The way the world is going, she and her children might be the precursor of the dwelling habits of the future generations, those who manage to survive the coming nuclear war between the rising bloc of rising nations and decaying bloc of decaying nations, the war between the BRICS and the Pricks.

The BRICS ─ Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and five new members — have no “biggest BRIC,” each Bric nation relishes its independence and the group is cemented by their distaste for the offensive Pricks. Fortunately, for the BRICS, their entourage contains China, the new superpower that encourages cooperation rather than domination and has initiated a “Belt and Road” that facilitates free trade throughout the world.

The Pricks — United States, Great Britain, and the European Union — have the United States as their power Prick, which is led by their president, the biggest Prick. In slavish obedience to genocide Israel, the U.S. identifies itself as the Super Prick. This bloc has recently featured severe discord, lack of cooperation, and inauguration of high tariffs that impede global trade. Domination is its focus. with cooperation a temporary means to enable domination.

For one simple reason, the Pricks are finding it difficult to control and use the BRICS for their personal gain ─ the BRICS have economic dominance.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
GDP PPP, Int$: 2025

Coming into 2025, the BRICS have a greater share of the economic pie, six times the population digesting the pie, and are growing in principal categories — GDP/PPP, population, and adherents at a faster rate.

The Pricks devalue the Brics by claiming they are a loose and uncoordinated confederation, unable to agree on vital issues. Brazil is accused of harassing former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and may be subjected to sanctions; Russia is led by an irresponsible tyrant and is heavily sanctioned; India gets a pass despite the heavy-handed tactics toward its Muslim community; China is led by a despotic dictator, and South Africa is guilty of genocide toward its white population.

The Pricks pose themselves as a model of decency and decorum. They have ballot boxes and freedom of speech, which enables their citizens to elect the biggest pricks and then freely criticize their selections by vocal erections. In the U.S. the next presidential election process — fund raising, organization, public relations, the “eye on the prize”— starts shortly after a new president takes office. Winning candidates in elections expend more time and energy in gaining victory and preparing for their next victory than performing their duties during their term in office.

The economic, social, and political advancements of their principal superpowers, China for the BRICS and the United States for the Pricks, determine the success of the BRICS and the Pricks. A brief examination of each nation’s potential to rise in the firmament or descend into chaos tells the story.

The Trump administration shows the hidden failures of the United States pluralistic democracy. The past has no continuity; just the opposite, many of the legislations from previous administrations are discarded. and the country, rather than advancing to a progressed new, returns to a rejected old. One example from Understanding AI:

…. Sen. Hawley asked Donald Trump to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, an $11 billion transmission line that is supposed to carry electricity from Kansas wind farms to homes in Illinois and Indiana. The proposed line would pass through Hawley’s state of Missouri, annoying farmers whose land would be taken by eminent domain.

According to the New York Times, Hawley “explained his concerns to the president, who has repeatedly expressed his distaste for wind power, saying he would not permit any new wind projects during his administration.” Trump then called Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who agreed to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the project, throwing its viability into question.

Impulse overrides soul searching, allegiance to leader is more important than professional education and experience; rash and subjective action replaces careful thought. The America of 2025, with its decaying infrastructure, troubled inner cities, dependence on fossil fuels, continuous problems of crime, drug addiction, health care, and immigration, closely resembles the America of 2010. One big difference ─ adversity and polarization of the population has increased, Americans are at the breaking point with one another. The country, which is rich in resources, has extensive farmland, enjoys suitable and varied climates, and contains an educated and diligent population, is not well managed; it is mismanaged.

The Xi JInping administration shows the hidden success of China’s people’s democracy. The past has continuity; legislations and plans from previous administrations are massaged and enhanced, and the country, rather than remaining stagnant, advances to a new level. Soul searching from millions of cadres provides suggestions for millions of improvements. All leaders have professional education and experience; careful thought displaces rash and subjective action.

The China of 2025, with its continually increasing infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, superhighways, high speed trains, and airline routes that link every remote place in China with central cores, with modern building complexes that replace the shanty towns and provide agreeable living space for an aging population and marginalized rural farmers, with its expanded megacities that are considered technology and planning marvels, and with a unified and obedient population ─ no adversity or polarization here ─ has only a fleeting resemblance to the China of 2010.

Dubbed an engineering marvel, the highly anticipated Raffles City Chongqing project is nearly complete. CapitaLand Group

Sheltering their deficiencies, the Western democracies shift the critical analysis to public relations stunts that highlight the supposed and exaggerated deficiencies of the Chinese system. The Westerners make no effort to learn and understand the workings of China’s political, social, and economic systems. Fabrications are added to the limited “don’t care to know” and conveyed to the public as authorized knowledge. One example is the “debt trap” verbiage, applied to Chinese lending, which began during Sri Lanka’s first debt crisis and has stuck around as an effective means to vilify the PRC.

We have the falsehood. Washington Post (WAPO), “This China has a hand in Sri Lanka’s economic calamity,” analysis by Ishaan Tharoor, July 20, 2022:

One of the major players in Sri Lanka’s calamity is China. Beijing is Sri Lanka’s lone biggest creditor, accounting for some 10 percent of the country’s foreign debt. Between 2000 and 2020, it extended close to $12 billion in loans to the Sri Lankan government, largely for a slate of major infrastructure projects that turned into white elephants — including a costly port facility in the Rajapaksas’ hometown of Hambantota, which was effectively ceded to Chinese control half a decade ago after Sri Lankan authorities recognized they could no longer pay off the loans.

Examination of the Sri Lanka debt crisis exposes the mendacity and viciousness of the WAPO report. Almost every sentence is spurious; China does not engage in “debt trap diplomacy” and has been one lender who makes financial sacrifices that rescues nations from debilitating borrowing.

We have the truth. The Atlantic, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth,” by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire, February 6, 2021, had already contradicted WAPO statements.

Steep payments on international sovereign bonds, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the country’s external debt, put Sirisena’s government in dire fiscal straits almost immediately. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.

There was also never a default. Colombo arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company—just as the Canadians had recommended. There was not an open tender, and the only two bids came from China Merchants and China Harbor. Sri Lanka chose China Merchants, making it the majority shareholder with a 99-year lease, and used the $1.12 billion cash infusion to bolster its foreign reserves, not to pay off China Eximbank. The China impressed on our minds is not the China that exists.

The United States moves on fumes, on the energies of its past without renewable energies for an improved future. China moves on constantly reinforced energy, all engines operating at top speed, each day becoming a new future. The Pricks know they will not be able to compete economically with the BRICS. They have a choice of consolidating and working together and maintaining reduced economies, cooperating with the Brics in mutual agreements, or, by the usual United States method, resolving the situation by military action.

The threat of military force alarms and subdues the BRICS. They may be compelled to yield much in order to save all. China, guided by its Mandate of Heaven, “a political and religious doctrine that justifies the rule of an emperor based on virtue and ability to govern,” and which it has extended to relations between all nations, might do what it did in the fifteenth century. At that time, China was, by far, the leading commercial power in the world, and huge Chinese fleets sailed the world for markets for its surplus products. After meeting the imperial powers of France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands and observing their nefarious methods in subduing the Africa and Indian peoples, stripping them of resources, and forcing upon them the products manufactured from the resources, China scuttled its fleet and went into solitary confinement.

The reason for Xi Jinping’s self-sufficiency drive is clear. Save the world from nuclear conflagration and let the rest of the world rot. Pricks always lose and always think they have won.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

“We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future projects terminated,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the bill passed. “And we talked to lawyers in the administration.”

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced what appeared to be a fulfillment of the president’s promise to his party’s right wing. The department’s new guidelines for wind and solar developers now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo “elevated review” by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.

The new guidelines include a granular outline of steps that will now require personal approval from Bergum’s office, rather than being delegated to department bureaucrats as had previously been customary. Experts who spoke to Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some are even worried that the effect of the updated regulations will spill over into private projects, which sometimes have to consult with the Interior Department when their work bleeds into federal lands or a habitat for endangered species.

Since only 4 percent of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, clean industry insiders who have interpreted the new policy narrowly are not yet panicking. But those with a broader interpretation of the text — or those who suspect that the administration will take a broad interpretation — wonder if the new rules will amount to a de facto gag order on the industry. For now, only time will tell just how many of their fears come to pass.  

Much of the memo’s power to wreak havoc for renewables depends on how strictly it’s enforced. The Interior Department maintains a website called Information for Planning and Consultation, or IPaC, which developers often use to plan large-scale projects. You type in the name of a locale, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and IPaC will tell you what kind of federal permitting you might need to move forward. (For example, it would flag if there are any protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) As of last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning users that “solar and wind projects are currently not eligible to utilize the Information for Planning and Consultation website.” This kind of opacity could make it especially hard for developers to plan for an endless bureaucratic battle with Interior. 

“It’s one thing to take away our [tax] credits, but it’s another to basically just put impediments so projects can’t get built,” a source who works for a renewables developer told E&E News. (He was granted anonymity due to his ongoing professional engagement with the federal government.) “The level of review here is so ridiculous.”

Others say that, while the outlook for wind and solar has become much dimmer, the new Interior rules aren’t necessarily a kill shot. “I was personally very worried when I saw it come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, a solar risk management firm. “But after doing more reading, it does seem like it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.” 

An internal report from the investment bank and research firm Roth Capital Partners, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5 percent of projects on private land — specifically, those that require an easement or need to cross public land to connect a transmission line to the main electrical grid — would be affected by the new regulations. 

“If [projects are on] a private piece of land, that’s a totally different story that would not be impacted by this,” said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s plenty of projects that are going to go ahead.” 

Others warn that it will be hard to know anything for certain until the dust clears and the permitting process begins to play out. “Just how broad and wide-scoped the activities listed in the memo were, points towards an attempt to quash [private] projects, not just the ones on federal land,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the Interior Department on issues like wildlife protection.

Regardless of the scope of the memo, any move with the potential to slow the deployment of renewables is almost certainly bad news for American energy, since most other sources of new electricity simply aren’t being built: 93 percent of new energy that came online in 2024 was renewable. But upon taking office, President Trump warned that the United States was reliant on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately set about revoking previously approved federal funding from green energy projects, trying to cancel offshore wind leases, and rescinding clean energy tax credits that had been expanded by his predecessor. How this will lead the nation toward the current administration’s promise of “energy dominance” is unclear. 

“You don’t have enough [electricity] supply to meet new demand,” said O’Brien. “Instead of new capacity coming online — cheap renewables — you have existing gas plants running longer, and so gas demand goes up and prices go up, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs point toward this being a bad, bad scenario.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will new Interior Department rules shackle wind and solar? Insiders are divided. on Jul 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

At least now, the choices are clearly defined—the alternatives revealed in ways that were once less obvious: what kind of world we want, what kind of country we aim to be, and what kind of people we aspire to become. It is up to us, then, to make our decision, upon which the future will be built.

On the face of it, there appear to be a variety of choices around any given issue. But if we look with dispassion and love at the major concerns of the day, can we truly say there are choices at all? Take a simple example: should we support drilling for oil, or not? When viewed through the lens of our guiding criteria—dispassion and love—the answer is plain, and is therefore free from choice.

Or take a more urgent example: is it “right” to support Israel in its actions against the Palestinian people? The Israeli government and military are committing genocide, all support—arms, aid, and political cover—therefore, should be withdrawn, and Israel completely isolated. This again is a choiceless decision, free from dilemma, if, and it’s a big if, we are willing to see the situation clearly, through the unflinching light of dispassion and love.

But most—if not all—of our choices arise not from this point of clarity, but from a muddled, self-centred position: our likes and dislikes, our desires and fears, our psychological and sociological conditioning.

Within this fragmented space, choice—routinely conflated with freedom—has little, if anything, to do with, freedom – true freedom. And can there be any other kind?

In fact, freedom does not equate with choice—but with love, and it is from this shining source that our ‘choices’ should emerge, if we—humanity—are to face the challenges of our time and begin to build a new and just world.

While it may appear counterintuitive, I would suggest it is, in fact, the cleansing energy of love that is driving everything to the surface—where it can be seen and recognised for what it truly is. This revelatory force acts as a mirror to humanity, exposing both the pure and the corrupted, the path of progress and unity, alongside the divisive, violent ways of the past; the cruel alongside the compassionate.

In the same way that both weeds and flowers grow under the same sunlight, neither side has a monopoly on this revealing light, which nourishes both the good and the bad, the true and the false alike. As a wise man has said, all are fed equally—“the one who loves and works for justice and sharing, but also the one who causes the divisions, schisms, and greed in the world.”

The opposites revealed—large and small, everyday and pivotal moments—demand that we choose. Some issues are more polarising than others, dividing families, fracturing friendships: Brexit, the environment, Trump, Israel/Palestine, and all things religious. Lines are drawn, sides are taken, and the space between becomes a battleground; and where there is division, there is almost always conflict—whether within an individual or a group

In the stark, unflinching light of our times, nothing can remain hidden for long. All is being revealed in the chaos: the ways of peace and the machinery of war; just and cooperative modes of living, in contrast to isolationism and the violence of inequality; environmental responsibility set against endless consumerism and corporate greed. On and on it goes—choices rising from the noise, asking us: Where are we? Where do we stand?

It is clear: the opposites are evident, and with them, so are the ‘choices’—if, of course, we are willing to set aside our selfishness and fears and observe these opposites with dispassion and love. When we do, we will discover that unity and Oneness are the natural order of things, not division and separation, as we have long believed.

The post Clear Choices in a Divided World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Graham Peebles.

Americans are notoriously fickle, flipping back and forth between parties 16 times since 2000. Expect a shift in the midterms and a potential flip in the 2028 presidential election. But here’s the real question: what if our elections have become as fake as Russia’s? We’ll dive into that in an upcoming episode to explore what leverage we have left to protect the integrity of our vote.

What matters most now is unity in opposition to Trump. But how can we come together when so much resentment remains over who refused to vote for Kamala Harris out of protest and encouraged others to do the same. In this week’s bonus show of Gaslit Nation, Andrea and Terrell Starr from the Black Diplomats Podcast and Substack discuss how we can set aside our differences, forgive the past, and unite for the future of our democracy. It’s the beginning of a tough conversation that ignited online after Trump essentially called for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the deportation of pro-Palestinian protesters here at home—an outcome many of us warned about when we urged people to vote for the sake of humanity’s survival.

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Show Notes:

Rachel Maddow episode that includes segment on Curtis Yarvin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UdHdjuodPg

Transcript: Rachel Maddow episode that includes segment on Curtis Yarvin: https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-rachel-maddow-show/exclusive-rachel-maddow-interviews-mn-governor-tim-walz-as-trump-plots-end-of-u-s

New York Times profile of Curtis Yarvin (gift article) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tU4.5F3W.Vw3JZNQC_UYS&smid=url-share

Terrell Starr // Black Diplomats Substack https://substack.com/@terrellstarr

The size of Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, explained in 5 charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-trumps-2024-election-victory-explained-in-5-charts

Trump’s Gaza proposal rejected by allies and condemned as ethnic cleansing plan https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/26/trump-resumes-sending-2000-pound-bombs-to-israel-undoing-biden-pause

Iowa Democrats flip Senate seat in special election to cut into Republican majority https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/28/iowa-democrats-flip-senate-seat-in-special-election-chris-cournoyer/77999519007/

Don’t Let Liberal Purity Elect Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/opinion/gaza-harris-trump.html

Events at Gaslit Nation

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• Feb 24 4pm ET – Gaslit Nation Book Club at our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss Albert Camu’s The Stranger (Matthew Ward translation) and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

• March 17 4pm ET – Dr. Lisa Corrigan joins our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss America’s private prison crisis in an age of fascist scapegoating 

• NEW! Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon

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• NEW! Climate Crisis Committee launched in the Patreon Chat thanks to a Gaslit Nation listener who holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences

• NEW! Caretaker Committee launched in the Patreon Chat for our listeners who are caretakers and want to share resources, vent, and find community 

• NEW! Public Safety page added to GaslitNationPod.com to help you better protect yourself from this lunacy (i.e. track recalls, virus threats, and more!) https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/public-safety

• ONGOING! Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet? It’s available on GaslitNationPod.com https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/survey-reject-hypernormalization

• ONGOING! Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community 

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This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

University students have been at the forefront of opposition to rule by the generals for generations and young people were out on the streets again after the military overthrew a government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.

After the military largely crushed a civil disobedience movement, many angry young people have refused education under its auspices. Instead, they look to independent institutions including ones run by a parallel government in exile, the National Unity Government, or NUG.

The NUG supports numerous independent institutions in cities under junta control, teaching subjects such as nursing and medicine, teacher training and technology to thousands of students. It also provides online courses.

In addition, social organizations, often those supporting ethnic minority causes, have set up colleges independent of both the junta and the NUG.

But the independent schools are not recognized by Myanmar’s junta and young people graduating from them lack recognized certificates, posing problems when they pursue further studies abroad in places like Thailand.

“It’s very difficult for them to study in Thailand,” said Ponnya Mon, the chancellor of Mon National College in southern Myanmar, referring to some students who have studied in colleges affiliated with the NUG.

“It’s not because they’re not qualified, it’s because of politics,” he said.

Keen to maintain relations with Myanmar’s military rulers, Thailand does not recognize the NUG and Thai educational institutions are mandated to work only with accredited institutions. So they usually decline to recognize qualifications issued by independent Myanmar colleges.

“The Thai government has to make a very difficult choice. Even though they would like to accept it, sometimes it’s the politics, right? If you accept a student from the NUG, that means you recognize the NUG,” said Ponnya Mon.

