Janine Jackson interviewed the Hartmann Report‘s Thom Hartmann about Jeffrey Epstein and the MAGA movement for the July 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Hartmann Report (7/24/25)

Janine Jackson: There’s no need to choose: We can and must address the grievousness of the operation Jeffrey Epstein ran, how it was abetted by the banks that process the checks, and the lawyers dismissing the women who were brave enough to come forward, against literally the most powerful people in the country. And at the same time, we can marvel that this is what it takes to get a measurable subset of the MAGA cult to say, “Wait a minute, the guy who said, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ is a creep?”

The Trump base’s relationship to reality is obscure to many people who are wondering; Why this? Why now? As much as we might want to look away, those questions have repercussions for all of us.

Here to help us with understanding the place of the Epstein story in various narratives, including that of corporate news media, is Thom Hartmann. He is a political analyst, radio host, author of the daily newsletter the Hartmann Report, along with many books, including The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, which is forthcoming from Penguin Random House. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Thom Hartmann.

Thom Hartmann: Hey, thanks, Janine. Thanks for inviting me.

JJ: The MAGA/QAnon relationship to pedophilia is a psychosocial, historical phenomenon that will be studied for decades, I’m sure. We’re interested, today, in the political repercussions, wherein Trump, who could not be more obviously part of the Epstein crime factory, is throwing it all at the wall to hold on to a crowd who live and breathe conspiracy around precisely these things.

ABC (7/31/25)

So when you’re trying to break it down for people who have avoided this storyline, for various reasons, and are now just trying to get caught up, you need to explain a little history, right? Where do you start, if you want to orient someone to why the Jeffrey Epstein story would be the fissure in the MAGA crowd?

TH: To start with, everything makes sense if you get it that most of the followers of Donald Trump and the MAGA base are actually members of a cult. What differentiates people who live in a cult versus people who are just in normal society is that people who live in a cult live in a constructed reality that does not comport with actual reality. In other words, they are being lied to at a bunch of different levels, and they live in this unreal world. And, typically, it’s an unreal world that’s filled with panics, particularly moral panics.

So if you think back to the Reagan administration, the McMartin preschool, where for a year or so, everybody was convinced that the people were doing Satanic rituals with children and killing rabbits and stuff. And it turned out it was all imagination. But the whole nation was seized with this moral panic. This Pizzagate thing, you know, the Democrats are drinking the blood of children to get their adrenochrome and all this, is another moral panic.

And moral panics lend themselves to conspiracy theories. The McMartin preschool spun off 1,000 conspiracy theories.

Thom Hartmann: “You’ve got people who have been conditioned to live in a world of conspiracy theories.”

So you’ve got people who have been conditioned to live in a world of conspiracy theories. “The election in 2020 was actually stolen from Donald Trump.” “The fluoride in the water is a Communist conspiracy to destroy America.” On and on and on, right? And Jeffrey Epstein is one of the powerful people who control the world, and he’s part of this pedo ring, you know, this international pedo ring, and that probably has a lot of Jews associated with it, because usually these right-wing conspiracy theories are antisemitic, as well as everything else. “The Jews will not replace us,” the “Great Replacement Theory,” is another one. You know, the moral panic/conspiracy theory that Jewish people, wealthy Jews, are paying for Black and brown people to replace white people in their jobs and in education in America.

So what has happened is that Trump, during his campaign in 2016 and again in 2020, used Epstein as basically a foil, saying, “Yeah, you know Epstein? You know he had Bill Clinton on his plane, and he had Bill Gates on his plane, and it’s a bunch of him and a bunch of Democrats.”

And it’s a real testimonial to the power of Fox News to exclude data from the news that they’re sharing with their viewers, that these people never realized that Trump was Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend for a decade, and he’s all over the Epstein files, and any investigation of Epstein has Trump all over it.

And they just didn’t know this. And they were convinced that, when the truth comes out, Bill Clinton is going to get crucified here. And it’s starting to dawn on them that Trump maybe wasn’t the most honest with them, which may hopefully cause them to wonder about what are the other things that he lied to us about? Because there’s certainly a long list.

JJ: But is it really the case? I mean, they seem so separated from reality. And it, to me, it seems like if Trump said, “No, don’t look behind the curtain, actually,” well, as he’s said, “Those files are fake. These files are partial, anybody who says I’m involved….” I’m not sure why they wouldn’t fall for that too.

TH: Because they’ve been sold the counterstory. They’ve already bought the frame. The framework is that there’s this international network of pedophiles, and Epstein, of course, is Jewish. That helps as well. So you’ve got this frame that draws on racism, it draws on antisemitism, it draws on classical moral panic, and they have come to believe it, and it’s been reinforced over and over and over again for well over a decade. And it was conflated in their minds with the whole Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton, pedophile ring stuff.

Guardian (7/14/25)

And so, undoing that, you’d have to go back and say, “You know, what you’ve really believed for the last decade, that Donald Trump has been telling you, and Republicans have been telling you, and all these right-wing talkshow hosts and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, and they’ve all been telling you this, but you know, it was all wrong. It didn’t exist.” That’s just not going to fly. This is too well-established, too solidly established in their brains, for them to simply deny it or walk away from it, or look away from it, even.

JJ: Given that, I wonder what you make about so-called “mainstream media’s” response to this. Because this is obviously a kind of, like I say, sociological thing that’s happening that we can look at, the sort of petri dish of what happened with QAnon and the MAGA cult and their relationship to reality.

But we look to mainstream news media to see that as an event, and to incorporate that into the reality for, if I may say, the rest of us, you know? So I’m mad at news media for the implication that they can flip on and off the switch of outrage. You know, it was also mainstream news media who were like, “The Epstein files are very important. Well, no, they’re not so important. We’re not going to talk about them. Now they’re important again.”

TH: Going after Barack Obama, our first Black president, and calling him “Hussein” and all this other kind of stuff, you know, it’s just classic Trump racism, and that does play well with his base, because I think the one major common denominator that runs through his base is white supremacy, particularly male white supremacy, Christian male white supremacy.

But the mainstream media has acknowledged that Trump is in the Epstein files for years. It comes and goes as a media fad, but they’ve acknowledged it.

It’s just that the people who are the MAGA base, that 20% of the Republican Party, that maybe 7% or 8% of the American population, they’ve never experienced that, because they don’t read or listen to or watch the mainstream media. They live in this isolated bubble of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and Breitbart on the internet.

And social media, of course, has really closed the door even tighter for them, by running algorithms that are designed to keep you in your bubble. Both Facebook and Twitter do that aggressively to make more money for their owners, of course. These people are just befuddled, baffled. And I think that’s something that we really should be taking notice of, how poorly informed the Republican base is.

New York Times (7/22/25)

JJ: I understand where right-wing media might be, but so-called “mainstream,” elite, corporate media, New York Times, Washington Post, they have a job to do, too, which is to locate this disinformation in a reality frame. And I guess I’m not seeing that. I guess my problem is I see things like “Trump Is Easing His Base’s Fury,” and that just seems like not telling us what we need to get from a free press, in terms of this nightmare, frankly, that we’re living through.

TH: I agree with you on that. I mean, the New York Times has been sanewashing Trump for years; this is what they do. Things that Trump has done and said recently, that had Joe Biden done them, would have been a full week’s news cycle, just largely get ignored. Just blatant lies, manufacturing stories, like the story about his uncle and the Unabomber. He literally just made it up out of thin air, and it was impossible. And yet the media did not harp on that. If Joe Biden had done that, if he had just made up a story out of nothing, they’d be calling for his impeachment or his resignation.

Trump has always had a special relationship with the media. Partly they’re afraid of him, partly they depend on him. He generates eyeballs and clicks and likes and views, and that makes them money.

JJ: You noted recently that the kind of “what aboutism” just isn’t landing this time, in terms of the Epstein story. When folks are saying, “Well, Clinton did it too,” people are like, “Well, yeah, OK, if Clinton did it too, he should also go to jail.” You can’t pluck the same thought-ending strings anymore, particularly with young people. And I see hope there.

CNBC (7/22/25)

TH: Yeah, I do too, and I think it certainly is the moment that some people, the hold of the cult on them has been weakened. You’ve got a dozen members, Republicans in the House of Representatives, who are willing to vote against Trump and demand the release of the Epstein files. This is why Mike Johnson just cut and ran, you know why he shut down for the end of this month, all of next month, and into the first week of September, is because he’s afraid of this topic coming up.

I think it’s going to backfire on him. I think it’s going to be just as hot in September. I think everybody’s going to kind of take a month off, and then just come back with some ferocity. But I could be wrong. It may be that Trump will actually succeed.

My big fear is that Trump will do what dictators are famous for doing when their approval ratings are in the tank. What Putin did, for example, with Ukraine, and what George W. Bush did with Iraq and Afghanistan, is he’ll declare a war someplace, as a way of distracting us. And that could be, particularly if he decides to go to war with China and Russia, that could be civilization-altering. I believe that Donald Trump will do anything to protect himself, and that’s the danger.

JJ: And I’ll just add, finally, that the way a lot of people will understand that danger will have to do with media. That will be the way that people understand what’s happening, and what it means for them. And news media are not neutral town criers, not to put too fine a point on it, but they are not simply telling us what’s happening; they’re also telling us how to feel about it, and I think, if we want to have a positive vision of what could come after, I just wonder, in terms of media, where do you think that conversation could happen?

FAIR.org (3/6/96)

TH: In my opinion, the big problem with media goes back to the Telecommunications Act of ‘96, and Reagan’s doing away of the Fairness Doctrine in ‘87, or in ‘86, I guess it was. Because we used to regulate how many radio stations an individual billionaire or a corporation could own, and not just radio stations–radio, television and newspapers.

And that all got blown up in ‘96, when Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act. Within a year, Clear Channel had gone from being a little regional cluster of stations in the Southeast to having over 1,000 stations, and Sinclair Broadcasting now runs kind of a semi-monopoly.

And this CBS merger is another example of just insane monopolistic behavior that’s not good for America. It’s not good for business, it’s not good for the media, and it’s definitely not good for our democracy.

So that’s where my biggest concern lies right now, that and Brendan Carr being the head of the FCC, when he’s just an open Trump toady and will do whatever Donald Trump tells him to do, including investigating the big three networks, and all this other stuff that he’s doing right now.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Thom Hartmann. You can get started on his varied work online at HartmannReport.com, and the new book is The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink. That’s forthcoming from Penguin Random House. Thom Hartmann, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TH: Thank you, Janine.

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

I’d like to say if you finish one project, then you turn to the other, and that would be a reprieve from the first—but it’s actually really hard to step out of the sphere of writing a novel and step into the sphere of writing an album. Not to equate everything to body or sports or working out, but imagine you’re a runner—that’s the novel. Then you’re like, “Okay, I finished that. Now I’m going to start lifting weights.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, just because you were running, just because you’re in some sort of artistic shape doesn’t mean that writing an album’s going to be easy. You haven’t lifted weights in five months,” or whatever.

I think the key to it is a little bit of guilt of not wanting one or the other to vanish. Books are going well, but that doesn’t mean let the songs side of your life and your band vanish. Or the band is touring, but that doesn’t mean stop writing books.

I think it has to do with keeping an eye on the fact that you love both these things and being aware that it takes a few days to get into each, but once you’re into them, getting into writing shape, getting into music shape, getting into even the performance doesn’t take that long. That said, it does take a few days, and so you have to be aware of that so then you’re not like, “Ah, you know what? I don’t like this anymore.”

When I’m in-between things, I’ll have moments of waking up with ideas in the middle of the night, or will type ongoing notes into my phone. Do you have those kinds of sparks where your novel writing influences music or vice versa?

Absolutely. And while the other one is going on, same thing—you’ll keep voice notes, or whatever. I’ll be writing a novel and think, “Oh, here’s a good song idea,” or maybe you’re struck by something you wrote or something you read.

There’s also a real link between it all for me in rhythm.

For a while my band was a three piece and the bass player was our lead, kind of like The Who’s John Entwistle. So I would stay home with the drummer most of the time playing guitar. Now we have a lead guitar player. With Chad, the bassist, and Stephen, the lead guitar player, I’m still mostly staying home with Derek, the drummer. That sense of the backbeat: It’s almost as if I’m the bass player, but I’m playing guitar.

The backbeat is absolutely something I think of when writing a book. Bird Box was a very consistent straight beat; the entire novel felt like that the whole way through. Ghoul N’ the Cape felt like some sort of jet, like woody, wood snare, jazzy, not atonal, but weird time signature, that kind of thing. I’m aware of that.

The hard part of that is that unless it’s four-on-the-floor, unless it’s just 4/4, when you come back to a rough draft, you may be like, “What is this?” You’re not really in that same rhythm anymore, but once you find it, you rewrite it to that rhythm. So, in all of these things—and that includes the performances for the readings—I think is there a rhythm from this scene that we’re reading to this scene and between this segment of music and that.

I feel like the band has taught me that more than actually writing. In a weird way, I find that the most important part of a novel is…I don’t want to say rather than the language used or that kind of thing, but it’s important to find that spirit, that beat behind it, and ask, “Can you dance to it?”

I imagine, without even asking you, that we’re both into a bunch of different types of music.

Definitely. Music comes into my work a lot. I may start my day with a ’70s Japanese funk live stream station, and it’s like, “This is weird and esoteric, but poppy and enlightening, and a lot about emotion and love.” It’s a great way to get in touch with the day. Then, at night, it’s like lo-fi beat tape stuff. That’s my shift into headier stuff to locate a more creative or relaxing space. So, yeah, I know what you mean.

It’s interesting to think about what is the music you listen to, or make, as a creative.

100%. I also think that that’s in horror, and horror is home for me. In horror, rhythm is so important. Even if we’re talking about a crazy offbeat moment.

We all agree that fear of the unknown is the ultimate fear, but then that fear of the unknown can extend beyond, or go deeper than, the story and it can extend to the artist. Say you’re seeing a movie like Texas Chainsaw for the first time—when it came out, nobody knew Toby Hooper, nobody knew any rhythm of his, nobody knew his beat. You’re unsafe with this rhythm that you don’t know.

A lot of the time, a foreign horror movie will have moments that scare us to pieces because it doesn’t follow the Western rhythm arc. So you’re actually like, “Oh, oh man. I was… Wait, hold on. I thought we were only supposed to be scared at night. Now it’s the middle of the day. Next day I got scared again?” I think that’s another thing.

Even a thing like Bird Box with four-on-the-floor—you suddenly throw a four-times-as-loud cymbal hit somewhere in there and even that cymbal rhythm informed the horror.

You mentioned fear of the unknown. One thing I’ve always been scared of is this idea of a forced transformation, where a character goes through something where either they’re made to change against their will or they become something they never thought they would become. I spoke with horror author, Jeremy Haun, and he talked about fear leading him to curiosity. What are you afraid of and how does that influence your work or how does that keep driving you to create new things?

That’s a hard one. I know that my love for the genres stems from a sort of cherished arrested development. What I mean by that is that who would you expect to be afraid of a vampire? Who would you expect to be afraid of a ghost? A kid. So if I’m able to at this age to be afraid for the duration of the movie, for the duration of the book, for the duration of the whatever it is, if I’m able to actually be afraid, that’s almost like smuggling childhood into adulthood, like a fountain of youth there. Because I’m reacting in a way that only a child’s supposed to.

It’s the believing in it and it’s the wonder, it’s the possibilities, it’s what’s out there. And so it’s less what I’m afraid of, and it’s more that I do cherish the feeling of being afraid itself, not just as a thrill but as an indication that I’m still capable of believing in these things, even if only momentarily.

What do you do when you aren’t producing? How do you recharge and find inspiration? I’d be curious here as well to hear more about how rhythm plays into that aspect of your life, if it does at all.

Well, I think in a general way, that’s probably something I need to be more aware of. Even recently, more than ever, it feels like. When I met my fiancé Allison I was writing two books a year, but I didn’t have a book deal yet, and I’d never written a short story. I’m still playing with the band. And then I meet her, I get a book deal. Now I’m still writing two books a year, but now I’m also rewriting two a year. Now I’m contributing short stories to anthologies and this kind of thing.

It almost snuck up on me how once you start to enter a quote, unquote, “career” arena is that you’re doing a lot more work than you were before and you don’t even realize it. Because to you, there was a long stretch of my life, it was 20 years of writing for, quote, unquote, “no reason.” There was no publisher, there was no editor, there was no interview of any sort. It was just me writing and I’m with the band.

So all of a sudden, there are all those other things, but you’re still so accustomed to anything that has to do with art or creation, you’re still so accustomed to it being completely a place of joy, and it is, that you kind of overlook the fact that, “Dude, now you’re doing about twice as much as you used to be doing.”

Allison pointed that out to me one day, thank god—this was probably eight years ago, she’s like, “Man, you’re doing more now than when we met.” And I’m like, “No I’m not. I still write two books a year.” And she’s like, “Yeah, but that’s not all you’re doing now.”

I’m a huge sports fan, which is a turn off to a lot of artistically minded people, but too bad. I’m a huge basketball fan, and if I’ve blurbed or read too much horror in a row, I’ll read a Magic Johnson biography, something to totally send me in a different space.

But I do think I could use more of it intentionally, whether that’s travel, whether that’s…Gosh, I don’t know. But I am definitely a prolific writer, at least two books a year, and with rewrites and this and that. And if I go too long without it I can start to feel, like I said before, some guilt and even some identity problems. Where, this is interesting, and tell me what you think about this, because in the early days, my agent wisely, or I justifiably said to me, “It’s dangerous for an artist to find their entire identity in what they produce.”

And I get what she’s saying because what if you had writers block, for example? Well, If this is entirely you, then where are you, right? Are you stuck? But I have found that what better place is there to find your identity than in you have an idea, you say you’re going to do it, and then you go and do it. To me, that’s the most confidence building thing I can imagine is being someone that makes good on their ideas and what they say they’re going to do.

What do you think? Are you consciously aware of stepping aside and that kind of thing?

I think more so now. There’s certainly an overlap in the comic space of sports fans. I don’t know if you know the website, SKTCHD, but there’s a prominent news creator named David Harper who has created this site that is all about comics and about the industry at large and all different types of people from publishers to retailers and whatnot. He recently did a podcast where he was talking about how he loves sports. He loves basketball and early on his dad set him up with a job with the Seattle Mariners, and he didn’t take it. He was a teen, he would’ve had to live in Seattle on his own, and his dad also said in that moment, “Be careful about making your hobby your job.” I think that rings very true. I’m in that space, where comics have been a big interest for me for a while, and it is also professionally what I do.

I make tabletop role-playing games. A couple of years ago, I wanted to do games full-time and create a pipeline of “There’s a bunch of comics properties, can we turn them into role-playing games” and have that be my job. I came to appreciate that most of the games I’ve made and produced are really solely for me. They’re not for anybody else. There’s something I find freeing about that experience, when I’m making something because I see a clear vision in it and I’m not going to compromise for a larger audience.

Yes. For a long time, I wouldn’t check the actual sales numbers on books. The book I just put out, I think it’s my 13th published book, and for a long time I would not look at the numbers because it’s similar to what you’re saying in that I didn’t want them to be represented in that way where the job of it, like, “This book sold more than that book, that means it’s better. This has done better than that.” Then, at that point, your career is eclipsing your passion versus, “I just love all of them and I don’t care.” Now I feel like I’m in a safe spot where I can check that and I feel that way still if nobody’s interested in one, I love it as much as all of them.

But that is interesting because I know some fellow authors who it’s clear to me that they’re setting out to write a bestseller, but they’re also good at it. I don’t do that, but they are, and that’s okay. They’re good at it. Imagine someone’s setting out to write a pop hit, like The Beatles tried to write pop hits, and they’re brilliant songs. So setting out to do that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to lose the artistic or the passionate side. But personally, in my own existence, it has so far been no, it’s like, “What’s turning you on? What’s this or that?” And if it does well, whew.

It’s a tricky and interesting game to play. Going back to the core question—getting rest is the difficult part. For me, it’s knowing when to absorb as much as I am needing to create. When you get to a point of burnout and you’re like, “I feel like I’ve told all the story that I wanted to tell, what can I now ingest and learn from?” It’s hard to make time for depending on what your life is, or where it’s at.

You have two kids?

I have a two and a half year old and an eight month old.

That probably gives you a natural—I don’t want to say break from it—but you naturally must have distractions or breaks from it. It’s not like a solid block of time.

Yeah, a thing that I relish about parenthood in the creative space that I’m in is that I get to introduce my kids to stuff that I’ve been interested in or I think they would be interested in and there is an element of revisiting childhood classics. Or we have this Pokemon book where it’s just a wall of illustrations of Pokemon, and I get to teach my kid, “Hey, this one is named this. This one is named that,” and it’s fun to be able to share and exercise a lot of that, in my case, printed material with my kids and help them feel comfortable at that taste.

