida Governor Ron DeSantis out-snarls him – thought he could get away with this bit of brutishness. After all, he is in Texas, where the oil and gas lobby (Exxon Mobil et al.) is pushing to increase North American exploration, production, and burning of these well-documented omnicidal sources of global warming and climate violence.

The oil, gas and coal industry’s tentacles have encircled a majority of the 535 lawmakers in Congress to shield and maintain huge tax subsidies behind the industry’s lethal drive for increased production. Its marketeers see their profitable circular death dance intensify as hotter days lead to higher air conditioning loads.

Running berserk with their bulging profits, these giant energy companies worldwide are forging a suicide pact with an abused Mother Earth. The projections for what climate eruptions will do to humans and the natural world continue to be underestimated. The realities each year exceed scientists’ predictive models.

With no other driving value system than short-term profits, these artificial entities or companies, and corporations controlling different dangerous technologies, cannot be allowed equal justice under the law with real human beings driven by other far more important life-sustaining and morally enhancing values. For over 2000 years, every major religion has warned about subordination by the merchant class of civilized values. The great “soft energy” or renewable energy prophet and physicist, Amory Lovins, put this critical declaration in modern, secular language when he wrote: “Markets make good servants, but bad masters.”

Our Constitution never once mentions “corporation” or “company” – it only speaks of “We the People” and “persons.” Our national charter needs amending to deal with big corporations, which in turn requires a mass movement. Since ravaging corporations impact people with indiscriminate harm, not caring whether the victims are liberals or conservatives, the political prospect for a decisive left/right coalition is as auspicious as ever.

The pressure for such a coalition is growing daily. Insurance companies, citing climate disaster claims, are skyrocketing homeowners and auto insurance premiums, or worse, either redlining areas or altogether pulling out of some states such as Florida. Some coastal areas will soon be private insurance deserts, requiring entry by state-run insurance coverage, at least for reinsurance purposes.

Overpaid insurance company CEOs are starting to demand bailouts without even guaranteeing coverage for consumers.

Faster and faster, the second, third and fourth waves of after-effects of these man-made natural disasters will become all-enveloping punishers of societies that are failing to head off the looming dangers, now maturing into evermore desperate states of living.

On Capitol Hill, a domestically paralyzed Congress only comes together every year to hoopla its bipartisan mega-billion-dollar additions to the bloated, unaudited Pentagon budget – taking over half of the entire federal government’s operating budget. Congress regularly gives the Generals more than they request.

Meanwhile, back home, tens of millions of hard-pressed American workers have given up on themselves securing a government that works for them, instead of for short-sighted, greedy corporations. These Americans continue to ignore the historically validated truth – no more than one active percent of the citizenry, representing the majority public opinion, can quickly make a large majority of those 535 Congressional Senators and Representatives fight first and foremost for the public interest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

The post Gabriel Kolko on the Foreign Policy Consequences of Conservatism’s Triumph appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Drake.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

“Something’s fishy,” declared a March newsletter from the right-wing, fossil fuel-funded think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation. The caption looms under an imposing image of a stranded whale on a beach, with three huge offshore wind turbines in the background. 

Something truly was fishy about that image. It’s not because offshore wind causes whale deaths, a groundless conspiracy pushed by fossil fuel interests that the image attempts to bolster. It’s because, as Gizmodo writer Molly Taft reported, the photo was fabricated using artificial intelligence. Along with eerily pixelated sand, oddly curved beach debris, and mistakenly fused together wind turbine blades, the picture also retains a tell-tale rainbow watermark from the artificially intelligent image generator DALL-E. 

DALL-E is one of countless AI models that have risen to otherworldly levels of popularity, particularly in the last year. But as hundreds of millions of users marvel at AI’s ability to produce novel images and believable text, the current wave of hype has concealed how AI could be hindering our ability to make progress on climate change.  

Advocates argue that these impacts — which include vast carbon emissions associated with the electricity needed to run the models, a pervasive use of AI in the oil and gas industry to boost fossil fuel extraction, and a worrying uptick in the output of misinformation — are flying under the radar. While many prominent researchers and investors have stoked fears around AI’s “godlike” technological force or potential to end civilization, a slew of real-world consequences aren’t getting the attention they deserve. 

Many of these harms extend far beyond climate issues, including algorithmic racism, copyright infringement, and exploitative working conditions for data workers who help develop AI models. “We see technology as an inevitability and don’t think about shaping it with societal impacts in mind,” David Rolnick, a computer science professor at McGill University and a co-founder of the nonprofit Climate Change AI, told Grist.

But the effects of AI, including its impact on our climate and efforts to curtail climate change, are anything but inevitable. Experts say we can and should confront these harms — but first, we need to understand them.

Large AI models produce an unknown amount of emissions

At its core, AI is essentially “a marketing term,” the Federal Trade Commission stated back in February. There is no absolute definition for what an AI technology is. But usually, as Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, describes, AI refers to algorithms that process large amounts of data to perform tasks like generating text or images, making predictions, or calculating scores and rankings. 

That higher computational capacity means large AI models gobble up large quantities of computing power in its development and use. Take ChatGPT, for instance, the OpenAI chatbot that has gone viral for producing convincing, human-like text. Researchers estimated that the training of ChatGPT-3, the predecessor to this year’s GPT-4, emitted 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — equal to more than three round-trip flights between San Francisco and New York. Total emissions are likely much higher, since that number only accounts for training ChatGPT-3 one time through. In practice, models can be retrained thousands of times while they are being built. 

The estimate also does not include energy consumed when ChatGPT is used by approximately 13 million people each day. Researchers highlight that actually using a trained model can make up 90 percent of energy use associated with an AI machine learning model. And the newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, likely requires far more computing power because it is a much larger model.

No clear data exists on exactly how many emissions result from the use of large AI models by billions of users. But researchers at Google found that total energy use from machine learning AI models accounts for about 15 percent of the company’s total energy use. Bloomberg reports that amount would equal 2.3 terawatt-hours annually — roughly as much electricity used by homes in a city the size of Atlanta in a year.

The lack of transparency from companies behind AI products like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI means that the total amount of power and emissions involved in AI technology is unknown. For instance, OpenAI has not disclosed what data was fed into this year’s ChatGPT-4 model, how much computing power was used, or how the chatbot was changed. 

“We’re talking about ChatGPT and we know nothing about it,” Sasha Luccioni, a researcher who has studied AI models’ carbon footprints, told Bloomberg. “It could be three raccoons in a trench coat.”

AI fuels climate misinformation online

AI could also fundamentally shift the way we consume — and trust — information online. The UK nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate tested Google’s Bard chatbot and found it capable of producing harmful and false narratives around topics like COVID-19, racism, and climate change. For instance, Bard told one user, “There is nothing we can do to stop climate change, so there is no point in worrying about it.”

The ability of chatbots to spout misinformation is baked into their design, according to Rolnick. “Large language models are designed to create text that looks good rather than being actually true,” he said. “The goal is to match the style of human language rather than being grounded in facts” — a tendency that “lends itself perfectly to the creation of misinformation.” 

Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies usually try to address content issues as these models are deployed live. But these efforts often amount to “papered over” solutions, Rolnick says. “Testing their content more deeply, one finds these biases deeply encoded in much more insidious and subtle ways that haven’t been patched by the companies deploying the algorithms,” he said.

Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the U.K.-based Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence who studies climate misinformation, says an even bigger concern is AI-generated images. Unlike text produced on an individual scale through a chatbot, images can “spread very quickly and break the sense of trust in what we see,” he said. “If people start doubting what they see in a consistent way, I think that’s pretty concerning behavior.”

Climate misinformation existed long before AI tools. But now, groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation have a new weapon in their arsenal to launch attacks against renewable energy and climate policies — and the fishy whale image indicates that they’re already using it.

AI’s climate impacts depend on who’s using it, and how

Researchers emphasize that AI’s real-world effects aren’t predetermined — they depend on the intentions, and actions, of the people developing and using it. As Corsi puts it, AI can be used “as both a positive and negative force” when it comes to climate change.

For example, AI is already used by climate scientists to further their research. By combing through huge amounts of data, AI can help create climate models, analyze satellite imagery to target deforestation, and forecast weather more accurately. AI systems can also help improve the performance of solar panels, monitor emissions from energy production, and optimize cooling and heating systems, among other applications. 

At the same time, AI is also used extensively by the oil and gas sector to boost the production of fossil fuels. Despite touting net-zero climate targets, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all come under fire for their lucrative cloud computing and AI software contracts with oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, Shell, and Chevron. 

A 2020 report by Greenpeace found that these contracts exist at every phase of oil and gas operations. Fossil fuel companies use AI technologies to ingest massive amounts of data to locate oil and gas deposits and create efficiencies across the entire supply chain, from drilling to shipping to storing to refining. AI analytics and modeling could generate up to $425 billion in added revenue for the oil and gas sector between 2016 and 2025, according to the consulting firm Accenture.

AI’s application in the oil and gas sector is “quite unambiguously serving to increase global greenhouse gas emissions by outcompeting low-carbon energy sources,” said Rolnick. 

Google spokesperson Ted Ladd told Grist that while the company still holds active cloud computing contracts with oil and gas companies, Google does not currently build custom AI algorithms to facilitate oil and gas extraction. Amazon spokesperson Scott LaBelle emphasized that Amazon’s AI software contracts with oil and gas companies focus on making “their legacy businesses less carbon intensive,” while Microsoft representative Emma Detwiler told Grist that Microsoft provides advanced software technologies to oil and gas companies that have committed to net-zero emissions targets.  

There are currently no major policies to regulate AI

When it comes to how AI can be used, it’s “the Wild West,” as Corsi puts it. The lack of regulation is particularly alarming when you consider the scale at which AI is deployed, he added. Facebook, which uses AI to recommend posts and products, boasts nearly 3 billion users. “There’s nothing that you could do at that scale without any oversight,” Corsi said — except AI. 

In response, advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and the AI Now Institute have called for the tech companies responsible for these AI products to be held accountable for AI’s harms. Rather than relying on the public and policymakers to investigate and find solutions for AI’s harms after the fact, AI Now’s 2023 Landscape report calls for governments to “place the burden on companies to affirmatively demonstrate that they are not doing harm.” Advocates and AI researchers also call for greater transparency and reporting requirements on the design, data use, energy usage, and emissions footprint of AI models.

Meanwhile, policymakers are gradually coming up to speed on AI governance. In mid-June, the European Parliament approved draft rules for the world’s first law to regulate the technology. The upcoming AI Act, which likely won’t be implemented for another two years, will regulate AI technologies according to their level of perceived risk to society. The draft text bans facial recognition technology in public spaces, prohibits generative language models like ChatGPT from using any copyrighted material, and requires AI models to label their content as AI-generated. 

Advocates hope that the upcoming law is only the first step to holding companies accountable for AI’s harms. “These things are causing problems now,” said Rick Claypool, research director for Public Citizen. “And why they’re causing problems now is because of the way they are being used by humans to further human agendas.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The overlooked climate consequences of AI on Jul 6, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

In an interview on Friday night, Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, said the world stands by Ukraine in the wake of this latest disaster stemming from the Russian invasion, but with agricultural land swamped, food security is bound to be hit.

Nargiz Shekinskaya began by asking him in the wake of initial criticism from President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, if the UN could have acted sooner with aid, once disaster struck.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Nargiz Shekinskaya.

Atrocities and the disinformation surrounding them is the subject of an important book by AB Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Clarity Press, 2023). It is an important book because it delivers an incisive account on how hegemony is systematically conducted by the US Empire. It cuts through the disinformation used to foment wars by the US, backed by its allies. What the US is engaged in is aggression, what the Nuremberg Tribunal deemed “the supreme international crime”; therefore, it undermines the US Constitution. It also creates a pretext for the US to attempt an overthrow of governments it doesn’t like, killing and displacing people, destroying infrastructure and economies, and leaving devastated lands to rebuild (often with treasuries and resources looted by the US).

The table of contents is a lead-in to how Atrocity Fabrication reveals the systematic nature of hegemony: Cuba and Viet Nam, the US war in Korea, the disinformation about a massacre in Tiananmen Square, the first US war in the Gulf (i.e., war on Iraq), the US war on Yugoslavia, the second US war on Iraq, creating conflict with North Korea, the NATO-Libyan war, the western-backed insurgency in Syria, and the demonization of the rising economy of China.

In each of these ten chapters, Abrams adumbrates some historical background, and a pattern of what is inimical to Empire is spelled out: anti-communism, control of resources wherever they may be, and instilling and maintaining obedience to Empire.

Abrams makes clear what the rules-based order is: rules decided by the US for other countries; however, the US is above the law. The order is enforced by the US as it sees fit.

It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission. (p 241)

Yet, the US usually does not openly flout the laws. It will create pretexts, surround itself with supportive international actors, and call upon its stenographic media. This is one stage of atrocity fabrication. For instance, Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq and the purported genocide in Xinjiang. Abrams brings this sleazy tactic to the fore.

Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unimaginable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted. (p 455)

Perhaps the worst of all fabrications is the false flag. This is when a massacre is perpetrated and the perpetrator lays the blame laid elsewhere, thereby creating a false casus belli. Such an atrocity fabrication may willfully sacrifice innocent people to attain a foreign policy objective. One example of this was the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. The West seized upon this to vilify Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. Or the warmaker will use the fabrication to justify one’s own hand in mass killing by blaming the other side. This Madeleine Albright did when she infamously said the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth achieving US policy objectives.