But change is afoot.

Thailand’s Payap University has set up a partnership with the Mon National College to offer a joint bachelor’s degree, said Michael Meallem, director of the International Relations Office at the Thai university.

“What we did differently, maybe to other universities, is now the Thai government is actually a little more lenient in terms of the recognition that universities can offer to prior learning,” Meallem said.

Kaung Khant, a student representative at an NUG-affiliated medical school, said he knew of one person who was accepted by Thailand’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University with credentials issued by the NUG. But the person in question had graduated before the coup, though he had not been issued with a degree so had to rely on an NUG-issued certificate.

“He explained to the university the current situation and how he finished his studies. He hasn’t received a graduation certificate but he was accepted,”

he said.

‘Fake and illegal’

But others have landed in trouble.

Chulalongkorn University contacted Myanmar authorities in November to check on degrees issued by an NUG-affiliated university to two students applying to study there, alerting military authorities to their bid.

The junta’s Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Defense Services said in a statement the students’ degrees were fake and illegal and their applications had been rejected.

The two students “will be blacklisted, identified and arrested,” the military office said, adding that the notaries and translators who helped them with their applications had been arrested.

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The NUG said the students’ degrees were valid and it denounced the junta for its attempt to block education for those who reject military rule.

“They are trying to destroy the future of young people who are free of their control,” said Kyaw Zaw, spokesperson for the NUG’s Office of the President, adding that the students had been able to continue their studies at the Thai university.

Chulalongkorn University did not respond to calls from Radio Free Asia seeking comment.

A Myanmar student studying at Chulalongkorn, asking to be identified as Lincoln, said the affair could put off some students from independent colleges thinking of studying abroad.

“The security risk has been raised. Students will be worried about applying for master’s or Ph.D.s abroad this way because of what happened, if the same thing might happen to them,” he said, adding that students should be prepared to handle the application process diplomatically.

“Not every university, not every country, is very well aware of our situation,” Lincoln said, referring to Myanmar’s turmoil since the 2021 coup.

“So whether or not they accept our degree certificates or academic transcripts depends on a case by case basis.”

Edited by Taejun Kang.

RFA Burmese contributed to this report.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kiana Duncan for RFA.

The Land of Papua is widely known as a land full of milk and honey. It is a name widely known in Indonesia that refers to the western half of the island of New Guinea.

Its natural wealth and beauty are special treasures entrusted by the Creator to the Papuan people who are of Melanesian ethnicity.

The beauty of the land inhabited by the blackish and brownish-skinned people is often sung about by Papuans in “Tanah Papua”, a song created by the late Yance Rumbino. The lyrics, besides being musical art, also contain expressions of gratitude and prayer for the masterpiece of the Creator.

• READ MORE: West Papua: The issue that won’t go away for Melanesia

For Papuans, “Tanah Papua” — composed by a former teacher in the central highlands of Papua — is always sung at various important events with a Papuan nuance, both in the Land of Papua and other parts of the world in Papuan gatherings.

The rich, beautiful and mysterious Land of Papua as expressed in the lyrics of the song has not been placed in the right position by the hands of those in power.

So for Papuans, when singing “Tanah Papua”, on one hand they admire and are grateful for all of God’s works in their ancestral land. On the other hand, by singing that song, they remind themselves to stay strong in facing daily challenges.

The characteristics of the Land of Papua geographically and ethnographically are the same as the eastern part of the island of New Guinea, now the independent state of Papua New Guinea.

Attractive to Europe
The beauty and wealth of natural resources and the richness of cultural heritage initially become attractions to European nations.

Therefore, the richness attracted the Europeans who later became the colonisers and invaders of the island.

The Dutch invaded the western part of the island and the British Empire and Germany the eastern part of the island.

The Europeans were present on the island of New Guinea with a “3Gs mission” (gospel, gold, glory). The gospel mission is related to the spread of Christianity. The gold mission is related to power over natural resource wealth. The glory mission is related to reigning over politics and territory on indigenous land outside of Europe.

The western part of the island, during the Dutch administration, was known as Dutch New Guinea or Netherlands New Guinea. Later when Indonesia took over the territory, was then named West Irian, and now it is called Papua or internationally known as West Papua.

The Land of Papua is divided into six provinces and it is home to 250 indigenous Melanesian tribes.

Meanwhile, the eastern part of the island which currently stands on its independent state New Guinea is home to more than 800 indigenous Melanesian tribes. Given the anthropological and ethnographic facts, the Land of Papua and PNG collectively are the most diverse and richest island in the world.

Vital role of language
In the process of forming an embryo and giving birth to a new nation and country, language plays an important role in uniting the various existing indigenous tribes and languages.

In Papua, after the Dutch left its territory and Indonesia took over control over the island, Bahasa Indonesia — modified Malay — was introduced. As a result, Indonesian became the unifying language for all Papuans, all the way from the Sorong to the Merauke region.

Besides Bahasa Indonesia, Papuans are still using their ancestral languages.

Meanwhile, in PNG, Tok Pisin, English and Hiri Motu are three widely spoken languages besides indigenous Melanesian languages. After the British Empire and Germany left the eastern New Guinea territory,

PNG, then an Australian administered former British protectorate and League of Nations mandate, gained its independence in 1975 — yesterday was celebrated as its 49th anniversary.

The relationship between the Land of Papua and its Melanesian sibling PNG is going well.

However, the governments of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea with the spirit of sharing the same land and ocean, culture and values, and the same blood and ancestors, should take tangible steps.

Melanesian policies
As an example, the foreign policy of each country needs to be translated into deep-rooted policies and regulations that fulfill the inner desire of the Melanesian people from both sides of the divide.

And then it needs to be extended to other Melanesian countries in the spirit of “we all are wantok” (one speak). The Melanesian countries and territories include the Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS).

Together, they are members of the sub-regional Oceania political organisation Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG).

In that forum, Indonesia is an associate member, while the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and Timor-Leste are observers. The ULMWP is the umbrella organisation for the Papuans who are dissatisfied with at least four root causes as concluded by Papua Road Map (2010), the distortion of the historical facts, racial injustice and discrimination, human rights violations, and marginalisation that Papuans have been experiencing for years.

Fiji:
Here is a brief overview of the diplomatic relationship between the Indonesian government and Melanesian countries. First, Indonesia-Fiji bilateral affairs. The two countries cooperate in several areas including defence, police, development, trade, tourism sector, and social issues including education, broadcasting and people-to-people to contact.

PNG:
Second, Indonesia-PNG bilateral affairs. The two countries cooperate in several areas including trade cooperation, investment, tourism, people-to-people contact and connectivity, energy and minerals, plantations and fisheries.

Quite surprisingly there is no cooperation agreement covering the police and defence sectors.

Solomon Islands:
Third, Indonesia-Solomon Islands diplomacy. The two countries cooperate in several areas including trade, investment, telecommunications, mining and tourism.

Interestingly, the country that is widely known in the Pacific as a producer of “Pacific Beat” musicians receives a significant amount of assistance from the Indonesian government.

Indonesia and the Solomon Islands do not have security and defence cooperation.

Vanuatu:
Fourth, Indonesia-Vanuatu cooperation. Although Vanuatu is known as a country that is consistent and steadfast in supporting “Free Papua”, it turns out that the two countries have had diplomatic relations since 1995.

They have cooperation in three sectors: trade, investment and tourism. Additionally, the MSG is based in Port Vila, the Vanuatu capital.

FLNKS — New Caledonia:
Meanwhile, New Caledonia, the territory that is vulnerable to political turmoil in seeking independence from France, is still a French overseas territory in the Pacific. Cooperation between the Indonesian and New Caledonia governments covers the same sectors as other MSG members.

However, one sector that gives a different aspect to Indonesia-New Caledonia affairs is cooperation in language, society and culture.

Indonesia’s relationship with MSG member countries cannot be limited to political debate or struggle only. Even though Indonesia has not been politically accepted as a full member of the MSG forum, in other forums in the region Indonesia has space to establish bilateral relations with Pacific countries.

For example, in June 2014, then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) summit in Nadi, Fiji.

PIDF is home to 12 member countries (Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Palau, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu). Its mission is to implement green economic policies in the Pacific.

Multilateral forums
Indonesia has also joined various multilateral forums with other Pacific countries. The Archipelagic and Island States (AIS) is one example — Pacific states through mutual benefits programs.

During the outgoing President Joko Widodo’s administration, Indonesia initiated several cooperation projects with Pacific states, such as hosting the Pacific Exposition in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2019, and initiating the Indonesia-Pacific Development Forum.

Will Indonesia be granted a full membership status at the MSG? Or will ULMWP be granted an associate or full membership status at the MSG? Only time will reveal.

Both the Indonesian government and the United Liberation Movement for West Papua see a home at the MSG.

As former RNZ Pacific journalist Johnny Blades wrote in 2020, “West Papua is the issue that won’t go away for Melanesia”.

At this stage, the leaders of MSG countries are faced with moral and political dilemmas. The world is watching what next step will be taken by the MSG over the region’s polarising issue.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta, and is a member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

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

This story contains a racial slur.

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Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me too,” she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to meet.”

Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing divisions.

“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the time.”

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman’s Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates, spoke at commencement in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial line that day.

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation academy, which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state’s legislature approved $3.75 million — worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” Suitts wrote in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.

“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies weren’t racist. Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality (often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or vacant buildings. Researchers who visited some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were “dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.

“It is really heartbreaking,” she said.

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.

Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on Antioch Baptist Church, where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the sense I got,” Sheffield said.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, state records indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found.

Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if they didn’t recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master’s thesis, she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.

“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’ most successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many enslaved laborers that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”

He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.

“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he said.

Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board’s request to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.

People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.

“If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t continue to die as a county.”

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt Treasures, where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn’t easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?

“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about school pride or tradition.”

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not in the public schools.

Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The new program, which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.

“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school.”

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there.”

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s standardized test results could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies offer.

“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,” Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: “They’ll be out to recruit now.”

When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. “A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would “the white school” treat their children?

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted existing research using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research. Sergio Hernandez contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office – Government Open Data License – India

In March, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said at an election rally in Arunachal Pradesh that previous governments had not cared for states that sent only two representatives to the country’s Parliament, as Arunachal and several others in the Indian Northeast do. Modi failed to see the irony of his claim given that he has not visited Manipur, which has only two representatives in parliament, since the outbreak of an armed ethnic conflict that has raged on for nearly a year. The toll from the violence stands at more than 200 lives lost, and many thousands displaced.

In India’s 2024 national election, widely seen as being decisive for the country’s democracy, the eight states in the Northeast—Assam, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Meghalaya—will decide whether they want to be part of “Modi ka parivar,” or Modi’s “family”—a phrase that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has rolled out on social media as an election gambit. The BJP-led central government in Delhi has repeatedly claimed to have bridged the “tyranny of distance” between the Northeast and the rest of India, something that the region has undoubtedly long suffered from. Unfortunately, the Modi government’s handling of the Manipur crisis shows otherwise—and none of the BJP’s numerous political partners in the Northeast region, who often profess themselves to be “sons of the soil,” have challenged the government’s claim.

The Northeastern states combined send only 25 representatives to the Lok Sabha, the 543-seat lower house of the Indian parliament. Assam, the most populous of the states, accounts for 14 of these alone. The perceived remoteness of these states, connected to the rest of India by only a narrow “chicken’s neck” of a corridor in West Bengal, is another factor that has kept the region on the fringes of national politics. What’s more, the Northeastern states are among the country’s poorest—with the exception of Sikkim, which has the highest per-capita net domestic product of any Indian state—and among those most heavily dependent on central funds. In fact, the central government has a ministry dedicated to the development of the Northeast, going by the acronym DoNER, which channels 10 percent of the annual budgets of all 52 central ministries to infrastructure projects in the region. Regional experts often remark that the Northeast is compelled to follow Delhi’s lead because of this historical dependence on the center.

The BJP secured its first electoral victory in the Northeast when it won an assembly election in Assam in 2016. Since then, it has gained a hold over much of the region and worked to better integrate it with the rest of India. But the specifics of that integration follow a very particular vision: for the BJP, the Northeast is not beyond the purview of its longed-for Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation. In a region long perceived to be dominated by Christian groups, the party has played on the sentiments of the Northeast’s Hindus, who constitute a 53-percent majority in the region cutting across multiple divisions of language, ethnicity, and caste. With this approach, the last decade of BJP politics in the Northeast has exacerbated internal divisions in a region that was already struggling with bloody schisms to begin with. The Manipur conflict is one symptom of this.

In the early 2000s, even while Atal Behari Vajpayee headed a BJP-led government at the center, the opposition Indian National Congress was in power in four of the Northeastern states, and in ruling coalitions with regional parties in two others. Once the Congress returned to national power, the grand old party’s presence and power in the Northeast remained more or less a constant. That was until 2014, and Modi’s ascent to prime minister. Like almost everywhere else, the BJP has used money and power to completely change this electoral picture in the Northeast, throwing large sums into campaigning in this region where many voters openly accept bribes. The party also played mitra, or ally, to various regional parties, and partnered with them in numerous state governments.

Unlike the Congress, which typically chose to take on electoral contests in the Northeast alone, the BJP entered the region relatively quietly through alliances with the National People’s Party in Meghalaya, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam, the National Democratic People’s Party in Nagaland and the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura. In a region with a dizzying mix of ethnicities and cultures, not only did this help deflect attention from the BJP’s general reputation of being anti-minority, or being against anyone who was non-Hindi or not caste Hindu, but it also enabled the party to poach certain regional leaders. For example, Sarbananda Sonowal, the former chief minister of Assam and leader of the AGP, joined the BJP in 2011. The AGP eventually declined and is now reduced to being a token partner in Assam’s BJP-led five-party coalition government. Such poaching by the BJP effectively ended the political runs of several regional parties. Helped by this, since 2014 the BJP has gone from a bit player to a dominant force in the politics of the Northeast, forming state governments in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Tripura.

Moreover, the BJP has been able to exploit historical resentment against the Congress, which presided over the many brutalities of the peak years of insurgency in the Northeast, in the 1980s and 1990s. After a dark phase of counterterrorist operations and extrajudicial killings that lasted into the early 2000s, Assam saw relative peace under a Congress government at the center from 2004 onwards. Yet the BJP has successfully blamed the Congress for allegedly encouraging illegal immigration into the Northeast, primarily from neighboring Bangladesh, by “appeasing Muslims.” The BJP has even interpreted a radio speech by the Congress icon and former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru as reflecting the rival party’s indifference to the Northeast. Speaking in 1962, when China invaded India, Nehru used the phrase, “My heart goes out to the people of Assam at this hour.” His political opponents have long claimed that this was a signal that Nehru had abandoned Assam to its fate—an accusation that the BJP has continued to drum up in its 2024 electoral campaign.

The BJP has temporarily neutralized civil society groups and armed groups in the region that would, in earlier times, have likely stood in opposition to the central government. The home minister, Amit Shah, boasted during the election campaign that the Modi government has signed nine peace accords in the Northeast in the last 10 years. Given that the Northeast has long had the greatest concentration of secessionist groups and movements anywhere in India, the first order of business for any government looking to impose itself on the region is to establish peace, preferably through political settlement. However, the Modi government’s peace agreements look better on paper than on the ground.

For example, the government’s first major move in the Northeast after coming to power in 2014 was to sign a framework agreement for a Naga peace accord with the Isak Muivah faction of the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM). Given the Nagas’ history of demanding self-determination and standing against union with the rest of India, a firm agreement with the Naga leadership for a settlement within the Indian republic would have been a landmark achievement.

However, the framework agreement was ambiguous in ways that eventually left the Nagas feeling let down. Naga negotiators had agreed to share sovereignty with India while retaining Naga’s unique identity, as well as a separate flag and constitution. However, after the Modi government unilaterally abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution of India, which allowed for special constitutional status and autonomy for the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, it became clear that the BJP government was pursuing a policy of “One nation, one constitution.” The Nagas were blindsided and talks went into a stalemate.

Then there is the example of the Bodos. The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution offers special privileges regarding land and resources to groups recognized as Scheduled Tribes (a government-recognized disadvantaged socio-economic group in India.) After a bloody struggle, the Bodoland Territorial Council emerged in 2003 out of a settlement between the Bodoland Liberation Tiger Force and the governments of India and Assam. Such territorial councils, under the provisions of the Sixth Schedule, empower a designated tribal community in a designated region to self-govern within constitutional limits, with earmarked funds from the central government. Despite claims that the BJP has fulfilled promises of the accord such as providing direct funding to the Bodo Territorial Council, the Indian government has categorically said that it has not. Meanwhile, even as Bodos have continued to engage with the government, their claims and ambitions have been pushed back. Under an agreement signed with the Modi government, the Bodo leadership’s purview extends only over a “region,” and not over a full-fledged state as the Bodos once hoped for.

More recently, the government has signed agreements with factions of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the United National Liberation Front (UNLF) of Manipur—two insurgent groups known to be among the least amenable to negotiations. ULFA was founded in 1979 with the professed aim of liberating Assam from exploitation by India. The UNLF, established in 1964, has been advocating for Manipur’s secession on the basis that its former ruler should never have agreed to merge with India in 1949.