That’s one thing that’s always attracted to me about parenthood, is just the ability to have that level of influence over somebody’s media or worldview, not in a domineering way, but in a way where you can very thoughtfully just be like, “Hey, we’re going to watch this or that.” We watched Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which is a really great practical effects Muppet movie. My son loved it. It’s like, “Oh, instead of whatever’s popular in the animated space, let’s sort of revisit this movie you may not normally come across because it’s not as popular right now.” I think that’s really interesting to see what they glean towards.

That’s another fountain of youth, too. Sometimes I wonder, because I don’t have a kid, and I have an idea for a book where there’s two guys, maybe they’re friends, maybe they’re not. Either way, we alternate their stories. One doesn’t have a kid, one does. The one that does has to literally explain to the kid, “This is a sidewalk, This is a tree.” And the other guy, the one without the kid, is actually missing that sort of rudimentary reminder of what everything is. It’s like, okay, obviously I don’t need to be told what a tree is, but at the same time, maybe I do. Maybe I need that reminder by showing someone else what everything is. And here you’re saying in a much more colorful, elaborate way, when you show your kids something, you’re experiencing it again yourself.

What’s your history with comics and what made you want to take a step into this world?

The very first thing I ever tried to write was a novel in fifth grade. I didn’t finish it and it still bothers me that I didn’t, because how amazing would that be to tell that story? After that, though, it’s hard to call them comics, but it would be a unified 20, 30, 40, 50 page book, but with a new character on each page. It was almost like just coming up with characters drawn and a description and then saying, whatever.

Then that led to short stories and this and that, and also reading comics, of course, and being interested in them. But not until From Hell, and a lot of Alan Moore because I went on that bender that a lot of newbies must go on, that was when I started. Then Junji Ito. I mean, oh my god, you might want to put him as the fourth on a horror Mount Rushmore. But, yeah, just starting to see things in those terms.

Honestly, also [graphic novel author] Dirk [Manning] approaching me…. Dirk had been at a few readings and with other friends we went and saw John Carpenter live, playing music. And I saw him at a convention or two. It led to discussions about other books, and I have a lot of stories.

I had one that’s unpublished that I had talked to him about, and he was like, “Man, I would love to make that into a graphic novel.” As someone who had experienced not only how rich, but how cinematic it could be… I read Jonathan Maberry graphic novels, and just like truly it felt as if the entire essence of the novel had been parlayed, had been taken care of, had been expressed in a graphic novel. That to me was like, “Wait, we don’t even have to truncate the spirit of this for this medium?” Where you kind of do with a film.

I think that Dirk bringing it up, that led to me and my manager talking, “Well, should we send him this story?” And then we did. Dirk, he delivered the first script for it, and I immediately saw, number one, “Okay, this dude is really good.” But number two, I had an understanding of the fluidity, again, the rhythm of the graphic novel form, as opposed to had I written it myself, it’d probably be just endless blocks of text. It would just be a book in lettered.

Sometimes it just takes the right person to see the potential in another medium in your work. I know some comics writers who had a whole other life in television writing and tried to sell a show and turned it into successful comics. That’s a great indicator of what the medium is capable of. Like you said, film, in some ways, will truncate the experience, or there’s only so much time that someone can sit around and absorb the atmosphere, there’s a bit more space in a graphic novel.

What I love about comics is the reading experience is largely up to the reader. They can stay on one page for as long as they want to. They can skip over, they can revisit things. The ability to augment your experience, both as an author and as a reader, is my favorite thing about the medium.

You’re right. You could literally just sit and study the artwork. You can just sit there with it as long as you want before moving on. It is so thrilling, again, as someone who’s written a lot of stories and novels, and it’s just to see it in this form. And I’m going to say this again because it really means something to me, to see in Dirk’s script, to see it fully expressed, the full story expressed is like, “Okay, this is something here.” Because I think that if you didn’t know better and you walked up to an author and said, “Hey, I want to make a graphic novel,” the immediate thought would be like, “What are they exorcizing? What are they cutting out? What are they…”

No, no, that whole arc is there. And it makes me want to do it again. I’m a little scared of trying my hand at a script because, I mean, Dirk’s good. And just writing a script for a movie, I think I’ve written probably 10 now, which maybe sounds like a lot, but believe me, there’s people that write hundreds, and I’ve written about 10, and I feel myself getting better.

But for me, the novel is home. It’s just home for me. So meeting someone like Dirk, where the graphic novel was home, and Josh Ross, the illustrator, to see them work on this idea is like, “Okay, I want to do this again.”

It’s nice to work with people who are well-oiled machines in their craft. When somebody is skilled and able to speak eloquently to the decisions that they made and back up why they did what they did, it makes the experience all the better. You feel like you’re being taken cared of, right? I think it’s a big part of the creative exchange: “Here’s my idea, and let’s translate this into something I’m less familiar with.”

Right. It would be directing a film and having full confidence in your cinematographer, having full confidence in your actors. And even your storyboards. Where at some point you’re like, “We got it all, now let’s just film it.”

After seeing Dirk’s script, obviously knowing this story and the potential illustrations, it felt like, “All the pieces are here. Now let’s just film it.” And yeah, it is thrilling, and it makes me want to dig way deeper into the whole world, into the whole medium.

Last question: If you could have your pick of any character or property to work on that is not your own, what would it be?

The first one that comes to mind is Jekyll and Hyde. As a horror fanatic and a horror purist, it’s one of the most brilliant creations to me: You’ve got the studious, industrious, knowledgeable man who, when he downs this potion, becomes a raging Id running around town. To me, that’s always been even a little bit more interesting than the werewolf-within—because Hyde is a man, too. Hyde’s just a bad man.

In a weird way, Jekyll and Hyde is kind of… I don’t want to say an alcoholic story… but it’s like it’s just two guys, and there’s something really thrilling about that.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to take over cultural institutions and attack diversity, equity and inclusion programs has centered on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the venerable arts institution in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center was established by Congress and has been run by a bipartisan board since it opened in 1971, but Trump upended that in February when he moved to install his loyalists in key positions and make himself chair. Last week, the Kennedy Center’s new leadership fired at least seven members of its social impact team that worked to reach more diverse audiences and artists, including vice president and artistic director of social impact Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The acclaimed artist and playwright joins Democracy Now! to discuss Trump’s changes at the Kennedy Center, which he criticizes for destroying a “sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression.” Joseph notes that while the Kennedy Center has not yet made drastic programming changes, the rhetoric from Trump and others “severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity.”

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

We’ve been reporting from the US Capital over the past several weeks, hoping to document how Congress is responding to the authoritarian impulses of the Trump administration.  

It has been fruitful, albeit chaotic. There have been colorful press conferences and illuminating back-and-forths with Republican legislators, but not in the way we expected.  

Republicans, it seems, are happy to dispense with democracy, provided liberals go with it into the dustbin of history. In person they seem practically giddy, almost ebullient, and dangerously overconfident that abolishing liberalism is an end unto itself, regardless of the consequences.

And that might be their downfall—and ours.

During the press conferences we’ve attended, Republicans have reveled in massive federal job cuts and a possible tariff-induced recession. They’ve deflected serious concerns about data privacy and the dislocation of veterans from the federal workforce with puzzling confidence.

They have expressed few doubts about a feckless billionaire delving into Social Security data and IRS records with little apparent oversight.

Congressman Pete Sessions, co-chair of the Republican-led DOGE caucus, gave an elliptical answer on this very topic. When we asked if he could guarantee the safety of Americans’ personal information in light of reports that the DOGE team was underskilled and over-empowered, he deflected.

“The IRS failed that test, and has failed it for many, many years,” he responded obliquely. 

Even on topics like economic growth, high-profile Republicans have acted confident about usually touchy subjects, like a possible recession. Congressman Tim Burchett embraced a tariff-induced downturn, proclaiming with confidence on the Capitol steps that there would be temporary pain from the fallout over Trump’s tariff ballet, but it would be limited to the wealthy. 

“There is going to be some pain, but it’s going to be very, very short term,” he said with confidence.

Normally, all of these political third rails—a dour economy and massive federal job cuts—would be anathema to a party working to remain in power. Yet these controversial topics have been met with a collective shrug by MAGA apostles. 

You could write off this behavior as the natural hubris of a newly elected majority. But that would be an understatement. Conservatives seemed buoyed by a different sort of political calculus—the kind that shrinks politics to a binary conception of power, us versus them, that is downright dangerous.

That’s because Republicans seem certain their sole enemy—and ongoing biggest political challenge—is excising liberalism from its traditional bastions, like the federal government and academia; not improving, not reforming, or even meeting the challenges of a changing world, but vanquishing their Democratic rivals. They’re giddy that Democrats and liberals have been silenced, obliterated, or otherwise marginalized.  

That’s one of the reasons they seem unconcerned that the cuts have been indiscriminate and unlawful. Purging appears to be a priority. Chaos, the primary effect.

But all of this gloating ignores the reality of a world that is not so easily cowed. Conservatism may consider itself to be locked in an epic battle of left versus right, but the world is more complicated and nasty, and that might be a fatal miscalculation. The defeat of liberalism could be a pyrrhic conservative victory.

Consider that while the Trump administration has withdrawn aid and drastically cut funding for research at American universities, China has committed to even more funding for research.

As Trump has been deleting references to climate change and green energy, China is on the precipice of world domination in renewable energy. Sure, Republicans may wipe out the “Green New Scam,” as they call it. But how do we compete with China when cheaper and cleaner solar power drives an economy already constructed to overwhelm ours?

Trump has slowed immigration to a trickle, even as our falling birthrate indicates we need more people. The downturn occurs as the conservative Cato Institute touts that immigrants consume fewer welfare benefits than native-born Americans and have also been a key factor in America’s recent economic growth. 

If the game were simply between these two teams, liberals and MAGA, the victory could be resounding. Universities will falter, the federal workforce will dissolve, and the power base of liberalism will wither.

But the world does not abide by this calculus. This will not be the win MAGA expects. The upcoming fight will, more accurately, be one of democracy versus autocracy, scientific truth versus disinformation, and a free market versus a command economy. Battles we might not be able to fight if the chaotic deconstruction of the federal government continues.

These are the spoils Republicans seek. The rest of the world awaits a weakened nation courtesy of the Republican obsession with liberalism.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.

You’re a fifth-generation San Franciscan and a Chinese and Japanese American. How does your identity shape the work you produce as an artist? Is there any separation between the art and the artist? What drives you to make art?

I’m about to sound like an art teacher: everyone’s an artist. Life is art. Everything we create is art. But I really do feel that even just our choices, our decisions, the way we look at the world, the way we interact with one another are forms of art in some way. Growing up as a fifth-generation San Franciscan with deep roots in San Francisco and deep roots in California, I have always felt this deeper inner body of knowing—a deeper connection to self, but also to others, and to existence, and to the place that not only raised me but raised my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents. The place that has been stewarded by generations of the Ohlone and Ramaytush-Ohlone ancestors.

I’ve always had this deep fascination with walking in San Francisco and feeling that I am in a portal, like timeline jumping. I would walk through the city as a kid and my grandma would be like, “Eryn, this is where we used to go for really good pork chops, the Pork Chop House. They were really cheap, $2.75 a plate.” And then I’d be imagining my grandma there, imagining my mom there, and then just feeling this deep connection to the place and people.

My identity is the lens through which I see the world, and also the lens through which so many others probably see me. I feel like my identity is how I get to express myself. It’s also me trying to figure things out and alchemize these pasts that I didn’t have any words or visuals or pictures for. Audre Lorde says, “Name the nameless.” I felt all these unsung songs, these deep hymns and feelings. Creating and expressing was a way for me to dig all of these things up and to make them more tangible. I’m so deeply intertwined. The art and the artist are one and the same.

You’re predominantly a collage artist. You pull from a vast personal collection of vintage magazine clippings and handmade Japanese paper, amongst other materials. What is the value of repurposing found and archival materials?

Collage allows me to look at the collective memory. I love going through these magazines and publications that were a part of mass media during my parents’, my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’ time. It’s like understanding the hegemony of the time. You see these large cultural currents that were the exact currents and discourses my ancestors were traversing and navigating, but also actively questioning. I feel a lot of those discourses throughout my body. I feel those lineages of generational trauma through the ways in which those discourses still play out today. Collage and the act of going through papers and touching the ephemera and looking at it, it’s so tactile. I just fucking love that. This is the shit that people were being inundated with at the time.

Like racist shit?

Yeah, very racist shit. It’s just a trip because these articles and prints were very supremacist and very patriarchal. Collage allows me to literally tear shit out and rip it apart and crumble it and then create something totally new and different. The act of cutting things up, dissecting—it’s almost turning hegemony on its head. What did these things actually mean? What brings me joy and beauty from looking at it? I think a lot of it also has to do with de-contextualizing and reimagining. There’s a magical element, but there’s also a deep, nostalgic element to everything I do.

My mom is a musician. My parents met at the height of 1969 at a school dance. They’re high school sweethearts. When they met, my mom was in a daisy chain and her own homemade dress, maybe tripping on acid. When my parents tell me these stories, I already have these visuals and these feelings, and I’m able to transcribe them and reconfigure them. It’s satisfying. There’s a deep pleasure that comes from all of it.

I would love to hear a little more about your creative process.

When I was living in Japan, I really felt the gender dynamics, the sexual and patriarchal trauma. I know the queens that came before me have dealt with so much shit. All the femmes that I grew up with, all the aunties, my mom, my grandma—fierce-ass warrior femmes. I’ve always felt this lack of safety in my body, whether in America or in Japan or anywhere. So I found all these old 1950s publications with “demure” Asian American women and took them out of these contexts, reimagining them as these revered figures who are also complicated and yet powerful in their bodies. I’m so deeply nostalgic for San Francisco, the village that raised me and that is so at risk. So I include those pieces of Frisco in the collage. Whether that’s through the cars that I grew up seeing, that my parents and my grandparents used to drive; or the foods that we all grew up with; or the streets we were raised on. I have certain threads and motifs that I always put in all my work.

I am so obsessive about cutting little things. I literally just take stacks of magazines, newspapers, ephemera that I find at estate sales, like at the Japanese American Buddhist temple garage sales where everyone’s just giving away their shit. I have days where I just cut things. I organize them because I’m a Capricorn. And I cut big pieces and really small ones. I have those Altoid mini cans [for storage]. And then I put things together. I always start with the big and then go small.

I revisit things a lot. Oftentimes when I’m creating something through collage, I know that I may not love the first few sketches, but I try to just keep going. I try to just remember creativity is like a muscle. Sometimes you make some shit things.

What do you do when you feel like something is not working?

It’s really hard to just stop. Sometimes I let go and step away and do other shit. I put time limits on myself because I’m incredibly obsessive. I like to go for a walk or listen to music or get really, really high and just see what happens.

How does ancestral wisdom guide your creative practice?

I’m one of those people that needed a manual or a book to tell me how the fuck to make it in this world. But instead I have been given morsels from all my family members, all the elders in my life, and even from nature and interactions with the universe. I’ve been given these little grains, these little snacks, and now it’s my job to synthesize them. It’s my job to take these threads from all these different records—places that I’ve been to, people that I’ve met—and quilt them all together. My collage art and my art process is me synthesizing this ancestral wisdom that I feel and that I’ve been collecting over time. I see myself as a legacy worker. I feel so lucky to be doing this legacy work and to be a part of this continuum of care, abundance, and infinite possibility. Now that I have all my niblings—my eight nieces and nephews—it’s never been about me. It’s always been about the “we.” I exist in this village.

You were born and raised in San Francisco and live in Oakland now, though you also lived in France and Japan. Due to the tech industry, COVID, and other things, San Francisco looks different from the city you were raised in. From a local’s perspective, how has it changed?

First of all, I needed to fucking leave San Francisco because I was just popping off on everyone in my 20s. I was like, “This place is awful.” But I don’t want to live in this doom loop anymore. What I see now is the deterioration and the active dismantling of the intergenerational village, of the poly-cultural village. The village is upheld by the mom and pop stores that have been there for a while, the pillars of the community. I firmly believe that people are places, and that places are people. When you don’t have the people, you don’t have the place. The people in the community that create that place are actively being pushed out. It happens so quickly in San Francisco because there is a tremendous amount of wealth here.

In addition to making art, you are a community organizer. I would love to hear about how one informs the other. What is the intersection between community organizing and art making? How do these two things coexist?

One of my strengths is connecting with people. How can I continue to be a steward of the village? I work for this 105-year-old Black-led institution that has been embedded in the Fillmore and has a really deep history with Japantown. My preschool is in that building. When Japanese Americans were incarcerated, this community center held on to everyone’s stuff and helped people find housing when they came back from the camps.

I haven’t been doing a lot of collage lately, but my current work, my 9-to-5 work, is very much in alignment with my principles and my values and my art. I’m dedicating a lot of time in life to creating an intergenerational village: one that is culturally responsive, one that is dignified, one where people want to be there, one where joy is centralized. How do we ensure that all of these OGs like Fillmore Black Frisconians can age with utmost dignity and joy, in community, in the place that they helped steward and create?

Your day job feels like it’s a human tapestry, like a collage in physical form.

That’s what I hope. I want all the babies to remember that they exist in this beautiful collective ecosystem with rich histories, with incredible stories, and people that are just pure love.

How have you maintained your art practice for over a decade? I know you have taken breaks and picked up other interests along the way, like baking. What do you think an artistic life looks like?

I’ve taken many capitalist and anti-capitalist sabbaticals, aka my whole time in fucking France, where I had all these odd jobs and was just scrounging around for money. Japan was my art sabbatical. I literally can’t help but think that every choice and everything that I do is an artistic practice. For example, I like saying hi to everyone on the street. I like smiling at people. I love doing really mundane things. I love walking outside. Have you ever read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? The beauty is in the shadows. I love looking at the way light hits the walls, and the changing of the day. I think a lot of living an artistic life is just being incredibly present. To exist: what a fucking miracle. What are the odds that we’re all here, that we’re all here together, in this skin and with all these birds and these trees and everything? An artistic life also looks like taking my time, really making sure that in every moment I carve out corners and crevices of joy and of stillness and awe. Awe is really important to me.

What inspires you?

Walking in early morning light through Chinatown or on Clement Street and seeing the shadows hit the mounds of oranges on display. Seeing the way the sun shines through the gates throughout the Richmond District and throughout the Mission. Jenny Odell’s books really inspire me, especially How to Do Nothing. There is just so much in the seemingly mundane. Going to the Tilden Park Botanical Gardens, because it’s fucking free. Smelling fresh earth. Redwoods post-rain. Watching babies and kids running the streets—they make me remember who I’m fighting for and what we have to fight for. Whale watching in April or May off of Fort Funston gives me all the good feels. Berkeley farmers markets. The literal fruits of people’s labor. I love looking at people’s grocery lists, seeing the cursive. They tell you so much about a person and what stage they are at in life. That’s their everyday practice, right? What a gorgeous art form, just their printed cursive and their little notes. The Museum of the African Diaspora curator Key Jo Lee really inspires me. San Francisco is not worthy. Octavia Butler. LaRussell. Risographs. Betye Saar.

Things have been bleak in the world lately (maybe always?) and it’s been a particularly rough start to the year in California with the devastating wildfires. What brings you hope these days?

My imagination. Everyone’s imagination. The first thing to be colonized is our imagination. They don’t want us to dream. They don’t want us to have hope. They don’t want us to imagine a new world, but we have no choice but to imagine a better world. I love the quantum universe. These new worlds exist. We have no idea why we’re here, why our skin grows back when it gets cut, but we’re all miraculously here. We do some really fucked up things together. But the fact that we’re here, and the fact of the movements that have come before us, and the love that has been transmitted before us… that shit really helps.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

Photo by iMattSmart

I watched the close protection team empty their weapons at the gate of what was the largest US military base in Afghanistan. This was just under 17 years ago. It was a hot day and I had spent three hours of it filming inside a literal minefield. Later, as I sat down in the shade to eat, I wasn’t even hungry. In fact, I was feeling nauseous—my usual response to the company of trained killers. Just then, an American soldier—someone I had never met before—slapped me hard on the back, commenting first on my accent, then telling me how much he loved the Brits.

Who knows the situation by the time this goes out but watching Zelenskyy’s plane touch down at Stansted Airport—and the subsequent cavalcade of black and grey 4×4 vehicles speeding down the tidy three-lane motorway to London and Downing Street—was like eyeballing the future, not tending to the present. A future where the US may no longer be the go-to place for every democratic leader defending freedom.