Demonizing the leader of a country that the US identifies as an enemy state (i.e., a state that is not sufficiently obedient) is another important weapon in the arsenal of Empire. Thus Assad, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Miloševic, the Kims in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Muammar Gaddafi are all caricatured along the lines of the WWII boogeyman, Adolf Hitler. Today, the US excoriates Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, and anyone else who does not bend to Empire.

U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. (p 163)

The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $ 2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, … (p 215)

In attaining its objectives, the US will stoop to whatever means it deems necessary. Atrocity Fabrication is replete with the most sordid acts of criminality: massacres, rapes and violent sexual indecencies, torture, burying people alive, brutalizing prisoners-of-war, using cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium. The book must be read to grasp the inhumanity and perversion of warmakers.

Whatever and whoever, thus, the US will ally with Islamic terrorist groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), al Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS) — and even retract the designations of groups formerly held to be terrorist, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). In other words, the terrorist enemy of a US enemy is no longer a terrorist. Too often, it is those actors wielding the term terrorist that may be the biggest terrorist. As the noted linguist Noam Chomsky stated in the film Power and Terror (2002): “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

The US-aligned world has regularly resorted to propping up defectors and encouraging false narratives. Along with this is the often insidious role played by NGOs to bring down governments.

This is the third book that I have read by AB Abrams, so I am aware of the depth of research, the substantiated factuality, the logic, and the implicit morality that led to these books being written. Books by Abrams are critical reading.

It is clear that there is a rogue entity beholden to its oligarchic class and that this lawless class seeks full spectrum domination through whatever means. That Empire and hegemony persist in the 23rd century is condemnatory; enlightened and morally centered people must relegate such criminality to an atavistic past.

Don’t be deceived by the warmaking demagogues. Refuse to be an accomplice to killing. Life is meant for all humans to live together in peace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

The post Disconnecting War from Its Consequences appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.

When was the last time you forked over nearly $800 million?

Really think. There must have been some moment, some dispute where you decided to reach deep within your checking account to find the better part of a billion dollars—a dispute where you weren't wrong, but you wanted to end things the easy way.

Well, Fox News knows the feeling. While the United States braced to watch a sure-to-be-fascinating defamation trial between Rupert Murdoch's prized cable news channel and Dominion Voting Systems—which alleged that Fox had repeatedly aired false claims that it fixed the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden—the two parties reached a settlement. The $787.5 million is about half of the $1.6 billion the election technology company demanded.

"Fox News' $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in U.S. history involving a media company."

Nevertheless, as CNN (4/18/23) reported, "Fox News' $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in U.S. history involving a media company." It amounts to 5.5% of total revenue of the Fox Corporation, Fox News' parent company, for all of 2022.

It's still less than what Alex Jones of Infowars was forced to pay after a court found that he had repeatedly defamed the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims for faking the massacre (Independent, 9/15/22; AP, 10/12/22). And this wasn't Dominion's first settlement regarding false election claims: Newsmax, a network that's sort of like Fox News on crystal meth, settled a similar lawsuit with Dominion two years ago (Business Insider, 4/20/21).

Fox's critics are disappointed; the network gets to keep its dirty laundry out of the light, and it still retains its place as the go-to right-wing cable news source (Atlantic, 4/19/23). On the other hand, Dominion attorney Justin Nelson (Deadline, 4/18/23) told reporters: "The truth matters. Lies have consequences," and that the settlement "represents vindication and accountability."

Tough legal road

On the face of it, Fox had one big thing on its side going into the trial. The 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan holds that a plaintiff who's a public figure must show "actual malice" in order to prove libel, which means the defendant must have known that the defamatory statement was false, or else showed "reckless disregard for the truth." This is a tough standard to meet in court, and one that we've defended at FAIR (3/26/21, 2/25/22, 3/1/23, 3/10/23) against conservative calls to overturn the decision.

But it does not seem to have been too tough for Dominion to meet. It appears that the Fox lawyers, taking a look at the jury, smelling the wooden air of the courtroom, and looking at all the discovery documents showing that Fox hosts knew what they were airing was bunk, said to themselves, "We're not going to win this one."

They had good reason to be nervous. At the beginning of the trial, the network apologized to Judge Eric Davis, who is overseeing the case, after he said the network "made misrepresentations to the court and delayed turning over evidence" (ABC, 4/15/23). FoxNews host Howard Kurtz tweeted (4/16/23): "Judge knocks down some of [Fox's] key defenses, sanctions the network and suggests an investigation."

Observers forecast a tough legal road for Fox. The New York Times (4/6/23) said that "a number of well-regarded First Amendment lawyers have called the Dominion case among the strongest they have ever seen," because

the documents produced in discovery go far in establishing that people on virtually every level of the company knew that the allegations about Dominion were wrong yet for weeks did nothing to cut them off.

LA Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman (2/21/23) wrote that Dominion's case was "unusually strong." "Defamation suits often concern the work of careless or sensationalist reporters slipping past fact-checking safeguards," he noted. However, the allegations in this case had threatened to "lay bare a deliberate corporate decision to ignore the truth and publish lies."

At Bloomberg (3/18/23), Noah Feldman balanced the necessity of protecting press freedom and holding press outlets accountable, saying that courts should strive to "preserve the core idea behind the law of libel: that no one, not even the media speaking about a public figure on a newsworthy topic, may knowingly repeat defamatory lies as statements of fact." Feldman added that if

we abandon that basic idea, we will launch public discourse into a fully fact-free zone. Donald Trump has already done his best to put us there. The courts and the Constitution should not give him an after-the-fact victory.

In-house cheering squad

And yet Murdoch's empire, as well as some other conservative journalists, had spoken publicly in the network's defense, seemingly convinced of Fox's blamelessness. William Barr, former attorney general under George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump, assured readers of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal (3/23/23) that the case against Fox, before the trial, was weak, because "it isn't defamatory for journalists to report on newsworthy allegations made by others, even when those allegations turn out to be false." (In fact, reporters who repeat defamatory falsehoods are often committing libel, though there are exceptions to this general rule—Volokh Conspiracy, 11/7/18.)

Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple noted that Fox even publicly scoffed at the lawsuit last year in its annual report (Twitter, 4/19/23).

The idea that it's been proven that Fox aired false accusations "is virtually gospel among American liberals," complained Glenn Greenwald (System Update, 3/3/23), a frequent guest on Fox's Tucker Carlson Tonight. "As usual, these corporate media outlets"—as though Fox were somehow not corporate, or not a media outlet—"along with Democratic Party leaders, are marching in total lockstep, and none has aired any skepticism or questioning of this accusatory framework."

The Murdoch-owned New York Post editorial board (4/17/23) pulled an "I know you are but what am I?" routine in regards to the Dominion case, saying that the New York Times ran "endless Russia, Russia, Russia stories" about 2016 election interference (AP, 4/21/20), as well as the 1619 Project (8/14/19), which it called a

Pulitzer-winning disinfo push hawking the factually inaccurate idea that the American Revolution was undertaken primarily to preserve the slaveholding rights of Southern colonies.

There's some difference between allegations of defamation and a controversial interpretation of U.S. history. Who does the Post think should sue the Times for damages over the 1619 Project, the ghost of James Madison?

The Post went on, "How many internal emails from the Times' own newsroom would express private concerns over coverage, even as bogus stories are rushed into print to juice subscription revenues?" That's actually a fair question, especially when you consider the Times' coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 3/22/23). However, that still doesn't vindicate Fox.

No need to weaken press protection

These defenses seem laughable now that Fox has decided to part with the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Samoa in order to keep its dirty laundry out of the public eye. Interestingly, though, Barr's defense of Fox got one thing right when he said, "Conservatives shouldn't try to weaken the actual-malice standard"—which is something, as mentioned earlier, many conservatives want to do.

In fact, some right-wing outlets are already warning the Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' effort to challenge Sullivan could backfire, because, as the New York Times (4/3/23) put it, it "would affect right-wing reporters and commentators, not just the mainstream outlets that have become punching bags for Republican politicians."

But what Barr, and the other Fox defenders, didn't quite understand is that there can be some measure of accountability for victims of defamation by right-wing rage machines like Fox without sacrificing free press rights. Because this settlement showed just that.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ari Paul.

In an after-hours opinion late Friday, federal District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk donned his scrubs to rescind the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first drug in the most common medication abortion protocol.

The ruling by the far-right, Trump-appointed judge was lawless and should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the ratcheting up of tensions over the legality of abortion since the United States Supreme Court upended constitutional protection for the procedure last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

In fact, Kacsmaryk’s ruling in the mifepristone case, known as Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has a lot in common with the Dobbs opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito: It ignores science, wholly reimagines facts, and cites less-than-credible sources to arrive at a preordained destination.

“Medication abortion is among the safest medical interventions in any category — related to pregnancy or not.”

Matthew Kacsmaryk listens during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 13, 2017.

Photo: Senate Judiciary Committee via AP

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

Donald Trump has provoked a bullying crisis in America that extends from elementary school all the way to Congress. It’s time to say, “Enough!”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, an infamous bully who once chased then-17-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg down the street screaming epithets at him, bullied her pooch Kevin McCarthy into threatening New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a congressional investigation if he didn’t back off from prosecuting her role model, Donald Trump.

Following up, Gym Jordan, notorious for his bullying any witness who appears before his committees or brings up his alleged coverup history, has now been joined by James Comer (accused of abusing a girlfriend and then getting her an abortion), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil in demanding Bragg give their committees all the information he’s gathered on Donald Trump’s crimes relating to his paying off porn star Stormy Daniels.

For his part, Bragg is having none of it, pushing back with a statement saying though a spokesman:

“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law.”

Bullying has now become the trademark behavior of the GOP, the result of Donald Trump’s entrance on the scene in 2015 when he successfully bullied and cowed every other candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Humans invent political systems, and we base our inventions on our observations of human behavior. It makes perfect sense that when Benito Mussolini invented fascism in its modern form, he was simply patterning it after a behavior he knew well because he’d exhibited it his entire life: bullying.

This understanding parallels the rise of fascism as the political system now most vigorously embraced by the GOP, from rigging courts and elections to using naked threats of violence and even attempted murder to try to stop the peaceful transfer of the presidency from Trump to Biden on January 6th.

As Madeline Albright wrote in her book Fascism: A Warning:

“Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was ‘bully.’”

If we don’t take on bullies — particularly fascist bullies — they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them.  The best political example of this writ large was Hitler.  He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough.

Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.”  But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only contain or defeat them.  Which is what FDR, Churchill, and Stalin ended up having to do.

From that experience, Europe learned a lesson about dealing with fascist bullies, which is why the governments of the continent are united in their support of Ukraine against the murderous bullying of Russia’s fascist leader.

Bullies never stop. And, most importantly, every time they win they set their sights on the next conquest.  Giving in to their demands only creates a newer and more elaborate set of demands.

People in the business world know this well because some of the most successful and powerful people in that realm are, themselves, successful bullies and everybody in business has dealt with them at one time or another.  We typically only learn late in their careers what tyrants they were, as in the biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Donald Trump.

But because they’ve acquired wealth and power through bullying their colleagues, competitors, suppliers, and employees, those business bullies who move into politics (whether as elected officials or as those who buy off elected officials) bring their bullying tactics with them.

We have so many of these bullies polluting our political waters today that it’s nearly impossible to get anything done that benefits anybody except the morbidly rich bullies themselves and their friends.

As lawyer and therapist Bill Eddy writes for Psychology Today:

“Bullies don’t negotiate; they make demands, they make threats, and they fight for them. They generally lack the modern skills of win-win… So don’t think of their demands as a form of true negotiation. It’s more like warfare. And you don’t want to give in to that.”

Right now, America is suffering from an epidemic of political bullying.

Billionaires started bullying us in the 1980s at the suggestion of Lewis Powell, demanding that the top 74% income tax rate be collapsed to 25%; Reagan enthusiastically gave in (as did a few Democrats) and now the billionaires who are paying 3% tax rates (not a typo) are using their political muscle to try to eliminate funding to the IRS as part of their “negotiation” around the debt ceiling.

Trump, like all fascist bullies, delights in this.

He gets pleasure stripping power away from others while causing fear and pain in his enemies’ lives, and the more successfully he can bully high-profile people the more he seems to puff up with pleasure.

This is a crisis for America now because presidents tend to establish both the tone, tenor, and fashions of the day.

John Kennedy, for example, established an optimistic and forward-looking tone for our country, while Jimmy Carter made it fashionable to be a thoughtful, compassionate Christian and an energy geek. Bill Clinton turned us all into policy wonks, and George W. Bush transformed himself from an AWOL draft-dodger drunk into a warrior. Barack Obama established a tone of thoughtful, elegant inclusion and diversity, celebrated around the world.

Tragically, what Donald Trump showed us is that when the President of the United States is a bully, being a bully becomes fashionable.

Political bullies, from the soft-spoken Mitch McConnell to the outrageous Gym Jordan, all surfed the wave of Trump’s bullying style. Right wing media has become filled with outrage-puffed bullies, each reveling in being more brutal, oafish, and outrageously fascistic than the last.

Over the past few years, Trump followers delighted in bullying store owners and people in public spaces by refusing to wear masks. Now they’re bullying trans people, pregnant women, public school teachers, librarians, and drag queens. Bullies, being cowards deep down inside, always pick on those they see as the least able to defend themselves.

Bullying is contagious, which makes the GOP’s fascist bullying a whole-of-society crisis.

Multiple studies showed, in the months after Trump was elected, an increase in school bullying. White “Karens” (female and male) around the country found new validation in their attempts to bully people of color, including children. And Trump’s bullying use of the phrase “China virus” led to a huge spike in attacks on Asian Americans.