The Modi government brandishes its agreements with these two old and formidable militant groups as impressive achievements, but they were, in fact, low-hanging fruit. Support for ULFA in Assam has decreased considerably in the last decade, with a steady fall in recruitment, partly due to fatigue with the group’s Ahom revivalist mission and partly due to backlash after a series of blasts linked to it that killed civilians. The government signed an agreement with a pro-talks faction of ULFA in 2023, while an anti-talks faction refused to abandon the armed movement unless the government was willing to discuss sovereignty for Assam. The fact that the agreement led to the disbanding of the pro-talks faction while the more militant anti-talks faction continues to survive has left a major, and potentially dangerous, loose end.

In Manipur, the government was all set to sign an accord with the Kukis in May 2023—much to the displeasure of Biren Singh, the BJP leader and chief minister of Manipur, according to a report in the Wire. Singh belongs to the Meitei community concentrated in the Imphal Valley, which has long been at odds with the Kuki Zo tribes of the surrounding hill districts of Manipur. Kuki Zo communities, who complain of disadvantage and discrimination under the Meiteis’ established dominance of Manipur politics, have been asking for separate statehood since the 1980s. The accord would allegedly have granted them autonomy under a territorial council. However, the violence in Manipur broke out the very month the accord was to be signed, pitting the Kuki Zo tribes against the Meiteis, and there has been no movement on it ever since.

Instead, there is increasing doubt that the ceasefire agreement between Kuki insurgent groups and the central and state governments, first signed in 2008, will be extended. Far from bringing real peace to the hills or the Imphal Valley in Manipur—the Modi administration has faced widespread criticism for not stemming the violence—the central government has signed a cosmetic peace agreement with the pro-talks Pambei faction of the UNLF, even though it has refused to surrender its arms. Instead, members of this armed group have openly carried AK-47, M-16, and INSAS rifles, which are among the more than 5,000 weapons stolen from government armories, and are carrying out military-style operations aided by drone surveillance to attack Kuki villages in the hills. The armed faction has often fought along with Manipur police commandos, with the central security forces functioning as nothing more than mute spectators.

The extortion of civilians by armed groups, something commonplace in earlier years, saw a brief lull in the initial years of BJP rule. Now, with armed groups resurgent across Manipur amid the conflict, the phenomenon has returned to both the hills and the valley. And the tensions in Manipur have naturally overflowed into neighboring states. The NSCN-IM has already warned the government against settling the Pambei faction in the Naga hills. As the Kuki Zo tribes and Meiteis fought each other in Manipur, many Meiteis in Mizoram were forced to leave the state after open threats against them by a local Mizo group.

Even the tripartite agreement signed in February between the Modi government, the Tripura state government, and the recently formed Tipra Motha party appears to cede political advantage only to the BJP. The Tipra Motha has seemingly compromised on its demand for a separate state for the indigenous Tiprasa people in exchange for a territorial council with more seats. Tripura’s chief minister, Manik Saha, who is from the BJP, has said that only Modi can ensure the development of the state’s tribal communities.

This has become a widely held belief among tribal communities across the Northeast. This explains why, in Manipur, Kuki Zo MLAs from the BJP and the Kuki People’s Alliance, one of the national party’s local partners, continue to be faithful to Modi’s party even after being driven out of the valley and shut out from assembly proceedings.

Much of the mainstream media across India has failed to look at the fine print of the peace agreements. Instead, it has followed the official line of hailing them as victories for the ruling government, alongside touting statistics like an 86-percent reduction in civilian deaths across the Northeast since Modi’s arrival in power. What such coverage has ignored is the wider atmosphere of conflict and heightened insecurities within the region, and the distrust that the one-sided “peace agreements” have engendered in the people of the Northeast, who have seen their long-standing demands being traded away cheaply.

The BJP model of governance to pacify tribal minorities caters to a political status quo that favors ethnic majorities in specific regions, and this has further cemented feelings of “us versus them” between ethnic communities. The government has exploited fault lines of identity politics in the Northeast as a ploy to distract from important issues that adversely affect all of the Northeast, like the amendments to the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act. There have been eruptions of violence along ethnic lines not only in Manipur but also along the disputed border between Assam and Meghalaya, and between Assam and Mizoram, where sub-regional identities have been pitted against each other. The atmosphere has never been as polarized as it is now.

This ethnic polarization in the Northeast is something the BJP does not know how to deal with, and that can get in the way of its own Hindu nationalist agenda. The party would rather curb the growth of Christian missionary movements in the region, which continue to make deep inroads, and project Muslims as a common adversary of the people like it has to its advantage across much of India. Still, to expand its reach in Christian-dominated states like Mizoram and Nagaland, the BJP has used the ploy of an ostensible Hindu-Christian solidarity that it has resorted to in Kerala. A BJP leader and former legislator of the Mizo National Front warned against Bangladeshi Muslims in Mizoram, claiming that “only Hindus would come to the aid of Christians.” In Nagaland, similar sentiments led to a Muslim man being lynched to death in a town square in March 2015 after he was accused of raping a minor. Local Hindutva groups are already acting as vigilantes against “love jihad,” a supposed conspiracy by Muslim men to seduce, marry, and convert Hindu women for their own demographic gains. It is very likely that a big-budget propaganda film with an anti-Muslim narrative set in the Northeast—doing here what the inflammatory movie The Kerala Story did in the context of South India—will soon be made.

In Assam, where anti-outsider sentiment has built up since the 1960s largely along linguistic lines, the BJP has placated majoritarian anxieties by further bullying the local Muslim minority. In the last five years, Muslims have been evicted from their homes on flimsy excuses, an act allowing the voluntary registration of Muslim marriages has been repealed, and the government has passed a law retroactively criminalizing child marriage and consigning offenders to new detention centers meant for “illegal” foreigners—measures understood to target the Muslim community.

But such targeting of Muslims brings its own complications. Through the winter of 2019 and 2020, India was swept by protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed by the Modi government, which allowed granting Indian citizenship to only non-Muslim immigrants from the Muslim-majority countries of Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In the rest of India, the protestors took issue with the non-secular nature of the law, setting a precedent for possible future disenfranchisement of Muslim citizens on the basis of their religion. Assam saw massive protests against the BJP government too, only here they were based on fears that the law would allow an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants and so threaten the identity and existing demographics of the state.

Bengali Hindus in Assam, many of whom came to India from Bangladesh, have already been declared non-citizens by foreigners’ tribunals, kangaroo courts set up by the Assam government, or marked “doubtful” voters by the Election Commission of India. Despite their being an important vote bank for the BJP, many Bengali Hindus have been excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), another BJP-led effort originally intended to target and disenfranchise the Muslim population, and have been detained or stripped of access to government welfare as a result. On this, too, the BJP government faced significant pushback.

Yet, despite the unintended consequences and backlash from the CAA and NRC, the BJP won the 2021 Assam elections with greater numbers than before. When the Modi government released framework rules for the CAA in March this year, taking the next step in implementing the controversial law, protests in Assam were far more subdued than the earlier ones.

Elsewhere in the region, where the CAA aroused similar anxieties over a possible influx of outsiders, the BJP managed to douse the fires by exempting from the purview of the law tribal areas with special protections under the Sixth Schedule, as well as areas under the inner-line permit system that regulates the entry of outsiders. Another potential flashpoint could be the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), which the BJP apparently intends to impose across all of India. The UCC, again intended primarily to target Muslims, would bring all Indian citizens under uniform personal laws regardless of their religion—yet it is also deeply divisive and complicated in the Northeast, where myriad communities hold dear to the traditional customs they are currently able to follow, and the customary laws and religious practices of Hindu, Christian, and indigenous communities overlap significantly. Assam’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma has said that his state government will exempt tribals from following such a code, but the inflammatory potential of the UCC remains. The Modi government’s abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir has led to fears of similar action in the Northeast, which is allowed several accommodations under Article 371 that recognize various tribal and customary laws.

In Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura, there has been growing support within tribal communities for stripping those among them who have converted to Christianity from Scheduled Tribe status, which comes with special protections and reservations. Hindu tribal groups and ones following various indigenous faiths have been radicalized by BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to act against Christian proselytization. This effort is primarily run through educational institutions, including the RSS-run Ekal Vidyalayas, which impart Hindu nationalist philosophy to tribal children and train them to counter Christian-run schools. In the early months of the Manipur conflict, extremist groups that patronize the indigenous Sanamahi faith, practiced by a section of the Meiteis, attacked members of tribal communities and destroyed a large number of churches—estimates vary between 150 and 300—including ones that served Meitei Christians. They have also forced Meitei Christians to return to the Sanamahi faith by making them sign conversion affidavits and burning their bibles in what they described as acts of ghar wapsi, or homecoming—the preferred Hindu nationalist term for the reconversion to Hinduism of Indian Christians and Muslims.

The BJP’s majoritarian playbook, bolstered by its push for the region’s development, has proven largely successful in the Northeast. The BJP administrations in Delhi and the Northeastern states have invested heavily in promoting tourism and improving connectivity in the region, with long-term plans to make the region a trading thoroughfare connecting India to Southeast Asia. The BJP also has plans to promote mineral extraction, hydropower generation, and palm oil plantations, which it touts as economic boons without heed of the ecological costs. Local communities have largely welcomed these announcements, and regional parties have not been able to challenge the BJP even on their home turf—Mizoram being the only exception to this.

Yet the BJP has not fully understood the region’s complex ethnic and linguistic dynamics, or the dangers of heedlessly manipulating them, as the conflict in Manipur has shown. For the people of the Northeast, many of its intellectuals would argue, this national election is just business as usual, with pockets being stuffed and potholed roads (temporarily) fixed. However, every act of majoritarianism in the region is slowly changing its people and politics. The Northeast might have finally got more roads and bridges, but they have come at the cost of our relations with each other. With election predictions pointing heavily to a return to national power for Modi and the BJP, the people of the Northeast might expect greater connectivity with the rest of India, but with certainly more disunity among themselves.

This article is part of “Modi’s India from the Edges,” a special series by Himal Southasian presenting Southasian regional perspectives on Narendra Modi’s decade in power and possible return as prime minister in the 2024 Indian election. The article is distributed in partnership with Globetrotter.

The post Under Modi, the Northeast Is More United With India, but More Divided Within appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Makepeace Sitlhou.

A verified X (formerly Twitter) user posted the viral clip with a caption in Hindi that can be roughly translated as – ‘Kharge Sahab is also saying that Congress is dividing the country in the name of caste.’ (Archive)

खरगे साहब भी कह रहा है कि कॉंग्रेस जाति के नाम पर देश को डिवाइड कर रही है

That’s #WhyModi pic.twitter.com/bmbjIHFVGd

— Himanta Biswa Sarma ( Congressiyon ke Papa) Parody (@HimantaBiswa_S) March 7, 2024

Another user posted on Facebook with a similar claim that the Congress President had inadvertently condemned his own party. (Archive)

Fact Check

Alt News ran a reverse image search on one of the key frames from the viral video, and came across this YouTube video posted by the news channel, Times Bharat, on February 16, 2024. The caption indicates that the speech is from a Congress rally held at Aurangabad, Bihar, as a part of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, in February 2024.

We ran a relevant keyword search on Google and came across this video uploaded by the official channel of Congress on YouTube.

In the full speech, Kharge speaks about the party’s commitment to conducting socio-economic caste surveys in order to assess the progress of various communities in India since its independence. 

At the 13:11 mark, Kharge can be heard exclaiming ‘Modi says that the Congress Party is always trying to divide the country on the basis of caste differences…What are we doing? All we are trying to do is provide justice to the people’ (Translation from Hindi). It is thus evident that he attributes the comment from the viral clip to Prime Minister Modi, criticizing him for not supporting the move for the caste survey. 

In the small clip which has gone viral, the segment of the speech where Kharge mentions PM Modi’s name has been cut out to make it look like Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge is blaming his own party for the division of the country on the basis of caste. 

To sum up, the viral clip is part of a longer speech by Mallikarjun Kharge, wherein he implicates Prime Minister Modi for not supporting the nationwide caste survey. The claim that the Congress president criticized his own party for dividing the country on caste-based differences is thus false. 

Prantik Ali is an intern at Alt News.

The post No, Mallikarjun Kharge did not say Congress had divided India on caste appeared first on Alt News.

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

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Robert Tracy’s appointment as St. Louis’ police chief came with a sweetener: In addition to a $175,000 annual salary from the city, a nonprofit organization made up of local business leaders pays him $100,000 a year more.

The arrangement raised some questions at the time about whether the St. Louis Police Foundation’s money would influence Tracy’s approach to policing in a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime.

Thirteen months after Tracy took charge, those questions remain largely unanswered.

Megan Green, president of the board of aldermen and the city’s second-highest ranking official, said that while Tracy is generally responsive to the board, aldermen need more information about the financial relationship between the foundation and the Police Department and will now ask for it.

“I think we don’t know the exact extent to which he collaborates with the foundation or they have his ears,” Green said. “The public deserves to understand exactly, even beyond salary, how much money the police foundation is investing in the Police Department.”

Sharon Tyus, a longtime alderwoman who represents some north side neighborhoods most affected by crime, questioned whether Tracy’s arrangement with the foundation is legal.

“Who else can pay the chief?” she asked. “Can the criminals get together and pay the chief?”

Since it was founded in 2007, the foundation has given the Police Department at least $20 million in support, including both cash donations and in-kind gifts of training, weapons, protective gear and technology.

But until Tracy’s hiring, it had never paid a public official; the deal with Tracy, policing experts say, is unheard of for a U.S. police chief. (It’s far more common for coaches at elite college athletic programs.)

Tracy, who previously was the chief of police in Wilmington, Delaware, was the first chief in the St. Louis department’s 214-year history to be selected from outside the department. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones announced his appointment after a nationwide search with help from a firm whose work was paid for by another St. Louis-area business group, the Regional Business Council. Jones has praised Tracy for the city’s reduction in reports of violent crime in his first year on the job, while Tracy has credited the work of the department’s officers, community support and his own crime reduction strategies.

Tracy and Jones did not respond to questions from ProPublica or requests for interviews. Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for Jones, said in an email that the mayor has been “continuously transparent” about the selection process and Tracy’s salary.

“It remains clear that Chief Tracy is a worthwhile investment in the safety of St. Louis residents,” Dunne said.

Tracy assumed his role just a few months after ProPublica published stories focusing on the growth of private police forces in St. Louis. Those stories revealed that wealthier neighborhoods paid private companies for additional police services provided by moonlighting city officers and high-ranking leaders.

After the stories’ publication, Jones said in a radio interview that she intended to make changes to the private policing system to eliminate the disparities. But Tracy’s appointment has only cemented the city’s pay-to-play policing environment; the promised overhaul has not taken place. In a recent interview with KSDK-TV, Tracy said he didn’t want to prevent his officers from earning additional money in second jobs.

Experts in policing and public administration criticized private funding of Tracy’s salary. They said the foundation’s money threatens to divide Tracy’s civic loyalties or at least create the impression that he’s beholden to wealthy donors.

“When you have what could be perceived as a very high-level pay-to-play scheme, where certain businesses and entities have not just the chief’s phone number but literally sign more than a third of his paycheck, that’s just a bad look,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school who has studied private policing.

Money from police foundations is used in a number of cities and in a variety of ways, from funding officer appreciation days to providing helicopters. They bridge budget gaps and provide resources that might otherwise be unavailable because of public funding limitations. Their supporters say they enhance what police can do and can foster partnerships between the community and the police.

But, Stoughton said, that kind of spending is “significantly different from giving a police chief a private stipend, particularly one that constitutes a substantial portion of his public salary. That’s weird.”

Justin Marlowe, a research professor at University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director for the school’s Center for Municipal Finance, said it was clear “something is wrong with the way St. Louis is budgeting for policing.” If it was important to pay the chief $100,000 more, he said, “then you find a way to do that through the budget process. And then that way it’s very clear where the accountability is and clear what the performance expectations are.”

Marlowe noted that public officials are expected to recuse themselves from votes or actions in which they have a financial interest to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. While taxpayers and the foundation might share objectives, “What we’re worried about is, What if there’s not alignment?”

In public statements to the media, Tracy has said he is not beholden to the foundation. The foundation’s chairman, Doug Albrecht, has told reporters that the foundation’s only condition for Tracy was that he remain engaged with the community and with officers.

But in his first year on the job, the foundation played a role in financing Tracy’s downtown crime strategy, contributing $860,000 for additional patrols in the business district, an area that had seen spikes in crime and raucous parties that turned violent. The foundation said this funding was at Tracy’s request. And Tracy told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he chose downtown for foundation-funded patrols because it’s a popular gathering place. The program has been renewed this year.

In the email to ProPublica, Dunne, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the downtown patrols were “designed to incentivize officers to work secondary under the department itself, rather than private companies.”

Joe Vaccaro, the longtime chairman of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee until he lost reelection last year, said that, if he were still on the board, he would ask why Tracy chose downtown for the foundation-funded patrols.

“Why are you picking downtown over my neighborhood?” he asked. “There are more killings in areas of north St. Louis. Why is downtown more important? Oh, wait a minute, the money comes from the group that’s paying you.”

Vaccaro’s successor as public safety chair, Bret Narayan, said the financial relationship between the foundation and Tracy “is something we should be taking a hard look at.” He said that though the board has not typically received line-item detail on foundation gifts to the department, some aldermen have been discussing legislation that would require the department to provide that.

In an interview, the foundation’s president and executive director, Michelle Craig, said that its relationship with Tracy is substantially the same as with his two predecessors — though neither of them received foundation money. She said board members “do not have any more access than anyone else who would call the chief’s office and make an appointment.”