As the motorbike dispatch riders weaved in and out of the traffic, speeding up and slowing down, like a performative dance, many softer-hearted viewers were feeling relief that our embattled guest would at least be predator-free for a couple of days. In addition, so many European leaders had offered carefully unified support for Zelenskyy after what had looked to the casual observer like a Vance-led mugging—already mischaracterised as the other way round by some Trump supporters—in the evidently coveted Oval Office.

Meanwhile, though Ukrainian forces had now advanced close to the major eastern cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, Moscow continued its own larger push with Russian and North Korean conscripts into a country which not so long ago had been the third-largest nuclear power in the world (before it surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for long-forgotten US, UK and Russian security guarantees in the equally unrecalled 1994 Budapest Memorandum). ‘The point is,’ as comedian Chris Farley once said, ‘how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer.’

Unfairly or otherwise, a mixture of horror and despair now greeted one or two Americans in London. I had seen it in the park with my own eyes. However, even the most pro-Trump of social media sites had been showing overwhelming support for Zelenskyy. Only the most conspiracy theorist of Americans—and there are many—could honestly call it otherwise. To have attacked and berated a punch-drunk, bloodied ally in the middle of a war felt repulsive to many. Why do so many Americans hate the aggressed so much, people were left wondering? Is it a general hatred of ‘losers’? We Europreans already knew Ukraine couldn’t ‘win’ this war. Was the fall-out a set-up? Not by Zelenskyy, I didn’t believe. The stakes were too high.

What we did know was that Vance didn’t care what happened in Ukraine because he had said as much. Trump at the same time played a weird game of poker. ‘You don’t have the cards,’ he said. ‘I’m not playing cards,’ replied Zelenskyy. (‘His people are the cards!’ Christiane Amanpour told the BBC.) I just could not see this ending well. But it was not to me the complicated web of deliberately stage-managed Ukrainian triple-bluffing as some Americans would have it.

Besides, Ukraine, as military historian Lawrence Freedman reminded us at the weekend, will fight to defend its dignity just as much as its sovereignty. Not that this ‘appeared’ to matter. Regrettably it had looked at times like Trump and Vance were calling for Zelenskyy’s surrender, when I am sure Trump was not. Similarly, the same people saying Team Obama was behind the contretemps were devaluing the validity of their point by describing Trump as ‘statesmanlike’ throughout. Susan Rice was implicated. Mollie Hemingway was irate. Yes, Trump must keep Putin sufficiently on board to come to the table. Yes, we Europeans get that. But this is our security too.

Which made Starmer’s firm embrace of Zelenskyy on the Downing Street pavement late Saturday afternoon quite frankly a pretty moving experience for some Londoners on what had been one of the first truly sunny days of the year. ‘What Zelensky wants is for NATO, Europe and the US to fight Russia, risks and all,’ blasted one American at me last week, as if by defending Zelenskyy Europe was showing a lust for war. This was not the case at all.

‘The absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,’ announced German Chancellor-designate Friedrich Merz earlier last week. Though this was unhelpful, he meant it. It was presumably not quite clear how long the many working US military facilities parked on German soil would remain. Meanwhile, increasingly separatist Moscow-facing East Germans and their AfD party were still licking their wounds after coming in only second in the German elections. (They had little support in the former West Germany.) The truth was, by supporting AfD, Vance and the salutist South African may well have helped the Die Linke party instead.

Of course, we should have seen all this coming. Before the Starmer love-in at the White House, followed by a measured display on Sunday with Macron and other European leaders at Lancaster House here on the Mall, it was like Brexit all over again—though the additional Russian sandbags and razor wire tossed into the mix had been unexpected. Everyone had already split into two camps, it seemed. On the one side we had the people deprioritising investigations into far-right terrorist groups while over-rehearsing battle cries for more mirrors, more make-up, a fatter wallet (good luck with that), and an abiding disregard for anyone in the way. (Not forgetting a truly weird appreciation of Andrew Tate.) On the other, though less contentious, we had the freedom-loving Vulnerablists, wary of people being press-ganged by social media sites, later enjoying an allusion of civility as if the blows in the Oval Office which had derailed the peace train were now firing up updated European pistons. Starmer and Macron would come up with something themselves, along with a few others, it was declared, and report back to Trump. ‘I am clear in my mind that he [Trump] wants lasting peace,’ said Starmer.

Just as henchmen Vance and Musk regularly display a kind of weird complex about the Brits, the US looks so bad to some Brits when even the young French far-right leader Jordan Bardella chose to cancel his CPAC speech after Bannon’s dodgy hand salute. (Tellingly, the likes of the UK’s Liz Truss and Nigel Farage stayed put.) Someone close said the US was such a turn-off to them now, they couldn’t believe anyone would ever want to go there. A learned friend said Americans didn’t give a damn about us anymore, anyway, encouraging the view that certainly one wing of the United States of America may want to torpedo the United States of Europe. (Interestingly, China has already begun equating Europe with greater stability.)

So is this love of the ogre thing a phase or full-on ripping out of trees? ‘I’ve been very critical of the liberal left, woke—yes, it exists—agenda,’ posted neighbour and journalist Dan Hodges last week. ‘But Trump’s victory has pushed people over a line. Overt 1970’s racism is now perceived to be acceptable again. And good people on all sides of the political spectrum are going to have to take a stand.’ On Kier Starmer, people were already growing more upbeat. Podcaster and ex-BBC man Jon Sopel said after the London Summit: ‘Thought Starmer came across today as serious, thoughtful, calm, pragmatic and a leader. Yes, there have been missteps aplenty by him since becoming PM. But on this most critical issue he looks sure-footed.’

In 1987 I painted a house in Atlantic City to help towards rehearsal costs for a play I still had to find a theatre for. On the shelf was a row of Mark Twain books and with them a direct link to my childhood. After work I’d make myself an omelette and after nostalgically leafing through a few of these—they even had the baffling A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—would spend hours reading through my notes on the play. The apartment, I remember, creaked like a ship.

If I couldn’t sleep, which was often, I would walk past the flashing casinos on the Boardwalk—Donald Trump owned one but was away in the Soviet Union at the time, according to the owner of the house I was painting. Anyway, some nights I would sit alone on an outside bench smoking a Lucky Strike. Shortly after Trump returned from Moscow and St Petersburg, maybe even coming to Atlantic City, he famously splashed out nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads criticising US foreign policy and pleading for the US to stop defending its allies. It seemed out of character at the time, unless he was running for President.

The point is, if any of his Russian ties can help now lead to peace, I am all for them. I painted the house in the end. This included its entire white exterior and the unreasonably long white picket fence. Thanks to producer Tarquin Callen, I put on my play—largely about invasive men—in a popular East 13th Street New York theatre. Before leaving Atlantic City, though, as I may have written once before, I clocked a man using a public telephone who was shouting down the line, perhaps to his wife, that he had lost everything, including the family home.

What type of person would ever own a casino, I remember thinking?

‘You know,’ said the American soldier at the US air base at the beginning of the piece, ‘you Brits are always fucking there for us!’ Some of his pizza had travelled across his face. ‘And you for us,’ I said, handing him a paper napkin. Always there, I think now? Are we, both? Er, um, ah, right, okay, ouch, oh dear, righty-ho, I am left thinking. Then: okay. Let’s do it then. For peace this time.

The post Letter from London: When You’re a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

With one exception: the two-state solution to the problem of Israel, Zionism and the rights of Palestinians and other peoples that Israel violates to get what it wants. Let me begin with the question “Who proposed the two-state solution?” The answer is: the vast majority of nations on the face of the earth, including the Arab nations, but especially the imperialist nations. But who did not propose it? Neither Israel nor Palestine.

It is a matter of historical record that representatives of both peoples have agreed from time to time to the principle of a two-state solution. But neither has proposed it. This is because for both peoples the two-state solution has never been an end goal, only a strategic way-station on the road to their real objective: the whole basket. They agree to the two-state solution because they want to exercise the influence of the great imperialist powers toward their real objective.

The Palestinians want all the land “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.” (It rhymes in Arabic “min al nahr lel bahr.”) For them it has always been a matter of getting back what was taken from them. There was never anything inherently racist or exclusivist in their intentions. Palestine has incorporated many peoples from many places throughout the world. This history is reflected in many of the family names: al-Hindi (“the Indian”), Daghestani (“from Daghestan”), al-Maghrabi (“from Morocco”), Franjiyeh (“from France/Europe”), al-Masri (“the Egyptian”), al-Roumi (“from Rome/Byzantium”) and so on. Over the centuries, they have all been welcomed as Palestinians, living in a land called Palestine since even before Roman times. They don’t mind anyone coming to live there as fellow Palestinians, including the Jews, who considered themselves Jewish Palestinians until Zionism sprang out of Europe (and for some even afterward; Zionism was a foreign ideology for them). What Palestinians want is not to be expelled, and for those who have been, they want to return.

Zionism also wants all of the land “from the river to the sea,” – and even beyond – for Israel, but not to share with everyone who wants to live there, only Jews, and preferably Zionist Jews. Israel is an exclusivist state. It was created by expelling more non-Jewish Palestinians in 1947-49 than the number of Jews living in Palestine at the time. Israel made the decision at the time of its founding, that it would continue its goal of reclaiming all the Land of Israel (all of Palestine and even beyond) only if it could empty it of most of its non-Jewish inhabitants, so that it would become and remain an overwhelmingly Jewish state. This objective remained in 1967 when it captured the remaining territory of Palestine, as well as the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights. That is why Israel did not annex the West Bank or Gaza: too many Palestinian non-Jews. It is also why they chose to annex the Golan Heights, because they drove out 95% of the indigenous Syrian population. Israel similarly drove out roughly 1 million Lebanese from south Lebanon in 2006 with the same intentions, but the Lebanese resistance proved too strong, and Israel had to pull its troops back after only 34 days. This is obviously the motive behind Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and ultimately the West Bank: Israel wants the land but not the people, because they’re not Jews.

This difference between Palestinians and Israelis is also why a two-state solution cannot work. If it is imposed, Israeli Zionists will simply be waiting, as they have until now, for an opportunity to continue to pursue the Zionist dream of a “Greater Israel”. In the meantime, exiled Palestinians all over the world will be waiting for restoration of their land and territory. A two-state solution is not a solution, merely an explosion waiting to happen. It is a pause in the fighting. Neither side will be satisfied with such an outcome, and will be waiting for an opportunity to take or take back what they believe belongs to them, or what they simply want, regardless of whether it belongs to them or not.

I suspect that Professor Sachs knows this, but that he regards this as the closest that we can come to a solution: to divide the object of contention. Unfortunately, this will satisfy neither side. Palestinians will wait for as long as necessary to recover their land, and ardent Zionists will seek to expand their “promised land” insofar as their population, resources and influence with powerful governments will allow them.

As you might imagine, there is another solution, usually called the one-state solution, for a single state, including both Palestinians and Israelis, and allowing immigration of Jews and return of exiled Palestinians, with equal rights for all and restoration and compensation for all that has been lost. This is rather like the South African solution that ended apartheid, at least officially. To the extent that it is popular at all, it is moreso among Palestinians than Israelis, perhaps because the Palestinian model is not exclusivist. Of course, South Africa is by no means a perfect society after the end of apartheid, and Palestine will not be after the Zionist state disappears. To the extent that the concept is an ideal, it unfortunately seems unlikely under the present circumstances.

Perhaps the most realistic conclusion to the struggle will be a winner-take-all, as horrific as that may be. That was the strategy behind Yahya Sinwar’s design of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza: to be able to keep resisting regardless of the sacrifices endured by the Palestinian people. It must be said that it seems to be having an effect on Israeli society, exhausting its resources. The strength of the Palestinian society has always been sumud – steadfastness, and this may be the deciding factor. A millennium ago, it was, in effect, what enabled Palestine to rid itself of the European crusaders. Israel’s counter strategy is clearly genocide, as it has been since the beginnings of the Zionist movement. It is hard to know which will prevail, but it may depend upon currently unknown factors, such as the balance of power in the world.

But a two-state solution? Dividing the territory between the thief and the victim? I don’t think so.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

We kick off the new season of Working People with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with the people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones.” In this episode, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of guests about the ongoing public health crises in East Palestine, OH, where a Norfolk Southern train derailment in Feb. 2023 changed residents’ lives forever, and in Conyers, GA, where residents continue to deal with the toxic fallout of a chemical fire that broke out in Sept. 2024 at a facility owned by pool chemical company BioLab. Panelists include: Ashley McCollom, a displaced resident of East Palestine; Hannah Loyd, a displaced resident of Conyers; and Kristina Baehr, a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. 

Additional links/info: 

• Ashley’s Facebook page
• Ashley’s GoFundMe page
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Just Well Law website 
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Everytime we come back, we all get sick’: GA residents affected by September BioLab fire are still going through hell”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “Vance visit on derailment’s second anniversary leaves residents wondering, ‘Who has our backs?’”
• Grace Gibson, The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, “Hawaiʻi’s Red Hill Water Crisis Isn’t Over”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. We’re broadcasting today’s show on 89.3 WPFW out of Washington dc, the home of jazz and justice. For folks across the DMV, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes for the month of February and my co-host Mel er will be hosting next month. Today we are kicking off our new season with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, more working people live in sacrifice zones today than we realize and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we’d care to admit.

And unless we start banding together and doing something to stop it, the best that we can do is sit and hope that our community won’t be the next one to be upended by an explosive train derailment or a toxic chemical fire. The best that we can hope for is that our homes are not the next to be destroyed by evermore frequent wildfires and evermore destructive hurricanes that we and our families won’t be made sick by some massive waste incinerator or petrochemical plant, some industrial hog farm or fracking operation landfill or military base near our homes. You may think it won’t happen to you, but neither did so many of the residents that we’ve spoken to over the past couple of years. This ongoing investigation began two years ago when I started speaking with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio, a small working class town about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, February 3rd, marked the two year anniversary of the day that changed their lives forever when a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in their backyard on a frigid Friday night, followed three days later by the disastrous criminal and unnecessary decision by Norfolk Southern to pressure emergency responders and contractors to empty five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set them on fire, releasing a massive black death plume and exposing residents to toxins that have been making them sick ever since, like carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and even phosgene gas.

And late last year, I began speaking with residents living in and around Conyers, Georgia, who have been living through a hellish situation that is both distinct from and eerily similar to East Palestine. At the end of our last season, I interviewed three local residents who have all been affected by the nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about half an hour outside of Atlanta. And the fire broke out on September 29th, 2024. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs fourth in the last two decades, and residents have described experiencing breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, and other negative health effects after being exposed to the fumes from the fire. Ashley McCollum is the very first resident of East Palestine that I connected with two years ago, and Hannah Lloyd is the first Conyers resident I connected with. Today I am truly honored to have both Ashley and Hannah with us on the show together. And we are also so grateful to be joined by Kristina Baehr. Kristina is a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. Thank you all so much for joining us, and as always, I wish we were speaking under less horrifying circumstances and we are sending all of our love and solidarity to you and your communities. Ashley, I want to come to you first here. We just crossed the two year anniversary of the derailment. How are you and your family doing what has happened since we last spoke?

Ashley McCollom:

Well, first Max, I’d like to say thank you for having myself and others on here to be able to speak. It’s been a long stressful ride. Nothing has changed that. It feels like the town is basically the same, the reactions, the uncomfortable feeling, the stress you walk in, you can clearly smell something’s not right. So it has been going consistently the same and it feels like we don’t know what safe is and everyone’s confused and running a mile a minute and we’re getting nowhere.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ashley, you yourself, you had to move, right? I mean since we last spoke, you had to get out of your home, is that right?

Ashley McCollom:

Yeah, but you still have to deal with the burden of what happened your forever home that you don’t want to put that forever problem on someone because we don’t have clear answers of what we can do. But I mean, I continue to pay a tax on something that I don’t want to put on someone else, and I don’t know if I’m okay doing so and haven’t had the right directive from anyone involved in the incident that happened on February 3rd.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. And I want to dig into this more and we will over the next hour. But Hannah, I want to come to you because you are one of the voices that our listeners last heard at the end of last season. And I wanted to just ask if you could tell our listeners about what’s been happening in your life and in Coner since we last spoke a few months ago.

Hannah Loyd:

Well, one thing that has recently happened is the fire chief resigned and we’re not sure why. And they are still running, but they’re not manufacturing is what they’re stating. Since we talked last I up and left my house and I had to move away from everything that I ever had, and I’m better, but I’m not, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. I mean, could you tell people a little bit about what that was like? I can only imagine what you’re going through leaving your home. We talked about the health effects that you were feeling living near Conyers. I mean, have those lifted since you’ve left? I mean, I guess, yeah. What wait are you carrying now that you’ve had to leave your home to escape this tragedy that you did not cause?

Hannah Loyd:

So since we’ve left, yes, we’re better, but every time we go back to get more stuff that we need, we get re-exposed and we get sick again. The last time we went, me and my daughter went up and within a couple of hours she was vomiting. She had a surgery performed when she was six weeks old. She’s not even supposed to vomit. So if she does vomit, that means something serious. So that means that whatever it is is still there and it’s almost like it’s getting worse. So not only was she sick, I was sick. So trying to pack more stuff up and be sick and all that stuff, it’s just hard. And you know what you have to do for your family and your kid, but you also know that there’s just no one holding any accountability still. So you just have to figure out what you have to do somehow get it done and just do it. That’s the only way I had three doctors tell me plus her, so four, to leave the state that that’s all that I could do to get better. And we did because we had no other choice. My daughter was sick and she’s three. So when a three-year-old can’t really express things but say, I’m sad, I’m itchy, I hurt. And then you go somewhere else and she’s happy and she’s laughing and she’s fine. That tells you right there, something’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

God, I’m like,

Hannah Loyd:

That’s the big two changes since I talked to you last.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m just, again, I’m getting really emotional here because as a father, I can’t imagine what’s going through your heart in that situation. And of course you got to do what you got to do to protect your family. But Christina, I want to kind of bring you in here on this because escaping danger is not accountability for the people who have caused residents like Hannah and Ashley to leave their homes. I want to ask first if you could say a little more about the kind of work that you do and about your involvement in the case of East Palestine. What have you been seeing from your side as a community safety lawyer about the situation that folks in East Palestinian are really facing right now?

Kristina Baehr:

Well, I’m a survivor of toxic exposure myself, and so I started a little law firm called Justwell Law to help other families, and now I get called into sick communities all around the country and I help them unite and rise up and take on the bad guys. And I’ve done that now in Hawaii representing the Red Hill victims against the United States Navy. We won that case. We had a trial in May, and now we’re waiting on the judgment so that those people can get paid and move on with their lives. And then while that case was on hold, I got a call from an expert in East Palestine and invited me to come and meet Ashley and some of her comrades in arms. And I heard a familiar story. I heard about doctors not treating people. I heard about the EPA lying to people and telling them that it was safe when it wasn’t.

I heard about tests not being done properly and not testing for the right things, which drives me insane. And I got fired up. And when I went that December night, I had not a single client, but I was willing to represent any one of them, just any one of them. And I started talking to more people and more people. And now I represent 744 of them. And we filed on Monday in an enormous case, first in Ohio, and we’re seeking a jury trial and then separately in DC claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the EPA and the CDC because the EPA and the CDC have to stop coming to communities and telling people that it’s safe when it’s not, and looking at sick people and telling them that they’re not sick. There’s a movement of families around the country, including Hannah and Ashley and many, many others who are standing up and saying, no more, we’re not going to do this anymore.

We are not going to allow you to poison our families and we’re going to stand up not just for ourselves and our community, but for the next community. And one of the things that I think is so beautiful is seeing Ashley and Hannah’s relationship, and likewise, my clients in Hawaii knew the clients at Camp Lejeune, knew the families at Camp Lejeune. There is this club that none of us ever wanted to join, but it is a fierce and loyal community and people are ready to take a stand against institutions, and I’m just here to help them. It’s their movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I feel intense solidarity with you on that front as a journalist who’s been connecting with these folks that way, but hearing the same things that you’re hearing, I keep telling people it feels like I’m investigating a serial killer because I keep hearing the same things from communities across the country, whether it be causes of the pollution, the gaslighting about how it’s all in their heads, the sort of ways that communities are split apart between the people who are feeling the effects and the people who are not all that stuff. You can only interview so many people from what feel like disparate, disconnected communities and start hearing them describe the same things before you start putting these connections together. And I guess before we have our first break, I wanted to ask if just on that point, what you would want folks listening to this to know as someone who has spoken with community members in Red Hill, spoken with community members in East Palestine, I guess what’s the sort of big message folks need to understand here about how widespread this is or what the real kind of situation we’re facing is in this country?