Trump set the tone for all these bullies: truth doesn’t matter, so long as you can hurt and intimidate somebody for your own benefit or even just for fun. As Glenn Altschuler wrote for The Hill:

“And like all bullies, Trump traffics in personal insults and group stereotypes. He began calling immigrants ‘rapists,’ complained about ‘shithole countries,’ mocked a reporter with disabilities, said the Speaker of the House has ‘mental problems,’ said four American congresswomen of color should ‘go back’ to the ‘crime-infested places from which they came.’

“He’s peddled the racist idea that immigration is an ‘invasion,’ and retweeted the claim that ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.’ He responded to the #MeToo movement by declaring, ‘It’s a very scary time for young men in America.’ He spread a phony conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a congressional aide, in 2001.”

Remember Mitch McConnell bragging, “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’” Classic bullying.

The people whose bullying tendencies drew them to guns and violence have joined the bullies in the GOP as well, with the ultimate bullying event being their assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6.

Convicted foreign agent, bully, and Trump toady Mike Flynn, who suggested that a wholesale slaughter of minority Americans a la Myanmar “should happen” here, upped the ante by saying, when presented with a new AR15, “Maybe I’ll find someone in Washington, D.C.” Spoken like a lifelong bully.

Our world is in flames, as climate scientists have been warning us would happen for at least five decades, but fossil-fuel billionaires here and abroad continue to bully civilized nations into a suicide pact. Just let them get richer and richer selling their poisons, they say…until everything collapses.

Psychologist Shawn T. Smith, author of Surviving Aggressive People, notes that bullies almost always back down when they’re confronted.  Bullies, he notes, are both lazy and cowards; preying on people who fight back is too much trouble and risk.

“[B]ullies and predators,” Smith writes, “…test, …prod, and…scan for vulnerability. When they do, responding quickly is more important than responding perfectly.”

The vast majority of Americans don’t want the world these GOP bullies are trying to impose on us.

Most Americans, for example, would like to have the same kind of healthcare and educational system that Canadians, Europeans, Australians, and South Koreans have. Everybody covered, not a single medical bankruptcy, and undergraduate student debt largely nonexistent. They’d like good union jobs, a stable environment, quality public transportation, and top-notch primary schools.

So, why don’t we have what Europe got in the 1940s and Canada got in the 1960s?  Because wealthy bullies who don’t want to pay their taxes buy off Republicans who, themselves, are willing to bully the American people and the press.

We have “Jan. 6th” bullies, anti-mask bullies, anti-vax bullies, an entire health insurance industry that bullies us, bank bullies who rip us off, Wall Street bullies stealing everything that’s not nailed down, anti-abortion bullies threatening women, and religious bullies threatening our courts.

Pushing back hard is imperative, otherwise we lose.

It’s way past time for average Americans to fight back: we’ve been bullied enough. Democrats and average Americans must follow Alvin Bragg’s example: stand up and put a stop to it.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

During Cyclones Hale and Gabrielle the poor management of exotic plantations in Aotearoa New Zealand — primarily pine — has again led to extensive damage in Tairāwhiti.

Critical public infrastructure destroyed; highly productive agricultural and horticultural land washed away or buried; houses, fences and sheds knocked over; people’s lives and dreams upended; people dead.

The impacts on natural ecosystems are still unknown, but there will have been extensive damage in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Similar damage occurred during storms in June 2018 and July 2020.

• READ MORE: Cyclone Gabrielle triggers more destructive forestry ‘slash’ — NZ must change how it grows trees
• Global supply chains are devouring what’s left of Earth’s unspoilt forests

While heavy rainfall and flooded rivers are a major factor, it is sediment and slash from plantation harvesting that has been the cause of most of the damage.

Slash is the woody material (including large logs) left after clear-fell harvesting of commercial forests.

Landslides in harvested sites pick up the material and carry it downstream, causing significant damage. All the evidence from Cyclone Gabrielle shows that much of the damage was caused by radiata pine slash.

The legacy of poor land management
Sediment and slash from exotic tree harvesting sites were established as major factors in the damage that occurred during the June 2018 Tolaga Bay storm in recent court cases taken by Gisborne District Council.

Five plantation companies were found guilty and fined for breaching resource consent conditions relating to their management practices.

Multiple groups have called for an inquiry into the way plantation harvest sites are being managed in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere.

But given the severity and ongoing nature of these impacts, is it not time we move beyond focusing on management practices and address the broader underlying issues that have triggered this situation?

These ultimate causes are complex but primarily revolve around historic poor land management decision-making and human-induced climate change.

‘East Coast disaster’: Environmental group calls for inquiry into forestry practices https://t.co/pjTVIiy0Cf pic.twitter.com/MQYkVZCMAY

— nzherald (@nzherald) January 13, 2023

Among the key drivers of the current problems in Tairāwhiti are the large areas of exotic tree plantations that were established with government support after the devastation of Cyclone Bola.

But this devastation also reflects earlier poor land management decisions to clear native forest off steep, erodible hill country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was also encouraged by the government of the day.

Looming climate change
The other underlying driver of the disaster is human-induced climate change. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now 150 percent above pre-industrial levels and climates are changing rapidly with new and unprecedented events becoming the norm.

While increasing global temperatures are the most obvious feature of human-induced climate change, it is the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that are having the biggest impacts on people and the environment.

It is essential that we hold the forestry sector accountable in Tairāwhiti and elsewhere. But we also need to urgently address the underlying causes because no matter how strict harvesting rules are, storm events are going to occur with increasing frequency and intensity.

Time for urgent action
With more than 40 years experience researching forest ecology and sustainable land management in Aotearoa, I believe there are four key areas where we need to urgently act to address these issues.

1. As a country we need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and rapidly increase the draw-down of CO2 out of the atmosphere. These are national issues and not confined to Tairāwhiti but as a nation we seem to be sleepwalking in our response to the climate emergency.
2. We need a comprehensive catchment-by-catchment assessment across all of Tairāwhiti (and likely other areas of Aotearoa) to identify those plantations that are located in the wrong place in terms of potential harvesting impacts. There should be no further harvesting in Tairāwhiti plantations until this exercise has been completed. We also need to identify those areas that currently lack plantations but should never be planted in exotic tree crops (for any purpose).
3. The government then needs to buy out the current owners of these plantations and embark on a programme of careful conversion to native forest. This will come at a cost, but it needs to be done. We already have models for this in Tairāwhiti where the Gisborne District Council has started converting pine forests in its water supply catchment to native forests.
4. Finally, we need to establish substantially more native forests throughout all Tairāwhiti, and Aotearoa more generally, to help build resilience in our landscapes.

The consequences of short-term thinking
For too long we have been fixated in Aotearoa with maximising short-term returns from exotic tree crops without thinking about long-term consequences. The legacies of this fixation are now really starting to impact us as the climate emergency exposes the risks that poorly sited and managed exotic tree crops pose.

And we are now making the same mistakes with exotic carbon tree crops, again leaving unacceptable legacies for future generations to deal with because of a focus on short-term financial gains.

Exotic tree plantations have dominated forest policy in Aotearoa and we urgently need to shift this to a focus on diverse native forests.

Our native rainforests provide so many benefits that exotic tree crops can never provide.

They are critical for the conservation of our native biodiversity, providing habitat for a myriad of plant, animal, fungal and microbial species. They also regulate local climates, enhance water quality and reduce erosion. This helps sustain healthy freshwater and marine environments.

Native replanting initiatives championed by charities like Pure Advantage need to be the primary focus of forest policy in Aotearoa now and in the future.

Dr David Norton, emeritus professor, University of Canterbury.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: Anthony Crider – CC BY 2.0

When it looked like ultra-right-wing forces, led by former President Trump, might win the elections to the U.S. Congress on November 8, there was alarm that democracy in that country could suffer a huge setback, potentially even the disappearance of the democratic system itself. As political analyst John Nichols noted, “The November 9 election could be the last for a vanished democracy.”

After the results of the elections were known, it seemed that these fears were exaggerated.  Although the extreme right – the Republican Party – won the elections in the House of Representatives, one of two legislative chambers in Congress, it lost the elections in the other, more powerful chamber, the Senate, which continues to be controlled by the Democratic Party. Hence, there was an outpouring of relief in the U.S. media (except those close to the extreme right) assuming that democracy had been saved.

But is this optimism justified?  Does the U.S. have a democracy capable of resisting the rise of the ultra-right with fascist characteristics currently spreading worldwide? In this article I will present evidence that U.S. democracy has a baked-in bias towards the far-right that makes it very difficult to enact basic policies that benefit the majority of the people.  This bias has created fertile conditions in the U.S. for fascism to grow.  As someone who lived under a fascist regime in Spain, and knows fascism when I see it, I am alarmed by the growth of the ultra-right, with similar characteristics to the fascism I knew.  Its growth is a consequence of the grave limitations of U.S. liberal democracy.  Thus, it is premature to assume that a far-right takeover has been averted; on the contrary, it is time for urgent mobilization to stop it.

THE U.S. HAS ONE OF THE LEAST DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS EXISTING TODAY IN THE DEMOCRATIC WORLD

In general, the U.S. democratic system has always been presented as one of the most advanced democratic systems in the world. Hence, many democratic countries readily accept the leadership of the U.S. government in international associations and alliances that claim to be defenders of democracy, such as NATO. Such a perception is promoted by the leaders of that government, including current President Joseph Biden who recently defined the U.S. as ” the most democratic country in the world. ” The evidence, however, indicates that the U.S. is one of the least democratic countries among the existing democratic countries today.What happened in the recent elections on November 8 cannot be understood without understanding the enormous limitations of its political system. Let’s look at the data.

THE UNREPRESENTATIVE SENATE, ELECTORAL COLLEGE, AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

The Senate is the most powerful legislative chamber in the U.S. federal government. It must approve, among other matters, the federal budget, the members appointed by the president to the Cabinet, and the members of the Supreme Court. The first thing that stands out when analyzing the composition of this chamber is that it is not very representative, since each of the fifty states has the right to elect two Senators, regardless of the size of its population. Thus, the state of California, which has forty million inhabitants, has the same number of Senators as the state of Wyoming, which has only half a million. A Californian therefore has eighty times less power to influence Senate elections than a citizen of Wyoming. As a result, small states wield much more power than big states. They also tend to be more rural, more conservative, less diverse racially and ethnically, and have more Republican Party voters (holding far-right views) than large states. As a result, the U.S. Senate, as an institution, has a far-right bias baked into its structure.

A similar situation occurs in the election of the President of the United States, which is conducted, not by direct election by the U.S. electorate, but by members of the Electoral College, which has 538 members elected by state assemblies using rules that also favor small rural states over large states with urban and industrial centers. This explains the conservative orientation of the Electoral College. Indeed, on five separate occasions the Electoral College has chosen the candidate who lost the popular vote to be President, most recently in 2000 and 2016, when Democratic presidential candidates lost to Republicans because of the conservative bias of the Electoral College. In 2000 the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, obtained 543,000 more votes than Republican George Bush, while in 2016 Democrat Hillary Clinton received 2.9 million more votes than Republican Donald Trump. (Although Trump falsely claimed that he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”)

Like the Senate and the Electoral College, the House of Representatives also has very limited representation. Voting districts are drawn up according to the electoral preferences of each state’s ruling party.  It is not uncommon, for example, for neighborhoods with a large Black population, who tend to vote Democratic, to be divided into small fractions that become part of majority White districts, in order to disempower Black people.  For many constituencies, such as poor minority and White working class people, there are also numerous barriers to voting, such as requirements for additional documents to prove identify or residence, long waits to vote on work days, and disqualification of voters with felony convictions. Republicans especially aim to eliminate programs like early voting and voting by mail, which allow more working class people to vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 21 states have passed 42 restrictive voting laws since 2021 alone.

THE ELECTORAL PROCESS DOES NOT ALLOW PLURALITY AND FORCES BIPARTISANSHIP

The American electoral system forces a bipartisanship that prevents political diversity. The electoral system is not proportional, that is, the percentage of members that a party has in a legislative chamber is not the same as the percentage of votes that party received, which would make it possible to establish blocs by party based on the size of their electorate. The system is bipartisan, allowing in practice only two parties, one, the Republican Party, today ultra-right (mostly Trumpist) and the other, the Democratic Party, a liberal right-wing party similar to the liberal parties in Europe, close to the financial and economic establishments (primarily financial capital), and the main promoter since the Clinton era of neoliberal globalization. This party has a preferential relationship with the international association of liberal parties, appearing as an Observer.  When I was an advisor to presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in 1988, we tried to change that situation without succeeding, due to strong resistance from the apparatus of that party.

A new party has to win at least fifty-one percent of the popular vote in its target district in order to be represented. This implies that it doesn’t matter if a candidate gets forty-nine percent of the vote or just one percent. Without fifty-one percent, the district is lost, which makes it very difficult for new parties to appear. Hence, minority parties such as the Socialist Party present their candidates in the Democratic Party primaries and their candidates can be elected individually, but without constituting themselves as a parliamentary group. The best known case is that of the socialist Bernie Sanders who almost won the Democratic Party primaries in 2016, being one of the most popular politicians in the country. In the U.S. there is no left-wing party with representation in the Congress of the U.S. and this is partially due to the design of the electoral process to avoid that to occur.