Tracy’s predecessor, John Hayden, who served as police chief for 4 1/2 years until his retirement in June 2022, said the foundation did not try to influence his decisions. He said the department would sometimes ask the foundation to buy equipment instead of waiting for the next year’s city budget allocation. He said that when the department said it needed bulletproof helmets, the foundation bought them, citing an incident where an officer had been shot.

Hayden said he wished that he’d had the opportunity to try to negotiate a higher salary than the $153,000 he made in his last full year. But he said he would have preferred to be paid by the city.

“I think then the citizens would be more comfortable that I wasn’t beholden to somebody,” he said.

Lt. Col. Michael Sack, who served as interim chief for about six months in 2022 and was one of four finalists for the chief’s job, said in a federal lawsuit against the city that he would have turned down the extra pay from the foundation so St. Louis would not have a chief “who has conflicts of interest.” (Sack says he was wrongly rejected for the job; the city says that the lawsuit has no merit and has asked a federal judge to dismiss it.)

St. Louis does not appear to have a clear need for private funding of its chief. The department’s budget this year is $189 million and, because it is about 300 officers short of its authorized strength of 1,215, it has not spent all the money the city has made available. Last year, the department was more than $12 million under budget.

The private pay for Tracy is part of a broader pattern where St. Louis-area business leaders, many of whom live and work outside the city, have quietly tried to influence police operations because of concerns about crime’s impact on the regional economy.

Albrecht, the foundation chairman lives in Ladue, an affluent suburb 12 miles west of St. Louis known for sprawling estates and private golf clubs. That’s also where his venture capital and private equity firm, Bodley Group, is based. The foundation’s mailing address is his office. Albrecht didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At the time of Tracy’s hiring, Albrecht said the group learned during the search that the process was limited by the low pay for the position. The city charter requires that the police and fire chief be paid equally. Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson made $157,423 in 2022. He was paid $175,000 in 2023 after Tracy was hired.

Jenkerson said in a brief interview that he was “in the process of working on that issue” and that “parity is parity.” He said he did not want to comment on what he thought about Tracy’s foundation pay.

St. Louis ranks at the lower end for how it pays its chief — at least before Tracy. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum found that, in 2021, the average salary for chiefs in the 38 largest U.S. police departments was $232,380.

The additional pay for the chief’s job was never part of publicly available information about it. And it’s not clear if the city considered paying the chief a higher salary, even if it meant paying the fire chief more. Green said she didn’t know if such a proposal was taken to the Board of Aldermen before she was elected its president in November 2022.

Her predecessor, Lewis Reed, resigned and is in federal prison on a bribery conviction.

Records the foundation provided to John Chasnoff, a local activist who has pressed for transparency over the city’s policing, show that its board members were discussing a plan to contribute to the next chief’s salary at least three months before Tracy’s selection. An email to board members from Albrecht said the city’s maximum salary of $175,000 “will not allow us to acquire the highest level of talent for this position.”

Albrecht wrote that to secure the contract of up to $100,000 with the new chief, the foundation would work directly with the search firm the city used and, ultimately, with the candidate. “The city would not be involved,” he wrote.

Minutes from a foundation board retreat in September 2022 indicate members agreed that this financial support was crucial to attract the most qualified candidate, even if they had no control over the process or the eventual appointee.

Tracy insisted in a KMOV-TV interview that he was not beholden to the foundation and that his integrity was intact because “that was a deal with the city, and not a deal to me personally.”

But that appears to not be true. A contract released by the foundation — after pressure from Chasnoff — shows that it was signed by Tracy and Albrecht.

Besides salary, the contract requires Tracy to conduct a series of outreach efforts, including town hall meetings with department staff, regular communications and updates to the community by a blog or other means, and annual meetings with leaders in each of the city’s 14 wards.

The agreement runs for three years or unless Tracy is fired by the city or the foundation has probable cause that he has committed misconduct or failed to uphold the agreement.

Craig said the foundation was pleased with Tracy’s performance.

“I’m not in the media, so I don’t know the struggles of getting his attention,” she said, “but to us it appears he’s in a lot of places in the community, and that’s what he’s supposed to be doing.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

Robert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency, to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. ​​For 20 years, he edited the Multinational Monitor magazine, and as the President of Public Citizen, Weissman has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy. He is the author, with Joan Claybrook, of The Corporate Sabotage of America’s Future And What We Can Do About It.

More than three in four people want to have CEOs held accountable for the crimes they commit. Eight in ten think the minimum wage is too low. Four in five support paid family leave, and on and on and on. By way of context, those are not regular numbers when you get polls. In fact, if you ask people, “Does the earth revolve around the sun?” only 80% of Americans agree that the earth revolves around the sun. So, when you get numbers in the 90% or 85%, these are extraordinary levels of national agreement.

Robert Weissman

If you step back from the immediate moment, I think the big-picture story is that the bounds of what's considered important—or the policy solutions that are considered acceptable or reasonable—are really constructed by corporations and their lobbyists, and that's the problem we face every day.

Robert Weissman

Ambassador Chas Freeman is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia, acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d'affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. Ambassador Freeman is the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy, including The Diplomat’s Dictionary, America’s Misadventures in the Middle East, and America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East.

I think one of the great pieces of collateral damage from this (Israeli/Gaza conflict) is the United Nations Charter, international law, and the credibility of these institutions at the UN. But more particularly, I think the next time Americans lecture foreigners about human rights, they're not going to laugh at us—they're going to sneer. Because this is such a tremendous demonstration of hypocrisy on our part.

Ambassador Chas Freeman

It (the bombing of Gaza) is a gross violation of any standard of human rights. And the fact that we support it is discrediting us. We started out claiming that the eyes of the world were upon us, and we should shine like a city on the hill. I think much of the world looks at us now and they see dead babies in rubble, not a shining city on the hill.

Ambassador Chas Freeman

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

1. On Tuesday, political titans like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries rallied in support of Israel in Washington. While supposedly condemning antisemitism, the speakers were joined by Pastor John Hagee, a rabid Christian Zionist who wrote in his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World that Hitler was a "half-breed Jew" he was sent by God, as a "hunter," to persecute Europe's Jews and drive them towards "the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have – Israel." John McCain rejected Hagee’s endorsement in the 2008 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the Intercept reports that the ADL plans to add Jewish peace rallies to their map of antisemitic incidents.

2. Axios is out with a report on an “internal State Department dissent memo [which] accuses President Biden of "spreading misinformation" on the Israel-Hamas war and alleges that Israel is committing "war crimes" in Gaza.” Axios continues “The memo — signed by 100 State Department and USAID employees — urges senior U.S. officials to reassess their policy toward Israel and demand a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.” This memo comes as the State Department is attempting to establish red lines on Israeli aggression, with Secretary of State Blinken stating “The United States believes key elements [for peace] should include no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Not now, not after the war…No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza,” per the Washington Post.

3. Al Mayadeen reports that Colombian President Gustavo Petro will cosponsor Algeria’s war crimes case against Israel at the International Criminal Court. Petro has previously voiced support for ICC action, stating “what is happening in Gaza are crimes against humanity.” TimesLIVE reports South Africa’s Foreign Minister Zane Dangor is also calling for an ICC investigation of Israeli leaders for “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” stressing that “Failure to do so will exacerbate the growing cynicism that international law is applied selectively for political purposes.”

4. From the Huffington Post: “Staffers from more than two dozen Democratic [congressional] offices say they are receiving an unprecedented number of calls and emails demanding for members to support a cease-fire…“Let it go to voicemail” was the prevailing guidance in several offices, one staffer said.” Yasmine Taeb of Mpower Change, a Muslim advocacy group lobbying on behalf of the ceasefire resolution, said there have been over 380,000 letters sent to the House alone. Last week, more than 100 staffers staged a walkout calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

5. Journalists have also begun speaking up for Palestine. Over 1,200 journalists have signed a letter “condemn[ing] Israel's killing of journalists in Gaza and urg[ing] integrity in Western media coverage of Israel's atrocities against Palestinians.” The letter names many of the reporters injured or killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza, including Mohammad Abu Hassir, who was killed along with 42 of his family members in a strike on his home. The journalists write “This is our job: to hold power to account. Otherwise we risk becoming accessories to genocide.”

6. Pro-Palestine protesters have also been taking the fight directly to the arms manufacturers. CT Insider reports protesters “blocked entrances at Colt…to protest…the gun manufacturer's sale of arms to Israel.”  Protester Mika Zarazvand is quoted saying that Israel is requesting 24,000 guns from the United States, and “we know that two-thirds of them are going to come from Colt.” In Arizona, the Tucson Coalition for Palestine staged a “die-in” blocking the roads to Raytheon’s facilities, according to Arizona Public Media. Meanwhile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 50 protesters chained themselves to the door of Elbit systems, decrying the company for profiting “from genocide” per NBC 10 Boston.

7. Abed Ayoub, Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, reports that 5 U.S. citizens from Pennsylvania were “seriously injured after their bus out of Gaza was bombed. The family was on the State Department list of evacuees, and followed instructions.” Instead of speaking out for these victims, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has instead been antagonizing pro-Palestine protesters. At a recent veterans protest in favor of ceasefire, Fetterman laughed at veterans being arrested and waved an Israeli flag at them, per progressive veterans group About Face.

9. In other news, details of the SAG-AFTRA deal have been released. In a note to members, the Guild wrote “In a contract valued at over one billion dollars in new wages and benefit plan funding, we have achieved a deal of extraordinary scope that includes "above-pattern" minimum compensation increases, unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI, and for the first time establishing a streaming participation bonus. Our Pension & Health caps have been substantially raised, which will bring much needed value to our plans. In addition, the deal includes numerous improvements for multiple categories including outsize compensation increases for background performers, and critical contract provisions protecting diverse communities.” A full summary of the deal is available at SAG-AFTRA.org.

10. Finally, ProPublica reports that for the first time, the Supreme Court has adopted a code of conduct intended to avoid improper outside influence on the Justices. This code establishes guidelines for acceptance of gifts and recusal standards, both of which have become major points of contention following ProPublica’s reporting on Harlan Crowe’s influence network targeting Justice Thomas. However, the publication is quick to note that this code does not come equipped with any sort of enforcement mechanism. Law Professor Stephen Vladeck is quoted saying “Even the most stringent and aggressive ethics rules don’t mean all that much if there’s no mechanism for enforcing them. And the justices’ unwillingness to even nod toward that difficulty kicks the ball squarely back into Congress’ court.”

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

1. The Fight for National Independence
   

Korea was unified as a nation by the 10th century.  During the last half of the 19th century, multiple invasions by foreign powers (US, France, Britain, and Japan) forced the country to allow foreign capital to enter and operate in Korea. ^[1]

In 1905, imperial Japan subjugated Korea as its Protectorate.  In 1910, Japan proceeded to annex Korea, which it then ruled until 1945.  While Japanese capital exploited the labor and natural resources of the country, the Japanese state banned use of the Korean language and customs in an attempt at forced assimilation. ^[1]

In 1919, the Korean independence movement organized mass rallies involving some 2 million protestors demanding independence from Japan.  Japanese police and military forces crushed these protests with repressive violence causing some 7,000 fatalities. Independence leaders in exile then established the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea [PGRK] which then obtained some limited international recognition and served until 1945 as an advocacy center for the independence movement. ^[1,2]

Between 1935 and 1940, the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army [NAJUA], led by the Communist Party of China [CPC], conducted guerrilla operations against Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea.  Kim Il Sung, then a member of the CPC, obtained some distinction as an effective and popular division commander in the NAJUA.  Japanese countermeasures forced Kim’s division, by the end of 1940, to escape into Soviet territory where they were retrained by the Soviet army.  Kim then became an officer in the Soviet Red Army and was serving therein when the USSR joined the War against Japan (1945 August).  During the interim, he was not present in Korea or China.  Kim returned to Korea with Soviet forces in 1945 August. ^[3]

2. Forced Prostitution
   

During the Asia-Pacific War (1941-45), Japan forced up to 200,000 Korean women (along with many more from other occupied countries) into sexual slavery to serve Japanese soldiers. During the Korean War (1950-53), the South Korean government re-established this system of forced sexual prostitution to serve South Korean and allied soldiers, the victims being conscripted almost exclusively from the ranks of the disempowered (worker and poor peasant) classes. This system persisted into the 21st century as a for-profit industry with sexual prostitution in “camp towns” (organized and regulated by the US and South Korean military authorities) around military bases. ^[4]

3. How Korea Came to be Divided

As the Soviet Army was about to liberate Korea from 40 years of oppressive Japanese colonial rule, the US, wanting to prevent that country from falling under predominant Soviet influence, asked (1945 August 10) that Soviet forces stop at the 38th parallel so that the US would be able to occupy the southern half of the country. Hoping for a good postwar relationship, the USSR promptly agreed, with the expectation that this would be a temporary arrangement until the removal of Japanese forces and the establishment of an independent government for the whole country.  Actual liberation began on August 14 with Soviet Red Army amphibious landings in the northeast of the country.  US forces did not enter southern Korea until September 08, by which time Soviet forces would otherwise likely have occupied the entire country and disarmed all occupying Japanese forces. ^[5]

In August, popular People’s Committees affiliated with the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence [CPKI] arose throughout Korea.  This organization was led by activists in country including: Lyuh Woon-hyung, and veteran Christian nationalist Cho Man-sik.  On September 12, activists from the People’s Committees, meeting in Seoul (in US occupation zone), established the People’s Republic of Korea [PRK] to govern the country. The PRK program included:

• confiscation of lands held by Japanese and their Korean collaborators;
• distribution of that land to peasants;
• rent limits on all leased land;
• nationalization of major industries;
• guarantees for basic human rights and freedoms (speech, press, assembly, faith);
• universal adult suffrage;
• equality for women;
• labor law reforms (eight-hour day, minimum wage, prohibition of child labor, et cetera);
• good relations with US, USSR, China, and Britain; and
• opposition to foreign interference in affairs of state. ^[6]

Soviet authorities recognized the People’s Committees and PRK which then instituted progressive social reforms in the North ^[7].  Meanwhile, the US Army Military Government [USAMGIK] in the South: regarded said PRK and People’s Committees as unacceptably leftist, and suppressed them by military decree and armed force.  USAMGIK also: put rightwing former Japanese collaborators in key power positions ^[6], and persisted in repressing reform advocates ^{[7, 8]}.  Popular protests and localized rebellions followed ^[9].  By 1948 state repression in the South under USAMGIK had subjected dissidents to arbitrary detention, torture, and murder with thousands of victims ^{[7, 9]}.  The US also chose rightwing anti-Communist, Syngman Rhee, as their man to govern the country ^{[7, 10]}.

With the US and USSR deadlocked in disagreement over the content of a government for a united Korea, the US orchestrated the establishment (1948 August 15) of the Republic of Korea [ROK] with Syngman Rhee as President.  Authorities in the North responded by establishing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK] on September 09 with Kim Il-sung as Premier.  ^{[5, 11, 12]}

4. What Happened to Democracy?

In the South, Rhee’s autocratic regime brutally persecuted Communists and other dissidents with detention, torture, assassination, and mass murder.  Victims numbered in the tens of thousands.  Repressive autocratic rule persisted in the South (with one brief reprieve) until 1987 when replaced by a liberal “democratic” regime with some semblance of civil liberties.  However, government under this regime remains dominated by political parties which represent factions of a ruling capitalist class.  Consequently, its “democracy” is illusory.  ^{[13, 14]}

In the North, the People’s Committees constituted popular democratic institutions, which were already active when Soviet forces arrived.  With Soviet backing, said Committees, with widespread popular support, constituted the governing authority.  By 1946, the Soviet-backed (Communist) Workers’ Party had begun to dominate the Committees and the governing administration.  Following the Korean War, Workers’ Party leader Kim Il Sung: purged other leading Communists (1952-62), replaced proletarian internationalism with Korean nationalism in Party doctrine, promoted a personality cult around himself, and created a hereditary dynastic autocracy, practices incompatible with Marxism and socialist participatory democracy. Thusly, the DPRK devolved into a dynastic bureaucratic welfare state, not capitalist, but also not actually socialist. ^{[5, 11, 15]}

5. The War on Korea

Both Korean governments claimed the right to govern the entire country and had made preparations to enforce said claim thru military force.  From 1949, there were border skirmishes, nearly all which began as incursions and/or artillery bombardments from the South into the North.  In 1950 June, following a 2-day ROK cross-border bombardment and seizure of northern territory (including the city of Haeju) in the Ongjin area, the DPRK responded with a full-scale invasion of the South.  The unpopular ROK regime collapsed, and DPRK forces quickly gained control of most of the South. ^{[16, 10]}

During its brief control in the South, the DPRK instituted progressive reforms (nationalization of industry, land reform, and restoration of the People’s Committees). According to US General William F Dean, “the civilian attitude seemed to vary between enthusiasm and passive acceptance”. ^[17]

The US, its allies, and their major news media, falsely characterized: the event as an unprovoked Communist aggression, the repressive ROK as a popular democracy, and the conflict as an international crisis (belying its reality as a civil war). The US, taking advantage of USSR boycott of United Nations [UN] meetings, induced said UN to authorize a US-led military intervention to save the ROK.  Thusly, the US transformed the hitherto relatively-bloodless Korean civil conflict into the horrendous Korean War. Moreover, the US, by threatening to invade China and by bombing China’s territory and threatening hydropower stations serving its proximate industries, provoked China to enter the conflict on the side of the DPRK. ^[10]

Toll. The War took the lives of an estimated 3 million people, including some 1.6 million civilians, many of them as a consequence of indiscriminate US aerial bombing and war crimes perpetrated by US and allied forces.  Said crimes included:

• massive US use of chemical weapons (especially napalm) in violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention;
• massive US use of bombing attacks upon civilian targets (cities and villages);
• deliberate destruction of crops and of food production infrastructure;
• massacres of many thousands of unarmed civilians by US armed forces under orders from high-ranking commanders at No Gun Ri and at many other locations (where US Army soldiers gunned down large crowds of civilians, or US airpower strafed and/or bombed them); and
• massacres of at least 100,000 Koreans by ROK police and army (as at Sancheong and Hamyang where ROK forces slaughtered 705 mostly women and children), at Koch’ang (where 719 persons of both sexes and all ages were mowed down by machine gun), and thru mass executions of rounded-up prisoners on mere suspicion that they might be unsympathetic to the repressive ROK regime.