Kristina Baehr:

It is very real, and that’s what I want people to know. I looked at my own testimony recently. I testified before a jury about the people who poisoned my family. And when I looked back at what I wanted that jury to know is I wanted them to know that it happened, that it’s real and it can happen to you. And I just had this. And when this happened to me, I had never, for me, it was toxic mold, but I had never heard of Stacky. I never, I have two Ivy League degrees, my husband has three, and neither of us have even heard the words. And there is a reason for that. There is a massive coverup in this country. There are people who are trying to influence, there are people who say that there are acceptable limits of whatever X is, right? And so you just talked about the gaslighting, but this is how it plays out. The federal lawyers at Red Hill stood up in front of a judge and said, judge, there was never enough fuel in the water to make anybody sick. It was always within acceptable limits, and it didn’t even affect half of the waterline. Therefore, anybody who says that they were sick or believes them to be themselves To have been sick were psychosomatic. I mean, These are federal officers [who] called my 7,000 clients who had rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, kids who had welts on them, esophagus that were burned, pets that were throwing up. All of them are psychosomatic, all of them. And of course, that’s what they said about me in my own case. I was just as stressed out mom during C, right? In every case, they say the same thing. It’s all within acceptable limits. And therefore, anyone who says they’re sick really is suffering from a lot of stress. Well, what caused the stress, dude, right? It makes me so angry because I hear that same thing day in and day out, this BS about acceptable limits. And no, I know that Ashley and people in East Palestine are sick because I hear the same symptoms, the brain fog, the short-term memory loss, the intense sweating in the middle of the night night. My clients in Hawaii had migraines, and now the United States is finally issuing the paper that says, oh yeah, according to our own data, there were more migraines amongst Red Hill families and there was more burning of the esophagus. This is true. This is historical fact. And when you come in and you hire experts to say otherwise, you are denying a historical event and it’s deeply unsettling. And the EPA and the CDC in particular have to stop looking at sick people and telling them they’re crazy.

That’s my soapbox, but I will continue to proclaim it from the mountaintops that this is real and it really affects people. And why can’t we show up in East Palestine with people to help? Why do we have to show up at Red Hill and take tests of water and say that it’s all non-detect when we just didn’t test for the right thing? Right? Literally, the Navy and Hawaii stood up and said, there’s no indication the water is not safe. People could smell the fuel. They knew there had been a fuel release right next to the well, but the officers in charge had the audacity to tell the people at town halls that there was no indication the water was not safe. So I get these people at deposition and I say, well, tell me sir, is the smell of gasoline, is that an indication? It’s not safe?

Of course it is. And what I think you’re doing, and I’m doing, and everyone here is doing, is we are bringing common sense to these issues. We are speaking in plain English about what is actually happening and we need to continue to do it. And so you’re doing God’s work by bringing these issues to light, by bringing these stories to light because they’re real. And it can happen to us and we are next, unless the people in charge follow their own safety rules, unless the institutions actually follow their own rules, it will happen again. And so I’m proud of the families that are rising up and saying not on our watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, I want to come back to you here for a second because as folks know, vice President JD Vance just visited your town this month on the anniversary of the derailment, and as a Senator Vance teamed up with Democrat Sherrod Brown to put forward the Railway Safety Act in response to what Norfolk Southern did to you and your town. Now, that Bill effectively went nowhere, but when Vance was in East Palestine earlier this month, he did vow to the cameras that more action would be taken particularly on holding Norfolk Southern accountable and implementing new rail safety measures. So let’s take a listen

Vice President JD Vance:

And you can be damn sure that over the next six months you’re going to hear a lot from the vice president of the United States and the entire administration. If Norfolk Southern doesn’t keep these promises, we are going to talk about it and we are going to fight for it. And so certainly I think that we can say with confidence, the president shares my view that we need some common sense rail safety. And yes, that is something that we’re going to work on over the next couple of years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that’s what Vance said. Ashley, how did that trip go? How did folks in town respond to the vice president being in East Palestine?

Ashley McCollom:

He has been here multiple times before. Any help is good help to the community. I mean, people look at different colors, different sides, it doesn’t matter. Anyone that’s willing to help and hopefully things can go through a lot and they should be because we’re just one example as to why these should have been put in place beforehand. And I hope that he comes back and makes as many visits as he did before to help us and get these things put in place because we were all just people sitting in our town enjoying our normal evening. And because this wasn’t there and things weren’t done correctly, we’re now here in this situation talking to you. And granted, all of us enjoy talking to you, but it shouldn’t be a situation that it should come to this and we should be going through it because we already see this big disaster. So it would be a good idea for things to be put forward quicker if possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the show with residents of East Palestine, with residents here in South Baltimore who are also being polluted by another rail company that’s CSX transportation, we’ve spoken with them on the show, so I’m not going to go into the whole kind of explanation here, but you guys who listen to the show know that when we say the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine was avoidable, it’s because we’ve heard directly from railroad workers that they are chronically understaffed, overworked. There aren’t enough guys to check the cars to make sure that faulty systems like the one that the train had with its bearings don’t end up with trains on the track that shouldn’t be there. You have people in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. You have safety layers done by union workers across the rail industry who have been getting laid off having more work piled onto fewer people for years, right?

All of these top-down corporate and Wall Street minded decisions to cut costs and boost profits have translated to a railroad system that has over a thousand derailments a year, and workers fleeing the industry on mass because they can’t take this anymore. And they keep warning that more catastrophes like this are going to happen. And so of course we would be hypocrites if we didn’t say we were in favor of more rail safety of more accountability for these companies. And frankly, I don’t give a crap if the person helping residents of East Palestine has a D or an R next to their names, just help. These people need help. That’s all we care about right now. But to this point, it’s not just rail safety that community members need. And Christina, I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about the other needs that folks in town and around, let’s not forget, it’s not just East Palestinian, Ohio, it’s the Pennsylvania side, it’s folks from miles around. What do folks need that are not going to be addressed by more rail safety and more accountability from Norfolk Southern?

Kristina Baehr:

I think more than anything, they need healthcare. When a disaster like this happens, why can’t we come in and teach doctors how to treat toxic exposure? Why can’t we talk about how to detox the body? Why can’t we talk about some of the signs that you might look out for, things that might happen down the road instead, the EPA comes in and says it’s going to be in and out of your body in 48 hours. I don’t know if you have heard this Max, but I’ve heard that at every site, okay, well, vinyl chloride in and out of your body in 48 hours, jet fuel in and out of your body in 48 hours, where is this 48 hours coming from?

What scientific ground is there for this 48 hours vs. That’s not true and people are sick and let’s help them get better. We know how to treat toxic exposure. We know for example, that there are people who are exposed to these chemicals in their vocations. What are the treatment protocols we’ve developed for those people? What are the blood tests we have had them take? How about just c, b, C count for people? Can we help them get better? And instead, we come into these places and we tell the doctors not to help anybody. So I think that we need some real medical care and from doctors who care, from doctors who care.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should really be noted that this is explicitly what residents have been asking for demanding. There are coalitions like the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition, folks from in town calling for the President Biden and now President Trump to issue an emergency declaration for East Palestine, which would unlock a suite of federal resources including guaranteed healthcare for all affected residents who are bioaccumulation these toxins in their bodies. They’re feeling the effects of them. I was standing in East Palestine last year, I could smell the damn chemicals. I could taste the metallic stuff in my mouth. Imagine living in that stuff for two years and being told, ah, it’s all washed out of your system. I mean, this is the kind of gaslighting that we’re talking about here, but you can feel the lie just by standing in the middle of the street if you’re there in East Palestine. And Hannah, before we go to another break, I wanted to ask you what if anything has been done to address the causes of the Biolab fire and the impacts that it’s been having on your community?

Hannah Loyd:

I mean, everything is real. Kind of like we can’t talk about it until the lawsuit or whatever because the county turned around and sued by a lab, so they say, oh, we can’t have any updates or anything to say until this is resolved.

Kristina Baehr:

Sorry. No, after Hannah talks, I want to answer that. That is bs.

Hannah Loyd:

So we’re just here every day living in it. In the beginning we had updates and this that, and we all knew it wasn’t right, and then it was like radio silence. And then the new commissioner came in and she was worried about the jobs of the people that were there. And now something’s been put out about the people that work there have the option to either retire with some kind of guaranteed salary forever. Everything’s real hush hush. So to be honest with you, I don’t know because we don’t know because they haven’t said anything. But it’s toxic there. Nothing’s changed. It’s toxic.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, we got to go to a break in a second, but yeah, I know you add something you want to hop in on to follow up on that.

Kristina Baehr:

There is no legal basis to stop communicating and speaking truth to the people who are there. And what happens is the bad guys always do that. They say, well, their investigation’s pending, and therefore everyone has to be silent. And that is, there’s no legal basis for that. And it’s unfair to the communities that litigation is about accountability and truth and transparency. And for the bad guys to come in and say, we’re going to shut it all down just makes it even worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to, in this second half gang, talk a bit about the special and important circumstances that have led Hannah and Ashley to you guys have actually connected over social media and it’s really incredible that we have you both on together. Having interviewed you separately in East Palestine and in Conyers, I wanted to ask if Hannah, you could just tell us a bit more about that. How did you and Ashley find each other? What was it like for you to be going through what you’ve been going through in Conyers and then find someone like Ashley, who knows what it’s like to go through that and what have you guys been talking about in that time?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, honestly, once I started learning things about different disaster areas and started hearing about East Palestine, east Palestine, I started watching YouTube videos. I think it was one, it may have been, I don’t remember who did it, but it was, I watched some on here there and I was like, I’m literally going through the same exact thing as her everything. And so I just messaged her and just kind of went from there. And she has been the biggest mentor, helper how to get bring pop out of my kids’ hair. I have literally been so honored to have met her even though I’ve never met her in person because she has helped me through some of the hardest days that I never thought that I was going to have to go through things that she learned in her area with kids and her own kid that she was able to teach me that I had no idea why my kid was screaming. And she told me why. And it was right. And I mean, She’s become family to me, to be honest. And I am just so thankful that I was able to connect with her just through social media from a disaster that literally uprooted all of our lives. And we talk sometimes every day. Sometimes we go weeks without talking. You just never know. And we don’t always talk about disasters. We talk about stuff to do with my kid that I never even thought of how to make something simple for dinner. I mean, we talk about it all, so it’s not always disaster related. But she taught me about chemicals, dioxin, what to ask my doctor to test me for what? To ask my doctor. Things that I never thought I would have to ask anyone or my doctor. And so I’ll say again, it’s literally been an honor her to be my friend.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, what is it like to get a message like that having gone through what you’ve gone, I have to imagine it’s both bittersweet because it’s like it’s happening again, but you can hear how much it means to someone like Hannah. What is it like for you to get a message like that?

Ashley McCollom:

It’s emotional because a lot of what she mentioned, I remember those times and going through that and being confused with everyone else, and I had people reach out to me that became my mentors the same and help me through it. And even like how she said, we can just talk about normal things because it’s nice to know that we went through similar things and have that break away to still be people, still be moms, still take care of a family out of every curve ball. This has thrown both of us from watching an entire plant catch on fire and not knowing is it safe, is what is going on normal. Hey, I went through that. Don’t be ashamed to ask. A lot of people need that need to understand we were there. I mean, the community understands. We understand each other and it is a privilege to meet Hannah and so many people and to be there and have that support because it feels like you have no other support but each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess if there are folks watching this right now who are living near a landfill that they suspect is making their contaminating their water, making them sick, if there are folks listening to this who are saying they are describing what I’m feeling the same way. Hannah, you felt that when you watched Ashley. I guess what would be your message to folks out there right now who maybe believe that it’s nothing or maybe it’s all in their heads? What would you advise them to do?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, I mean, some people it didn’t affect and some people it did, and some people still are unsure. I mean, if you are really unsure Or you’re on the fence, message me. I’ll talk to you. I mean, I have no shame in anything. I lost everything I ever had. I mean, can’t. I’ll be here. I’m here. I’ll talk to you. I may have to call Ashley and ask her. I may not know, but I’ll talk to you. I’m here. I have people in Max, Christina on our other interview, we talk to her. So I mean, we all kind of help each other I guess. So if you’re in doubt, just reach out because even though you may Not be for sure, think it’s in your head, just if you want to know, just ask Ash.

Ashley McCollom:

Don’t ever be ashamed to ask anything, especially in this, don’t ever be ashamed or don’t ever feel like you’re the only one because you’re not. Just remember that you’re not the only one. And it does get hard and it gets lonely and it gets tough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, I want to kind of toss that to you as well. Again, as someone who’s seen this from your side working as a lawyer, but hearing these stories from folks in affected communities as far away as Hawaii to here in Ohio or anywhere else, what would you say to folks who are maybe feeling that or thinking that as they’re hearing us talk right now, what would you advise folks to do if they suspect they are also being contaminated poison, lied to about this stuff,

Kristina Baehr:

Look for The helpers and look for the truth tellers, and they’re always there. And when I was in Hawaii, I showed up in the midst of it. I mean, not November, it happened in November, but I was there the first week of January. And so I was there to help point people to the test that Ashley’s talking about to say, here’s what you need to ask your doctor. I’m showing up in East Palestine a little bit late just because I was invited late and these events kind of happened around the same time, so I was focused on Hawaii. But in each case, there are truth tellers. There is someone who worked for the railroad who tried to get on neighborhood pages and warn people about what they were being exposed to. There are good people and there are people who are telling the truth and find them and then follow them and ask questions and find each other, find the helpers, find the truth tellers, and find each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, I think again, this is really important, powerful lessons for folks listening in Washington take to heart. And before we go to our break, Christina, I have one more question that you sort of referred to earlier in our conversation. I think it’s still really hard for a lot of average Americans to confront the reality that their government is not looking out for them. I’ve heard it from affected communities who trusted the EPA when agents were telling ’em, you’re fine. And then they keep accumulating the evidence in their bodies that they’re not fine. So before we go to our final break, do you have any other kind of thoughts you wanted to share on that, about folks who are still trusting of the agency that was set up to protect us against things like this? How do we manage the sort of the truth tellers, the whistleblowers, the folks who are there who want to help residents mixed in with all these other interests that maybe don’t?

Kristina Baehr:

It was hard for me to come to terms with as I was, I used to represent the United States, and I believed I was one of the good guys and I think I was charged with doing the right thing. And so when I had people standing up in federal court, these lawyers saying that it basically didn’t happen. I was personally upset because our country is supposed to represent us. Our country is supposed to do the right thing in those circumstances, our federal officers are supposed to tell the truth. And then I learned, actually, that was a really good for me from a litigation perspective. I’m so glad they took that approach. And I hope that the railroad does the same thing because a jury and a judge, it doesn’t go far with them. But I think you’re going to learn when you’re faced with this to start trusting yourself too.

So I said find the truth tellers, find the helpers, find each other, but also find yourself because you know your mama heart or your dad a heart knows. And so trust yourself over the institutions around you, and then trust the people that you trust. And what we’re finding when I gave the example of it’s like kids are in a school and they’re smelling smoke, and the firemen came and said, stay where you are, you’re fine. That’s how the Navy acted in Hawaii. That’s what’s happening when the EPA shows up to these communities. They’re more interested in getting the economic world back on track than they are in protecting the people. And I think all of us have a lot of distrust after everything that happened with Covid. And we all learned a little bit to trust ourselves over institutions. And that’s not a bad lesson, but I also believe that these institutions can change, and I think that there are good people within them. So when you look for the helpers, you can look for the helpers in the institutions too. They’re there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, Hannah, Christina, in the final kind of 10 minutes that we have to, I wanted to focus in on where we are as of now, February, 2025. What do you, your families and your communities still need? What are the needs that are not being met? Right? Yeah. We mentioned earlier in the episode that JD Vance went and visited East Palestine on the two year anniversary of the derailment, promising that there will be more developments in terms of the Trump administration’s focus on railway safety, on holding Norfolk Southern accountable. But Vance also explicitly said that a disaster declaration, and I quote may have been very helpful 18 months ago. I don’t know that it’s still helpful today. Let’s talk about what your community still need, who is trying to meet those needs and what people watching and listening can do to help. So Ashley, I want to start with you and then Hannah, we’ll go to you

Ashley McCollom:

For how long we’ve been doing this and it doesn’t get easier. I remember doing the first interview with you and I feel like I’m not as emotional as I was in the beginning because now I’m really getting into that reality and it’s stagnant it, and there’s no help. We need either a disaster declaration or we need to be put on the national priority list because people shouldn’t still be sick. People shouldn’t feel uncomfortable in their home. Home is where you feel safe and comfortable and no one’s feeling safe and comfortable. If you’re questioning, is this from that health insurance, great, we could do that. But when you treat those things and you put those people right back into those places, how much good is that going to do? I mean, some of us are still displaced. I feel like we need help for those people that are struggling. I don’t know how to do that. I mean, there are some great people that are doing food drives for people that are less fortunate and really put everything out there for the people in town. I mean, this is a little bit bigger than what we could even anticipate.

I don’t think it’s safe. If I get sick in my house, if I go into my house, I’m sick. I mean, I’d love to move forward. Our animals get sick. They stayed in there for a day, they’d come back vomiting, they come back with excessive bowel movements, almost like when you change a dog’s dog food or they’re really sick. I mean, these are serious issues. We’re seeing serious things go on and for where we were in the beginning to now, it’s just progressing. I mean, we need some things. Looked at again and looked at more thoroughly and looked into these residents homes because we are a part of the environment. No matter what disaster you’re in, no matter how long time has passed, we are a part of that environment. We make the impact. And these people need to live there. We need to live there. And if you can’t, it’s not an environment anymore for humans.

Hannah, how about you?

Hannah Loyd:

That was pretty powerful. So I mean, like I said, I mean they earlier, they’re just kind of there and they’re not, they briefly address things. They have never ever even said they’re sorry or hold accountability or any of that. So that’s out the window, whatever. I just think that the county, the company, everyone just needs to take accountability for what happened. This isn’t the first time, it’s the fourth time people are there that are deathly sick. I mean, they’re sick and they have no other choice but to stay there unless someone just comes and rescues. I mean, we we’re almost like silence. Now it’s not really a big topic anymore. Nobody’s really talking about it. When I had to meet with a new doctor because I’m having new issues with my liver, which is very, very scary. And he said, oh yeah, I remember when that happened. My eyes were burning and all this. And I said, yeah, imagine being three years old and that happening. No one is understanding or taking accountability. They just want us almost to

Speaker 4:

Be quiet. Quit talking about it. But I mean, honestly, I think

Hannah Loyd:

That the citizens there now that are still there, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to even seek legal counsel with getting out because a lot of people are elderly people. They have nothing but their little social security check. And these are people that I grew up knowing and to see them so sick, it’s just heartbreaking and knowing I got up and left my house. So it’s almost like we just need help somewhere for these people that can’t get the help or have the means or anything. I mean, there’s a couple little different groups that are having meetings and going to churches and meetings and all this, but I mean, I don’t think that anyone is really hearing them, if that makes sense. So we just need to be heard. Again, doctors need to be guided in what and how to treat the patients because they’re the ER doctor to know that day how to treat me. And then all these other doctors don’t know what’s going on. Something doesn’t make sense. So the doctors need to know how to do the care. They need to know how to treat people. They need to know what to help people get out. Like me, my kid, get out.

So we just need to and know what’s going on. Don’t tell us that we can’t talk about it because the county’s suing and we can’t tell you why or any kind of progress. Just give us an update. Y’all did that in the beginning. Why can’t we have it now? What happened to where we can’t know anything, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. It makes grim necessary sense, right? I mean, it’s the bare minimum of what people should expect. And we can’t even get,

Hannah Loyd:

I say, like I said at the first show with you, max, even just, I’m sorry, still haven’t even gotten that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, by all appearances, it looks like we’re heading in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go in because when we use the term sacrifice zone, which is a horrible ghoulish term in a just world, that term would not exist. But when we’re saying that, what we mean is what you’ve just heard Ashley and Hannah describe it is an area where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself and have been left to flounder there to either move if they have the ability to or stay, wait and die. And that is unacceptable, and that is how we are treating more and more of our communities, whether they be in the path of toxic industrial pollution or like in intensifying weather events through manmade climate change.

The thing that is consistent is that working class communities, working people just living their lives are having their lives obliterated and having no help when they need it most. And we as a people, as a class, as humanity need to do something to band together and say, enough is enough. In the final minute or two that I have you guys, I wanted to just go around the table and ask if you had any final messages on that front to people listening to this and watching this, whether they live in a sacrifice zone or not. What do you want folks to take away from this conversation? How can we fight back and what’s going to happen if we don’t? So I guess, Ashley, let’s start with you, Hannah, and then Christina, please close us out.