THE FINANCING OF ELECTIONS IS PREDOMINATELY PRIVATE               

Another major limitation of the U.S. electoral system is that it is privately financed. Wealthy individuals and corporations fund the elections of Congressional representatives to defend their own interests. Hence, the Congressional committees in charge of regulating industry are made up of people close to corporations in those industries who, in theory, are regulated by the committee. A clear example is Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who receives funding from the coal and oil industries while serving as the Chair of the powerful Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate. The same is true for the members of five key health committees in the House and Senate. Giant and powerful health insurance companies (which dominate the management of the health sector) fund candidates from both parties who will support their interests.  This is how health insurers cemented bipartisan support for their highly profitable Medicare Advantage plans that garner huge profits while driving up Medicare’s costs and skimping on seniors’ health care. This type of corporate funding of elections, which would be considered outright corruption in many European nations, is legal in the US. The U.S. Supreme Court has even ruled that corporations are “persons” and donations for candidates’ media campaigns may not be restricted because they are “free speech.”

The impact of private funding on U.S. elections reached its zenith on November 8, 2022. Those elections determined which party would control the federal and state legislatures, as well as many Governorships and other political positions. According to the Washington Post, fifty billionaire donors alone gave over $1.1 billion to finance the elections of their desired candidates. Between the super-wealthy, corporations, and smaller donations, a whopping $17 billion was spent on the midterm elections. Billionaires also gave huge sums to finance candidates for election to the judiciary such as judges. One of the billionaires in the Chicago business class (Barre Seid) gave an astounding $1.6 billion dollars to promote the election of conservative judges who will safeguard their economic interests and guarantee control of the legal system. The overall impact of private funding of elections, is to diminish the popular election process for representatives, senators, governors, and judges, as well as referendums, widely used at the state level. (The Largest Political Donation in U.S. History Took Place in the 2022 November Election, Truthout, November 11, 2022)

Corporations can donate unlimited amounts for the purchase of media space in which there is no regulation.Consequently, candidates with the most funding have a greater chance of gaining public exposure. Most of the media, including television, radio, and social media are owned by corporate behemoths, or by billionaire tycoons whose primary objective is the promotion of their commercial and political interests. A clear example is the billionaire and richest man in the world, Mr. Elon Musk. Musk recently bought the hugely popular social media company, Twitter. As the same time he reiterated his allegiance to Trump and reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, giving Trump, now a candidate for the 2024 presidential election, access to a powerful system of global communication (or miscommunication, given Trump’s proclivity to falsehoods).  Musk ironically defines himself as a libertarian, even though he is, in large part, a creation of the federal government.  He has received over $7.0 billion in government contracts and billions more in tax breaks, loans, and other subsidies for his firms SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONSERVATIVE BIAS AND PRIVATE FINANCE ARE A LACK OF SOCIAL, LABOR, AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS OF THE MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION.

One consequence of what has been said above is the great disconnect that exists in the U.S. between the policies that people want and what their institutions (governments, legislative chambers and the judicial system) deliver.  Examples of this abound. For example, the Supreme Court recently repealed Roe vs Wade, the 1973 decision which gave women the right to an abortion as a matter of privacy. Yet the right to abortion is supported by most Americans, including voters, as attested to by positive results in five state referendums. In fact, advocacy for the right to abortion increased turnout by young voters on November 8, helping Democrats to win more of their races than expected.

The Supreme Court has also repealed popular laws for the protection of the environment and for workers’ rights. Meanwhile the Senate refuses to regulate access to guns even though the major cause of death in children and young adults is gunshot wounds and most Americans favor gun control. There is opposition in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to increasing taxes on the profits of large corporations, another measure with popular support in the US. Most of the population also favors reducing barriers for workers to unionize, and over two-thirds think there should be a right to health care, a right that does not exist in the U.S.

Another proof of the grave limitations of U.S. democracy is that a higher share of the population lives in poverty in the U.S. than in dozens of other nations. The poverty rate (11.7 percent) and child poverty rate (20.9 percent) are among the highest out of thirty-five developed countries. Inequalities in wealth and income by social class, race, and gender are also among the worst in the world’s liberal democracies.

THE HUGE CRISIS OF THE LEGITIMACY OF THE POLITICAL CLASS: THE ORIGINS OF THE ULTRA-RIGHT

As a result of these limitations of U.S. liberal democracy, there is a lack of credibility and legitimacy in the political system. People without a college degree, who make up the majority of the U.S. population, overwhelmingly believe that “the corporate class” controls the government. This explain why voter participation in the U.S. is very low compared to other democracies, with almost half of the population eligible to vote in federal elections abstaining, and an even higher share, 70 percent, abstaining from voting in state elections. The working class is especially distrustful of government and the majority abstain from participation in voting at a higher rate than in any western European country.

It is this crisis of legitimacy of the political system that explains the growth of the ultra-right that presents itself as anti-establishment and anti-federal government. There are many points of similarity between the growth of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s during the Great Depression and the situation now as I have shown in a recent article, (Vicente Navarro, “The Predictable Resurgence of Fascism and Nazism On Both Sides of the North Atlantic and Its Consequences” Counterpunch, December 9, 2022). That growth has also stimulated higher participation from those forces that rightly perceive themselves as threatened by this supposedly anti-establishment movement. This is one of the reasons why participation increased in the last elections in 2020 and 2022: to stop Trumpism. In 2022, this mobilization against Trump, rather than greater approval of the Biden administration’s policies, helped the Democrats hold on to the Senate. People are especially dissatisfied with Biden’s management of the economic crisis. Inflation, perceived somewhat as related to the Ukrainian war, is one of the public’s biggest concerns and a majority of the population, fifty-four percent, hold President Biden responsible.

CONCLUSION: THE ULTRA-RIGHT HAS INCREASED ITS POWER

It is a mistake to read the U.S. November elections as a weakening of the ultra-right – that is, of what is defined as Trumpism. Its power has increased, as it now controls the Republican Party and the House of Representatives. On the other hand, retention of control of the Senate by the Democrats occurred despite Biden’s policies, not because of them. Biden’s popularity, inside and outside of government, is low, while many of his policies have been disappointing. Even in the case of abortion, his response to the Supreme Court decision was timid and late. Biden’s failure to establish a public option in the medical care system to expand health services was similarly disappointing. And the overwhelming influence of economic and financial interests on the apparatus of the Democratic Party and on Democrats in the Senate has diluted many of the proposals made by the President. The Democratic Party itself was an obstacle to motivating voters, as was seen in New York, where party leaders trying to eliminate progressive forces dampened the mobilization against Trumpism.

The historical evidence shows that the only way of stopping fascism and Nazism, or their equivalence in the 21^stcentury, is to profoundly transform and expand entitlements for universal social, labor, civil, and political rights that will benefit the majority of the population.  What in Europe is called the Welfare State is currently dramatically under-developed in the U.S. The commitment to developing universal social, political, and labor rights for the whole population (and not only for very vulnerable populations with very limited resources) would require greater spending in social areas and programs, with active government intervention to redistribute wealth and income.  Greater investment in protecting the environment and reducing global warming are also needed to guarantee the survival of humanity. These policies will require a significant change in foreign policy and a large reduction in military expenses.

The first proposal of the Biden administration seemed to take the New Deal as its inspiration, raising a set of hopes but unfortunately most of the promise was dramatically diluted. And the reasons are explained in this article. The U.S. political system is clearly aimed at making it very difficult to develop the needed policies. This is why it’s so important and urgent to demand the political changes that the majority of people desire and that the political class does not deliver.

It is urgent and necessary that transformative policies be adopted to unequivocally improve the lives of the majority of people. Deep democratization is necessary to achieve that splendid initial phrase “we the people” in its Constitution: “We the people” affirms that the government of the U.S. exists to serve the people. The majority of the U.S. population does not believe that their government is serving them, leading to a crisis of legitimacy of the political class. Deep democratization, therefore, is urgently needed to overcome the enormous limitations of U.S. liberal democracy. A failure to promote transformative policies in the near term will inevitably lead to the triumph of neo-fascism.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vicente Navarro.

Photograph Source: Anthony Crider – CC BY 2.0

When it looked like ultra-right-wing forces, led by former President Trump, might win the elections to the U.S. Congress on November 8, there was alarm that democracy in that country could suffer a huge setback, potentially even the disappearance of the democratic system itself. As political analyst John Nichols noted, “The November 9 election could be the last for a vanished democracy.”

After the results of the elections were known, it seemed that these fears were exaggerated.  Although the extreme right – the Republican Party – won the elections in the House of Representatives, one of two legislative chambers in Congress, it lost the elections in the other, more powerful chamber, the Senate, which continues to be controlled by the Democratic Party. Hence, there was an outpouring of relief in the U.S. media (except those close to the extreme right) assuming that democracy had been saved.

But is this optimism justified?  Does the U.S. have a democracy capable of resisting the rise of the ultra-right with fascist characteristics currently spreading worldwide? In this article I will present evidence that U.S. democracy has a baked-in bias towards the far-right that makes it very difficult to enact basic policies that benefit the majority of the people.  This bias has created fertile conditions in the U.S. for fascism to grow.  As someone who lived under a fascist regime in Spain, and knows fascism when I see it, I am alarmed by the growth of the ultra-right, with similar characteristics to the fascism I knew.  Its growth is a consequence of the grave limitations of U.S. liberal democracy.  Thus, it is premature to assume that a far-right takeover has been averted; on the contrary, it is time for urgent mobilization to stop it.

THE U.S. HAS ONE OF THE LEAST DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS EXISTING TODAY IN THE DEMOCRATIC WORLD

In general, the U.S. democratic system has always been presented as one of the most advanced democratic systems in the world. Hence, many democratic countries readily accept the leadership of the U.S. government in international associations and alliances that claim to be defenders of democracy, such as NATO. Such a perception is promoted by the leaders of that government, including current President Joseph Biden who recently defined the U.S. as ” the most democratic country in the world. ” The evidence, however, indicates that the U.S. is one of the least democratic countries among the existing democratic countries today.What happened in the recent elections on November 8 cannot be understood without understanding the enormous limitations of its political system. Let’s look at the data.

THE UNREPRESENTATIVE SENATE, ELECTORAL COLLEGE, AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

The Senate is the most powerful legislative chamber in the U.S. federal government. It must approve, among other matters, the federal budget, the members appointed by the president to the Cabinet, and the members of the Supreme Court. The first thing that stands out when analyzing the composition of this chamber is that it is not very representative, since each of the fifty states has the right to elect two Senators, regardless of the size of its population. Thus, the state of California, which has forty million inhabitants, has the same number of Senators as the state of Wyoming, which has only half a million. A Californian therefore has eighty times less power to influence Senate elections than a citizen of Wyoming. As a result, small states wield much more power than big states. They also tend to be more rural, more conservative, less diverse racially and ethnically, and have more Republican Party voters (holding far-right views) than large states. As a result, the U.S. Senate, as an institution, has a far-right bias baked into its structure.

A similar situation occurs in the election of the President of the United States, which is conducted, not by direct election by the U.S. electorate, but by members of the Electoral College, which has 538 members elected by state assemblies using rules that also favor small rural states over large states with urban and industrial centers. This explains the conservative orientation of the Electoral College. Indeed, on five separate occasions the Electoral College has chosen the candidate who lost the popular vote to be President, most recently in 2000 and 2016, when Democratic presidential candidates lost to Republicans because of the conservative bias of the Electoral College. In 2000 the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, obtained 543,000 more votes than Republican George Bush, while in 2016 Democrat Hillary Clinton received 2.9 million more votes than Republican Donald Trump. (Although Trump falsely claimed that he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”)

Like the Senate and the Electoral College, the House of Representatives also has very limited representation. Voting districts are drawn up according to the electoral preferences of each state’s ruling party.  It is not uncommon, for example, for neighborhoods with a large Black population, who tend to vote Democratic, to be divided into small fractions that become part of majority White districts, in order to disempower Black people.  For many constituencies, such as poor minority and White working class people, there are also numerous barriers to voting, such as requirements for additional documents to prove identify or residence, long waits to vote on work days, and disqualification of voters with felony convictions. Republicans especially aim to eliminate programs like early voting and voting by mail, which allow more working class people to vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 21 states have passed 42 restrictive voting laws since 2021 alone.

THE ELECTORAL PROCESS DOES NOT ALLOW PLURALITY AND FORCES BIPARTISANSHIP

The American electoral system forces a bipartisanship that prevents political diversity. The electoral system is not proportional, that is, the percentage of members that a party has in a legislative chamber is not the same as the percentage of votes that party received, which would make it possible to establish blocs by party based on the size of their electorate. The system is bipartisan, allowing in practice only two parties, one, the Republican Party, today ultra-right (mostly Trumpist) and the other, the Democratic Party, a liberal right-wing party similar to the liberal parties in Europe, close to the financial and economic establishments (primarily financial capital), and the main promoter since the Clinton era of neoliberal globalization. This party has a preferential relationship with the international association of liberal parties, appearing as an Observer.  When I was an advisor to presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in 1988, we tried to change that situation without succeeding, due to strong resistance from the apparatus of that party.

A new party has to win at least fifty-one percent of the popular vote in its target district in order to be represented. This implies that it doesn’t matter if a candidate gets forty-nine percent of the vote or just one percent. Without fifty-one percent, the district is lost, which makes it very difficult for new parties to appear. Hence, minority parties such as the Socialist Party present their candidates in the Democratic Party primaries and their candidates can be elected individually, but without constituting themselves as a parliamentary group. The best known case is that of the socialist Bernie Sanders who almost won the Democratic Party primaries in 2016, being one of the most popular politicians in the country. In the U.S. there is no left-wing party with representation in the Congress of the U.S. and this is partially due to the design of the electoral process to avoid that to occur.