Nearly all of the North and much of the South were reduced to rubble.  ^{[18, 10, 19]}

Armistice signed in 1953 July left a hostile and uneasy truce with little net change in the control of territory, but no peace agreement.  This condition persists to the present time.  Moreover, foreign troops have not been stationed in the North since 1958, but US armed forces (in the tens of thousands) have never yet left the South.  ^[20]

6. Who First Introduced Nuclear Weapons?

The US deployed nuclear weapons in south Korea (in violation of the Armistice Agreement) from 1958 until 1991 (when it apparently decided that its interests would be better served with a prohibition of nuclear weapons in Korea).  Moreover, US warships carrying nuclear weapons operate routinely in waters around Korea.  ^[21]

With the (1991) collapse of its protective USSR ally and with continued hostility from the US and ROK, the DPRK (in 1993) announced its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and stepped up its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability as a deterrent.  The DPRK suspended that withdrawal under the 1994 Agreed Framework whereby it agreed to remain in the NPT and to be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] in return for:

• light water nuclear power reactors to replace existing graphite nuclear power reactors (which were capable of easily producing weapons-grade plutonium),
• fuel oil deliveries to replace the power from shut down of the graphite reactors (until the light water reactors came on line),
• relief from sanctions,
• an end to threatening US-ROK military exercises, and
• movement toward normal diplomatic and economic relations.

It is now widely suspected that the US embraced the Agreed Framework on the assumption that the DPRK regime was on the verge of collapse which would mean no need for the US to fulfill its commitments.  ^{[22, 23]}

The US did default on the agreement thru long delays in construction of the light water reactors which was years behind the targeted 2003 completion date.  Then in 2002 the US further defaulted by ending delivery of promised fuel oil shipments.  Further, the US falsely accused the DPRK of having confessed violation of the Agreed Framework by misinterpreting the DPRK’s assertion of having an inherent right to possess nuclear weapons as an admission of actual possession of such weapons.  Finally, US President Bush: branded North Korea together with Iran and Iraq as an “axis of evil”; and then invaded Iraq where the US imposed regime change (followed by show trials and executions of deposed Iraqi leaders).  The DPRK responded (in 2003) to the US default and intensified hostility by reactivating its nuclear reactors and by quitting the NPT.  However, it offered to end its nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees, but the US was unwilling to provide.  ^{[22, 23]}

Repeated talks (2003-07) between the two sides failed to produce any lasting agreement.  The Obama administration ratcheted up the threatening military exercises and ignored DPRK calls for talks to make peace.  The DPRK has made six nuclear bomb tests (in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 January, 2016 September, 2017); and it has also developed an intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] capability.  ^{[20, 24]}

The US, in 2017, deployed its THAAD anti-missile system in south Korea thereby further destabilizing the confrontation and also provoking alarm in China ^[25].

7. The Current Danger
   

In 2011, the US and its allies used military force to oust the Gaddafi regime in Libya (after having used military force to effect regime change in Iraq in 2003).  Both Iraq and Libya had given up their nuclear-weapons and other WMD programs.  The DPRK drew the inevitable conclusion that it needed a nuclear weapons deterrent to protect itself against a similar event.

The US (with its imperial interventionist bi-partisan foreign policy consensus, arrogating to the US the “right” to use subversion, economic siege, military force, and any other available instrument in order to enforce its dictates against any country which insists upon following an insubordinate course) continues its hostility toward the DPRK.  Under Biden, it persists in its aggressions against said DPRK: vilification, economic siege, annually conducting threatening US-ROK joint military exercises in the South (to which the DPRK responds by test-firing its missiles).  The US refuses to discuss making a peace treaty or normalization of relations; it persists in its unwavering goal of regime change.  In fact, the US has used its economic power to intensify international sanctions (economic siege) against the DPRK.  Meanwhile, the obsequious (and/or negligently ignorant) mainstream news media misleads the public as to the realities of the confrontation; while the liberal left, if it responds at all, ignores US provocations and, tacitly or explicitly, accepts the mischaracterization of the DPRK as an aggressive “rogue” state.

Astute experts, including former US President Carter, have recognized that the current US policy, of attempting to coerce the DPRK to give up its nuclear deterrent while refusing to provide security guarantees, cannot succeed ^[4].  As long as the threat remains, the DPRK, regardless of who leads its government, will certainly not agree to give up the nuclear weapons deterrent which is its best insurance against military attack by an imperial US superpower bent upon regime-change.  The way to ensure peace in the Korean peninsula is to remove the sanctions and other hostile measures against the DPRK including the provocative joint military exercises with the ROK.

The DPRK does not want war.  It wants a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War.  Its officials have asserted that it also wants Korea reunified under a federal system wherein the central government’s functions would be limited to national defense and foreign relations.  Finally, the DPRK wants normal relations with the US and its neighbors; and, with that, it would, as it has repeatedly asserted, envision and welcome an end to hostile actions on both sides.  ^{[20, 22]}

US government policy has never prioritized the welfare of the Korean people, North or South.  Imperial hostility and pressure for regime change from outside forces, namely the US and its allies, has driven the DPRK regime to react with intensified repression of dissent.  That then has operated to reinforce the bureaucratic rule and dynastic autocracy, which (along with economic siege and need to heavily invest limited resources in military deterrent) are contrary to the best interests of the people of the DPRK.  Moreover, this US policy seriously threatens a catastrophic war which would devastate Korea and cause massive loss of life, South as well as North.  The principal beneficiaries of this policy are: the munitions vendors; their supportive imperial-minded US politicians of both major parties (whose election campaigns are significantly funded by said munitions vendors); government officials (who will subsequently become corporate executives or lobbyists for the merchants of death) ^[26]; and the “experts” in policy institutes and academia (who make their careers as apologists for Western imperialism).

ENDNOTES

[1] Wikipedia: History of Korea (2023 Oct 17) ~ §§ Later Three Kingdoms, Foreign relationships, Korean Empire (1898-1910), Japanese rule (1910-1945).

[2] Wikipedia: Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea (2023 Oct 26) ~ §§ introduction, Foreign relations.

[3] Wikipedia: Kim Il Sung (2023 Nov 02) ~ §§ Communist and guerrilla activities, Return to Korea.

[4] Hynesᵒ H Patricia: The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished (Truthout, 2013 Jul 12) @ https://truthout.org/articles/the-korean-war-forgotten-unknown-and-unfinished/ .

[5] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Division of Korea (1945—1950).

[6] Wikipedia: People’s Republic of Korea (2023 Oct 30).

[7] Cummingsᵒ Bruce: Korea’s Place in the Sun (© 2005, W. W. Norton & Company, New York & London) ~ pp 185—209 ISBN 0-393-31681-5.

[8] Wikipedia: United States Army Military Government in Korea (2023 Oct 20).

[9] Wikipedia: Autumn Uprising of 1946 (2023 Oct 18).

[10] Blum⸰ William: Killing Hope – U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (© 2004, Common Courage Press) ~ chapter 5 ISBN 1-56751-252-6.  Note: 1st half, thru chapter 34, of 2003 edition is online @ http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/livres8/BLUMkillinghope.pdf .

[11] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

[12] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 209—17.

[13] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 217—24.

[14] Wikipedia: History of South Korea (2023 Nov 02) ~ §§ First Republic (1948—1960) thru Fifth Republic (1979—1987).

[15] Wikipedia: Workers’ Party of Korea (2023 Oct 27) ~ § History.

[16] Cummingsᵒ: ~ pp 247—264.

[17] Wikipedia: History of North Korea (2023 Sep 05) ~ § Korean War (1950—1953).

[18] Wikipedia: Korean War (2023 Nov 09) ~ § Casualties.

[19] Wikipedia: Geochang massacre (2023 Sep 07); Sancheong-Hamyang massacre (2023 Jun 04); No Gun Ri massacre (2023 Sep 22).

[20] Wikipedia: Korean Armistice Agreement (2023 Jul 27).

[21] Wikipedia: South Korea and weapons of mass destruction (2023 Oct 25) ~ § American nuclear weapons in South Korea.

[22] Sigalᵒ Leon V: Bad History (38North, 2017 Aug 22) @ http://www.38north.org/2017/08/lsigal082217/ .

[23] Wikipedia: “Agreed Framework,” 21 May 2023.

[24] BBC: North Korea: What missiles does it have? (2023 Sep 03) @ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41174689 .

[25] Borowiecᵒ Steven: THAAD missile system agitates South Korea-China ties (Nikkei Asia, 2023 Jun 22) @ https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/THAAD-missile-system-agitates-South-Korea-China-ties .

[26] Kuzmarov, Jeremy, “Senate Report: Nearly 700 Former High-Ranking Pentagon and Other Government Officials Now Work at the Top 20 Defense Contractors,” Covert Action Magazine, 2023 May 12 .

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

The latest expression of hate and intolerance is once again in the Palestinian territory of Gaza. Enraged (and somewhat embarrassed) by the barbaric attack on 7 October by Hamas (or the Islamic Resistance Movement), the far right Israeli government, led by chief warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu, predictably, and tragically, launched a ruthless retaliation on the people of Gaza. A brutal response that should be condemned, as the vicious attack by Hamas should also be condemned.

Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, it is a Palestinian nationalist party, consisting of both a military arm and a political, social body. Classified by Israel and western Governments as a terrorist group, the recent assault, in which Israeli civilians, as well as IDF members were killed and kidnapped, was indeed a terror attack. But the actions of Hamas take place within the context of long-term systematic terrorism by the Israeli State against Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank over a period of five decades. A relentless genocidal campaign carried out in the full light of day.

As Diana Buttu, a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation to peace talks with Israel put it,  “The world keeps saying this attack is unprovoked, but in fact the world is ignoring how violent the daily [Israeli] occupation [of Palestinian territories] is.”

The causes and ‘provocations’ of the Hamas attack are clear: the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel; the illegal Israeli settlements, the indiscriminate arrests and imprisonment of Palestinians including children, the house demolitions, the sniper attacks; the Israeli check points inside Palestinian land, the destruction of olive crops by Israeli settlers, the brute force employed by the IDF, the refusal to enter into reasonable dialogue to reach a peaceful resolution; the breaking of international law, with impunity, and on and on goes the list of ‘provocations’. And unless these are dealt with and the subjugation of the Palestinian people ends, explosions of frustration, large and small will inevitably continue.

On top of the stifling Israeli assaults that Palestinian people endure daily, a little over two weeks ago, the Israeli Prime-Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (its hard to believe he’s still holding office of any kind), addressed the UN General Assembly (22 September 2023). He spoke endlessly and self-righteously about peace in the region, whilst brandishing a map entitled ‘The New Middle East’, in which Palestine was wiped out and Gaza and the West Bank were incorporated into Israel.

The Palestinian Ambassador to Germany Laith Arafeh, responded, saying there was, “no greater insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a ‘map of Israel’ that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea, negating Palestine and its people, then attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about ‘peace’ in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today’s world.”

Netanyahu’s inflammatory words, may well have been the final straw that led to Hamas launching the unprecedented attack on Israel.

Commons sense dictates that all pressure should be brought to bear on the Israeli government to stop the attack on Gaza, and an immediate ceasefire agreed. Chances are neither will happen, certainly not immediately, because hate and bitter revenge is driving Israeli actions, not common sense and certainly not compassion.

Division leads to conflict

Despite the fact that most people genuinely yearn for peace, humanity is not peaceful, and appears, by all the evidence to not know how to live in peace.

As well as this latest explosion of violence in Israel/Gaza there are dozens of armed conflicts taking place in the world. Inside communities, cities, towns, villages, there is violence, discord and enmity. Human relationships of all kinds contain within them tensions, which often lead to anger and violence, verbal or physical.

Violent conflict does not exist in isolation from other aspects of life — all is interconnected, this much is clear. Many of the pervasive structures and doctrines of our time are inherently divisive, and where there is division there will be conflict — within or without: Tribal nationalism (a burgeoning phenomena in recent years), as well as isms of all kinds — political, economic, religious, social. Competition and conformity (the dual pillars of much education), the pressure to conform and the focus on material success and pleasure.

These toxic ideals push the good — inclusivity, tolerance and kindness, to the margins, and collectively have created divided unhealthy communities (locally, nationally and globally). Selfish short-term behaviour, by governments, corporations and individuals is encouraged, contributing to a plethora of social ills including environmental vandalism, which is itself an act of  extreme violence.

Peace is impossible whilst these destructive ideals dominate.

If there is to be peace anywhere in the world, including Palestine/Israel, social justice must be created, sharing  and compassion cultivated, tolerance and understanding of others fostered (none of which exists for Palestinians in Gaza or the West bank e.g.), allowing forgiveness to naturally occur. Such perennial principles of goodness, held as ideals for generations, need to animate the socio-political systems, including education and crucially the economic structures. Indeed they should form the very foundation of such systems.

It is a truism to say that hate generates hate, violence begets violence; as the Buddha taught (Dhammapada chapter 3, verse 5) over 2500 years ago, “In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible.”

Imagine if you will, that the Israeli government had not reacted to the 7 October assault with hate, had not attacked Gaza, but had stopped for a moment to reflect, and had entered into discussions with Hamas. A bizarre naive suggestion perhaps, but one that would have saved thousands of lives and probably led to the hostages taken by Hamas being released. Instead there is carnage in Gaza, a major humanitarian disaster unfolding and the possibility of the conflict expanding.

 Humanity is one, how many times has it been said, – Jew or Arab, Christian of Buddhist, Hindu or Jain, man or woman, black or white, etc, etc, all are part of one group called humanity. And, unless we begin to lay aside our so-called differences, hatreds, prejudices and fears, and start to design systems and ways of living that are based on this inherent fact peace will forever remain a distant dream, and tragedies like the events taking place in Gaza will continue.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

In the fifth grade, VietNam war smoking,
piling up body bags in jungles out of sight,
I imagined being drafted…and not going.

Training to kill or be killed made no sense.
Now that I know the true reasons for war,
who wages them, at whose expense, all

seems lost. There is simply way too much
money in war—too much power to give up
for the sake of saving a family here or there.

You can blame the colonizers. I do, knowing
open air prisons run in first class to economy.
Thank G?d I was born in Puerto Rico not Gaza.

The post Boricua Standing at Divided Attention appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andres Castro.

The post A House Divided: What Raging Wars and Escalating Geopolitical Tensions Reveal About Our Failure to Co-Exist and Contain Existential Threats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chandran Nair.

Asked by Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, why she would not say categorically that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese virology lab, Haines said the intelligence community “remains divided on this issue,” with different agencies offering different analyses. 

“Basically, there's a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering,” Haines said. “What there isn't a consensus on is whether or not it's a lab leak, essentially ... or natural exposure to an infected animal.” 

“We've been trying to collect additional information,” she explained. “China has not fully cooperated, and we do think that's a key critical gap. That would help us to understand what exactly happened.”

Haines was appearing before a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee – alongside the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency – to answer questions relating to the intelligence community’s latest annual worldwide threat assessment report.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the committee his agency believed the so-called “lab-leak theory” was accurate. “The FBI has long said, going all the way back to the summer of 2021, that the origin of the pandemic was likely a lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said.

But Haines stressed that was not a universal view, with analysts “trying to do the best that they can to figure out what exactly happened.” 

“The Department of Energy has changed its view slightly, with low confidence: It says that a lab leak is most likely, but they do so for different reasons than the FBI does, and their assessments are not identical,” she said. “So you can see how challenging this has been.”

TikTok threat

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, on Tuesday had announced a new bipartisan bill that would give the Biden administration the authority to ban TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social media platform, across the United States. 

The bill, which has bipartisan support in the Senate and has also been backed by the White House, would allow the secretary of commerce to ban any foreign-owned technology deemed a national security threat.

None of the intelligence chiefs were asked if they supported the bill, but each said TikTok created an intelligence threat for the United States.

“In terms of our national security, it obviously enables our adversaries’ efforts at espionage,” CIA Director William Burns said. “It enables them to steal intellectual property, it enables them to get access to sensitive technologies, it enables them to spy on our citizens as well. So it offers enormous opportunities, I think, for our adversaries.” 

Wray said that TikTok’s threat stemmed from the inability of its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to refuse to follow orders from the Chinese Communist Party given China’s authoritarian system.

“The difference between an ostensibly private company and the CCP is essentially a distinction without a difference,” Wray said. “So if you were to ask Americans, ‘Would you like to turn over all your data, control of your devices, control of your information to the CCP?’ Most Americans would say ‘I'm not down with that,’ as my kids would say.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and the vice-chair of the committee, said that he believed the failure of Congress so far to ban TikTok came down to the fact that “we've forgotten what it's like to live in a world where we have near-peer competitors” like China.