Ashley McCollom:

It doesn’t hurt people that are sitting there and do not have a disaster or aren’t aware of a superfund around you. It would be good to be knowledgeable of those things. It would be good to get your water tested, your well tested, get your house tested, make sure that your heirs clean because if this happens, there’s no basis for you to have a guideline to refer back to. There’s nothing that helped us. Now, if we would’ve had our soil tested, who does that? But maybe it might not be a bad idea to spend that little extra money to have that safeguard. If this does, and it more than likely will, depending on how close you live to a rail site, a big factory, any truck could be driving down the road and spill and your normal evening could be like mine, and one minute it was there and the next it’s gone.

And as much as I like the connections I’ve made, I don’t want someone to have to reach out to me and be another Hannah. I appreciate these relationships I’ve made and I’d like to make more, but not on these circumstances. And I don’t want to see anyone else suffer and be confused and lost and be two years in a camper, not knowing where you’re going to go. This should not be anyone’s lives. Prepare yourself if you can do it, it doesn’t hurt. And be considerate of other people. Understand we’re not all going through the same things. Be kind to your neighbors because one day everything could change.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean, just

Hannah Loyd:

What she said, just be kind. We live in this world full of hate and it’s just getting worse, unfortunately. But yeah, just don’t ever hesitate to do things that you may think if you’re a mama, trust your mama gut because it’s always going to be right. If you think you’re crazy, you’re not. It’s real. It’s very real and it’s very scary. And I don’t wish this on anyone ever. I don’t wish this on any kid. I don’t wish this on any animal. I don’t wish this on anyone. But unfortunately it happens due to the negligence of people that are either not trained correctly or being short-staffed or other things that can have accidents, but just do your research if you’re going to move. Ashley helped me when I was moving. She’s like, make sure you look so you search Superfund sites, stuff like that. Make sure you know where you’re going because you don’t want to move from one disaster zone to another disaster zone. Well, who would’ve that? Because I didn’t. I just was trying to get out. So I mean, yeah, she said just connect with people, make friends be nice. Everyone is going through something you don’t know what someone’s going through. Just be nice. And there’s people out there that have gone through it or are going through it and can help you and will be there for you. I will.

Kristina Baehr:

I think that there’s a role for the law here too. I still believe in the rule of law. I still believe in our American jury system and American juries are entrusted with enforcing the safety rules. But the system only works if the people are brave enough if to bring the claims. And so I hope that one way we can help these communities is to show up and help them bring the claims because the law is about compensation for people who have been victims of negligence or worse of fraud. There’s more than just negligence here and deterrence of the bad conduct in the first place, prevention, and you can’t have one without the other. I hope that the law can be one tool in these communities for people to come together and demand change and demand truth, and demand accountability and demand the compensation that they need to get out of the contamination.

Because if you are in a contaminated house, I promise you, please make plans to leave. Do whatever you can to leave. And I know some of you think you can’t afford to leave, but you can’t afford to stay. I’ve had clients who have died in the house is I told them to leave. So one of my firm is called just well, because I truly want people to be well. And my hope and prayer for all of you who are affected from exposures is that you would get well enough to get help and to help others and to get out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our three incredible guests today, Ashley McCollum, Hannah Lloyd, and Christina Bear. We’re going to see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

The ‘isms’ that came from the Western Enlightenment boasting of human ingenuity and prowess have fallen apart. The horrific scale of genocidal violence unleashed upon Gaza exposes humanity’s blood-lust and makes us shrink from our own brutal and sadistic selves.

In the realm of international relations, the genocide of Palestinians has made it clear that the Westphalian world order based on sovereign nation-states has had its day, and that world peace is as elusive and as nebulous as it ever was.

The near-consensus of Western states and institutions over the bloodbath in Gaza shows how violence has been engendered and endemic in the very body politic of modern Western nation-states with all pillars of state and society fully complicit- policy and governance, economics and finance, education and the media. Gaza lays bare the endemic structural violence built into the bare bones of modernity. Violence of these gargantuan proportions cannot occur all of a sudden in a vacuum. It takes centuries, millennia and generations to build a system in which violence against a group becomes normalized.

Under the veneer of democratic progress, supremacist narratives of ‘other-ization’ have been transmitted inter-generationally. Metanarratives of hate and fear lie at the very root of social structures which allow genocides to happen to ‘others’ for fifteen months. Violent ideologies that dehumanize the ‘otherized’ are interwoven into the very structures of modern secular societies, normalizing and mainstreaming hate, bias, discrimination and prejudice, letting the suffering of the target group continue as a matter of course. Gaza continued to burn for 15 months while for the rest of the world it was business as usual.

But what of our shared innate humanity, our capacity to empathize? As people are fed with narratives of Western moral superiority through mainstream media and education that celebrate secular democracy and liberty as progressive ideals, voices on the contrary are discredited and silenced. When this happens over decades, only the narrative of the powerful begins to hold sway. This makes the un-seeing of another community’s suffering and erasure of its voices possible. The enormity of the suffering in Gaza is apparently not enough to move those who believe a state implanted in the Middle East by the West has the ‘right to defend itself’ using all means fair and foul.

Gaza rubbishes all hegemonic narratives of Western essentialism. It makes clear that the Western colonial project that began in the 17^th century and of whom Israel is the last vestige, never really ended. In fact, the might of the entire Western civilization is invested into the preservation of the Zionist blue-eyed boy amidst hostile brown Arabs.

Many systemic biases have come to the fore over the course of the Gaza genocide, reflected in the rhetoric of Western politicians and the way the global media covered the genocide- without, of course, ever calling it a genocide. According to Francesca Albanese in an interview with ‘The Thinking Muslim’, “There are double standards towards Palestine in the West, which are now fully exposed.”

It is important to understand the roots of this inherent bias that this rhetoric comes packed in. The roots go deep into the centuries-old deep-seated Orientalist biases in the Western imagination. Although the Jewish people have a history of victimization in Europe, over the years with the rise of the Capitalistic economy and the participation of the Jewish community in it on a global scale, Jews came to be seen as vital and central to the modern laissez faire economy. Driven by political and economic exigencies at the end of the First World War, it was Western diplomats who allowed the colonial implantation of the Jewish state upon Arab land. At the time, Europe was embroiled in conflict with the Islamic Ottoman empire, and it was expedient to get the support of the well placed and powerful Jewish community. Israel, therefore, began as a Western project. It was also a quick and ill thought-out ‘fix’ for a Western problem: the Jewish holocaust in Hitler’s Germany.

The US being the ‘land of opportunity’ attracted sizeable Jewish populations who made the best of American capitalism and thrived, developing a powerful and influential Zionist lobby. The American Jewish lobby exercises tremendous power and influence over elections as well as the global news media. The lobby works to perpetuate unconditional political and economic support for Israel in Western houses of power and to mainstream the Zionist narrative through the media.

Most of those who settled in the ‘holy land’ were immigrants and refugees from Europe and then America. Most settlers are ethnically white Europeans and bring with them the culture and values of Europe and the US. Israel therefore became part of the West in the midst of a religiously and ethnically different yet strategically important region: the Middle East. It was perceived as part of the ‘Us’ pitted against ‘Them.’ The Palestinian Arabs whose lands and homes were stolen to make way for Israel were never perceived as worthy of human rights, dignity and self-determination, as they were the hostile ‘Other’ of a different race and religion, dehumanized and negatively stereotyped.

As the tide of manic Islamophobia rose in the wake of 9/11, Israel came to be seen as the victim of the common enemy of so called ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Jihadism.’ Hence the legitimate struggle of the Palestinians came to be seen as violence and terror, and gelled perfectly well with the raison de etre of the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror.’ The Palestinian cause continued to be disregarded, even erased from the Western imagination, and Palestinians continued to be depicted as perpetrators rather than victims in Western discourse.

The same mindset has also dominated scholarship and academia. At the front of the effort to snuff out the Palestinian Solidarity Movement mushrooming in universities were academic administrations. Once again, UN Human Rights Rapporteur Ms Albanese lamented, “Human rights are only good to be taught in universities, not to be demanded in the streets trying to exercise freedom of assembly all the more for Palestine… that is what you are teaching your young generations.” Western universities which fully control higher education, academic research and scholarship have established an epistemic hegemony over Knowledge itself. The language and ideology of coloniality has infiltrated and dominated the Academy itself. It is academic scholarship from these seats of learning in the West that is mainstreamed, accorded prestige and credibility, whereas other forms of knowledge, learning and alternative education models are shorn of these.

Yet Gaza has created a paradigm shift. It has raised important questions about how lasting peace can ever be conceived within a system rooted in endemic structural violence. How can authentic knowledge be sought in an academic culture created by this epistemic hegemony of knowledge that sustains genocide and erasure?

Gaza has exposed the gaping-wide cracks beneath the veneer of modern civilization. The site of credible knowledge has begun to shift away from the Western Academy. The site of credible information has shifted away from the mainstream global news media. It is those standing against these oppressive structures- those marginalized voices- wherein a possible future for humanity resides.

The only task ahead of us worth taking up to save what remains of our humanity is to dismantle and challenge this metanarrative of coloniality and epistemic hegemony. To do so, the focus must shift away from institutions of power that have enabled the genocide. The hope to rescue our humanity is embodied by all those who have stood against the false narratives that come from powerful Western institutions: journalists, Gen Z students, poets, artists, academics and scholars, lawyers and activists, Imams and faith leaders… Their voices need to be empowered and their work needs to be projected.

Critical perspectives and voices of resistance, alternative reimagined systems of knowledge and education need to be explored and developed in order to decolonize education. In the alternative media, marginalized voices need to be mainstreamed as we question, reject and make accountable all those institutions that sustained the genocide. Engaged activism needs to continue with the same courage and spirit.

On the economic front, large corporations and enterprises that have contributed to the genocide need to be dismantled through sustained boycotts as we promote smaller cleaner businesses that do not serve political agendas.

The seismic waves for a tectonic shift to a better world where genocides are not let happen will not begin from Western corridors of power, podiums of authority or international forums. These will arise from the hearts and minds of artists, writers, poets, teachers, activists, speakers of truth, thinkers of meaningful change who can dare to dream and reimagine another world. From the debris and rubble of devastated, decimated Gaza, a new world must be birthed in order for our humanity to be salvaged.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Maryam Sakeenah.

Israel’s security cabinet has approved a long-awaited ceasefire deal with Hamas. If finalized, the ceasefire is expected to go into effect on Sunday. “The main challenge will be the second phase, and here there are many, many problems on the horizon,” says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who stresses the importance of also freeing the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel. “Again and again, Israelis always think that they are the only victims.” The announcement comes in the final week of U.S. President Joe Biden’s term as Israel prepares for the incoming Trump administration. “The only reason that Israel did not agree to this text until this week is because it didn’t have to worry about U.S. pressure,” says Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani, who explains why the limited agreement will not shift politics in Israel and Palestine. “I believe Netanyahu will do everything possible, with the collusion of certain Trump officials, to try to scuttle it after the first phase.”

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

A record number of Americans are living outside. Cities have responded by removing encampments from public spaces, a practice commonly referred to as “sweeps.” In the process, workers often take people’s belongings — including important documents, survival gear and irreplaceable mementos.

Over and over, people across the country told ProPublica they were devastated by such losses. We gave them notecards so they could explain in their own words how the sweeps have affected them.

[Here are some of their stories](https://projects.propublica.org/impact-of-homeless-sweeps-lost-belongings/).

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.

Comrade Kamala?

When bad faith critics call Harris “Communist,” maybe don’t misrepresent her policies as “price controls”? (Washington Post, 8/15/24)

For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws 

allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies. 

Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”

But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post  piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”

What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.

To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.

Just supply and demand

“According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied.” This is the wisdom offered by Josh Barro in the Atlantic (8/16/24), who added that “in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.” He chose not to elaborate beyond the 101 level.

The Wall Street Journal (8/20/24) sought the guidance of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who is indeed the author of the most widely used economics textbook in US colleges. He conceded that price intervention could be warranted in markets with monopolistic conditions. However, the Journal gently explained to readers, “the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much.” Mankiw elaborated: “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”

Rampell’s opinion piece in the Washington Post (8/15/24) claimed that, under Harris’s proposal, “supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.” Rampell apparently believes (or wants readers to believe) that grocery prices are currently set by nothing more than supply and demand.

The problem is that the grocery and food processing industries are not competitive markets. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian (7/14/21) and Food and Water Watch showed the extent to which food production in the United States is controlled by a limited group of corporations:

A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…. A few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.

While there is no strict definition for an oligopolistic market, this level of market concentration enables firms to set prices as they wish. Reporting by Time (1/14/22) listed Pepsi, Kroger, Kellogg’s and Tyson as examples of food production companies who boasted on the record about their ability to increase prices beyond higher costs during the pandemic.

Noncompetitive market conditions are also present farther down the supply chain. Nationally, the grocery industry is not quite as concentrated as food production (the pending Kroger/Albertsons merger notwithstanding). However, unlike a food retailer, consumers have little geographical or logistical flexibility to shop around for prices. 

The Herfindahl Hirschman Index is a measure of market concentration; markets with an HHI over 1,800 are “highly concentrated.” 

The USDA Economic Research Service has found that between 1990 and 2019, retail food industry concentration has increased, and the industry is at a level of “high concentration” in most counties. Consumers in rural and small non-metro counties are most vulnerable to noncompetitive market conditions. 

The Federal Trade Commission pointed the finger at large grocers in a 2024 report. According to the FTC, grocery retailers’ revenue increases outstripped costs during the pandemic, resulting in increased profits, which “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.” The report also accused “some larger retailers and wholesalers” of using their market position to gain better terms with suppliers, causing smaller competitors to suffer.

Unchecked capitalism is good, actually

If one still wishes to critique Harris’s proposal, taking into account that the food processing and retail industries are not necessarily competitive, the next best argument is that free-market fundamentalism is good, and Harris is a villain for getting in the way of it.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter (and mutual fund director) Roger Lowenstein took this tack in a New York Times guest essay (8/27/24). He claimed Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal and Donald Trump’s newly proposed tariff amount to “equal violence to free-market principles.” (The only violence under capitalism that seems to concern Lowenstein, apparently, is that done toward free enterprise.) 

Lowenstein critiqued Harris for threatening to crack down on innocent, opportunistic business owners he likened to Henry Ford (an antisemite and a union-buster), Steve Jobs (a price-fixing antitrust-violator, according to the Times—5/2/14) and Warren Buffett (an alleged monopolist)–intending such comparisons as compliments, not criticisms. Harris and Trump, he wrote, are acting 

as if production derived from central commands rather than from thousands of businesses and millions of individuals acting to earn a living and maximize profits.

If this policy proposal is truly tantamount to state socialism, in the eyes of Lowenstein, perhaps he lives his life constantly lamenting the speed limits, safety regulations and agricultural subsidies that surround him. Either that, or he is jumping at the opportunity to pontificate on free market utopia, complete with oligarchs and an absent government, with little regard to the actual policy he purports to critique.

A problem you shouldn’t solve

Roger Lowenstein (NYT, 8/27/24) informed unenlightened readers that high food prices are “a problem that no longer exists.”

Depending on which articles you choose to read, inflation is alternately a key political problem for the Harris campaign, or a nonconcern. “Perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest political vulnerability is the run-up in prices that occurred during the Biden administration,” reported the New York Times (9/10/24). The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) also acknowledged that Biden-era inflation is “a real political issue for Ms. Harris.”

Pieces from both of these publications have also claimed the opposite: Inflation is already down, and thus Harris has no reason to announce anti-inflation measures. Lowenstein (New York Times, 8/27/24) claimed that the problem of high food prices “no longer exists,” and Rampell (Washington Post, 8/15/24) gloated that the battle against inflation has “already been won,” because price levels have increased only 1% in the last year. The very same Post editorial (8/16/24) that acknowledged inflation as a liability for Harris chided her for her anti-price-gouging proposal, claiming “many stores are currently slashing prices.”

It is true that the inflation rate for groceries has declined. However, this does not mean that Harris’s proposals are now useless. This critique misses two key points.

First, there are certain to be supply shocks, and resultant increases in the price level, in the future. COVID-19 was an unprecedented crisis in its breadth; it affected large swathes of the economy simultaneously. However, supply shocks happen in specific industries all the time, and as climate change heats up, there is no telling what widespread crises could envelop the global economy. As such, there is no reason not to create anti-price-gouging powers so that Harris may be ready to address the next crisis as it happens.

Second, the price level of food has stayed high, even as producer profit margins have increased. As Teachout  (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) explained, anti-price-gouging legislation is tailored specifically to limit these excess profits, not higher prices. While food prices will inevitably react to higher inflation rates, the issue Harris seeks to address is the bad-faith corporations who take advantage of a crisis to reap profits.

Between January 2019 and July 2024, food prices for consumers increased by 29%. Meanwhile, profits for the American food processing industry have more than doubled, from a 5% net profit margin in 2019 to 12% in early 2024. Concerning retailers, the FTC found that

consumers are still facing the negative impact of the pandemic’s price hikes, as the Commission’s report finds that some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today.

In other words, Harris’s proposal would certainly apply in today’s economy. While the price level has steadied for consumers, it has declined for grocers. This is price gouging, and this is what Harris seeks to end.

Gimmicks and pandering

Once the media simultaneously conceded that inflation is over, and continued to claim inflation is a political problem, a new angle was needed to find Harris’s motivation for proposing such a controversial policy. What was settled on was an appeal to the uneducated electorate.

Barro’s headline in the Atlantic (8/16/24) read “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” He claimed that the anti-price-gouging plan “likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics,” but will appeal to the voters, who “in their infinite wisdom” presumably know nothing about the economic realities governing their lives.

The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) wrote that Harris, “instead of delivering a substantial plan…squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” Steven Kamin, writing in the Hill (8/23/24), rued “what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”

Denouncing Harris’s policies as pandering to the uneducated median voter, media are able to acknowledge the political salience of inflation while still ridiculing Harris for trying to fix it. By using loaded terms like “populist,” pundits can dismiss the policy without looking at its merits, never mind the fact that the proposal has the support of experts. As Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/19/24) pointed out in relation to Harris’s proposal, “just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”

If a publication wishes to put the kibosh on a political idea, it is much easier to dismiss it out of hand than to legitimately grapple with the people and ideas that may defend it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to assume the role of the adult in the room, and belittle a popular and beneficial policy as nothing more than red meat for the non–Ivy League masses.

Inflation and economic policy are complicated. Media coverage isn’t helping.

Perhaps the second easiest way to dismiss a popular policy is to simply obfuscate the policy and the relevant issues. The economics behind Kamala Harris’s proposed agenda are “complicated,” we are told by the New York Times (8/15/24). This story certainly did its best to continue complicating the economic facts behind the proposal. Times reporters Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek wrote that

the Harris campaign announcement on Wednesday cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not respond on Thursday to questions about the evidence Ms. Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.

Has the meatpacking industry become more consolidated, contributing to “excessive grocery prices”? The New York Times (8/15/24) couldn’t be bothered to do basic reporting like checking the USDA website—which, in addition to showing clear consolidation, also noted that evidence suggests there have been “increased profits for meatpackers” since 2016.

Generally, when the word “but” is used, the following clause will refute or contradict the prior. However, the Times chose not to engage with Harris’s concrete example and instead moved on to critiquing the vagueness of her campaign proposal. The Times did the reader a disservice by not mentioning that the meat industry has in fact been consolidating, to the detriment of competitive market conditions and thus to the consumer’s wallet. Four beef processing companies in the United States control 85% of the market, and they have been accused of price-fixing and engaging in monopsonistic practices (Counter, 1/5/22). However to the Times, the more salient detail is the lack of immediate specificity of a campaign promise.

Another way to obfuscate the facts of an issue is to only look at one side of the story. A talking point espoused by commentators like Rampell is that the grocery industry is operating at such thin margins that any decrease in prices would bankrupt them (Washington Post, 8/15/24). Rampell wrote:

Profit margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin. Despite Harris’s (and [Elizabeth] Warren’s) accusations about “excessive corporate profits,” those margins remained relatively meager even when prices surged. The grocery industry’s net profit margins peaked at 3% in 2020, falling to 1.6% last year.

This critique is predicated on Harris’s policies constituting price controls. Because Harris is proposing anti-price-gouging legislation, the policy would only take effect when corporations profiteer under the cover of rising inflation. If they are truly so unprofitable, they have nothing to fear from this legislation.

The other problem with this point is that it’s not really true. The numbers Rampell relied on come from a study by the Food Marketing Institute (which prefers to be called “FMI, the Food Industry Association”), a trade group for grocery retailers. The FTC, in contrast, found that 

food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs.

Yale economist Ernie Tedeschi (Wall Street Journal, 8/20/24) also “points out that margins at food and beverage retailers have remained elevated relative to before the pandemic, while margins at other retailers, such as clothing and general merchandise stores, haven’t.” In other words, if you look at sources outside of the grocery industry, it turns out the picture for grocers is a little rosier.