THE FINANCING OF ELECTIONS IS PREDOMINATELY PRIVATE               

Another major limitation of the U.S. electoral system is that it is privately financed. Wealthy individuals and corporations fund the elections of Congressional representatives to defend their own interests. Hence, the Congressional committees in charge of regulating industry are made up of people close to corporations in those industries who, in theory, are regulated by the committee. A clear example is Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who receives funding from the coal and oil industries while serving as the Chair of the powerful Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate. The same is true for the members of five key health committees in the House and Senate. Giant and powerful health insurance companies (which dominate the management of the health sector) fund candidates from both parties who will support their interests.  This is how health insurers cemented bipartisan support for their highly profitable Medicare Advantage plans that garner huge profits while driving up Medicare’s costs and skimping on seniors’ health care. This type of corporate funding of elections, which would be considered outright corruption in many European nations, is legal in the US. The U.S. Supreme Court has even ruled that corporations are “persons” and donations for candidates’ media campaigns may not be restricted because they are “free speech.”

The impact of private funding on U.S. elections reached its zenith on November 8, 2022. Those elections determined which party would control the federal and state legislatures, as well as many Governorships and other political positions. According to the Washington Post, fifty billionaire donors alone gave over $1.1 billion to finance the elections of their desired candidates. Between the super-wealthy, corporations, and smaller donations, a whopping $17 billion was spent on the midterm elections. Billionaires also gave huge sums to finance candidates for election to the judiciary such as judges. One of the billionaires in the Chicago business class (Barre Seid) gave an astounding $1.6 billion dollars to promote the election of conservative judges who will safeguard their economic interests and guarantee control of the legal system. The overall impact of private funding of elections, is to diminish the popular election process for representatives, senators, governors, and judges, as well as referendums, widely used at the state level. (The Largest Political Donation in U.S. History Took Place in the 2022 November Election, Truthout, November 11, 2022)

Corporations can donate unlimited amounts for the purchase of media space in which there is no regulation.Consequently, candidates with the most funding have a greater chance of gaining public exposure. Most of the media, including television, radio, and social media are owned by corporate behemoths, or by billionaire tycoons whose primary objective is the promotion of their commercial and political interests. A clear example is the billionaire and richest man in the world, Mr. Elon Musk. Musk recently bought the hugely popular social media company, Twitter. As the same time he reiterated his allegiance to Trump and reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, giving Trump, now a candidate for the 2024 presidential election, access to a powerful system of global communication (or miscommunication, given Trump’s proclivity to falsehoods).  Musk ironically defines himself as a libertarian, even though he is, in large part, a creation of the federal government.  He has received over $7.0 billion in government contracts and billions more in tax breaks, loans, and other subsidies for his firms SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONSERVATIVE BIAS AND PRIVATE FINANCE ARE A LACK OF SOCIAL, LABOR, AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS OF THE MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION.

One consequence of what has been said above is the great disconnect that exists in the U.S. between the policies that people want and what their institutions (governments, legislative chambers and the judicial system) deliver.  Examples of this abound. For example, the Supreme Court recently repealed Roe vs Wade, the 1973 decision which gave women the right to an abortion as a matter of privacy. Yet the right to abortion is supported by most Americans, including voters, as attested to by positive results in five state referendums. In fact, advocacy for the right to abortion increased turnout by young voters on November 8, helping Democrats to win more of their races than expected.

The Supreme Court has also repealed popular laws for the protection of the environment and for workers’ rights. Meanwhile the Senate refuses to regulate access to guns even though the major cause of death in children and young adults is gunshot wounds and most Americans favor gun control. There is opposition in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to increasing taxes on the profits of large corporations, another measure with popular support in the US. Most of the population also favors reducing barriers for workers to unionize, and over two-thirds think there should be a right to health care, a right that does not exist in the U.S.

Another proof of the grave limitations of U.S. democracy is that a higher share of the population lives in poverty in the U.S. than in dozens of other nations. The poverty rate (11.7 percent) and child poverty rate (20.9 percent) are among the highest out of thirty-five developed countries. Inequalities in wealth and income by social class, race, and gender are also among the worst in the world’s liberal democracies.

THE HUGE CRISIS OF THE LEGITIMACY OF THE POLITICAL CLASS: THE ORIGINS OF THE ULTRA-RIGHT

As a result of these limitations of U.S. liberal democracy, there is a lack of credibility and legitimacy in the political system. People without a college degree, who make up the majority of the U.S. population, overwhelmingly believe that “the corporate class” controls the government. This explain why voter participation in the U.S. is very low compared to other democracies, with almost half of the population eligible to vote in federal elections abstaining, and an even higher share, 70 percent, abstaining from voting in state elections. The working class is especially distrustful of government and the majority abstain from participation in voting at a higher rate than in any western European country.

It is this crisis of legitimacy of the political system that explains the growth of the ultra-right that presents itself as anti-establishment and anti-federal government. There are many points of similarity between the growth of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s during the Great Depression and the situation now as I have shown in a recent article, (Vicente Navarro, “The Predictable Resurgence of Fascism and Nazism On Both Sides of the North Atlantic and Its Consequences” Counterpunch, December 9, 2022). That growth has also stimulated higher participation from those forces that rightly perceive themselves as threatened by this supposedly anti-establishment movement. This is one of the reasons why participation increased in the last elections in 2020 and 2022: to stop Trumpism. In 2022, this mobilization against Trump, rather than greater approval of the Biden administration’s policies, helped the Democrats hold on to the Senate. People are especially dissatisfied with Biden’s management of the economic crisis. Inflation, perceived somewhat as related to the Ukrainian war, is one of the public’s biggest concerns and a majority of the population, fifty-four percent, hold President Biden responsible.

CONCLUSION: THE ULTRA-RIGHT HAS INCREASED ITS POWER

It is a mistake to read the U.S. November elections as a weakening of the ultra-right – that is, of what is defined as Trumpism. Its power has increased, as it now controls the Republican Party and the House of Representatives. On the other hand, retention of control of the Senate by the Democrats occurred despite Biden’s policies, not because of them. Biden’s popularity, inside and outside of government, is low, while many of his policies have been disappointing. Even in the case of abortion, his response to the Supreme Court decision was timid and late. Biden’s failure to establish a public option in the medical care system to expand health services was similarly disappointing. And the overwhelming influence of economic and financial interests on the apparatus of the Democratic Party and on Democrats in the Senate has diluted many of the proposals made by the President. The Democratic Party itself was an obstacle to motivating voters, as was seen in New York, where party leaders trying to eliminate progressive forces dampened the mobilization against Trumpism.

The historical evidence shows that the only way of stopping fascism and Nazism, or their equivalence in the 21^stcentury, is to profoundly transform and expand entitlements for universal social, labor, civil, and political rights that will benefit the majority of the population.  What in Europe is called the Welfare State is currently dramatically under-developed in the U.S. The commitment to developing universal social, political, and labor rights for the whole population (and not only for very vulnerable populations with very limited resources) would require greater spending in social areas and programs, with active government intervention to redistribute wealth and income.  Greater investment in protecting the environment and reducing global warming are also needed to guarantee the survival of humanity. These policies will require a significant change in foreign policy and a large reduction in military expenses.

The first proposal of the Biden administration seemed to take the New Deal as its inspiration, raising a set of hopes but unfortunately most of the promise was dramatically diluted. And the reasons are explained in this article. The U.S. political system is clearly aimed at making it very difficult to develop the needed policies. This is why it’s so important and urgent to demand the political changes that the majority of people desire and that the political class does not deliver.

It is urgent and necessary that transformative policies be adopted to unequivocally improve the lives of the majority of people. Deep democratization is necessary to achieve that splendid initial phrase “we the people” in its Constitution: “We the people” affirms that the government of the U.S. exists to serve the people. The majority of the U.S. population does not believe that their government is serving them, leading to a crisis of legitimacy of the political class. Deep democratization, therefore, is urgently needed to overcome the enormous limitations of U.S. liberal democracy. A failure to promote transformative policies in the near term will inevitably lead to the triumph of neo-fascism.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vicente Navarro.

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Responding to reports that the Biden administration is finalizing plans to send Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine as the country endures waves of deadly Russian missile strikes, a top Kremlin official said Thursday that such a move would be viewed as an escalation in hostilities.

Citing anonymous sources, CNN reported Tuesday that a Pentagon plan to send an unknown quantity of Raytheon MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile systems is awaiting approval by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin before being sent to President Joe Biden's desk. 

"We strongly advise those who make decisions in Washington to listen at last, if not to us, then at least to themselves, to draw the right conclusions from our repeated warnings that any weapons systems supplied to Ukraine, including Patriot systems, respectively, with the operating personnel, have been and remain legitimate priority targets for the Russian Armed Forces," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters Thursday during her weekly press conference in Moscow.

"Given the growing amounts of direct U.S. military aid, including the presence of U.S. servicemen on the ground, the transfer of such sophisticated weaponry, the handling of which requires months of training, would mean an expansion of the involvement of regular U.S. military personnel in combat operations with all the ensuing consequences," she added.

On Wednesday, the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. said that "an information campaign has been launched in the U.S. about alleged preparations for sending cutting-edge air defense systems to Kyiv."

"If this is confirmed, we will witness yet another provocative step by the [Biden] administration that may lead to unpredictable consequences," the embassy continued. "Even without delivery of the Patriot systems, the United States is increasingly drawn into the conflict in the post-Soviet republic. The weapons flow is growing, the training of servicemen is expanding. The Ukrainian army is being supplied with intelligence data. Sending American military specialists to the combat zone is discussed more and more often. In addition, U.S. citizens participate in the confrontation as mercenaries."

If approved, the Patriot systems would be shipped to a U.S. Army base in Grafenwöehr, Germany, where Ukrainian troops would be trained in their operation. Patriot missiles—which have a range of up to 100 miles—are deployed to intercept other missiles and can also shoot down crewed aircraft.

Ukraine—which is suffering a devastating onslaught of Russian missiles as President Vladimir Putin's faltering invasion nears its 10th month—has long sought the battle-proven Patriot to counter one of Russia's most destructive tactics.

However, anti-war activists fear Moscow could come to view the deluge of state-of-the-art Western weaponry as an intolerable provocation warranting a military response.

According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), more than 6,700 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and over 10,600 others have been wounded by Russian forces, although OHCHR "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher."

"Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects," OHCHR added, "including shelling from heavy artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, missiles, and airstrikes."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vicente Navarro.

Photograph Source: Elekes Andor – CC BY-SA 4.0

Is the radical right pure hate and all emotion?

Well, they may start from that, but humans that they are, some of them try to rationalize their hates and fears into theories that, though detached from reality, literally provide the ammunition that enables their followers to wreak havoc, like the guy did who descended on a store frequented by Black people in Buffalo several months ago in order to kill as many African-Americans as possible.

Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism (Yale University, 2021) brings together and critically analyzes the thoughts of people that most of us probably have not heard of but are worshiped in far right networks around the world. Rose says we better listen to what these guys are saying, even if we find them utterly distasteful, because their ideas have consequences.

Steve Bannon, the incendiary Trump adviser, may be the best known activist of the international far right, but he has derived inspiration from otherwise little known figures on the fringes of history, underlining the wisdom in Keynes’ well-known observation: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The first of these scribblers in Rose’s gallery is Oswald Spengler, an intellectual outside the academy that captured the imagination of a pessimistic post-War World I generation with his celebration of the “heroic” culture of the West. Spengler asserted that culture was in danger of being overwhelmed from within by lack of confidence and loss of a sense of identity — and from without by the “downtrodden races of the outer ring,” who had begun to move from the periphery to the center, armed with the technologies shared with them by the West owing to what Spengler characterized as misguided liberal values.

People of Europe had a shared, collective identity based on one central idee fixe — the “striving for the infinite,” manifested in art, adventure, and conquest. This “Faustian” collective identity, Spengler said, was threatened by the moral sensitivity and self-doubt that liberalism had engendered and by global immigration. The “Decline of the West” (also the title of his key work) was inevitable, but he argued it could be postponed if the peoples of Europe would recognize and embrace their common collective cultural and racial identity and decisively reject the corrosive influence of liberalism, with its leveling doctrines of democracy and equality.

People studying the contemporary far right, observes Rose, are often surprised to see the continuing influence of an early 20th century figure like Spengler on today’s far right activists.

Another influential blast from the past is the Italian philosopher Julius Evola. Evola adopted what was becoming early 20th century sociology’s standard description of social evolution from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, from traditional to modern society. But instead of seeing modern society as a positive, with its division of labor, economic development, democratic rule, and evolution of the law, he saw it as a fall from grace. Tradition, hierarchy, inequality, the superiority of the master class — these constituted the natural state of community that liberalism, democracy, and socialism had destroyed with their glorification of reason, which drained the world of meaning.

For Evola, race is destiny, and he heaped outrage after outrage on African Americans and Jews. His followers claim, however, that he was not a crude racist, since for him race was not only biological but “spiritual,” whatever that means. One might dismiss all this as nonsense but one cannot dismiss its influence, for Evola has garnered enthusiastic praise across the far right, from the Russian Aleksandr Dugin to the Frenchman Guillaume Faye and to the alt-right Americans Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.

Spengler and Evola provided later theorists of reaction an explosive legacy of ideas.

A virulent anti-Semite, Francis Yockey argued that world domination is the essential drive of western culture, and the people of the West must live up to that destiny or witness their culture lose its “vitality.” Self-doubt engendered by liberalism was the first step on a slippery slope to cultural self-destruction.