“The commentary class, think tanks, academia, to some extent even Congress, is still filled with officials who came of age in the post-Cold War fantasy about the end of history,” Rubio said, also blaming business for becoming reliant on off-shoring. “We’ve become a society addicted to cheap products from China, and viral videos on TikTok.”

He asked Wray whether TikTok could be used for propaganda.

“Could they use it to drive narratives, like to divide Americans against each other – for example, let's say China wants to invade Taiwan – to make sure Americans are seeing videos arguing why Taiwan belongs to China [and] why the U.S. should not intervene?” Rubio asked.

“Yes,” Wray responded, adding: “We're not sure that we would see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening.”

U.S.-China relations

Before shutting its doors for a closed hearing, the committee did not ask about a number of other claims made in the threat assessment report released by the intelligence committee on Wednesday. 

The report notably said that North Korea’s cyber program could “cause temporary, limited disruptions of some critical infrastructure” in the United States, and that the situation in Myanmar is heading toward a stalemate with neither side able to achieve military superiority.  

Instead, the meeting focussed mainly on the threat posed by China, which has become one of few areas of bipartisanship in Congress. 

Haines, the national intelligence director, told the hearing Beijing would likely soon seek a calming of tensions to allow China to get its house further in order, while outwardly “signaling opposition” to Washington.

“We assess that Beijing still believes it benefits most by preventing a spiraling of tensions, and by preserving stability in its relationship with the United States,” she said, explaining that Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks “a period of relative calm to give China the time and stability it needs to address growing domestic difficulties.”

“Beijing wants to preserve stability in East Asia,” she said, even as it adopts “an increasingly aggressive approach” to the world.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.

There is an understandable eagerness to celebrate that the Republican party failed to generate a “red wave,” and even experienced some major defeats, in this year’s election. Equally understandable is the inclination to seize on post-election Republican in-fighting as a hopeful sign of the party’s weakening. 

There is currently a blame game going on the right, and for perhaps the first time since 2016, some once-significant Republican leaders—former Governors Chris Christie and Larry Hogan, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, even Trump’s Attorney General William Barr—have called for a break with Donald Trump. Others, most notably former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have distanced themselves from Trump, positioning for possible runs in a 2024 presidential primary. The blame game is real. Equally real is in-fighting within the Republican Senate and House caucuses, especially the latter, where titular leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy face challengers who are making real demands as a condition of future support—demands that will no doubt be met, for both McConnell and especially McCarthy are unprincipled cowards willing to do whatever is necessary for them to hold power.

This is all very real. And every fissure within the Republican Party is worth noting and—if possible—exploiting. But it would be a huge political and even moral mistake to exaggerate the importance of these intra-Republican differences. 

Every fissure within the Republican Party is worth noting and—if possible—exploiting. But it would be a huge political and even moral mistake to exaggerate the importance of these intra-Republican differences. 

It is tempting to believe that voters this November repudiated election denialism and an obsession with The Big Lie and registered a preference for “normality.” And some voters did do this in some settings, like Michigan. But a great many did not. Wisconsin voters returned Democratic Governor Tony Evers; but they also returned Republican majorities to both houses of the state legislature, and re-elected Ron Johnson, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, to the U.S. Senate. Texas voters re-elected far-right Governor Greg Abbott, and Florida voters re-elected even farther-right Governor Ron DeSantis, both of whom remain wedded to The Big Lie to this day, however much they might be out of favor with Trump, and however much their “accomplishments” extended beyond the re-litigation of 2020.

The voters who returned a majority of Republicans under the leadership of McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Elise Stefaniak, and Jim Jordan to the House surely did not repudiate election denialism. As CBS News observed: “In the next Congress, there are projected to be 156 GOP House members who have raised doubts about the validity of the 2020 election, an increase from the 147 GOP House members who, in January 2021, voted to object to the certification of the Electoral College.” Virtually every House Republican who voted against the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on January 6, and then voted against any effort to investigate that insurrection, is returning to Congress. Indeed, they will be accompanied by some new members who actually participated in or at least actively supported the January 6 episode. As the Washington Post reports: “While the Republican Party suffered surprising losses in the midterms, including defeats of many who bought into Trump’s false election claims, the arrival of freshman lawmakers who had come to Washington as pro-Trump activists on that violent day underscores the extent to which the House Republican caucus remains a haven for election deniers.”

The House Republican leadership made very clear, long before the election, that if the party was returned to power, it would use this power to subject the Biden administration and even House Democrats to relentless investigation. And now that its control of the House in 2023 is assured, the same leaders have reiterated this promise. Kevin McCarthy, virtually certain to be the next Speaker of the House, has gone further, pledging to remove three high-profile Democrats—Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar—from their important committee assignments in retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s similar treatment of Marjorie Taylor-Greene in 2021. (Back in February 2021 Pelosi, when asked if she had concerns about a precedent being set, replied: “None, not at all . . . If any of our members threatened the safety of other members, we’d be the first ones to take them off a committee.” Now McCarthy will punish some of the Democrats’ most public defenders of democracy, while elevating neo-fascist Greene to a major role in the new Congress.)

Writing in The New Republic, Alex Shephard argues that “A New Republican Civil War is About to Begin,” explaining that “the GOP’s old guard is pinning their renaissance on a Ron DeSantis renaissance. But Donald Trump’s counterestablishment has beaten them once before.” Shepherd’s piece nicely outlines the sources of friction within the Republican party and the foolishness of counting out Trump. At the same time, the piece’s caption is misleading. For there really is no longer a GOP “old guard,” though there are some, like McConnell, who are old and whose loyalty to the party preceded Trump and has often been tested by him. The GOP is the party of Trumpism even if there are now others, beyond Trump, who now might vie for its leadership—or might ultimately refuse to vie for leadership, ceding it to the twice-impeached, disgraced former President who remains the most popular leader among Republican voters, currently holding a 30 point lead over his nearest rival, DeSantis.

Yascha Mounck writes in The Atlantic about “How Moderates Won the Midterms.” Yes, some fanatics were defeated. But who are the “moderates” among the current leaders of the Republican Party either inside of Congress or outside of it? It is true that a handful of pretty far-right Republicans who refused to embrace the January 6 insurrection, such as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, won election. But these candidates are hardly “moderates”; Kemp’s support for the Senate candidacy of Herschel Walker furnishes clear proof of that. 

Perhaps the best clue to the meaning of the current recriminations among Republicans is contained in a recent Guardian piece entitled “Trump for 2024 would be ‘bad mistake,’ Republican says as blame game deepens.” The piece quotes an important Republican who recently vacated his House seat to run for the U.S. Senate: “It would be a bad mistake for the Republicans to have Donald Trump as their nominee in 2024. . . Donald Trump has proven himself to be dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude and a lot of other things that alienate so many independents and Republicans. Even a candidate who campaigns from his basement can beat him.”

These are powerful words . . . . spoken by Mo Brooks, until very recently one of Trump’s most fanatical supporters, who refused to concede Biden’s victory in 2020, and who spoke at Trump’s January 6 Ellipse rally, declaring “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

If ever there was a MAGA-inspired insurrectionist, it was Brooks, who entered the Alabama Senate race in 2021 with the blessing of Trump, only to run afoul of Trump’s ego, causing Trump to shift his support in the Republican primary to Big Lie proponent Katie Britt. Here is how Politico described the bitter battle that ensued between the two Republican candidates:

Even after Trump put his weight behind Britt in the runoff — and as public and internal polling showed Brooks’ prospects as weak — top conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin and Charlie Kirk declared their support for Brooks up to the final day of the campaign. Kirk, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward spent Monday night on a tele-town hall in support of Brooks, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also continued to lend their support.

. . . Throughout the runoff campaign, Britt continued to rack up her own endorsements from high profile Republicans, including Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). In the final weeks, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the GOP nominee for governor in Arkansas, and commentator Steve Cortes have also put out statements and videos in support of Britt’s campaign. That follows several other incumbent senators endorsing her earlier this year.

Britt proceeded to win the primary and then the Senate seat in November’s election. The first woman elected to an Alabama Senate seat, Britt’s victory hardly attests to the failure of Trump-aligned election denial. And Brooks’s very public denunciations of Trump hardly attest to ascendancy of Republican “old guard moderates”—unless the likes of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Charlie Kirk, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are considered voices of moderation. Indeed, once Britt won the primary, these leaders of The Grand Old Party came together behind her, just as they have all more recently denounced the Justice Department investigation of Trump, rallying behind Jim Jordan’s demand for Congressional investigation of the well-known Critical Race Theorizing Marxist, Merrick Garland.

This is moderation? This signifies real disagreements within the Republican Party?

It is surely true that some Republican voters have lost their appetite for Trump. It is just as true that Trump remains by far the most popular leader among Republican voters, and that, just as in 2016, it is very possible for him to win the Republican nomination, and the presidency, even without the support of a majority of voters. But the more important truth is that should Trump fail to be the Republican nominee in 2024, the nominee is very likely to be another far-right Republican, someone, like Ron DeSantis, whose intelligence and proven autocratic savvy make him even more dangerous.

As Jelani Cobb has recently argued in The New Yorker, Trumpism has an enduring power that far exceeds Trump himself, and “the forces of intolerance, racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American politics will persist” regardless of whether Trump ever again runs for political office. 

These forces continue to circulate in civil society and the body politic, spreading lies and conspiracy theories, taking over school boards across the country, and waiting to be re-mobilized by Republican leaders in 2024. In the meantime, House Republicans will use their very real congressional powers to obstruct the Biden presidency, relentlessly attack the Democratic Party, and create chaos in the heart of the federal government.

Only a few short weeks and months ago it was widely understood by a wide range of commentators that the Republican Party is an explicitly illiberal party that most resembles “autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey,” and is indeed an “antidemocracy party.”  No less an authority than retired U.S. Judge J. Michael Luttig, one of the premier Republican jurists in the country, said as much in public testimony before the House January 6 Committee, declaring that “one of our national political parties . . . the former President’s party cynically and embarrassingly rationalizes January 6,” refusing to commit itself to the Constitution and continuing to undermine the legitimacy of liberal democracy.

Yes, in this year’s election some of the most cynical and embarrassing Republican candidates were repudiated—though many were not. Yes, there is back-biting and in-fighting among Republican leaders jockeying for position as the next election cycle looms. But has the Republican Party really changed? Some might wish it has. But wishing does not make it so. And so the party continues to represent a clear and present danger to American democracy.

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

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

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This article was produced in partnership with NBC News.

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Weston Brown was scrolling through Twitter last month when he came across a video that made his chest tighten. It showed a woman at a school board meeting in North Texas, calling on district leaders to ask for forgiveness.

“Repentance is the word that’s on my heart,” she said near the start of the video.

For months, the woman in the clip had been demanding that the Granbury Independent School District ban from its libraries dozens of books that contained descriptions of sex or LGBTQ themes — books that she believed could be damaging to the hearts and minds of students. Unsatisfied after a district committee that she served on voted to remove only a handful of titles, the woman filed a police report in May accusing school employees of providing pornography to children, triggering a criminal investigation by Hood County.

Now, in the video that Weston found online, she was telling the school board that a local Christian pastor, rather than librarians, should decide which books should be allowed on public school shelves. “He would never steer you wrong,” she said.

The clip ended with the woman striding away from the lectern, and the audience showering her with applause.

Weston, 28, said his heart was racing as he watched and rewatched the video — and not only because he opposes censorship. He’d instantly recognized the speaker.

It was his mother, Monica Brown.

The same woman, he said, who’d removed pages from science books when he was a child to keep him and his siblings from seeing illustrations of male and female anatomy. The woman who’d always warned that reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies could open the door to sinful temptation. And the one, he said, who’d effectively cut him off from his family four years ago after he came out as gay.

“You are not invited to our house for Thanksgiving or any other meal,” his mother had texted to him in November 2018, eight months after he revealed his sexual orientation to his parents.

Weston, who lives with his partner in San Diego, had long ago come to terms with the idea that he would never again have a meaningful relationship with his parents. He still loved them and desperately missed his younger siblings, he said, but he was done trying to convince his mom and dad that his sexuality wasn’t a choice or a sin. He was done challenging their religious beliefs and praying for them to change.

Until he saw the video of his mom at a school board meeting.

In recent months, Weston has watched as the same foundational disagreements that tore his family apart have begun to divide whole communities. Fueled by a growing movement to assert conservative Christian values at all levels of government, activists across the country have fought to remove queer-affirming books from schools, repeal the right to same-sex marriage, shut down LGBTQ pride celebrations and pass state laws limiting the ways teachers can discuss gender and sexuality.

Much as the seemingly intractable arguments over America’s pandemic response and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have led to fractured personal relationships in recent years, these clashes over gender and sexuality have pitted neighbors against neighbors, parents against teachers and — in the case of the Browns — a son against his mother.

“It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Weston said. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.”

Monica, 51, who has homeschooled all nine of her children and serves as the director of a private Christian education cooperative, declined to be interviewed or answer written questions. In a series of email exchanges with NBC News, she initially invited a reporter to discuss the article over dinner at her home in Granbury, but in a subsequent message, she said her husband would not allow the meeting, adding, “I have been advised to not speak with you at all.” Her husband also declined to be interviewed.

In public, Monica has denied targeting LGBTQ books. At a recent school board meeting, she said her only objective has been to protect children from sexually explicit content — gay or otherwise.

“There’s nothing about LGBTQ involved in this,” she said. “There are LGBTQ books that are sexually explicit, yes. They are wrong, too. If they are between men and men, women and women, cats and women, dogs and women, whatever, that is not appropriate educational content.”

That statement, however, doesn’t square with many of the books that she has flagged for removal at Granbury. Several of the titles on her list feature LGBTQ storylines, but contain no sexually explicit content. That includes “Drama,” by Raina Telgemeier, a graphic novel that depicts gay and bisexual characters navigating the routine awkwardness of middle school crushes.

Of the nearly 80 library books Monica and her supporters want removed, 3 out of 5 feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to an NBC News analysis of titles posted on GranburyTexasBooks.org, a website where the activists have compiled parent reviews of books they want banned. In addition to sexually explicit content, the site calls for books to be removed for “normalizing lesbianism,” focusing on “sexual orientation” and promoting “alternate gender ideologies.”

Monica has also signaled anti-LGBTQ views in formal library book challenges that she’s sent directly to Granbury school officials, according to copies of the forms obtained through a public records request. In one instance, she criticized a biography of notable women in part because it included the story of Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman who made national headlines in the 1950s for speaking openly about her gender-confirmation surgery. She suggested replacing that book with a Christian biography series about girls and women who used their talents to serve God — “biographies of truly great Americans,” she wrote.

After watching the video of his mom at the school board last month, Weston skimmed through excerpts of the books she wanted pulled. It seemed to him that she and her supporters were pushing public schools to adhere to some of the same strict religious ideologies that he says he suffered under as a child.

Granbury’s Long Fight Over LGBTQ Library Books

• The public library’s refusal in 2015 to remove two LGBTQ books from the children’s section sparked a yearslong political battle that was still reverberating in last year’s school board elections.
• In January, school district superintendent Jeremy Glenn was recorded telling librarians that Granbury is a conservative town, and therefore there’s no place for books about sex and LGBTQ subjects in schools.
• The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has called on the school district to apologize for pulling LGBTQ books from shelves.

He thought about all the students, at Granbury and across the country, who might benefit from reading the types of books that were off-limits to him growing up.

With tears in his eyes, he started to type a tweet on the afternoon of July 3.

“This is my mom,” he wrote, with a link to the school board meeting video. “Seeing her advocate for the erasure of queer representation is crushing. Coming up on the 5 year anniversary of being effectively cut off from my family and siblings after coming out in 2018.”

He hesitated, knowing he would be reopening old wounds for the world to see. He didn’t want to do anything to hurt the woman who’d raised him, he said.

But trying to get librarians arrested?

Weston added one more line to his post — “Much love to those standing up and pushing back for representation” — along with a rainbow flag emoji. And then he hit send.

Weston has many fond memories growing up in the suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth, about an hour from his parents’ current home in Granbury. He recalled summer days splashing in their backyard swimming pool, family ski vacations to Colorado and hours spent at the public library with his mom, who fostered his love of reading.

“I didn’t really have friends growing up, and going to make new friends via fictional characters was always something I looked forward to,” he said. “It was a beautiful way to leave my world and go somewhere better.”

But in a conservative Christian home, some content was off-limits.

Although the Brown family’s bookshelves were lined with classics, such as books from C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” series, many popular titles were forbidden, Weston said. That included the Harry Potter series, which he said his mother, like many other conservative Christians, regarded as a satanic depiction of witchcraft.

Weston, the eldest child, said his mother also did her best to shield him and his siblings from words or images that might stir sexual curiosity. He remembered being told to look down at the floor anytime they walked through the women’s underwear section at department stores. Even as a child, he said, he was more intrigued by the marketing photos on display in the men’s section — though he didn’t dare tell anyone.

The lessons on purity didn’t stop after he became an adult.

In 2015, when he was 20 and still living with his parents, he returned home late one evening after seeing “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a PG-13 superhero movie that his mother disapproved of. When he walked into his kitchen, he said, he found two pans of brownies waiting for him, along with a stack of articles printed off the internet about the corrosive influence of Marvel comics and films.

One pan of brownies was normal. The other had a label that warned it had been baked with a small amount of dog poop mixed in.