British economist Joan Robinson once wrote that the purpose of studying economics is primarily to avoid being deceived by economists. It takes only a casual perusal of corporate media to see that, today, she is more right than ever.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Paul Hedreen.

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy discusses ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hostility to compromise and the Biden administration’s ineffectual mediation. Contrary to its claims of brokering peace, the U.S. “will continue to send the weapons” Israel uses to devastate Gaza, unremittingly fueling an increasingly unpopular war, says Levy, who is now president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

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

This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have-nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

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

Wow. Just like the "stable genius" and "very innocent man" predicted, it turns out "even Mother Teresa could not beat these charges" - 'cause she too evidently had Michael Cohen pay off an adult film star she banged - which is why a blessed jury of regular Americans found Trump guilty of all 34 charges in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the 2016 election so we wouldn't know what an utter scumbag he is. Now, of course, we do. A good day.

Along with his endless squealing and whining about a witch hunt - aka a demand for accountability for just a few of his many crimes - Trump this week outlandishly compared himself to Mother Teresa, the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Catholic missionary canonized in 2016 for her humanitarian work with the poor in Kolkata, India. God knows she had her own issues: Skeptics called her "an emotional con artist," anti-abortion zealot and outright sadist who clung to often-inadequate care of the sick and dying because their suffering brought them closer to God, just like Jesus would have wanted. Still, the Narcissist-in Chief adding her to the lofty, bonkers stable of luminaries he's just like - Lincoln, Washington, Mandela, Elvis and of course Jesus, along with the more dubious Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter - was a bridge of cognitive dissonance too far. "I'm sorry," said one baffled observer. "Did Trump pretty much just say Mother Theresa slept with Stormy Daniels and paid her off?" Yes. Yes, he did. Nothing to see here.

— (@)

Starting out, he also - E.B. White wept - charged Judge Juan Merchan with "confliction." As in, "I would say, in listening to the charges from the judge, who's, as you know, very conflicted and corrupt, because of the confliction, very, very corrupt..." he blathered, before launching into the killer claim that, "Mother Teresa could not beat these charges." "These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged. The whole country's a mess...You have a trial like this where the judge is so conflicted he can't breathe....It's a disgrace. Mother Teresa could not beat those charges, but we'll see. We'll see how we do." Well, now we know how he did. Watch Rachel Maddow and her straight-faced colleagues count down the "definitive" guilty verdicts, 1 to 34. A moment for the ages. Each, for a class "E" felony, carries a maximum sentence of four years. Don't hold your breath on prison for a first-time offender, but still: Now he's a twice-impeached, legally adjudicated rapist with 34 felony convictions - who, hallelujah, can't get a real estate license.

— (@)

"This is a very sad day for America," the perp sulked. "The whole world is watching." Yes, gleefully. It's also "a very sad day for New York," which will now lose "trillions" of dollars in business because he was "treated very, very badly." Just like the massive outraged crowds, numbering five or six sad slouches, who daily converged at the courthouse to demand he be freed from "these fascists and these thugs that are destroying us (with) everything they do," also from a jury of random New Yorkers, each braver than every slimy GOP lawmaker (sic) who trudged there in fealty. When the verdicts were announced, hear the cheers outside as the guilty counts roll in: "Count 1,2,3,4...up to.24...guilty on all 34 charges." See the giddy headlines: "Queens Man Convicted." Read the shiny new Wikipedia entry for DJT: "American politician, media personality, businessman and convicted felon." And on behalf of Mother Teresa, see Franklin Graham's earlier plea to join him in prayer: "We pray that God's will be done." It was. Maddow: "The test for us as a country starts right now."

Update: The New Yorker was ready. So was the Grifter-In-Chief's political machine. Within four minutes of the verdict, his campaign sent out a rabid fundraising pitch shrieking, "I am a political prisoner!" and "JUSTICE IS DEAD IN AMERICA!", decrying his enemies' "sick & twisted goal (that) proud supporters like YOU will SPIT when you hear my name." He also posted a darkly threatening video: "This is our final battle." David Frum, on Trump's Florida opposing voting by felons but not for felons, following "the foundational rule "if you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold." Heather Cox Richardson: "Today, twelve ordinary Americans did what Republican senators refused to do. They protected the rule of law and held Trump accountable for his attempt to rig an election...In a court of law, where prosecutors brought facts, witnesses were under oath, and jurors did not need him to keep them in positions of power, he lost."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces raided the northern city of Jenin early Tuesday morning, killing at least eight Palestinians, including a doctor shot dead on his way to work and a teenager riding his bicycle. About a dozen others were injured, including a journalist. Motasem Abu Hasan, an actor at The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp who escaped the invasion, describes the ongoing attack on the camp. “They are shooting everything,” says Abu Hasan. The Freedom Theatre was about to premiere their first play since October 7 as part of their wider effort to share the Palestinian narrative and “reveal the truth about the Israeli occupation.” The raid began just as Spain, Ireland and Norway became the latest European states to recognize the Palestinian state. “It’s a result of the cultural intifada,” says Abu Hasan. “That’s why we really believe in the power of narrative, especially in The Freedom Theatre, in Palestine, in Jenin camp.”

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

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Nearly 100 people crowded into the library in Calvert City, Kentucky, in February when the Environmental Protection Agency hosted a public meeting on air pollution. Many had discovered flyers in their mailboxes explaining how the agency had found “elevated levels” of chemicals that “can pose an increased risk of cancer.”

The EPA aimed to deliver a simple message that evening: Local petrochemical plants were leaking toxic air pollutants and regulators were working to fix them. And what played out next was predictable to anyone who has been to one of these meetings. There were concerned questions (Would you hesitate to live here? What are you going to do today?), unsatisfying answers (We’re working with the plants on voluntary measures) and pleas for action that regulators said couldn’t happen “overnight.”

What made this meeting remarkable, however, was a sobering truth that bubbled up amid the exasperated grumbles and earnest assurances.

Once a community becomes a hot spot for these pollutants, it’s nearly impossible to clean it up for good. In fact, ProPublica found, such a success story is virtually unheard of.

In 2021, we published a cutting-edge national map of more than 1,000 communities that had become what are known as “sacrifice zones” — areas caught in clouds of cancerous pollution that seep from the refineries, chemical plants and plastic producers that power America. We highlighted all of the ways state and federal regulators had failed to protect those places, by not installing air monitors, or alerting residents, or penalizing polluters.

In Calvert City, though, all of that had already happened.

Since the early 2000s, monitors near three facilities owned by Westlake Corp. have captured alarming levels of ethylene dichloride, which is linked to stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer and leukemia. One was found emitting more of it than any other industrial facility in America.

ProPublica has written stories about the city’s problem, and the local news has followed up.

The U.S. Department of Justice has even gotten involved, forcing the company to pay a $1 million fine and spend another $110 million to fix equipment at its facilities in Calvert City and Louisiana.

None of it had stopped the poison.

Westlake didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company previously told the nonprofit newsroom Kentucky Lantern that it would work with environmental regulators and had “engaged a consultant” to study the EPA’s air-monitoring report. In response to the $1 million fine from 2022, Westlake told Law360 that it was “​​pleased to have reached an agreement with the United States Environmental Protection Agency and is making investments to reduce environmental emissions in concert with the company’s sustainability strategy.”

In an interview, EPA officials said they have inspected Westlake’s facilities, have updated a federal rule on industrial pollution and are working with Westlake on voluntary measures to reduce emissions in Calvert City.

“EPA is concerned about the concentrations here, and we are committed to protecting public health in this community,” said Daniel Garver, an environmental scientist in the EPA office that oversees Kentucky.

During the meeting, an older man on oxygen said he wished he’d been warned before he moved to town years ago. A woman who had never worked in a chemical plant, but had developed a rare cancer linked with industrial workers, asked the EPA to offer community cancer screenings.

And Steve Miracle, the school district superintendent, was worried about his youngest students. An air monitor near the elementary school playground had captured toxic concentrations that were many times the level that triggers EPA concern for cancer risk.

Thus far, the best fix regulators had offered were indoor air filters at the school, which would do nothing to protect the kids the moment they stepped outside.

Talking to ProPublica earlier that day, Miracle asked, “Is it going to take another two years before we get a solution in place?”

Through interviews with air pollution experts, former EPA employees and public health professionals, ProPublica found it will likely take much longer — if real change happens at all.

We asked environmental experts if they knew of communities where excess toxic air pollutants had been tamed after regulators and residents interceded.

“I don’t know of one,” said Jim Pew, an attorney at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “I think the answer is really depressing.”

The inability to stop Westlake from polluting is really an indictment of the rules that govern toxic air pollution, experts told ProPublica. Scott Throwe, a former senior EPA enforcement official, put it this way: If Westlake followed every regulation, the emissions “would still be significant.”

The EPA regulates only a handful of pollutants with enforceable standards for outdoor air quality. Air monitors track those compounds, like particulate matter and lead, and when concentrations hit a certain limit, regulators must intervene to bring them down. That might involve limiting the construction of new industrial plants or requiring emissions testing on residents’ cars.

The law governing ethylene dichloride doesn’t work like that. The EPA regulates it and 187 similar air toxics in a less direct way, by enforcing standards for the technology that polluters must install to lower emissions.

A facility like Westlake has dozens of smokestacks, tanks and other points where air toxics are supposed to be released. The company has to install pollution-control equipment on these devices to reduce emissions.

Many of them have specific emissions limits, like 2 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour. But there’s little to no direct air monitoring to ensure the limit is met, and generally no cap on the total emissions that are allowed to come from a plant. If one of the Westlake facilities expands production and adds three smokestacks permitted at 10 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour, it’s not required to cut back on 10 pounds in another part of the facility.

And not all air toxics come out where they’re supposed to. So-called “fugitive” emissions can escape from pumps, valves and thousands of other places. Westlake is supposed to conduct routine maintenance to identify and repair leaks. But at the end of the day, no one knows exactly how many tons of air toxics are streaming out of a particular plant.

The law has a backstop to alleviate these weaknesses: Every eight years, the EPA is supposed to review its chemical plant regulations and update them as needed. That might involve requiring newer and better pollution-control technology. Additionally, the EPA might conduct risk studies by estimating the total amount of air toxics coming from these plants and modeling how they disperse into communities. If the results show a lot of residents at high risk, that adds urgency to tightening controls.

But the agency is so understaffed that these reviews can take decades. Westlake Vinyls, one of the plants in Calvert City, got a stricter rule in April for many of its processes — the first revision since 2006.

EPA rarely conducts these reviews for industrial polluters until they’re “practically under pain of death to do it,” often due to lawsuits from environmental groups, Throwe said.

There’s ample evidence that Westlake’s emissions have gotten out of hand. The Calvert City facilities have been repeatedly fined for leaking air toxics since at least 2010. When the EPA inspected the plants in September 2022 — several months after ProPublica wrote about alarming air-monitoring results — inspectors found multiple leaks, including one estimated at 170,000 parts per million. Throwe called it a “huge” deal, considering the EPA typically counts anything above 500 parts per million as a leak. In April 2023, EPA inspectors showed up with experts from the agency’s National Enforcement Investigations Center, an elite unit whose involvement shows the case’s escalating importance. They documented additional problems in an inspection report, including a pipe with “a visible gap or hole allowing emissions to be released.”

But EPA staff are spread thin. The National Enforcement Investigations Center has five inspectors handling air-pollution violations. They’re supported by additional inspectors from other EPA offices; the one in charge of Kentucky refused to say how many air-pollution inspectors they have. (The vast majority of inspections are conducted by state and local regulators. The EPA has more of an oversight role.)

To wrap up its most recent investigation, the EPA can’t just lean on the dozen or so leaks its inspectors witnessed. If the agency wants real improvements from Westlake, it needs proof of systemic problems. It needs to examine Westlake’s records for patterns of poor maintenance and prior leaks, a labor-intensive process that could take many months.

“It is totally unacceptable” for the EPA not to act more quickly to protect the public, said Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities on air pollution. She said the agency should know which parts of the facilities are prone to leaks based on its history and target enforcement to immediately fix those weak spots.

Once the EPA is ready to penalize Westlake, any kind of significant fine requires input from the Department of Justice, Throwe said. If the agency accepts an EPA referral, he said, negotiating a settlement with Westlake could take three to five years.

Then, whatever penalty comes out of this process would be added to the other fines the company has faced in the past.

The recent $1 million fine, for example, took eight years to levy.

The company’s net worth is $19 billion.

Residents are tired of waiting for the pollution to stop. “It’s time for EPA to really take some action,” Jim Borders, a retired credit union manager, said at the meeting, calling the government’s recent fine “chump change.”

When an EPA scientist mentioned how the agency was continuing to take air samples, a resident interrupted, “You’ve been monitoring for years!”

The updated EPA regulations for Westlake Vinyls could make a real difference, said Michael Koerber, former deputy director of EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. The new rule, released this month, is giving chemical plants like Westlake a two-year deadline to install ethylene dichloride air monitors along their perimeters. If concentrations exceed a certain limit, Westlake would need to investigate the cause and fix the leaks responsible for high emissions.

Koerber said the monitors could provide an early warning system and force faster repairs.

The state’s regulatory agency is working with Westlake to adopt the new regulations sooner than required, said John Mura, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Kentucky will also apply state guidelines for cancer risk “to protect the health of Calvert City residents,” he added.

The samples merit urgent action, particularly the ones captured around the elementary school, said Koerber. The federal agency calculated that the air toxics raised chronic cancer risk to 60 in a million — meaning that if 1 million people were continuously exposed to those levels for 70 years, 60 people would likely develop cancer. That far exceeds the level that triggers EPA concern but is still below the maximum level the EPA considers acceptable.

“If I’m a parent sending my kid to this school? I’d be concerned,” Koerber said.

Children are particularly vulnerable to this kind of pollution, said Carol Ziegler, a family nurse practitioner and co-founder of the Climate, Health and Energy Equity Lab at Vanderbilt University. “Those numbers are just appalling,” she said, adding that they raise a key question: “How many sick kids are OK with you?”

Rhonda Fratzke, the woman who asked the EPA for cancer screenings, fears the pollution has caused illnesses that are difficult to diagnose. Several years ago, Fratzke learned she had angiosarcoma of the liver — a rare cancer linked to workers who handle vinyl chloride, a colorless gas used to make plastic. Fratzke lived near one of the Westlake facilities for nine years while it released vast plumes of the compound. Now, the 62-year-old just wants to see her teenage granddaughter graduate from high school. “With what time I got, I want people to know that it is your right to stand up and say, ‘Hey, just fix it.’”

Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to help communities like Calvert City. If residents want to see the best results they can get, they should look to Louisville, Kentucky, the closest experts could come to finding a partial success story. Air toxics from Rubbertown, a part of the city with a cluster of industrial plants, had affected nearby neighborhoods — largely populated by communities of color — for decades.

In 2005, local officials adopted an air toxics reduction program that was stricter than the EPA’s. Eboni Cochran, a homeschool mom and co-director of the grassroots group Rubbertown Emergency ACTion, said her organization was largely responsible for getting community support. Volunteers packed government hearings, held protests and canvassed neighborhoods to collect thousands of signed postcards urging officials to act. The group was following in the footsteps of years of activism led by the Rev. Louis Coleman Jr., who died in 2008.

Cochran said the program led to initial improvements. Even before it was fully in place, one major polluter drastically reduced its emissions, she said.

But no victory is final, Cochran added. There were years without air monitoring due to inadequate funding, and residents still complain about ineffective investigations, she said. Cochran has repeatedly sacrificed time with her husband and son to continue her advocacy.

With this kind of community work, she said, “99.9% of the time there’s no clear win.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lisa Song.

In a momentous day for the quest to keep Israel and its allies accountable for its brutal war on Gaza, members of leading Palestinian human rights groups, residents of Gaza, and Palestinian Americans argued in a U.S. District Court on Friday that the Biden administration should halt its financial and military support for Israel and uphold its obligations to prevent genocide.

The arguments came in a lawsuit that the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, filed in November against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, charging them with complicity and failure to prevent the “unfolding genocide” in the occupied strip. Testifying either in person at the Oakland, California, courthouse or remotely from Palestine, the plaintiffs spoke for nearly three hours about the deliberate devastation wrought by Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks. 

The hearing commenced hours after the International Court of Justice in The Hague found that it’s plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza, in a case brought by South Africa. While the United Nations court fell short of ordering an immediate ceasefire, a panel of judges delivered a historic set of rulings and denied Israel’s request to dismiss the case. A final resolution in that case is expected to take years.

Lawyers involved with the lawsuit playing out in federal court said that the ICJ ruling bolsters their case. Their lawsuit argues that Biden, Blinken, and Austin are liable under U.S. law for failing to uphold their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. In Oakland, dozens of people lined up outside the courthouse hours before the hearing on Friday, according to organizers on the ground, while the Zoom stream reached its capacity of 1,000 people tuning in.

The Biden administration has maintained that genocide allegations against Israel are “meritless” and “unhelpful” while on Friday, U.S. government attorneys argued the court has no standing to decide on what they say is a matter of foreign policy. Plaintiffs meanwhile, including several Palestinian Americans, spoke powerfully about the need for the U.S. government to take immediate action to save lives. 

In the last three months, Israel’s has killed at least 25,000 Palestinians — one in every 100 residents of Gaza. 

Laila el-Haddad, a Palestinian American writer and one of the plaintiffs in the case, described her neighborhood being reduced to “a large pile of sand” and the killing of dozens of her relatives, including some who were buried in mass graves. 

“My family is being killed on my dime,” she told the court. “President Biden could, with one phone call, put an end to this.” 

A view of devastation due to Israeli attacks as Palestinians, who had returned to the area, try to gather salvageable belongings from the debris of their destroyed homes in the Al-Zawaida region of Deir Al-Balah, Gaza, on Jan. 20, 2024.

Questions of Law

At the hearing, U.S. Judge Jeffrey S. White went to some length to state the impact of Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians and the U.S. government’s support for it but indicated the case might ultimately hinge on questions of jurisdiction. 

“The Palestinian people are living in fear and without food, medical care, clean water, or sufficient humanitarian aid. Defendants — the president of the United States and his secretaries of state and defense — have provided substantial military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel,” he said. 

“However, the primary concern for this court is the limitation of its own jurisdictional reach.” 

He later described the case as one of the “the most difficult” of his career. “You have been seen, you have been heard by this court,” he told the plaintiffs. “I’m going to take it extremely seriously.”

CCR and Justice Department attorneys deliberated for more than an hour about the court’s standing to hear the case. Attorneys for the plaintiffs referenced a different legal case accusing Russia of genocide in Ukraine, which the U.S. government has supported, to point to the Biden administration’s awareness of its responsibility to take steps to prevent genocide.

Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at CCR, stressed that the case is not a “wholesale challenge to U.S. military support to Israel.” 

“This case does not present the court with a political question,” she added. “These are not questions of policy. These are questions of law.”

Justice Department attorney Jean Lin, for her part, referenced a legal concept known as the “political question doctrine” to argue the court has no authority over foreign policy matters. “It’s a long-standing doctrine that the court has no jurisdiction to enjoin the president in his exercise of official duties,” she said.

“This court is not the proper forum,” she said in her closing remarks.

“Judges and courts have roles to play in enforcing and making real this duty that all of us in this world have to prevent a genocide,” CCR senior attorney Pamela Spees said in her closing remarks. “And the government’s only response is to say to this court that it can’t even engage with the question.”

“Everything Has Been Destroyed” 

The legal argument was followed by nearly three hours of testimony by the plaintiffs, which include the human rights groups Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq, as well as Gaza residents Ahmed Abu Artema, the founder of the 2018 Great March of Return; Omar Al-Najjar, a 24-year-old doctor; and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh, all of whom have lost many relatives since the war started. The plaintiffs also include Palestinian Americans whose families in Gaza have been subjected to a relentless bombing campaign by Israel.

Al-Najjar called into the hearing from a hospital hallway in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Wearing scrubs, he described a medical infrastructure that is overwhelmed and on the brink of collapse, heavy shelling and gun fighting near medical facilities, and medical workers coming under attack in areas the Israeli military had declared safe. 

“I have lost everything in this war … I have nothing but my grief,” he told the court. “This is what Israel and its supporters have done to us.” 

Ahmed Abofoul, a Palestinian lawyer and legal researcher at Al-Haq, testified from the courthouse that he lost 60 relatives on his father’s side of the family alone, 15 in a single airstrike, and that many of their bodies remain under the rubble. His cousin, he said, has been unable to retrieve the bodies of his five children, as the Israeli military fires at him whenever he tries to approach his destroyed home. Abofoul described not being able to get in touch with some family members after the war started and other relatives, including children, with no access to food and water. 