Alain de Benoist of France denounces racial equality, celebrating instead, “racial plurality” as a “veritable human treasure.” Benoist is said to have inspired the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that immigration represents an “existential threat” to the white community and is part of a conspiracy to water down and eventually replace the white race as the dominant race in western societies.

Samuel Francis died in 2005 at age 58, but his impact on the far right continues to resonate. Like the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills, Francis saw the rise to power and consolidation of a power elite. But instead of moving left with this insight as Mills did, he moved right. Fancisc depicted a liberal managerial elite determined to advance the interests of a minority at the expense of an endangered white majority.

Francis also pioneered the depiction of liberals and progressives as promoting what eventually received the popular tag “cancel culture.” As Rose points out, Francis saw in liberalism “a coordinated project of ongoing cultural dispossession” that would “eventually target every symbol and institution of an old social order.”

Even if the Republicans won elections, in this view, the liberals’ policies would prevail because of their entrenchment in key unelected positions in the government bureaucracy — another perspective he shared with some on the left that was later popularized under as the “deep state” that allegedly countermanded Trump’s exercise of power.

Francis was among the first to uncover the political potential of the demographic of lower and middle class white Americans, people he termed “Middle American Radicals (MARS). His analytical work would contribute to activating that demographic into the angry mass that first took the form of the Tea Party Movement and later mutated into the Trumpist base.

But for all his sophisticated theorizing, Francis was obsessed with one idea, and this was that “the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”

Though Rose tries his best to treat his subjects’ ideas with care, his book serves as proof that Spengler, Evola, and their descendants are engaged in a fool’s errand, which is to rationalize that which resists reason. For reason is always critical and tied to a moral end: to dissolve or dismantle the myths, obfuscations, folk foolishness, urban legends, and outright falsehoods that stand in the way of the realization and achievement of that most fundamental and primeval of human aspirations: equality.

Ideas — even the most foolish, unfortunately — have consequences.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Walden Bello.

Wage theft includes a range of illegal practices, such as paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying overtime, or requiring workers to work through breaks or off the clock. It impacts service workers, low-income workers, immigrant and guest workers, and communities of color the most, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s “Cheated at Work” series, published from May 2021 to March 2022. An Economic Policy Institute study from 2017 found that just one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations—costs US workers an estimated $15 billion annually and impacts an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.

Based on their independent analysis of fifteen years of reports from the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, Campbell and Yerardi concluded that companies engaging in wage theft “have little incentive to follow the law.” In 2019 alone, the Department of Labor cited more than 8,500 employers for stealing approximately $287 million from workers. Major US corporations—including Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle K Stores—are among “the worst offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi reported.

The labor department’s Wage and Hour Division, which is charged with investigating federal wage-theft complaints, “rarely penalizes repeat offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi explained. Between October 2005 and September 2020, the agency fined “only about one in four repeat offenders.” In just 14 percent of the documented cases, companies were ordered to pay workers cash damages, and since 2005, the agency has allowed more than 16,000 employers to avoid paying more than $20 million owed in back wages.

Lack of resources at the federal level is blamed for lax enforcement. As of February 2021, the Wage and Hour Division employed only 787 investigators, a proportion of just one investigator per 182,000 workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Campbell and Yerardi noted. For comparison, in 1948 the division employed one investigator per 22,600 workers, or eight times the current proportion. Insufficient federal enforcement is “especially problematic” for workers in states that lack their own enforcement agencies: some fourteen states “lack the capacity to investigate wage theft claims or lack the ability to file lawsuits on behalf of victims,” according to the 2017 Economic Policy Institute report.

Strong state and local laws can help to protect workers and could offset weak federal enforcement. Campbell and Yerardi’s report mentioned local successes in Chicago (2013), Philadelphia (2016), and Minneapolis (2019), for example. But, as the reporters also noted, workers’ rights advocates continue to seek federal reforms, appealing to Congress to allocate funding to double the number of federal investigators. Terri Gerstein observed in May 2021, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, that in lieu of federal enforcement, and in response to “widespread, entrenched, and often egregious violations of workplace laws, an increasing number of district attorneys and state attorneys general have been bringing criminal prosecutions against law-breaking employers.”

Nonetheless, wage theft appears to be on the rise. A September 2021 study by One Fair Wage and the University of California, Berkeley, Food Labor Research Center found that 34 percent of workers in the service sector reported experiencing more violations of their rights—including wage theft—in 2021, compared to 2020. Some 35 percent of surveyed service workers reported that tips plus additional wages did not bring them up to their state’s minimum wage, and 46 percent reported that employers did not compensate “time and a half” for working overtime.

Since May 2021, a handful of corporate news outlets, including CBS News, covered or republished the Center for Public Integrity’s report on wage theft. Corporate coverage tends to focus on specific instances involving individual employers, but otherwise pays little attention to wage theft as a systemic social problem or to anemic federal enforcement. For example, a September 2021 NBC News report framed wage theft cases as “disputes” involving “dueling claims that are difficult to verify.” Verifying systemic wage theft has become easier, however, thanks to the Center for Public Integrity’s March 2022 decision to make the data and code used in their yearlong “Cheated at Work” investigation available to the public.

The story may gain more traction now that Congress is starting to pay attention. In May 2022, US House lawmakers introduced H.R. 3712, known as the “Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022,” which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect workers from wage theft, according to Ariana Figueroa of the Virginia Mercury. Minnesota congressperson Ilhan Omar said, “It is clear more DOL [Department of Labor] funding and additional federal reforms are needed in our localities in order to protect our most vulnerable workers.”

Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi, “Ripping off Workers without Consequences,” Center for Public Integrity, May 4, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Advisor: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #2 Wage Theft: US Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Is the radical right pure hate and all emotion?

Well, they may start from that, but humans that they are, some of them try to rationalize their hates and fears into theories that, though detached from reality, literally provide the ammunition that enables their followers to wreak havoc, like the guy did who descended on a store frequented by Black people in Buffalo several months ago in order to kill as many African-Americans as possible.

For reason is always critical and tied to a moral end: to dissolve or dismantle the myths, obfuscations, folk foolishness, urban legends, and outright falsehoods that stand in the way of the realization and achievement of that most fundamental and primeval of human aspirations: equality.

Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism (Yale University, 2021) brings together and critically analyzes the thoughts of people that most of us probably have not heard of but are worshiped in far right networks around the world. Rose says we better listen to what these guys are saying, even if we find them utterly distasteful, because their ideas have consequences.

Steve Bannon, the incendiary Trump adviser, may be the best known activist of the international far right, but he has derived inspiration from otherwise little known figures on the fringes of history, underlining the wisdom in Keynes' well-known observation: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

The first of these scribblers in Rose's gallery is Oswald Spengler, an intellectual outside the academy that captured the imagination of a pessimistic post-War World I generation with his celebration of the "heroic" culture of the West. Spengler asserted that culture was in danger of being overwhelmed from within by lack of confidence and loss of a sense of identity—and from without by the "downtrodden races of the outer ring," who had begun to move from the periphery to the center, armed with the technologies shared with them by the West owing to what Spengler characterized as misguided liberal values.

People of Europe had a shared, collective identity based on one central idee fixe—the "striving for the infinite," manifested in art, adventure, and conquest. This "Faustian" collective identity, Spengler said, was threatened by the moral sensitivity and self-doubt that liberalism had engendered and by global immigration. The "Decline of the West" (also the title of his key work) was inevitable, but he argued it could be postponed if the peoples of Europe would recognize and embrace their common collective cultural and racial identity and decisively reject the corrosive influence of liberalism, with its leveling doctrines of democracy and equality.

People studying the contemporary far right, observes Rose, are often surprised to see the continuing influence of an early 20th century figure like Spengler on today's far right activists.

Another influential blast from the past is the Italian philosopher Julius Evola. Evola adopted what was becoming early 20th century sociology's standard description of social evolution from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, from traditional to modern society. But instead of seeing modern society as a positive, with its division of labor, economic development, democratic rule, and evolution of the law, he saw it as a fall from grace. Tradition, hierarchy, inequality, the superiority of the master class—these constituted the natural state of community that liberalism, democracy, and socialism had destroyed with their glorification of reason, which drained the world of meaning.

For Evola, race is destiny, and he heaped outrage after outrage on African Americans and Jews. His followers claim, however, that he was not a crude racist, since for him race was not only biological but "spiritual," whatever that means. One might dismiss all this as nonsense but one cannot dismiss its influence, for Evola has garnered enthusiastic praise across the far right, from the Russian Aleksandr Dugin to the Frenchman Guillaume Faye and to the alt-right Americans Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.

Spengler and Evola provided later theorists of reaction an explosive legacy of ideas.

A virulent anti-Semite, Francis Yockey argued that world domination is the essential drive of western culture, and the people of the West must live up to that destiny or witness their culture lose its "vitality." Self-doubt engendered by liberalism was the first step on a slippery slope to cultural self-destruction.

Alain de Benoist of France denounces racial equality, celebrating instead, "racial plurality" as a "veritable human treasure." Benoist is said to have inspired the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that immigration represents an "existential threat" to the white community and is part of a conspiracy to water down and eventually replace the white race as the dominant race in western societies.

Samuel Francis died in 2005 at age 58, but his impact on the far right continues to resonate. Like the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills, Francis saw the rise to power and consolidation of a power elite. But instead of moving left with this insight as Mills did, he moved right. Fancisc depicted a liberal managerial elite determined to advance the interests of a minority at the expense of an endangered white majority.

Francis also pioneered the depiction of liberals and progressives as promoting what eventually received the popular tag "cancel culture." As Rose points out, Francis saw in liberalism "a coordinated project of ongoing cultural dispossession" that would "eventually target every symbol and institution of an old social order."

Even if the Republicans won elections, in this view, the liberals' policies would prevail because of their entrenchment in key unelected positions in the government bureaucracy—another perspective he shared with some on the left that was later popularized under as the "deep state" that allegedly countermanded Trump's exercise of power.

Francis was among the first to uncover the political potential of the demographic of lower and middle class white Americans, people he termed "Middle American Radicals (MARS). His analytical work would contribute to activating that demographic into the angry mass that first took the form of the Tea Party Movement and later mutated into the Trumpist base.

But for all his sophisticated theorizing, Francis was obsessed with one idea, and this was that "the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

Though Rose tries his best to treat his subjects' ideas with care, his book serves as proof that Spengler, Evola, and their descendants are engaged in a fool's errand, which is to rationalize that which resists reason. For reason is always critical and tied to a moral end: to dissolve or dismantle the myths, obfuscations, folk foolishness, urban legends, and outright falsehoods that stand in the way of the realization and achievement of that most fundamental and primeval of human aspirations: equality.

Ideas—even the most foolish, unfortunately—have consequences.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Walden Bello.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu.

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According to a July 2022 report titled “The Economic Cost of Gun Violence” by Everytown for Gun Safety, “America cannot afford gun violence.” In an average year, US gun violence has an economic consequence of $557 billion, a figure that continues to increase as more mass shootings occur. These costs represent the lifetime expenses associated with gun violence, such as long-term physical and mental health care, earnings lost to disability or death, criminal justice and police investigations, and more.

The enormous economic costs of gun violence impact all Americans. According to Everytown, taxpayers, survivors, families, and employers pay an average of $7.79 million daily in health care costs. American taxpayers pay more than $30 million every day in police and criminal justice costs for investigation, prosecution, and incarceration. And employers lose an average of $1.47 million on a daily basis in productivity, revenue, and costs required to recruit and train replacements for victims of gun violence. Overall, US society loses $1.34 billion daily in quality-of-life costs from the impacts of gun violence on shooting victims and their families. The annual cost for each resident in the country is about $1,698. However, states with weaker gun laws and more gun-related injuries and fatalities suffer more economically, with almost double or more the amount of costs, compared to individuals living in states with stronger gun restrictions.

To raise awareness of this growing toll, in June 2022 Everytown launched a $400,000 “Don’t Look Away” advertisement campaign to urge senators to reach an agreement regarding firearms measures and to reinforce the urgent need for stricter gun laws following mass shootings in Texas and New York.

“Calculating the economic cost of gun violence is a critical addition to this narrative because it puts a price on our collective inaction and equips policymakers, advocates, local leaders, and all Americans with additional information that can help advance action to prevent shootings and keep our families safe,” said the Everytown staff.

As of July 2022, ABC News is the only major news outlet to cover the economic impacts of gun violence, stating that “gun violence costs in America haven’t been thoroughly analyzed because they haven’t been the top priority for policy makers who are looking for solutions to curb gun violence.”

Source: Everytown Research & Policy Staff, “The Economic Cost of Gun Violence,” Everytown, July 19, 2022.

Student Researcher: Lauren Reduzzi (Drew University)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eric Draitser.

As the Summit of the Americas wrapped up in Los Angeles with President Biden announcing a plan to address migration in the Western Hemisphere that includes a series of so-called bold actions, we spend the hour with Democracy Now! co-host, professor, longtime journalist and author Juan González, who has just released the newly revised edition of his landmark 2000 book, “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.” González’s best-seller has been expanded to include more contemporary Lantix history, such as U.S. immigration policy under Presidents Trump and Biden, the overpolicing of non-U.S. citizens and how it connects to a history of Western colonialism in the region. While European colonization caused Latin America to be “the incubator of the American empire,” the millennial immigration apparatus has become fixated on “kicking out Latin Americans, and no one is doing anything about it,” says González. He also examines the culture and history of Latinos and discusses the history of U.S. involvement and imperialism in countries like the Dominican Republic, where many of the immigrants here in New York City hail from, and the conditions of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples under the brutal U.S.-backed government that drove many of them to leave their country and head north in search of safety.