“Poo anyone? Just a little?” Monica wrote later, when she posted an image of the brownies on Facebook. “How much yuck is too much?”

The moral of the illustration, which is popular among some evangelical Christians: If you wouldn’t eat brownies that might harm your body, then why would you expose yourself to movies, books or music that might harm your soul?

Her son was disgusted, but he didn’t push back on the lesson.

“She made her point,” he said, “and we never spoke about it again.”

That was the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage — a tectonic cultural development that disturbed many evangelical Christians. Afterward, Monica posted frequently on social media about the “dangerous” gay agenda that she believed was on the march across mainstream U.S. society. She warned in posts that Disney was secretly pushing LGBTQ lifestyles on children in movies such as “Toy Story 4,” and shared a link to a video alleging that pop star Katy Perry was conspiring with satanic forces to convince teens to embrace homosexuality.

Weston said he didn’t challenge his mom’s views while he lived with her. He’d spent years struggling to reconcile his desires with the religious values his parents had instilled in him — trying to convince himself that the butterflies in his stomach any time he was around one of the boys at church was just something friends felt for each other. It didn’t help, he said, that he’d had no meaningful sex education as a teenager — just a blanket instruction to abstain until marriage — and no understanding of LGBTQ identities or what those letters even meant.

But by 2018, he was 23, living on his own and finally confident enough to tell his parents what he’d always known about himself.

“Dear Mom and Dad, I’m writing this to share something that I’ve wanted to share with you yet have held back for a long time,” he wrote in an email to his parents in February 2018. “It is with great relief, clarity and vulnerability that I share this with you: I am gay.”

He ended the note: “I pray that you receive this with an open mind.”

That prayer, he said, went unanswered.

Over the next year and a half, he said, his parents tried to convince him that he was mistaken. Through a series of emotional lunch meetings, phone calls and text messages, he said, they urged him to see a Christian counselor in the hopes that he could learn to overcome his homosexual urges. They invited Weston to church — the one place where they would allow him to see his younger siblings — and openly wondered about what corrupting influences might have led their son down this sinful path.

For months, his mother sent him links to articles from Christian news sites with headlines like “Evidence shows sexual orientation can change” and “It’s not gay to straight, it’s lost to saved” — links that she was simultaneously posting publicly on Facebook. But after Weston made clear that there was no prayer or summer camp that would change who he is, he said his parents made clear that he was not welcome at their home, even on holidays or birthdays.

“You are not rejected, not at all, and never will be,” his father, James Brown, texted to him in October 2019, more than a year after he came out. “The lifestyle you have chosen goes against God and therefore that is the rejection you have chosen.”

His father added, “Have you ever considered the pain you have put your mother and I through?”

That same day, Monica sent him a message on Facebook to say that she was praying for dark forces to be cast out of him.

“I specifically come against evil that has entered you from the movie ‘It,’” she wrote, referring to the time when Weston, at around age 10, had watched part of the Stephen King mini-series about a murderous clown. “Clown demons have to go in the mighty name of Jesus.”

She ended the message, “I love you, Mom.”

Monica Brown’s campaign to rid schools of books that she considers obscene began late last year with a trip to the Granbury Middle School library, which sometimes hosts robotics competitions that her homeschooled children have competed in.

She started flipping through a few books while she was there and was disturbed by what she found, according to a May interview she recorded with The Blue Shark Show, a local far-right internet talk show hosted by a Republican former state legislator.

“What I saw was negative, dark — things nightmares are made of,” Monica said, without sharing more details.

Her sudden interest in library books coincided with a wave of similar book ban attempts across the country last year amid a growing conservative backlash against school programs and lessons dealing with racism, gender and sexuality.

The books that have drawn the most intense scrutiny, both in Granbury and nationally, are largely young adult novels and memoirs that contain passages with explicit descriptions of sex or rape, especially those featuring LGBTQ themes and characters. Defenders of these books argue that any sexual content is presented in the context of broader narratives that help teens understand and process the world around them.

The fight has been particularly heated in Texas, where Republican state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have gone as far as calling for criminal charges against any school staff member who provides children with access to novels, memoirs and sex ed books that some conservatives have labeled as “pornography.”

Monica didn’t say in her talk show interview whether she had reported her concerns to the school district. But in early January, Granbury’s schools superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, called a meeting with district librarians and shared that he’d started to get complaints about library books.

“Let’s call it what it is, and I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn told the librarians, according to a secret recording of the meeting obtained by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune and first reported in March. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”

When asked about his comments, Glenn released a statement in March saying the district was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And although he said the district’s primary focus is educating students, Glenn said “the values of our community will always be reflected in our schools.”

In the days after the meeting, district employees pulled more than 130 books off of school library shelves and announced the formation of a volunteer committee to review them.

Monica was one of the first residents appointed. From the start, she felt the process was a sham, she said in her Blue Shark interview. The first two meetings were held at times when she couldn’t attend, she said, and by the time she arrived at the third meeting, the committee had already voted to return most of the books to shelves.

“That meeting was completely disrupted in the sense that we didn’t vote at all because I kept asking questions,” she said.

In the end, over objections from her and one other member, the volunteer committee voted to ban only three books: “This Book Is Gay,” a coming-out guide for LGBTQ teens by transgender author Juno Dawson that includes detailed descriptions of sex; “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez, a young adult novel about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy that includes a rape scene and other mature content; and “We Are the Ants,” by Shaun David Hutchinson, a coming-of-age novel about a gay teenager that includes explicit sexual language.

The district returned dozens of other titles to shelves. Several of the books had no sexual content, the committee found. For the others, a majority of committee members believed that any descriptions of sex were age-appropriate when read in complete context.

Monica was outraged, she said on the Blue Shark Show in early May.

“I think they’re breaking the law,” she said.

That same week, she put that belief to the test. On May 2, she and another disillusioned member of the book committee filed a police report with Hood County Constable Chad Jordan alleging that the district was making pornography available to students, according to a copy of the incident report. Four days later, Hood County constables visited Granbury High School to investigate the claim.

In a letter sent to NBC News on Wednesday and dated Aug. 1, Jordan said his office could not release additional information about the case because the investigation remained active. In a statement issued in May, Glenn, the Granbury superintendent, said the school district was cooperating with law enforcement.

In the months since, Monica has continued to keep the pressure on, speaking at every school board meeting, filing more than a dozen additional book challenges and, in the process, becoming a prominent and polarizing figure in Granbury.

Her activism has been praised by several leading conservative figures in town, including members of the Hood County Republican Party and Melanie Graft, the school board member who selected Monica to serve on the book review committee. Graft, who rose to local prominence in 2015 while leading a conservative campaign to remove LGBTQ-themed picture books from the children’s section at Granbury’s public library, did not respond to messages requesting an interview.

Monica’s fight has also come at a personal cost. In social media posts and public remarks, she’s said the hours spent reviewing library books have required her to sacrifice time with her family and led to a barrage of personal attacks from residents who oppose her efforts.

In May, Adrienne Martin, a Granbury parent and chair of the Hood County Democratic Party, was recording on her phone as she confronted Monica outside a school board meeting.

“You want to have librarians arrested,” Martin said as Monica walked away. “That’s fascism. You’re a fascist.”

At a board meeting last month, Monica tried to explain why she’s fought so hard to remove books from a school district that her kids do not attend. She’s doing it, she said, for all the other children.

“I feel like it’s a raging fire,” she told the board, “and I’ve got a water pistol.”

After Weston’s initial post criticizing his mother, he fired off several more tweets denouncing her efforts in Granbury.

It didn’t take long before the posts had reached his parents. His dad texted him to demand that he apologize to his mother.

“We have not come out against the LGBT Community,” his father wrote, insisting that their efforts at Granbury schools were focused on “pornography” and nothing else. “I know you are hurt by our decisions but we are also hurting and have been ever since you said you were Gay.

“We have not been hateful to you,” his father added.

Weston replied: “All I can say is I pity you and wish you the best.”

Soon, opponents of Monica’s efforts began posting images of her son’s tweets on Granbury community Facebook groups — making a family’s private rift public.

“Call your son and leave ours alone!” a woman wrote in response to one of Monica’s many public posts about obscene library books.

“Your crusade against books won’t bring your son back to you or make him straight,” another Granbury resident wrote. “Go home and look in the mirror, fix your house before you worry about others.”

Monica never publicly addressed her son’s tweets, but in response to a Facebook post about them, she wrote: “You can believe what you want about me. In the meantime, I will carry on doing my best to finish out my life for an audience of One.”

A couple of weeks later, she finally got in touch with her son. Two days after NBC News contacted her to request an interview, she texted him to let him know that she didn’t plan to share “personal family details” with a reporter.

“I did not come out against LGBTQ at all — ever,” she wrote, before adding: “I love you, and I pray for you.”

Weston studied the message, thinking back to all the hours he’d spent pleading with her to accept him for who he is rather than trying to control and change him. It hurt, having the woman who’d given birth to him tell him that his sexual orientation was an abomination.

He didn’t want to revisit that trauma, he said. He just wanted his mom to stop pushing her beliefs on other people’s kids.

Weston re-read her text message one more time. He started to type a reply, then stopped. Instead he closed the message and set his phone aside.

He’d already told his mom everything that needed to be said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News.

The post Divided We’re Falling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Oscar Zambrano.

In mid-April, New York state regulators voted to approve two clean energy projects that are expected to reduce the city’s reliance on fossil fuels by more than 50 percent over the next 10 years. The first project, called Clean Path, will ship 1,300 megawatts of wind and solar from a northern New York county to NYC via a 175-mile underground transmission line starting in 2027. It has broad support from civil society groups across the state. 

The second project, called the Champlain Hudson Power Express — or CHPE, pronounced “Chippy” — will do something similar: it will funnel clean energy into the city via a transmission line, part of which will be buried under the Hudson River. But the power CHPE will bring in isn’t local — it’s sourced from Canada, where dams owned by a company called Hydro-Québec generate a bounty of electricity. To meet its climate goals, the city has approved the construction of a 339-mile power cable carrying that excess hydropower from Québec all the way to Queens. This project, however, has faced stiff opposition from environmentalists and community groups, who argue that it outsources clean energy and jobs to a different country; from First Nations in Canada, who allege the company’s dams perpetrate environmental harms on Indigenous communities in Québec; and from critics who say hydropower isn’t as clean as its proponents claim.  

Those groups did not succeed in stopping CHPE. The April vote by New York regulators was the last hurdle standing in its way. And from an emissions perspective, that appears to be a good thing: New York City will get 1,250 megawatts of clean power from Canada starting in 2025. That electricity, plus the power from the Clean Path line, are expected to supply more than a third of the city’s annual electricity consumption. The hydro will also do what wind and solar generated in the state can’t: provide a source of reliable power that keeps energy flowing into the city when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. 

But the way CHPE divided communities in New York, and the plan’s impact on First Nations in Canada, are worth paying attention to. Many states across the U.S. are embarking on a clean energy transition that should have begun decades ago. Now, up against hard deadlines and intensifying pressure to decarbonize their grids, states are being forced to make tough choices. 

“This is the stuff that keeps me up at night,” Tracy Brown, president of the clean water advocacy group Riverkeeper, one of the environmental organizations that opposed CHPE, told Grist. “We’ve gotten to a point where there’s really no great alternatives left. We’ve waited so long that everything is going to involve a tradeoff.” 

For decades, New York City had a powerful source of reliable low-carbon energy: the Indian Point nuclear power plant. After 59 years of operation, the plant’s last reactor was shuttered last year thanks to a dogged campaign waged against the reactors by environmentalists, who said the aging plant had become unsafe and was killing billions of fish and harming other aquatic wildlife as it siphoned water from the Hudson River to cool its reactors. Some 25 percent of the power keeping the lights on in New York City and the Hudson Valley winked off the grid just as the state was ramping up its efforts to reduce emissions. 

Wind and solar couldn’t fill the void left by Indian Point for two reasons: Wind and solar are intermittent sources of energy that don’t provide the same kind of reliable, 24/7 power that nuclear provides. More importantly, the city has a transmission problem. There’s no way to get green power from the cleaner grid in upstate New York down to the city efficiently. Three natural gas-fired power plants came online between 2019 and 2021 to help New York City make up the slack as Indian Point’s reactors wound down. But regulators hoped they would be a short-term fix. 

In January 2021, several months before Indian Point closed for good, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, put out a call for renewable energy projects. Hydropower projects, NYSERDA said, would be eligible if they were “existing or already under construction” by 2020. It received seven proposals from developers, CHPE and Clean Path among them. 

For the city, CHPE looked like a neat solution to its transmission problem. It also fit NYSERDA’s requirements: Hydro-Québec completed its first dam in 1917. Construction on its latest hydroelectric project, which company officials say will be its last, started in 2009. In all, the company operates 61 hydroelectric generating stations that have been supplying Québec with clean power for decades. New York regulators liked the idea of plugging New York City’s grid into all of that existing clean power via a giant extension cord, and they ultimately approved both CHPE and Clean Path last month.  

CHPE won’t just alleviate some of the city’s reliance on fossil fuels, it will help eliminate key sources of air pollution in some of New York City’s poorer neighborhoods. The city currently houses 19 antiquated and polluting “peaker” power plants, which run on natural gas, and sometimes kerosene, and get switched on during periods of peak energy demand. People in areas around those plants suffer from high rates of asthma and endure other negative health effects due to peaker plant pollution. “Low-income and communities of color are literally gasping to breathe,” Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a group that opposed Indian Point and supports CHPE, told Grist. A spokesperson for NYSERDA told Grist that CHPE will “substantially aid and accelerate the current efforts of peaker plant owners to explore the conversion of their facilities into energy storage and other clean energy technologies,” though the agency didn’t say how many of the 19 peaker plants will be offset by CHPE. 

“These projects help bridge past that transmission bottleneck and help us use this in city fossil fuel generation half as much,” Daniel Zarrilli, former Chief Climate Policy Advisor to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and a special advisor on climate at Columbia University, told Grist. “It’s a huge impact.” But others don’t think that plugging into Québec’s excess hydro is the best idea.

Brown, the president of Riverkeeper, said the narrative around the CHPE has become “it’s either hydro from Canada or natural gas,” but she maintains that any of the other projects the city was considering, all of which focused on expanding wind or solar energy within the state, would have been better. “Our main thing is just we think there were better choices, better options,” she said.

Stephen Eisenman, cofounder of the community group the Anthropocene Alliance, also opposes the project on the grounds that it outsources economic opportunities and revenue to Canada. “If there’s profits to be made they ought to be made by New York State,” he said. He also took issue with the fact that the company that’s building the transmission line from Canada to New York City is owned by Blackstone, a massive investment group. 

There are environmental justice concerns on the other end of the project, too. Several First Nations oppose CHPE, citing Hydro-Québec’s long history of flouting their rights and concerns.

Some of Hydro-Québec’s dams flooded First Nations lands in Québec that were never ceded to the Canadian government, impacting terrestrial and aquatic wildlife that the tribes depend on for food and traditional practices. Naturally occurring mercury in the soil of land that got flooded turned into methylmercury when it came into contact with bacteria in the water. Methylmercury is a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and other aquatic organisms and can make its way up the food chain into humans. “The mercury is always there, it’s always present in the water and the fish,” Lucien Wabanonik, a Lac Simon Anishinaabe Nation councilor in Québec, told Grist. 

Wabanonik wonders why Hydro-Québec would sell off its hydropower to the highest bidder when First Nation communities in Québec still lack power. One community, Kitcisakik, lives beside one of Hydro-Québec’s dams but doesn’t have access to the electricity that comes from it. “They only have generators, and they put gas in there to have light,” Wabanonik said. “To warm them up in their cabins they have to cut wood.”

In 2020, the Innu Nation of Labrador, another Indigenous community that opposes the project, partnered with the Center for Biological Diversity to send a formal notice of opposition to the U.S. Department of Energy calling on the agency to do a more thorough assessment of CHPE’s environmental impact. The impacts of Hydro-Québec’s dams on Indigenous communities, the letter says, “have historically been ignored.” 

Wabanonik said Hydro-Québec should compensate tribes in the area for the harms they’ve experienced as a result of the company’s dams. “We have to live with these conditions,” he said. “They say this is for all of society, everyone benefits from it. Well, I don’t think First Nation people are really benefiting from it.” 

However, last month, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke, representing Mohawk communities in southeastern Canada and northern New York, released a statement blasting critics of the project and arguing that Hydro-Québec did its “due diligence in consulting with Indigenous groups.” The council acknowledged Hydro-Québec’s historical impacts on Indigenous communities but pointed out that no new power infrastructure will be built for CHPE. The council said it “has been a strong supporter of the CHPE and its construction, as it will significantly reduce the use of fossil fuel power plants” in the region. 

Activists who tried to stop CHPE’s approval often touted a shocking statistic: some hydropower projects produce as many greenhouse gas emissions as coal-fired power plants. “There’s no clear evidence that CHPE will do anything to lower greenhouse gases,” Eisenman, cofounder of the Anthropocene Alliance, said. 

It’s true that hydropower can produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane emissions. That’s because flooding a wooded area to create a reservoir prevents the area from absorbing carbon dioxide, turning it from a carbon sink into a carbon source as the submerged vegetation decomposes. In tropical regions, these emissions can indeed rival the emissions produced by coal-fired plants. Some reservoirs continue to produce emissions long after the original organic matter that once grew there has decomposed because of algae or agricultural runoff. Others produce emissions for a number of years and then stop becoming a significant source of methane and CO2. 