“People are struggling to have anything to survive on,” he said. “Those who survive the bombing most likely will not survive staying in this condition.” 

Abofoul also put the current onslaught in the context of the forced displacement of Palestinians since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Pleading with his grandfather to evacuate to a different part of the territory after the war started, Abofoul’s relatives reassured the grandfather he would eventually return home. “That is exactly what they told me in 1948,” he responded, echoing fears by tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians that Israel is seeking to drive them out for good. 

Schools, universities, churches, and even Gaza’s archives were destroyed in the ongoing war, Abofoul added. “Everything has been destroyed,” he said, “The Gaza that we know no longer exists.” 

El-Haddad, the writer, told the court that she felt an obligation as an American to bring the lawsuit against the Biden administration and that hearing “our president not only actively support this, but cast doubt on the deaths of my family members and other college students in Gaza” had made her feel “dehumanized” and “completely invisible.”

“I felt it was my duty as an American whose taxes and government have been directly responsible for the deaths of my family,” she added. “My government is complicit in this ongoing genocide against my family and the destruction of everything that I knew and I loved.”

Barry Trachtenberg, a professor of Jewish history and author of two books about the Holocaust, testified as an expert witness in the case – over repeated objections from Justice Department attorneys. When he filed his declaration in the case in November, he said, some 11,000 Palestinians had been killed. Today, that number is far greater.

“Everything that we feared and more is unfolding,” he said, noting that often, legal actions about genocide happen long after the fact. “What makes this situation so unique is that we’re watching the genocide unfold as we speak. And we’re in this incredibly unique position where we can actually intervene to stop it using the mechanisms of international law that are available to us.”

A screenshot of U.S. President Joe Biden delivering a live televised address on Israel’s war on Gaza on Oct. 10, 2023.

A Historic Case 

CCR’s 89-page complaint lays out, in painstaking detail, statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials, paired with affirmations by U.S. officials that they would back Israel’s war effort with every tool at their disposal. 

“The highest level of Israel’s senior political and military leadership made statements on October 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, laying out that they intended, in effect, to destroy Gaza,” Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at CCR and one of the lead attorneys on the case, said on Intercepted last week. “And as the statements of intent were being made, senior levels of the United States government — including President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin — were likewise making declarations about their intentions in the coming days, weeks, months … And that was to give unconditional and complete support to Israel.”

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined as the intention to destroy or partially destroy a group of people based on their ethnic, religious, racial, or national identity, either by direct killing or by the creation of conditions making life impossible. While Israel has for decades flouted international law standards and ignored rebukes, including by the ICJ, the Israeli government’s actions in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks were “qualitatively different,” Gallagher said. 

Two days after the attacks, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered mass war crimes when he announced “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said then, a threat that Israel has since largely delivered on. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

As Israel unleashed an onslaught that quickly outpaced any recent conflicts for the number and pace of deaths, human rights groups warned the Biden administration that its unconditional support for Israel risked making it complicit in the crime of genocide.

Josh Paul, a former senior State Department official who resigned over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza and filed a declaration in support of the CCR case, said on Friday morning, “Since October 7th, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the transfer of arms to Israel both through the speeding up of previously authorized transfers and through the ramming through Congress of so-called emergency sales of thousands of rounds of tanks, ammunition, and alternative shells.”

“The U.S. has likely transferred munitions totaling in the tens of thousands since October 7 to Israel,” he added, speaking at a briefing CCR hosted on Friday morning. “This also demonstrates, I think, the significant amount of leverage that we have if we wanted to push Israel to end or curtail its operations in Gaza.”

“None of this could be done without the U.S. government,” echoed Ata Hindi, a lawyer who helped draft an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit on behalf of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, at the event preceding the hearing. “It’s for the United States to say whether or not, through its weapons in particular, whether or not this genocide continues.” 

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, he noted, was “drowned” in complaints by Palestinian Americans who accused the U.S. government of discriminating against them. “It’s unfortunate to see how little the U.S. government in particular has paid attention to these American citizens and their families,” said Hindi. “And we hope that the court will do something to change that.” 

The lawsuit has garnered significant international attention, with 77 legal and civil society groups from around the world backing it in a late December briefing to the court. They argued that the U.S. is violating its duties under international law to prevent and not be complicit in genocide, contributing to the erosion of “long and widely-held norms of international law,” like the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The U.S. federal case is one of a number of legal efforts stemming from Israel’s war on Gaza. In another U.S. lawsuit, Palestinian Americans have accused the administration of failing to protect U.S. citizens in Gaza and denying them equal protection, a constitutional right. That lawsuit argues that U.S. officials have not done as much to evacuate U.S. citizens trapped in Gaza as they did for Israeli Americans. 

One-third of Americans — and nearly half of the country’s Democrats — believe Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

In addition to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the ICJ, a group of South African lawyers have also indicated their intent, pending the court’s early rulings, to bring civil action against the U.S. and British governments over their support for Israel’s actions. Other countries have also filed separate complaints against Israel before the ICJ. 

The cascading cases against Israel are a remarkable development for a country that has for decades acted with impunity, largely thanks to unwavering U.S. support. In a further sign of waning support, a poll released this week issued its own verdict: One-third of Americans — and nearly half of the country’s Democrats — believe Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

Behold, in Gaza, there is no new year, just old afflictions - life in tents without water or blankets, point-blank death for children and grandmothers, half the population starving, the broken and displaced "living out our nightmares before we even dream them" as Western leaders declaim their genocidal fantasies. For Jews, writes Abe Louise Young, the times call for confronting "the killing myth" that is Israel, "an anathema to faith, an equation with an error: A country built on top of another country (that) is not the way home."

On Thursday, Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the U.K., said the quiet rabid part out loud when she argued Israel must destroy all of Gaza because "every school, every mosque, every second house" sits on a tunnel - even though most tunnels in Gaza were built decades ago by Israel - thus offering up on British national radio what critics agree is now an alarmingly common, clear "call for genocide." Her candor was grimly praised by U.K. journalist Robert Carter for exposing "how evil Israel's colonialist project is and what (its) true ambitions are - the total genocide and land theft of all Palestine." And so it goes. The Israeli assault on Gaza, as well as the West Bank, lurches bloodily on, with harrowing stories of mass executions of families, bodies left in the street for days under Israeli gunfire, prisoners forced to strip, adults going hungry to feed their kids, the forced departure of residents from their longtime "home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world." "This year has been very bad," says a mother of five forced to flee to multiple schools. "When my daughters look at pictures from the past they start to cry. We have lost everything beautiful."

Under the brutal, random orders of an Israeli military that views as "terrorists" anyone who doesn't comply with the latest evacuation order, families are forced to repeatedly flee from home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood. Across Gaza City last month, that pitiless policy brought multiple deaths. In one neighborhood, Moemen Raed al-Khaldi lay wounded and still for three days amidst the bodies of his dead relatives after soldiers suddenly stormed their house; they told the family to leave in Hebrew, which none of them understood, and in the ensuing confusion they shot dead his grandfather, grandmother, uncle, a pregnant woman and several others staying there. Nearby, his six year-old cousin also survived after soldiers shot his parents in front of him. In al-Rimal neighbourhood, soldiers ordered 24 residents of a building to evacuate; retired UN worker Kamel Mohammed Nofal was explaining that his four adult children, there with their spouses and nine children, were deaf and blind when soldiers shot him dead. At least 11 others were killed in al-Rimal, including an 8-year-old girl; the UN is investigating it as a(nother) war crime.

For those Gazans who survive, 90% have been displaced and Israel continues to call for evacuation from more and more areas, most recently around Khan Younis, where over 620,000 people once lived. Perhaps half of them have now fled to coastal Al-Mawasi, an empty, narrow strip of sand stretching south toward Rafah. Al-Mawasi was home to about 6,000, mostly Bedouin farmers and fishermen; today, hundreds of thousands of refugees live packed into makeshift tents. They stand in long lines for water, roam the streets looking for food or firewood - uprooting trees, collecting paper, taking down now-useless electrical poles - and despair that their children go to bed hungry and wake up cold. "We left the house crying for the (warmth) we left behind," laments Muhammad Sadiq, who'd never fled Khan Younis in past wars, "and we went (to) a barren land with only sand." Said 40-year-old mother Reem Al-Atrash, "People carry their tents, bedding, clothes and sorrows, and walk toward the unknown, weighed down by all their fears. Here we are just passers-by, living out our nightmares before we even dream them."

Meanwhile, "Gaza is starving." In what aid workers call "the impossible reality of Gaza," at least half the population is said to suffer from severe hunger - young children face the greatest risk - and all of it is classified in "a state of crisis," with the highest share ever recorded of people facing "catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity." Workers say many adults already go hungry so their kids can eat, but in the coming weeks at least 10,000 children under five could suffer "severe wasting," the most life-threatening form of malnutrition: "The threat of dying from hunger is real." Atrocities have also spread to the West Bank, where over 300 Palestinians, including 80 children, have been killed in attacks by soldiers and settlers, and the IDF have detained hundreds more "suspected of terrorist activities." For Palestinians already long besieged and terrorized, says Nowar Nabil Diab, "Our memories are being erased." He mourns his home, his sky, his morning with "a cup of tea and a feta sandwich" while listening to Lebanese singer Fairouz;, now, he fears looking out a window. "Life is dwindling," he says. "Fear is a loyal friend. It will never leave us."

Still, amidst "the most savage war conducted in the 21st century against a civilian population," one in which its perpetrator refuses to even consider ending a brutal occupation almost universally condemned, White House spokesperson John Kirby says there is no U.S. plan to look into Israeli abuses and "we have not seen anything that would convince us we need to take a different approach (trying) to help Israel defend itself." Shame, shame. They forget: "Never again" means "never again." Recalling a Haitian resistance akin to that of Palestinians, some cite the Creole, “Tout moun se moun” - Every person is a person. For Jews today, writes Abe Louise Young, it is time to "look in the mirror." "I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people," Young writes. Today, "I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot." Instead, we must "tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor. This telling must be done."

Here's the entire piece. With thanks to Vox Populi:

New Seeds For Old Stories

by Abe Louise Young.

"When I was a child, everything I heard & read about Israel was aspirational. We saved our quarters in cardboard boxes emblazoned, "Plant Trees In Israel!" People said, "Next year in Jerusalem!" to mean goodbye, to celebrate New Year's Eve. We sang of Yisrael in plaintive prayers that seemed older than petrified wood. Being connected to something ancient made me feel more real (and when you are a little girl, many things conspire to make you feel unreal.)

Now, I understand that this Israel I learned of is a myth. Yisrael is a timeless spiritual space–the holy core, the center of everything. But Israel was built like a physics equation spliced into a river, a laboratory sent into a bloodstream. An equation with an error. A country built on top of another country, another culture it tried to bury, thinking the world too busy or guilty-feeling to care about the human beings living there; naming the Holocaust’s collective loss reason enough—good reason—to move in, to push out, with carte blanche.

An example: Today, I learn that the editor of the Jerusalem desk for the New York Times lives in a house built above a house stolen from a Palestinian editor and BBC Arabic Service journalist named Hasan Karmi. Hasan was forced under threat of death to leave his home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world. The Karmi family became refugees from Palestine in 1948 so a Jew fleeing Nazi Europe could move into their house (free of charge), could call it his own address and refuge: Israel.

Did he use their plates? Their artwork? Did he keep or destroy Hasan's library? Where are their family papers and embroideries? Their birds and their dog, Rex? The children's clothes and toys? The president of Hebrew University inscribed his name on the facade. When the New York Times bought the new home built on top of it, the Karmi family had been erased.

I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot. The words that rise up are unfair, unjust, unholy.

I spoke to my father yesterday. He said, "There were very few Arabs in Israel when it was founded. Just a few, and they left willingly." I said, "Dad, you've been lied to. Have you heard of the Nakba?" "What is that?" he asked, "propaganda?" I order an oral history collection about the expulsion of 750,000 Arab people from Palestine to be sent to his doorstep, a Hanukkah present. He sends me Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. A miracle for whom?

Israel today denies that the people of Palestine exist as people. They are called dogs, human animals. How else to pretend that you did not steal their beds, their roofs, their gardens, doves, foods and dances, make them flee barefoot, execute them in lines against a wall? How else to pretend you do not confine them in prisons and a concentration camp, fly drones overhead that shoot bullets at anything that moves?

But people are not easy to erase. They write poems, keep archives, have children to tell stories to. They wear iron keys to the stone homes their great-grandparents built around their necks, even as they starve in plastic tents in the rain.

They share videos on Instagram of white phosphorus, made in Arkansas, burning through the legs of infants. They share videos of singing together while bombs drop, of baking bread on a metal plate held over burning paper as Israel starves them. They share videos of people they love dying, of mothers mourning, of babies and bodies pulled from rubble; they write new endings, they cry on camera. We hear the voices of Motaz, Plestia, Bisan around the globe; we read poems by Mosab, Rafaat, Naomi out loud.

What can we do? What can we do? How do we turn the hands of history, interrupt the seige? Around the world we call and plead with politicians to stop sending money and bombs to Israel, we hang ceasefire signs from buildings and overpasses, boycott, mass in millions to march, we watch our glowing phone screens and retch as we see Israeli snipers execute Palestinian children, soldiers press buttons to bomb mosques, bakeries, hospitals and universities. We cry out as we see the apartment buildings fall with families inside them, rage as we see Israeli soldiers laugh and dance with the lace underwear from dead women's dresser drawers.

All this for a myth. For stolen land. All this for a myth. For stolen land. To make a place for Holocaust survivors and atone for European crimes, to help Western presidents control the Middle East, and again, again, for white people’s “safety” at the expense of brown people’s lives.

Again.I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith

Israel, this is not the way home. Israel, we must look in the mirror. Yes: descendants of a holocaust immediately created another holocaust: oh painful, terrible truth. Oh repetition compulsion. Oh catastrophe. Truth tribunal, please commence; help us into a true story.

Those who continue to slaughter must be restrained by all nations of the world working together. The sacred, battered place must become one where people of any faith and race can live in freedom, without violence or apartheid, with equal rights to enjoy bread, love, children, the sea and the sunset, stories and buying tomatoes.

Each stolen home, each stolen acre of Palestine must be returned and every prisoner freed.

To tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor, will take many generations. This telling must be done. Each name of a soul taken must be spoken, engraved and gilded, embroidered with tatreez; each life must be grieved.

I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith. I want the money Jewish children save to go to the people of Palestine for five hundred years. I want all the years of the U.S. payments, $318 billion to Israel, to pour into Palestinian hands as reparations. We must return what was stolen, heal what was harmed, apologize for every life ended. Let the next trees planted be peace groves, be olives and oranges watered by indigenous hands; protected by safe, loving, hands, tree-tending hands.

Let us learn from them how to live again on holy land."

Children in Gaza seeking shelter

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Sept. 1, 1975.

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

We are dealing with an Arab world whose peoples have experienced devastation, even if the circumstances of that devastation differ. There are peoples whose democratic and social revolutions were destroyed, and military rule came to administer the counter-revolution, such as in the case of Egypt, and to a lesser degree, Tunisia. They are peoples who are being exterminated, while reconciliation and normalization are taking place in parallel with their extermination and exile, as is the case with the Syrian catastrophe.

There are other peoples in the region whose unifying ties are disintegrating, and the conflicts of internal factions are intensifying, returning them to the situation of political nothingness that preceded the national state form, such as in Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, leaving only the continuation of conflict without an end in sight.

The most dangerous thing is that, because of all of this, and in parallel, there are other Arab elements that possess financial abundance and liquid investment capabilities, which have enabled them to penetrate the Western financial and economic world and the globalized capitalist structure. This capitalist structure seeks to find a foothold and control within this miserable Arab scene, and sometimes even invests in its ruin, exploits its shabbiness and political and rhetorical collapse. We see this well in the impulsive United Arab Emirates, the evasive Qatar, and the caution of Saudi Arabia due to the weight and centrality of its role.

This takes different and varied forms, but it penetrates all levels. For example, controlling the Arab digital sphere, dominating the entire media and cultural scene, leading to being present in the reconstruction plans for destroyed Syria over the corpses of its people, strangling Lebanon economically, seeking to buy Egyptian public assets, and financing wars in Sudan, Libya, and Yemen. These are just random examples of the different effects.

I see a region in a much worse situation than simply an outbreak of war causing it to regress, or God forbid, disrupting its renaissance. Israel’s wars against us in the past were some of the reasons for obstructing the progress and growth of certain countries in the region, including my country, Egypt. I believe that Israel today has no Arab progress to obstruct. In fact, it is [Israel’s] plans that are being obstructed now, specifically its strategic partnership with the Emirates and perhaps Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, a percentage of the middle and lower classes have actually begun to approach the brink of starvation, and in Iran, Iranians are sweeping the streets of cities large and small in protest. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them, have been killed in the last five years. Lebanon’s economic condition is far beyond horrific. And the Syrians know what happened to them after they became a means of clarification for how to abuse and devalue the human soul of the residents of this region.

This is the situation. It is a situation sufficient to tempt Israel to reduce the value of Palestinian existence to the nadir, the depths of the abyss. And this is what it was previously restricted from doing. But what the Israelis do not realize is that they will also pay a heavy price. They, too, will become a statistic and a number. They are not an exception, even if they think themselves so.

Also, it is not possible to look at the current situation without looking at the international situation as a whole, where it has become appealing and easy to launch a war in Europe itself, the price of which is about half a million people killed and injured between Russia and Ukraine up to this moment. We are in a world that no longer fears wars and their outbreaks. The world has become accustomed to war, and the United States launches wars in the world, or helps to ignite and continue them. Russia finds no objection to committing genocidal practices on the grounds that they are existentially threatened.

Beside this, there has been an unmistakable crisis afflicting international capitalism since 2008. This crisis is not growing, but it has not been remedied and it has not stopped. The COVID pandemic arrived to announce the possible resumption of this crisis anew. The catastrophe is in the attempts to remedy this crisis through the same old-new stupid solution, by igniting political crises and using weapons to impose its decree, for the military component of the capitalist empire to restore its health. I mean here the American army in particular. And to do this in a way that helps American capitalism, which represents by itself a quarter of the world economy – to impose its economic conditions on its partners and then its enemies. That is what is happening right now. The United States militarizes the world anew, meanwhile holding a thousand reasons for nuclear annihilation.

Therefore we cannot deny or avoid the fact that the global scene is unruly, in a word. And that the weakest links in it, and Israel is one of these, will be extremely explosive when they explode. I cannot see October 7 in isolation from this escalating chaos. Suddenly, a month ago, it was announced that a trade line would be established beginning in India and ending with us in the region, in Tel Aviv, passing through the Emirates and through Saudi Arabia and Jordan by railroad line. This was announced by the Americans as good news for all of humankind.

Thus suddenly the flow of trade in the region and the world is being reshaped to the exclusion of the Palestinians and countries like Egypt and Iran and Turkey. By definition, it is the commercial axes that create the political axes. Meanwhile, they suddenly announce a project on the order of importance of discovering the route to the Cape of Good Hope or the construction of the Suez Canal!

Along with that, they announce that the issue of Palestine has finished, as if there was no one there! What’s so strange about it, then, when the prison of Gaza tries to blow itself up!

Q: So then, this combined situation explains the decision of Hamas to play all its cards and strike?

The Palestinians have no cards to play other than returning to the forefront of events once again, even if by a suicidal act. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has become nothing more than an Israeli police force that is dependent, miserable, to such an extent that it is difficult to grasp the limits of its misery. At the same time, Hamas, despite its possession of military power that has demonstrated itself on more than one stage, is without a comprehensive political agenda that would enable it to lead the Palestinian political scene. [It can only operate] at the level of the situation, it is unable to be part of a broader Palestinian framework that represents a wide spectrum of Palestinian national and social liberation movement.

Rather, it must be made clear that Hamas’ military leadership in the Gaza Strip, represented by Yahya Sinwar and Mohamed Deif, has neutralized, and marginalized the capabilities of the movement’s civilian leadership in the last seven years and almost exiled it abroad.

So the basis for this moment of explosion is that the Palestinian political situation is in a deep crisis, organizationally and rhetorically, and requires efforts and political leadership that go beyond the hapless stooge of Abu Mazen (1) and the demagoguism of Ismail Haniyeh (2). And in the end, Mohamed Deif (3) and his suicidal heroism will not be enough to lead on the Palestinian issue, either underground or above ground.

Palestinian [political] action in recent years has been directed at the Palestinians inside Israel, and has consisted of confronting it on the basis of their demand as indigenous people for equality within an apartheid state that declares its Judaism and does not care at all. This is happening while Israeli plans are far more catastrophic (nakbawiyya) than the limits of a civil liberal discourse betting on the conscience of the “civilized world”.