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

In recent years, the U.S. has seen great numbers of people and mass movements take to the streets to challenge the status quo. While domestic outrage grows, resistance to the U.S. war machine remains limited, even as President Joe Biden is looking to pass a military budget of $813 billion. This bloated budget proposal comes as inflation makes basic products unaffordable and funds for the ongoing pandemic are gutted. 

The militaristic and imperialist foreign policy of the United States has negative consequences for every aspect of life in the U.S. and abroad. As long as we're investing so much in the military, not only will we not have the money to invest in better things, but we are also exacerbating countless problems on a global level. In order to create the world we want and need, U.S. social movements must take up the struggle against militarism. Here are just ten ways that injustices in the United States are fueled by the war machine. 

1. Police violence is armed by the Pentagon. Since 1996 the 1033 program has been providing excess military equipment to police departments throughout the United States. A 2014 ACLU report titled "War Comes Home" found that "militarized police act aggressively and violently, target Black and Brown communities, and kill Americans at an alarming tempo." This violence was shown explicitly when city police departments as well as federal police and the National Guard were deployed to tear-gas, bludgeon, and kettle anti-racist protesters in 2020. Within the last year, we saw abortion rights, activists in Los Angeles and water protectors in the Indigenous-led struggle to stop Line 3 from being subjected to similar militarized police suppression. 

2. The War on Terror has fueled the criminalization of immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a massive surveillance database that it uses to track immigrants and immigrant rights activists. ICE is a direct product of the War on Terror which eroded basic privacy rights and established some of the United States' most draconian anti-immigrant policies which the Biden administration is maintaining. The War on Terror also ramped up the longstanding militarization of the United States/Mexico border and raids on immigrant communities. 

3. U.S. warmongering fuels hate. Last year anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States jumped 339 percent. It is no coincidence that this spike happened as the United States was pushing a foreign policy of militarily containing China. Similar spikes in anti-Asian violence throughout the United States were prevalent when the United States was at war with Japan and waging a military invasion of Vietnam. During the height of the War on Terror similar racist violence and systemic racism were directed at Arab and South Asian communities. 

4. The U.S. military furthers settler colonial occupation of Indigenous lands. From mining uranium and testing nuclear weapons on Navajo Land to poisoning and harassing Indigenous communities throughout the Pacific like in Hawai'i and Okinawa, the U.S. military maintains colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to support apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, giving Israel nearly $4 billion in aid just last year.

5. The U.S. military is the world's largest institutional polluter in the world. The U.S. military is the world's largest oil consumer and causes more greenhouse gas emissions than 140 countries. Along with fossil fuel use, the U.S. military has harmed the environment by dumping toxic chemicals that poison communities throughout the United States. Yet, at COP26 militaries were exempt. We've publicly spent $21 trillion since 2001 on the Pentagon and yet $4.5 trillion could fully decarbonize the U.S. electric grid. 

6. The military upholds patriarchy. The recruitment and training methods of the military are based on stereotypes that strength corresponds to manhood and physical dominance. The harm and misogyny of these stereotypes can be seen most clearly in the rampant sexual assault of women within the military and toward local women where the military is based abroad, as well as suicide rates of men in the military whose suppression of their emotions results in untreated depression. 

7. U.S. imperialism suppresses LGBTQ+ communities. Because the main purpose of the military is to impose U.S. economic interests by force, the military maintains the interests of some of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ regimes so long as they are U.S. allies. For example, the U.S military has acted in support of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two violently anti-LGBTQ+ regimes. 

8. Student debt is a predatory trap used for military recruitment. The U.S. Army has outright bragged that it has been able to use the student debt crisis as a way to meet its recruitment goals. This predatory recruitment practice which many characterize as a "poverty draft," means that Black, Brown, and poor white communities are disproportionately more likely to enlist. 

9. When warfare is a priority, healthcare is not. Just like promises of debt cancellation, the military uses promises of healthcare to recruit vulnerable communities. Along with depriving people in the U.S. of healthcare to make military service more appealing, U.S. imperialism deprives the world of healthcare by suppressing medical innovation if it comes from countries that don't align with U.S. imperialism, like Cuba and China. 

10. The military budget must go towards reparations for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Along with maintaining white supremacy and systems of oppression, the U.S. military continues to further bloat its budget every year, taking away wealth that could go towards reparations programs for racial equity. The United States owes reparations to countless communities including payments to Black communities for loss of generational wealth tied to slavery, Land Back to Indigenous communities, and repayment to economies destroyed by U.S. wars such as Afghanistan. The military's constant hunger for more money is an obstacle to putting money towards reparations programs. 

As movements grow and struggles unite, it is essential that injustices that the United States perpetuates via military aggression are not left out of the conversation. Intersectionality allows activists to understand not only how systems of oppression are intertwined, but also how they are bolstered by unchecked state violence.

CODEPINK will be highlighting this anti-war perspective at the Poor People’s Campaign Mass Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. from June 17 thru 19. This perspective is central to the Poor People’s Campaign's framework of fighting the interlocking oppressions of racism, militarism, poverty, and ecological destruction. Peace activists will be coming to D.C. from across the country to demonstrate the power of strength in numbers, demand an end to the immoral war economy, and build power for the fights ahead. By connecting our struggles and building mass movements, we can resist war and all the injustices that come with it.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Sam Carliner, Olivia DiNucci.

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and its intervention on that country’s internal affairs constitute a serious breach of international law. According to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that the crime of aggression is one of the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community,” and provides that the crime falls within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). As of November 2019, 123 states are parties to the Statute of the Court. Four of these signature states –the United States, Russia, Israel and Sudan—have informed the UN Secretary General that they no longer intend to abide by the laws of the Statute, and therefore have no legal obligations arising from their signature.

Current Russian military actions in Ukraine are clear violations of the Geneva Convention of 1949, particularly its attacks against civilians who are not participating in hostilities. The Russian army has blockaded thousands of Ukrainian civilians in the basements on churches, theaters, and subway stations in conditions of near starvation. The 1949 Geneva Conventions have been ratified by all Member States of the United Nations, which are then bound by its tenets.

In 1965, the UN General Assembly issued a Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Domestic Affairs of States (UNGA resolution 2131). According to that declaration, “no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state…and no state shall organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed toward the violent overthrow of another state, or interfere in civil strife in another state.” Even before launching its armed aggression, Russia had conducted a campaign of cyberattacks against critical Ukrainian infrastructures.

The UN General Assembly resolutions, however, are considered recommendations and are not, therefore, legally binding. The principle of non-intervention was alleged in the case of Nicaragua vs. United States, following the U.S. support for the “contras” fighting the Nicaraguan government and the mining of Nicaraguan harbors.

The case was decided in 1986 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States, and awarded reparations to the Nicaraguan government. According to the ICJ, the actions of the U.S. against Nicaragua violated international law. The U.S. resisted participating in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.

Related to the principle of intervention is the right to carry out preventive war against another country perceived to be a threat. Although that principle was argued, unsuccessfully, by the Bush administration war against Iraq, it doesn’t stand either in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

If any party should have felt threatened it would be Ukraine, given the massive deployment of military equipment by the Russian government on the border area with Ukraine before launching its fateful attack. In addition, Putin had at his disposal other means to show his anger at the expansion of NATO. He didn’t need to initiate a war that has already caused thousands of deaths and the forced displacement of millions of civilians.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused the United Nations of being ineffective because of its failure to protect Ukraine from Russian attack. However, the U.N. is as strong and effective as its member states want it to be. The UN Security Council’s needs urgently to be revisited, incorporating new members and reconsidering the conditions of the veto power of present members.

International laws regarding the use of force and non-intervention against another country have been repeatedly breached in recent times. The serious consequences of the armed interventions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine indicate the need to honor those laws.

A new international security framework needs to be created whereby every country will feel secure that it won’t be invaded at the whim and unilateral decision of more powerful countries. Until the perpetrators of these violations accept such a framework, brutal force will continue to be used and the sovereignty of nations will continue to be violated.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

"We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase," Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical advisor, told the PBS Newshour this week. Not all experts agree. "With all due respect to Dr. Fauci. I think we are still very much in a pandemic in this country," Dr. Jonathan Reiner of the George Washington School of Medicine told CNN. "Cases have risen in the United States over 60%. Currently there are 15,000 people hospitalized in the United States with COVID-19 and and that number has risen by almost 2000 people over the last couple of weeks…And because hospitalizations are rising, we will soon see deaths rising."

The WHO's target of vaccinating 70% of the population in poor and developing nations by the end of June, 2022 is not going to be met, in part due to the U.S. government's elimination of funding for the effort.

Dr. Fauci did announce he would not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday. "I'm 81 years old, and if I get infected, I have a much higher risk," he told CNN. It is predicted that by Memorial Day, one million Americans will have died of COVID-19, almost certainly an undercount. Fauci also acknowledged, "if you look at the global situation, there's no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing."

The Biden administration is at an impasse with Congress over emergency funds to confront the pandemic. Biden's $22.5 billion request for COVID funding was stripped out of the $1.5 trillion appropriation bill that passed in mid-March. A partial funding agreement is back on the table, but it eliminates the $5 billion Biden requested for global vaccination efforts.

"So far, Congress has not stepped up to provide the funds that are needed for our most urgent needs," Dr. Ashish Jha, the new White House COVID Response Coordinator, said at a news briefing this week. Among those needs are the purchase of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines to provide initial shots and boosters, in preparation for a potential surge this coming fall, and development of a new generation of vaccines that could potentially protect against multiple new variants. Expanding availability of Prizer's antiviral pill, Paxlovid, is another major, unfunded priority, as is the provision of AstraZeneca's Evusheld, an antibody treatment that can be taken in advance by immunocompromised people to shield them from infection.

Another White House funding priority is the distribution of vaccines globally. "We've got to get the resources we need to get shots in arms so we can actually vaccinate the world and help bring this pandemic to a close," Jha said at the news briefing on Tuesday.

At the moment, the U.S. government has no money allocated for this. To date, the U.S. has delivered half a billion vaccine doses to 114 countries. Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, credits the U.S. effort, but says much more needs to be done.

"2022 must be the year that we completely tip the balance in favor of increased vaccinations in the developing world, especially in Africa," Dr. Nkengasong said on the Democracy Now! news hour. "This is the year we must vaccinate at scale and at speed, if we have to defeat the emergence of new variants…Omicron taught us a lesson that any threat anywhere in the world is a threat everywhere in the world."

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation highlights COVID's ongoing threat here in the U.S., especially for the unvaccinated. "Approximately 234,000 deaths since June 2021 could have been prevented with primary series vaccination," the report states. "These vaccine-preventable deaths represent…a quarter of the nearly 1 million COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began." Kaiser also reports that, in January 2022, COVID-19 was the single greatest cause of death in the U.S. for those aged 45-84, and the fourth greatest cause of death overall.

Someone in the United States dies of this largely preventable disease about every four minutes – equivalent to a deadly disaster on the scale of the 9/11attacks every eight or nine days.

The WHO's target of vaccinating 70% of the population in poor and developing nations by the end of June, 2022 is not going to be met, in part due to the U.S. government's elimination of funding for the effort. This could very well lead to the emergence of new, potentially more transmissible and deadlier coronavirus variants. In our globalized world, these threats need to be met with a global response. As drug manufacturers make record profits, ensuring vaccine access around the world is not only a moral imperative, but a practical, achievable goal that protects us all.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Fake news” and “post-truth” are popular neologisms — but they have actually been part of the political landscape for a very long time.  We have learned to live with fake news, fake history and bogus law. We swim in an ocean of lies and dis-information, but somehow manage to survive the economic and political sharks all around us.

What is far more worrisome is the phenomenon that there are “real facts” that cry out for our attention, that demand urgent action, and that our politicians and media treat as non-existent or marginal, e.g. exorbitant military expenses, skewed national budgets, xenophobic war-mongering, structural violence, military aggression, unilateral coercive measures, financial blockades, the homologation of the media, manifestly unjust laws, the corruption of the “rule of law” through legal scams and “lawfare”, the penetration of public institutions by intelligence services, the “weaponization” of human rights, the imprisonment of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, unjust taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, corporate bribery, economic exploitation, ecocide, extreme poverty, man-made famine, social exclusion, etc.

Now pause, take a breath and ask yourself why these facts are largely ignored or trivialized by politicians and media alike.  Why are these “inconvenient” facts shoved aside, as if they were only of marginal importance or as if they did not exist?  Without a doubt these facts engender short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences, create or perpetuate imbalances and spread a vague, destabilizing sense of incoherence and cognitive dissonance.

“Facts without consequences” constitute a sui generis category of reality.  These facts may be present and available in the internet and generally acknowledged — but only under the tacit condition that no genuine debate will be conducted and no concrete action will be taken thereon. It is worse than a conspiracy of silence. It is a conspiracy of irresponsibility.

There are also “books without consequences”, books without the urgent, imperative follow-up.  Whereas some trash books like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man are given enormous attention, hugely relevant and challenging books by Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Kinzer, William Blum, Jeffrey Sachs, Nils Melzer, President Jimmy Carter are published by notable houses, but there is no follow-up.  One would have expected that after the publication of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Kinzer’s Overthrow, Sachs’ The End of Poverty, Melzer’s The Trial of Julian Assange, Carter’s Our Endangered Values, or Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion not only polite academic debate and scholarly conferences would follow, but genuine democratic discussion would be conducted in townhalls, in the daily press, in the internet, throughout the spectrum of the media.  Politically these and other necessary books were met by silence.  They had the potential to advance international law and human rights, and that is precisely why they have been victims of “benign neglect.”