It’s not true, however, that Hydro-Québec’s existing dams — the ones that will be sending excess power to NYC once CHPE is built — are major sources of emissions. Most studies, including some funded by Hydro-Québec, indicate that the company’s reservoirs produce far fewer emissions than natural gas or other fossil fuels. An independent 2021 study showed that the electricity produced in Québec, 95 percent of which comes from hydropower, emits just 35 grams of emissions per kilowatt-hour. Natural gas, by comparison, produces between 400 and 600 grams per kilowatt-hour. Coal produces between 900 and 1,000. 

“What we’ve seen in Québec, and a lot of measurements have been done, is that emissions are not so high,” Annie Levasseur, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Québec and the lead author of the 2021 study, told Grist. Levasseur found that emissions in Québec spiked in the first 10 years after a reservoir was created, but those emissions, she said, “are still much much lower than, for instance, producing electricity from natural gas or coal.”

The general consensus among academics and researchers is that hydropower is a crucial aspect of the transition to clean energy. It’s not just that hydropower tends to be a low-carbon alternative to natural gas; it’s also that it’s flexible. It can fill in the gaps left by greener but more intermittent technologies like wind and solar. 

Some of the activist groups that worked to close the Indian Point nuclear point plant think that’s reason enough to support CHPE. These groups have thrown their support behind the transmission line not because they think it’s a perfect plan, one community organizer told Grist, but because they recognize the urgency of the climate threat and because few other options exist at this point. Any ratcheting down of emissions that occurs in the short term, such as the one that will take place when CHPE comes online and NYC’s peaker plants shut down, will alleviate some degree of warming, and the suffering that comes with it, in the future.

“We can’t be whimsical about what kind of power should go to New York City,” Esposito, the director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said. “Saying no to the clean hydro is saying yes to continuing on with fossil fuels and the antiquated power plants. It’s our ethical obligation to choose the infrastructure project with the least impact.” 

But CHPE’s opponents argue that the ethics of the transmission line aren’t so clear cut. Powering down polluting peaker plants in New York City solves an environmental justice problem in Queens, but what happens to Indigenous communities in Québec who have their own issues with Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs? The company has said it won’t build any new dams, but hydropower is proving to be a valuable and in-demand commodity. Brown, the Riverkeeper president, doesn’t trust that Hydro-Québec will stick to its promise not to build any new dams. “Of course, if they’re opening new markets in the U.S., it’s going to trigger dam building,” she said. Whether or not Brown’s prediction comes true, First Nations in Québec maintain that the existing dams have been taking a toll on their way of life and will continue to do so. That’s an impact energy consumers in New York City won’t see or feel. 

Weighing these kinds of tradeoffs will be the name of the game in coming years, as states scramble to make the belated transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Community opposition to large-scale clean energy projects across the country shows how complicated that transition already is and will continue to be. Activists oppose an ​​800-megawatt offshore wind project off New England on the grounds that it will harm whales. Communities near Las Vegas oppose the now-approved $1 billion Gemini solar and battery storage project because it’s too big. Last year, voters in Maine approved a measure that temporarily stopped a project similar to CHPE after environmental groups, conservationists, and tribes in Maine and Canada waged a campaign against it. That project, if completed, will channel hydropower from Québec into Maine via a 145-mile transmission corridor. The legal fight that followed the vote in Maine made it all the way to the state’s Supreme Court this week. 

“CHPE is just one of many projects that are going to be complicated and difficult but necessary in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Zarrilli, the former New York City climate advisor, said. “These are the kinds of choices we’re going to be faced with quite often going forward. We’re going to need to be able to make hard choices.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A New York power line divided environmentalists. Here’s what it says about the larger climate fight. on May 11, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

While the United States began its illegal war against Iraq in 2003, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro spoke in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ‘Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples’, he said, ‘nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities … Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated on the idea of saving lives’. Cuba had an army, yes, but not an army for war; Castro called it ‘an army of white coats’. Most recently, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of medical practitioners have selflessly worked around the world to help stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Castro reminds us that there are two ways to be alive in this world. We can live in a war-filled world awash with weapons and confounded by intimidation, a world that continuously prepares for combat. Or, we can live in a world of teachers and doctors, scientists and social workers, storytellers and singers. We can put our confidence in people who help us create a better world than the one we live in today, this wretched world of war and profit, where ugliness threatens to overwhelm us.

The surface of our skin beats with the fear that a new iron curtain will descend, that there is pressure to box in China and Russia, to divide the world into camps. But that is impossible, because – as noted in last week’s newsletter – we live in a knot of contradictions and not in a clean cut world of certainties. Even close allies of the US, such as Australia, Germany, Japan, and India, cannot break their economic and political ties with Russia and China. Doing so would plunge them into a recession, bringing the kind of economic chaos that war and sanctions have already brought to Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka. In those countries – already battered by the International Monetary Fund by the greed of the elites and by foreign embassies – rising fuel prices have transformed an economic crisis into a political crisis.

Wars either end with the destruction of a country’s political institutions and its social capacity or they end with ceasefires and negotiations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) war on Libya in 2011 ended with the country stumbling along with the smell of cordite in the air and a broken social order. The fate of Libya should not be repeated anywhere, certainly not in Ukraine. Yet it is a fate ordained for the people of Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, who have been suffocated by wars egged on by the West – wars armed by the West and that have been profitable for the West.

When contemporary Russia emerged from the fall of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin led a coup against the Russian parliament, tanks blazing. Those currently in power in Russia operate in light of these violent beginnings and the experiences of other war-stricken nations. They will not allow themselves to suffer the fate of Libya or Yemen or Afghanistan. Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are ongoing in Belarus’ Homyel Voblasts (or Gomel Region), but trust must be strengthened before a ceasefire can become a real possibility. Any ceasefire should not only apply to the war inside Ukraine – which is imperative – but should also include halting the broader US-imposed pressure campaign on all of Eurasia.

What is that pressure campaign and why bother talking about it now? Shouldn’t we only say Russia out of Ukraine? Such a slogan, while correct, does not address the deeper problems that provoked this war in the first place.

When the USSR collapsed, Western countries wielded their resources and power through Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999) and then Vladimir Putin (from 1999). First, the West impoverished the Russian people by destroying the country’s social net and allowing elite Russians to devour the country’s social wealth. Then, they drew the new Russian billionaires into investing in Western-driven globalisation (including English football teams). The West backed Yeltsin’s bloody war in Chechnya (1994–1996) and then Putin’s war in Chechnya (1999–2000). Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007) signed allowances for Russia to buy British weapons till his arm hurt and welcomed Putin to London in 2000, saying, ‘I want Russia and the West to work together to promote stability and peace’. In 2001, former US President George W. Bush described looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing his soul, calling him ‘straightforward and trustworthy’. In the same year, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman encouraged readers to ‘keep rootin’ for Putin’. It was the West that helped the Russian billionaire class capture the state and ride astride Russian society.

Once the Russian government decided that integration with Europe and the US was not possible, the West began to portray Putin as diabolical. This movie keeps replaying: Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a great hero of the US and then its villain, the same with former military leader Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama. Now the stakes are unforgivably higher, the dangers greater.

Beneath the surface of the current moment lies dynamics that we foregrounded in our tenth newsletter of this year. The US unilaterally damaged the international arms control architecture, withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (2001) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (2018) and thereby gutting the policy of deterrence. In December 2018, the US pushed its allies to prevent, by a slim margin, the United Nations General Assembly from passing a resolution to defend the INF. Putin began to talk about the need for security guarantees, not from Ukraine or even from NATO, which is a puffed-up Trojan Horse of Washington’s ambitions: Russia needed security guarantees directly from the US.

Why? Because in 2018, the US government announced a shift in foreign policy that signalled that they would increase their competition with China and Russia. NATO-led naval exercises near both countries also gave Russia cause for concern about its security. The US’s bellicosity is enshrined in its 2022 National Defence Strategy, where it asserts that the United States is ‘prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritising [China’s] challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russian challenge in Europe’. The key phrase is that the US is prepared to prevail in conflict. The entire attitude of domination and of defeat is a macho attitude against humanity. The US-imposed pressure campaign around Eurasia must end.

We do not want a divided world. We want a realistic world: a world of humanity that deals adequately with the climate catastrophe. A world that wants to end hunger and illiteracy. A world that wants to lift us out of despair into hope. A world with more armies of white coats and instead of armies with guns.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we amplify the lives and voices of people building a world of hope against fear, a world of love against hate. One such person is Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004), the focus of the third study in our Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series. Nela, as we call her, was a leading figure in the Communist Party of Ecuador and a builder of institutions that infused the masses with confidence. These organisations included anti-fascist fronts and women’s federations, support for the rights of indigenous Ecuadorians, and platforms defending the Cuban Revolution. In 1944, during the Glorious May Revolution, Nela briefly led the government. Throughout her life, she worked tirelessly to build the basis for a better world.

In 2000, as president of the Women’s Continental Front for Peace and against Intervention, Nela fought against the creation of a US military base in the city of Manta. ‘Colonisation returns’, Nela said. ‘How will we escape this colonisation? How can we justify ourselves in the face of our cowardice?’

That last question hangs over us. We do not want to live in a divided world. We must act to prevent the iron curtain from descending. We must fight against our fear. We must fight for a world without walls.

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

The post How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

In the absence of any reliable opinion poll of the world’s 7.9 billion people, this vote may indicate that the majority of humanity sympathizes with Russia in Ukraine. The statistics presented below show that only 41% of the world’s people live in countries that joined the US in voting for the UN resolution.

This lopsided vote is even more striking if you consider the demographics. Populations represented by governments that did not vote for the resolution are much more likely to include the world’s poorest nations, nations with younger populations, “nations of color,” nations of the Global South, and nations in the periphery of the world economic system.

To put it another way, although the war is nominally a conflict between two developed and ethnically white nations, Russia and Ukraine, this UN vote suggests the war may be viewed by much of the world as a fight over the global political and economic system that institutionalizes the imperial hierarchy, the distribution of nations between rich and poor, and global white supremacy.

The UN Vote by Population   

Of the world’s 7,934,000,000 people, 59% live in countries that did not support the resolution and only 41% live in countries that did.² But that last figure drops to 34% outside of the immediate belligerents and their allies: Ukraine, US, and NATO countries, and on the other side, Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikistan (all the countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization).

41% or 34% amounts to a resounding, humiliating defeat for the US on this non-binding UN resolution. Instead it is reported in the west as a US victory and an “overwhelming” worldwide condemnation of Russia.

The UN Vote and GDP Per Capita

All the countries in the top third of the GDP per capita (nominal) rankings, including Japan and all the countries of Western Europe and North America, voted for the resolution, Venezuela being the only country in the top third that did not.

Of the countries that did not vote for the resolution, most are ranked the poorest in the world, and almost none came above the approximate midpoint rank of 98. The exceptions were: Venezuela (58), Russia (68), Equatorial Guinea (73), Kazakhstan (75), China (76) Cuba (82), Turkmenistan (92), South Africa (95), Belarus (97).³

The UN Vote and the Core/Periphery Divide

Another way to show the wealth divide in the UN vote is by distinguishing core and peripheral countries. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately to the core countries: “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20)

The countries usually considered in the core are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.

The difference here is stark. Every single core country voted for the resolution and every country that did not is either in the periphery or in some cases, like Russia or China, in the semi-periphery.

The UN Vote and Median Age

All the countries ranked in the top third of median age rankings, from Monaco (51.1 years) to Iceland (36.5 years), voted for the resolution, with the following exceptions: China (37.4), Russia (39.6), Belarus (40), Cuba (41.5).

Of the twenty entries with the lowest median ages (15.4 to 18.9), only half voted for the resolution.

The UN Vote and “Countries of Color”

Of the 7,934,000,000 people in the world, 1,136,160,000 live in what are usually recognized as “white countries” (consistently or not) with about 14% of the world’s population. Yet “white countries,” by population, represent about 30% of the total vote in favor of the resolution. This “white vote” accounts for every one of the core countries (except Singapore and Japan). Compare: 97% of the population in the countries that did not vote for the resolution live in “countries of color.” Only Russia, Belarus and Armenia (which did not vote for the resolution) have dominant populations classed as “white.”

Therefore “white countries” are overrepresented in the group that voted for the resolution (30% vs. 14%), and underrepresented in the group that did not (3% vs. 14%).

Before the Intervention

What follows is a brief sketch of events leading to the February 24 Russian intervention that prompted the UN resolution. It is a history seldom mentioned in the mainstream media, though it is easily found in selected alternative and now-suppressed media. It is presented here as a possible, partial explanation of why the UN resolution had so little support measured by population.

US/NATO has directed aggression toward Russia for decades, advancing NATO forces ever closer to Russia’s western border, ringing Russia with military bases, placing nuclear weapons at ever closer range, and breaching and discarding treaties meant to lessen the likelihood of nuclear war. The US even let it be known, through its planning documents and policy statements, that it considered Ukraine a battlefield on which Ukrainian and Russian lives might be sacrificed in order to destabilize, decapitate and eventually dismember Russia just as it did Yugoslavia. Russia has long pointed out the existential security threat it sees in Ukrainian territory, and it has made persistent, peaceful, yet fruitless efforts over decades to resolve the problem. (See Monthly Review’s excellent editors’ note.)

Recent history includes the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, followed by a war of the central government against those in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk resisting the coup government and its policies. Those policies include a ban on the Russian language, the native tongue of the region and a significant part of the country (ironically, including President Zelensky).

By the end of 2021 the war had taken 14,000 lives, four-fifths of them members of the resistance or civilian Russian speakers targeted by the government. Through years of negotiations Russia tried and failed to keep the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside a united Ukraine. After signing the Minsk agreements that would do just that, Ukraine, under tight US control, refused to comply even with step one: to talk with the rebellion’s representatives.

As to why the intervention happend now, Vyacheslav Tetekin, Central Committee member of Russia’s largest opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, explains:

Starting from December, 2021 Russia had been receiving information about NATO’s plans to deploy troops and missile bases in Ukraine. Simultaneously an onslaught on the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republics (LPR) was being prepared. About a week before the start of Russia’s operation the plan was uncovered of an offensive that envisaged strikes by long-range artillery, multiple rocket launchers, combat aircraft, to be followed by an invasion of Ukrainian troops and Nazi battalions. It was planned to cut off Donbas from the border with Russia, encircle and besiege Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities and then carry out a sweeping “security cleanup” with imprisonment and killing of thousands of defenders of Donbas and their supporters. The plan was developed in cooperation with NATO. The invasion was scheduled to begin in early March. Russia’s action pre-empted Kiev and NATO, which enabled it to seize strategic initiative and effectively save thousands of lives in the two republics.

All this may have informed the world’s overwhelming rejection of the US-backed UN resolution condemning Russia, which western media perversely considers a US victory simply because the resolution passed. Never mind that it passed in a voting system where Liechtenstein’s vote carries the same weight as China’s.

The Global South also knows from bitter experience that unlike the West, neither Russia nor it’s close partner China habitually engage in bombings, invasions, destabilization campaigns, color revolutions, coups and assassinations against the countries and governments of the Global South. On the contrary, both countries have assisted the development and military defense of such countries, as in Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and elsewhere.

Conclusion

Just as the imperial core of North America, Europe and Japan does not represent the world in their population numbers, demographics, wealth, or power, neither does the imperial core speak for the world on crucial issues of war, peace, justice, and international law. Indeed the Global South has already spoken to the Global North so many times, in so many ways, with patience, persistence and eloquence, to little avail. Since we in the North have not been able to hear the words, perhaps we can listen to the cry of the numbers.

Image credit: Victoria Forum

1. The resolution “Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter.” (Article 2 (4) reads: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”) The resolution also “[d]eplores the 21 February 2022 decision by the Russian Federation related to the status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine as a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter.” Beyond Russia, the resolution “[d]eplores the involvement of Belarus in this unlawful use of force against Ukraine, and calls upon it to abide by its international obligations.”
2. The population of countries voting for the UN resolution is 3,289,310,000. The population of countries voting against the resolution, abstaining, or not voting is 4,644,694,000. (Against: 202,209,000; abstaining: 4,140,546,000; not voting: 301,939,000.)
3. Here are the countries that did not vote for the resolution, with their GDP per capita rankings (the lower the number the higher the rank). 5 countries voted against the resolution: Russia 68, Belarus 97, North Korea 154, Eritrea 178, Syria 147. 35 countries abstained: Algeria 119, Angola 128, Armenia 115, Bangladesh 155, Bolivia 126, Burundi 197, Central African Republic 193, China 76, Congo 143, Cuba 82, El Salvador 121, Equatorial Guinea 73, India 150, Iran 105, Iraq 103, Kazakhstan 75, Kyrgyzstan 166, Laos 140, Madagascar 190, Mali 174, Mongolia 118, Mozambique 192, Namibia 102, Nicaragua 148, Pakistan 162, Senegal 160, South Africa 95, South Sudan 168, Sri Lanka 120, Sudan 171, Tajikistan 177, Tanzania 169, Uganda 187, Vietnam 138, Zimbabwe 144. 12 countries did not vote: Azerbaijan 110, Burkina Faso 184, Cameroon 158, Eswatini 117, Ethiopia 170, Guinea 175, Guinea-Bissau 179, Morocco 130, Togo 185, Turkmenistan 92, Uzbekistan 159, Venezuela 58.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger Stoll.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paolo Sorbello, Aigerim Shapagat, Marina Samoilovich.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paolo Sorbello, Aigerim Shapagat, Marina Samoilovich.