The facts are there and can be consulted in official documents and in the internet.  We know that grave crimes have been committed and are being committed by our governments.  We should be able to shout “not in our name”, but the corporate media refuses to address the issues, and dissidents are often ignored or ridiculed.  We know that the United States government has overthrown government after government throughout Latin America and the world, that the CIA has destabilized countries in Europe and the Middle East and financed coups d’état.  We know what Assange and Snowden have revealed, but there is a tacit agreement in the media not to focus on these facts, but to distract us with the demonization of our geopolitical rivals and with other “convenient facts”.

When important facts and publications are deliberately kept out of the political narrative, the core of democracy is being undermined.  We observe this in the totally skewed narrative in the Western media concerning the current war in Ukraine. Such manipulation of public opinion is hugely dangerous, because the dis-information and suppression of genuine debate may lead us straight into World War III and nuclear apocalypse. President Carter was not kidding when he said that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”[1] .

This abnormal state of affairs quite naturally generates “conspiracy theories”, because, as Spinoza wrote in his Ethics, “nature abhors a vacuum”.  If people are deprived of the truth, if they cannot access information, they quite naturally start formulating hypotheses. No wonder that when the elites ignore or suppress facts, the vacuum is often filled byhalf-baked populists and crackpots.

The phenomenon of selective indignation and application of the law à la carte predictably subverts the system of governance and makes societies lose faith in the rule of law, or at least in the “establishment”. The attempt to deal with “fake news” through censorship and “hate speech” legislation is futile and will only lead to driving discussions underground and provoking an atmosphere of terror and fear, as our societies move closer and closer to the totalitarianism that Orwell anticipated and tried to avert.

What is needed is easier access to all pertinent information and pluralistic views, more open debate — not less!  The internet must remain free of political controls – whether by government or the private sector. Official censorship of RT and Sputnik, private-sector censorship by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube constitute a frontal attack on everyone’s right to know, everyone’s right to access to information as stipulated in article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  Everyone should be able to arrive at his or her own judgment.  Only thus can societies meaningfully exercise democratic rights and responsibilities. Censorship constitutes an assault on democracy.

There must not be “filters” to test the truth of digital exchanges. The only legitimate controls are those to suppress pornography, war-mongering, incitement to violence, racketeering and other scams.  In democratic societies no filters should be imposed in order to suppress the dissemination of factual information that the mainstream media deliberately ignores, nor to suppress an alternative interpretation of facts.  What we need is a “culture of civilized dissent” – where everyone can express his/her opinions without the threat of career death and social ostracism.  We need to reaffirm the right to be wrong — because only by preserving the possibility to err do we remain independent. Artistic, scientific, sociological progress depends on the freedom to postulate hypothesis, different models, different perspectives — which sometimes will be correct and sometimes not. But a failed hypothesis cannot be criminalized. The alternative is stagnation in homologation, robotization, Orwellian dystopia. The conformism of the current Zeitgeist is unworthy of democratic societies.  It is up to us to vindicate the right to know and the right to dissent.  That is the freedom we desperately need. That is the kind of democracy we must demand from our leaders.

Notes.

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1115145/former-us-president-jimmy-carter-china-donald-trump

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred de Zayas.

Corporate media outlets are calling for the United States and its allies to react to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by escalating the war. The opinion pages are awash with pleas to pump ever-more deadly weaponry into the conflict, to choke Russian civilians with sanctions, and even to institute a “no-fly zone.” That such approaches gamble with thousands, and possibly millions, of lives doesn’t shake the resolve of the press’s armchair generals.

No-fly zone: ‘necessary and overdue’

The Daily Beast (3/18/22) dismisses fears of nuclear war in one paragraph: “To those who would argue that a no-fly-zone would mean the beginning of an apocalyptic World War III, I would counter argue that history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future.”

The Daily Beast (3/18/22) ran an opinion piece by Joshua D. Zimmerman contending that “A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue.” He said that

NATO should immediately announce a 72-hour ultimatum—using the threat of a no-fly zone over Ukraine as leverage—to demand an immediate cease-fire and the beginnings of a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

If Putin fails to meet these terms, then a NATO-led no-fly zone over Ukraine—at the express invitation of the Ukrainian government—will go into effect.

It’s hard to imagine three words doing more work than “go into effect” are here. A “no-fly zone” could only “go into effect” by NATO destroying Russia’s air capacities—by launching, that is, a direct NATO/Russia war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (3/7/22) conveyed the risks of such a move:

So long as NATO and Russian forces don’t begin fighting each other, the risk of nuclear escalation may be kept in check. But a close encounter between NATO and Russian warplanes (which would result if NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace) could become a flashpoint that leads to a direct and wider conflict.

Pesky details like nuclear war don’t bother Zimmerman, who claimed that “the only form of aid that today would halt Russia’s day-in, day-out slaughter of Ukrainian civilians is military intervention,” specifically a “no-fly zone.” He argued that “history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future,” citing events from the 1930s such as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Italy’s of Ethiopia and the Nazis’ conquests in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Perhaps Zimmerman selected examples from more than 80 years ago because more recent cases, in contexts much more comparable to the present one, demonstrate the danger of advocating a “no-fly zone” to save Ukrainians. Every “no-fly zone” established in the post–Cold War era has been a precursor to all- out war and the destruction of a country.

The United States implemented two “no-fly zones” over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, at which point the US and its partners moved on to the full-scale devastation of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process (Jacobin, 6/19/14).  NATO created “no-fly zones” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later over Kosovo, during the period in which NATO was dismantling Yugoslavia (Monthly Review, 10/1/07). In 2011, NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” in Libya, ostensibly to protect the population from Moammar Gadhafi (Jacobin, 9/2/13): The result was ethnic cleansing, the emergence of slave markets, mass civilian casualties (In These Times, 8/18/20) and more than a decade of war in the country.

Defending ‘US global leadership’

Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22): Some say a “no-fly zone” “might anger Mr. Putin and trigger World War III. But inaction based on fear usually causes more conflict than action based on confidence.” Positive thinking will allow the US to go to war with a nuclear power with nuclear war!

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed  by Joe Lieberman (3/9/22) in which he too states “The Case for a  No-Fly Zone  in Ukraine.” The former senator and vice presidential candidate bemoaned that

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.

It’s Lieberman’s argument that “makes no sense”: NATO imposing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine would be an offensive action because it entails firing on Russian forces, and Russia has not fired at a NATO member.

Lieberman went on to say:

Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut US global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.

“Keep[ing] Russian aircraft away” is a strange way of saying “shooting down Russian aircraft,” which is what Lieberman is actually describing. And not only aircraft would be targeted: Even a prominent proponent of the “no-fly zone,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, acknowledged (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 3/8/22):

Probably what would happen even before that is if there are defense systems in the enemy’s territory that can fire into the no-fly zone, then we normally take those systems out, which would mean bombing into enemy territory.

Or as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted behind closed doors while advocating for a “no-fly zone” in Syria (Intercept, 10/10/16; FAIR.org, 10/27/16): “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.”

In other words, Lieberman’s plan to “protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground” is to initiate a shooting war in Ukrainian territory between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles (Independent, 2/28/22).

‘If they can shoot it, we can ship it’

The Wall Street Journal (3/16/22) praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s evocation of peace activist Martin Luther King before declaring that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial (3/16/22) said that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.” The editors approvingly quoted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse saying,

“If they can shoot it, we can ship it.” MiGs and Su-25s, S-200s and S-300s, drones.

An example are Switchblade drones that are portable and can destroy a target from a distance. The weapon is ideal for attacking tanks and some of the artillery units that are hitting cities and civilians. The latest US arms package reportedly includes 100 Switchblades. But the Pentagon should have delivered all of the Switchblades in the American arsenal to Ukraine at the start of the war, and then contracted to buy more.

The Journal’s editors were hardly alone in wanting to flood Ukraine with weapons. A Washington Post op-ed (3/16/22) by former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul asserted that “Ukrainians will ultimately defeat Vladimir Putin’s army,” and that the only question is how long it will take, though the basis for this claim appears to be little more than a priori reasoning and a crystal ball.

McFaul called on “the West” to  “boost” military aid to Ukraine “to hasten the end of the war [in Ukraine’s favor] and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons…do just that.” McFaul wrote that “President Biden and his team cannot escalate US involvement in ways that might trigger nuclear war,” though escalation short of that threshold is apparently fine.

Michael McFaul assures Washington Post readers (3/16/22), “If the risk of Russia’s escalation can be assessed to be below the nuclear threshold, then…the transfer of planes or air defense systems will not trigger World War III.”

Russia’s ruling class sees their country as having “a vital interest in preventing the expansion of hostile alliances on its borders” (Russia Matters, 3/14/19). Full Ukrainian membership in the alliance in question, NATO, may be far-fetched in the short-term, but last June, NATO insisted that Ukraine “will become” a member, and a year earlier, NATO recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunities partner.” Given that Russia sees “preventing” that as “a vital interest,” McFaul and the Journal editors are on shaky ground when they assume that the West giving Ukraine more weapons will cause Russia to give up, rather than countering the move with more firepower of its own.

Nor do the authors worry themselves with the peculiar habit US weapons have of finding their way to some of the nastiest factions in the warzones to which the US sends arms. ISIS benefited mightily from the US doling out weapons for use in Syria (Newsweek, 12/14/17), a practice that didn’t have  particularly salutary effects for Syrians or people living beyond the country’s borders.

Arming proto–Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a central cause of such minor inconveniences as the 9/11 attacks and more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21). The risks of a similar outcome in Ukraine are real, considering that the vicious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is part of the Ukrainian military (Haaretz, 7/9/18), and that “far-right European militia leaders…have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines” (New York Times, 2/25/22).

Sanctions: ‘harsh’ but ‘appropriate’

The New York Times (3/4/22) warned that ” it is the duty of all leaders to prepare their countries for…pain.”

A New York Times editorial (3/4/22) deemed the latest round of “harsh, immediate and wide-ranging sanctions” to be “appropriate,” because they “demonstrated that there are consequences for unprovoked wars of aggression.” (Note that over the last 30 years, the New York Times has never opposed and has often endorsed the United States’ numerous acts of military aggression—none of which can be described with a straight face as “provoked.”)

In this case, the “consequences”—”the ruble tanked, the Russian stock market plunged and Russians lined up at ATMs to withdraw money”—make life “harsh” for ordinary Russian civilians, irrespective of whether they support the war or the Putin government. (When polled, approximately one-fourth of Russia’s population expresses opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, roughly the same proportion of Americans that opposed the disastrous Iraq invasion—Meduza, 3/7/22; Gallup, 3/24/03).

Peter Rutland (The Conversation, 2/28/22), a scholar who focuses on Russia’s political economy, notes that “the falling ruble pushes up the price of imports, which make up over half the consumer basket,” including about 60% of the medicines Russians consume. According to Rutland, “The new sanctions will severely impact the living standard of ordinary Russians.”

Subjecting the Russian population to such policies is about as constructive a step toward a ceasefire in Ukraine as would be bombing St. Petersburg. Historically, sanctions have exacerbated rather than reduced international tensions; that sanctions preceded both Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month, would suggest that the pattern is continuing (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

‘Punishing Russia’s economy’

The Washington Post (2/24/22) described the Ukraine invasion as “an aggressor’s bombs, missiles and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor”—while the US’s similarly illegal invasions were “Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory.”

A Washington Post editorial (2/24/22) said that consequences of

unchecked Russian aggression…could be more damaging and more lasting than any turmoil stemming from the economic sanctions, limited troop deployments and other measures Mr. Biden has announced.

“Raising the costs to Mr. Putin,” the article said, “may still have an impact, but not unless those costs are truly punishing to Russia’s economy.”

In practical terms, “punishing…Russia’s economy” means penalizing virtually all Russians. Bloomberg (3/4/22) reports that Russia is now “on course for an economic collapse,” noting that JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s economists said that they “expect a 7% contraction in [Russia’s] gross domestic product this year, the same as Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Bloomberg Economics forecasts a fall of about 9%.”

Apart from being collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, “punishing” an entire country to the point that its economy faces possible “collapse” may indeed have an “impact.” However, that may be something other than a groundswell of support inside Russia for the sort of functional relationship with the United States that could help end the violence in Ukraine and prevent US/Russian brinksmanship—including the nuclear variety.

‘Putin’s troubles’

The Washington Post (2/27/22) called the remilitarization of Germany “the sound of a mature democracy, Europe’s richest and largest, dealing a strategic defeat” to Russia.

A Washington Post editorial (2/27/22) three days later advocated sanctions in a roundabout fashion, noting that polls suggest Americans support such moves:

Lawmakers should consider these data from a new Washington Post/ABC News poll: 67% percent of American adults favor sanctions against Russia. More than half of adults said they would support sanctions even if it meant higher energy prices. Between the resistance of the Ukrainians and the unity of the West, Mr. Putin appears baffled. Congress should add to his troubles.

Yet sanctions do not merely “add to [Putin’s] troubles”: They are acts of war. The paper is seeking an escalation in the US/Russia conflict from which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inextricable (FAIR.org, 1/15/22; Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).

Corporate media may not be saying that America should launch a third world war, but the courses these outlets are recommending are geared toward prolonging the war in Ukraine, intensifying the violence and risking its expansion, rather toward achieving a negotiated end to the war as quickly as possible.

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