The Palestinian [political] scene, then, is a confused scene, and from within this confusion, fragmentation, and lack of a clear vision for engagement with the Israeli situation, Hamas pushed the question forward by creating a major crisis, by declaring a suicidal Insurrection at a moment when Israel had already reached a position of complete neurotic solipsism that made it an unlivable country.

Israel Will Be Like a Large Maniac Settlement

Q: [What was Israel like on the eve of October 7th?]

I have been good at following [the situation in] Israel, but as an Egyptian political actor, I was completely immersed in the Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring from 2009-2010 to 2014-2015. In fact, after I went back to contemplating Israel again, it seemed to me another country in decline, as if it took advantage of the failure of the Arab Spring to unleash what was in its right-wing to become more right-wing, to [push the] limits of religious Zionism, military-religious security, and anything else that can be imagined, to the limits of disintegrating. In the past months, we have seen with our own eyes, street fighting in which the more extreme right accuses the less extreme right of receiving foreign funding from the United States and from suspicious global civil society organizations!

It has become a country whose rising political stars are people like Itamar Ben Gvir, a Kahanist. A major part of the ruling core in Israel today are affiliated with the authority of the Kach movement, which was classified as a right-wing terrorist movement in Israel itself in the days of Yitzhak Shamir (4) in the 1980s.

It seems to me that [Israel] has become a place on the verge of exploding in favor of some crazy behavior, revolving around a genocidal act that expels the Palestinians from within the Green Line. which is the actual manifestation of “From the River to the Sea”.

Q: But was its army ready to enter a war that might expand to include several fronts?

The foundation of the Israeli army is that it is professional and organized. But what I know well is that if the State of Israel wants to win a war, it must determine the goal, place, scope, timing, and duration beforehand. The absence of even one of these factors reduces its chances of victory.

Despite Israel’s unlimited fire superiority over the Al-Qassam Brigades, it lacks at the present moment the ability to determine the factors of scope, duration, and purpose. It always needs a short-term, quick, rapid war that achieves all its goals within the specified period of time. The only and optimal formula for Israel’s victory is the 1967 War formula, meaning that it obtains a large area of territory within a few days while the other side, completely crushed, announces its withdrawal from battle. With this in mind, I do not know exactly what the Israeli army is prepared for.

But I am certain that its own ideology, which has been stable for a long time, deals with human cost with extreme caution, to the point of investing in self-propelled automatic defense systems. They are now at a new threshold, facing suicidal Palestinian fighters. what is the goal after crushing them? Therefore, it seems to be [either] that the Israeli goal of the war is very confusing and unimplementable in light of the factors that meet the recognized criteria for Israeli victory, or that they are at a new turning point that is reshaping them.

Q: What impact does the chronological extension of the war have on the cohesion of [Israel]?

We are still at the beginning of the war, but I do not see Israel in the future as anything but a dysfunctional entity unfit for normal living. Militarized status, alert, its hand on the trigger.

I believe this will empty [Israel] of certain components: the intelligentsia, the intellectuals, the left, and the non-ideological in general. This leaves those who are forced to remain by birth and not holding another nationality, the religiously obsessed, and the Mizrahim who are originally from the Middle East. It is a mixture suitable for mobilization in which religion is mixed with national obsession and salvationist preparedness and is dominated by the Middle Eastern regional climate at the same time.

It will be a more ferocious, authoritarian, militarized, and unlivable state by Western European standards. Israel will be similar to the settlements it established in the West Bank, and they are likely to all be in a state of solitude and simultaneously ready for destruction and salvation. This is my imagination if the war lasts for a long time, or for what comes after it in the coming years.

But I believe this will consequently require an increase in the influence of American decision-making in Israel, as an official sponsor of the Jewish question around the world. In the final analysis, the vast majority of the world’s Jews are distributed between Israel and the United States. I believe, and this is just a belief at this moment, that to the extent that the face and image of the armed settler become the face and image of Israel itself, American influence there will increase to control the resulting chaos. Unlawfulness may express itself in the form of internal conflicts, or through attempts to expel the Palestinians from within, or in all forms of delinquency. And it may be a joke, but the clock may turn back and the British mandate over Palestine will become the American mandate.

Notes.

1) Abu Mazen is the president of the Palestinian National Authority

2) Ismail Haniyeh is the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau.

3) Mohamed Deif is the Military Commander of Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

4) Yitzhak Shamir was the seventh prime minister of Israel and leader of Likud Party

The interview was conducted by Mahmoud Marrwa and originally published in Al-Morasel is a Leftist online magazine in Lebanon. It is slightly edited by Naeem for the English translation by Jessica Martin

.

The post Everything Led Gaza to the Inevitable Insurrection appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mohamed Naeem.

Wu Fang (China), 行走 (‘Journey’), 2017.

In his 1963 book, Africa Must Unite, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent. United Nations investigators have recently shown that Africa, far from having inadequate resources, is probably better equipped for industrialisation than almost any other region in the world’. Here, Nkrumah was referring to the Special Study on Economic Conditions and Development, Non-Self-Governing Territories (United Nations, 1958), which detailed the continent’s immense natural resources. ‘The true explanation for the slowness of industrial development in Africa’, Nkrumah wrote, ‘lies in the policies of the colonial period. Practically all our natural resources, not to mention trade, shipping, banking, building, and so on, fell into, and have remained in, the hands of foreigners seeking to enrich alien investors, and to hold back local economic initiative’. Nkrumah further expanded upon this view in his remarkable book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).

As the leader of Ghana’s government, Nkrumah devised a policy to reverse this trend by promoting public education (with an emphasis on science and technology), building a robust public sector to provide his country with infrastructure (including electricity, roads, and railways), and developing an industrial sector that would add value to the raw materials that had previously been exported at meagre prices. However, such a project would fail if it were only tried in one country. That is why Nkrumah was a great champion of African unity, articulated at length in his book Africa Must Unite (1963). It was because of his determination that African countries formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) the same year as his book was published. In 1999, the OAU became the African Union.

As Ghana and Africa made small strides to establish national and continental sovereignty, some people had other ideas. Nkrumah was removed from office in a Western-backed coup in 1966, five years after Patrice Lumumba was ejected as prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then assassinated. Anyone who wanted to build a project for the sovereignty of the continent and the dignity of the African people would find themselves either deposed, dead, or both.

Guo Hongwu (China), 革命友谊深如海 (‘Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean’), 1975.

The Western-backed governments that followed these coups often reversed the policies to exercise national sovereignty and build continental unity. For instance, in 1966, the military leaders of Ghana’s National Liberation Council began to gut the policy of establishing quality public education and an efficient public sector with industrialisation and continental trade at its centre. Import-substitution policies that had been important to the new Third World states were rejected in favour of exporting cheapened raw materials and importing expensive finished products. The spiral of debt and dependency wracked the continent. This situation was worsened by the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, set in motion during the worst of the 1980s debt crisis. A 2009 research paper from the South Centre noted that ‘the continent is the least industrialised region of the world, while the share of sub-Saharan Africa in global manufacturing value added actually declined in most sectors between 1990 and 2000’. Indeed, the South Centre paper referred to the situation in Africa as one of ‘de-industrialisation’.

In April 1980, African leaders gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, under the aegis of the OAU to deliberate about the harsh climate created by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, which targeted their fiscal policies but did nothing to change the adverse international credit markets. Out of this meeting came the Lagos Plan of Action (1980–2000), whose main argument was for African states to establish their sovereignty from international capital and to build industrial policies for their countries and for the continent. This was, in essence, a renewal of the Nkrumah policy of the 1960s. Alongside the Lagos Plan of Action, the United Nations established the Industrial Development Decade for Africa (1980–1990). Towards the end of that decade, in 1989 the OAU – cognisant of the policy’s failure due to the deepening of neoliberal approaches that slashed budgets and intensified the export-oriented theft of African resources – worked with the United Nations to establish 20 November as Africa Industrialisation Day. The failure of the Industrial Development Decade for Africa was followed by a second decade (1993–2002) and then a third (2016–2025). In January 2015, the African Union adopted Agenda 2063 to combine the imperative of industrialisation with Africa’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals. These ‘decades’ and Agenda 2063 have become merely symbolic. There is no agenda to undo external debt and debt servicing burdens nor any policy to create a climate to advance industrial development or finance the provision of basic needs.

Pan Jianglong (China), 撒哈拉以东 (‘To the East of the Sahara’), 2017.

At the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue, held on the side-lines of the fifteenth BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) summit in Johannesburg, China launched the Initiative on Supporting Africa’s Industrialisation ‘to support Africa in growing its manufacturing sector and realising industrialisation and economic diversification’. The Chinese government pledged to increase its funding to build infrastructure, design and create industrial parks, and assist African governments and firms in developing their industrial policies and industries. This new initiative will build off of China’s commitments at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to strengthen infrastructure on the continent, share its own experiences with industrialisation, and support a development project that emerges out of the African experience rather than one forced upon African states by the IMF or other agencies.

This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Dongsheng launched the third issue of the international edition of the journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), entitled ‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’. This issue features three articles, written by Grieve Chelwa, Zhou Jinyan, and Tang Xiaoyang. Professor Zhou, concurring with the South Centre report, notes that ‘African countries were essentially de-industrialised’ since the 1980s and that whatever growth African countries experienced was a consequence of high commodity prices for exported raw materials. She points out that Western countries – offering debt, aid, and structural adjustment – are ‘not motivated to promote African industrialisation’. Drawing heavily from the UN Economic Commission for Africa and analysing the industrial policies of most African countries, Professor Zhou highlights four important points: first, the state must play an active role in any industrial development; second, industrialisation must take place on a regional and continental level – not within African states alone, given that 86 percent of Africa’s total trade is ‘still conducted with other regions of the world, not within the continent; third, urbanisation and industrialisation must be coordinated so that cities on the continent do not continue to grow into large slums filled with jobless youth; and fourth, manufacturing will be the engine of African economic development rather than the fantasy of service sector-led growth.

These points guide Professor Zhou’s assessment of how China can support the process of African industrialisation. In sharing its experiences with African countries, she notes that ‘China’s failures’ are as important as its successes.

Zhao Jianqi (China), 回望故乡 (‘Longing for Home’), n.d.

In his essay, Professor Tang tracks the record of the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the continent. Established in 2013, the BRI is only a decade old, which barely allows enough time to fully assess this massive, global infrastructural and industrial development project. At the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (April 2019), UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, ‘With the scale of its planned investments, [the BRI] offers a meaningful opportunity to contribute to the creation of a more equitable, prosperous world for all, and to reversing the negative impact of climate change’. In 2022, the UN released a report on the role of the BRI called Partnering for a Brighter Shared Future, which noted that the BRI – unlike most other development projects – provided significant funding for infrastructure projects that may form the basis for industrialisation in regions that had previously been exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured products.

Building on such assessments of the BRI, Professor Tang offers three practical ways in which the BRI has promoted industrialisation on the African continent: first, by constructing industrial parks with integrated power sources and creating industrial clusters of interconnected firms; second, by building industries to supply infrastructural materials; and third, by prioritising production for local markets rather than for export. Unlike the IMF policies that are forced on African countries, Professor Tang argues that ‘China encourages each country to follow its own path of development and to not blindly follow any model’.

Neither Tang nor Zhou nor Chelwa indicate that China is somehow the saviour of Africa. Those days are gone. No country or continent seeks its salvation elsewhere. Africa’s path will be built by Africans. Nonetheless, given its own experiences of building manufacturing against a structure that reproduces dependency, China has a lot to share. Since it has enormous financial reserves and does not impose Western-styled conditionality, China can, of course, be a source of financing for alternative development projects.

In December 2022, African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said that ‘Africa’s prosperity must no longer depend on exports of raw materials but on value-added finished products’. ‘Across Africa’, he continued, ‘we need to turn cocoa beans into chocolate, cotton into textiles and garments, coffee beans into brewed coffee’. To keep in step with the times, we might add that Africa must also turn cobalt and nickel into lithium-ion batteries and electric cars and turn copper and silver into smartphones. Inside Adesina’s statement is Nkrumah’s dream: as he wrote in 1963, we have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent.

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

Cyclone Biparjoy made landfall over the coastal areas of Saurashtra and the Gulf of Kutch on Thursday evening around 7 pm in the form of a very severe cyclonic storm causing extremely heavy rainfall, strong winds and tidal waves. BBC reports that more than 150,000 people in the two countries were evacuated from the path of the storm before its landfall.

Reporting on the weather conditions in Gujarat hours before the landfall, Republic Bharat anchor Sweta Tripathi hosted a bulletin that has since gone viral on social media. (Barely) Standing with an umbrella in the studio, she twisted and turned, ducked and swerved, stuttered and stumbled under the imagined influence of stormy winds to present a simulacrum of the actual scenario. The result was both hilarious and pathetic. Hilarious because of its absurdity, and pathetic because it ended up making a caricature of what is essentially a natural disaster affecting thousands in potentially life-transforming ways.

Sweta from @Republic_Bharat reporting live from Dwarka, Gujarat. Hope she’s safe. #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/rolXX5Pz4b

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) June 14, 2023

Standing inside the Noida studio, she says: “See this.. we have reached Dwarka in Gujarat. The wind is blowing so hard that even standing here is difficult.. wind blowing at a speed of 150kmph.. it is tough to be standing or speaking… People have been asked to stay away from ports. How will people face such high-speed wind that is the question. Just imagine what will happen when the actual landfall takes place. That’s why I am asking you to stay safe. Trees are getting uprooted. NDRF teams are prepared….” All the while she continues her antics.

Moreover, the absurdity of the whole thing did not end with the news anchor’s histrionics.

2022 Florida Hurricane Video Shown in Background

The visual that played out behind the anchor all the while was that of Hurricane Ian in Florida from September 2022. We looked at a video of the storm’s destruction uploaded on YouTube by the Washington Post. The red building and the movement of the trees match those in the Republic Bharat video to a tee.

The description of the Washington Post video says: “Video taken on Sept. 29, shows Hurricane Ian slamming Fort Myers, Fla., with destructive winds and devastating flooding.”

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two screen-grabs, one from the Republic Bharat show and one from the Washington Post video report:

As it turns out, the bulletin was not only improperly presented, but factually incorrect as well. An old video from Florida was shown as visuals of the cyclone in Gujarat. But how does authenticity or correctness matter compared to sensationalism!

Aerial Survey by Republic Anchor

Just before the above-mentioned part in the bulletin, the same anchor was shown with the help of VFX inside a helicopter surveying tumultuous sea waters below.

She says: “The storm will also pass over Karachi, but Gujarat will bear the maximum brunt. I’ll now tell you where the landfall will be. We are now passing over the Jakhau port area. This is where the cyclone will hit land. And then, its speed will be 150kmph. If it loses speed, the cyclone will weaken. But if the wind speed goes up, what are the preparations for that? I’ll tell you.”

In the next frame, she ‘storms’ into the screen holding an umbrella as the Florida hurricane video plays out in the backdrop. Watching the entire bulletin is a severe test of the audience’s ability for the willing suspension of disbelief, a faculty that was thus far considered necessary to enjoy a work of creative art.

Not a One-off Instance of Mindless Sensationalism

This is not the first time anchor Sweta Tripathi has seemingly thrown all journalistic decorum to the wind. As part of  Republic’s months-long ‘investigation’ into the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, she was seen hounding and bullying a watchman and others outside actor Rhea Chakraborty’s house.

They are innocent Watchmen of the building where #RheaChakrobarty stays. They have nothing to do with the case. Now just watch the video what type of journalism is this? Forget journalism what kind behaviour is this? pic.twitter.com/6aK8Ky58gE

— Saurabh Vaktania (@saurabhv99) August 27, 2020

In another part of the bulletin, she can be seen reporting from outside the gate of Chakraborty’s house. She says, “Rhea Chakraborty, thoda to sharam kijiye! (Have some shame)… We asked Rhea Chakraborty, “What is your drugs connection?”.

The media trial and witch-hunt of Rhea Chakraborty after her former partner Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was one of lowest points in the history of Indian television journalism.

Again, in September 2020, Sweta Tripathi chased actor Deepika Padukone’s car on the streets of Mumbai to ask her questions about her ‘drug addiction’. This was also related to the channel’s ‘investigation’ into Rajput’s death. In the bulletin, she can be herd screaming, “the black car, the black car…” Then, as the TV channel’s vehicle comes close to the actor’s car, she holds the boom out of the car window and screams at the top of her voice, ‘Deepika Padukone, tell us, do you take drugs’? The other car has its windows rolled up.

Kids, don’t do drugs. Or you may become a reporter for @republic pic.twitter.com/QxxKmmgevc

— Danish Aslam (@dan1shaslam) September 25, 2020

Taking the Viewer for Granted

At the heart of this trend to pass off anything as ‘breaking news’ lies the belief that the audience will accept whatever they are fed. Not to be left behind, Times Now Navbharat too put out a video placing presenter Shweta Srivastav inside a helicopter as she reported on the impending disaster.

#EXCLUSIVE: ‘बिपरजाॅय’ तूफान की महाकवरेज.. जमीन से आसमान तक ‘नवभारत’ पर देखिए, तूफान से जुड़ी हर अपडेट@NAINAYADAV_06 @PreetiNegi_ @SwetaSri27 #CycloneBiparjoy #Cyclone #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/9Xt6Q7PZXK

— Times Now Navbharat (@TNNavbharat) June 15, 2023

The same confidence to take the audience for granted left Republic editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami red-faced after he had claimed on his show in 2021 that he had intelligence inputs about the goings-on on the fifth floor of Kabul’s two-storeyed Serena Hotel. And the same no-holds-barred craving for sensationalism had made top Times Now editors Navika Kumar and Rahul Shivshankar fall for a fake WhatsApp forward when they read out 30 names of ‘dead Chinese soldiers’ after the Galwan clash in 2020.

The post Cyclone Biparjoy: Republic anchor’s antics symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with Indian TV media appeared first on Alt News.

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

Cyclone Biparjoy made landfall over the coastal areas of Saurashtra and the Gulf of Kutch on Thursday evening around 7 pm in the form of a very severe cyclonic storm causing extremely heavy rainfall, strong winds and tidal waves. BBC reports that more than 150,000 people in the two countries were evacuated from the path of the storm before its landfall.

Reporting on the weather conditions in Gujarat hours before the landfall, Republic Bharat anchor Sweta Tripathi hosted a bulletin that has since gone viral on social media. (Barely) Standing with an umbrella in the studio, she twisted and turned, ducked and swerved, stuttered and stumbled under the imagined influence of stormy winds to present a simulacrum of the actual scenario. The result was both hilarious and pathetic. Hilarious because of its absurdity, and pathetic because it ended up making a caricature of what is essentially a natural disaster affecting thousands in potentially life-transforming ways.

Sweta from @Republic_Bharat reporting live from Dwarka, Gujarat. Hope she’s safe. #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/rolXX5Pz4b

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) June 14, 2023

Standing inside the Noida studio, she says: “See this.. we have reached Dwarka in Gujarat. The wind is blowing so hard that even standing here is difficult.. wind blowing at a speed of 150kmph.. it is tough to be standing or speaking… People have been asked to stay away from ports. How will people face such high-speed wind that is the question. Just imagine what will happen when the actual landfall takes place. That’s why I am asking you to stay safe. Trees are getting uprooted. NDRF teams are prepared….” All the while she continues her antics.

Moreover, the absurdity of the whole thing did not end with the news anchor’s histrionics.

2022 Florida Hurricane Video Shown in Background

The visual that played out behind the anchor all the while was that of Hurricane Ian in Florida from September 2022. We looked at a video of the storm’s destruction uploaded on YouTube by the Washington Post. The red building and the movement of the trees match those in the Republic Bharat video to a tee.

The description of the Washington Post video says: “Video taken on Sept. 29, shows Hurricane Ian slamming Fort Myers, Fla., with destructive winds and devastating flooding.”

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two screen-grabs, one from the Republic Bharat show and one from the Washington Post video report:

As it turns out, the bulletin was not only improperly presented, but factually incorrect as well. An old video from Florida was shown as visuals of the cyclone in Gujarat. But how does authenticity or correctness matter compared to sensationalism!

Aerial Survey by Republic Anchor

Just before the above-mentioned part in the bulletin, the same anchor was shown with the help of VFX inside a helicopter surveying tumultuous sea waters below.

She says: “The storm will also pass over Karachi, but Gujarat will bear the maximum brunt. I’ll now tell you where the landfall will be. We are now passing over the Jakhau port area. This is where the cyclone will hit land. And then, its speed will be 150kmph. If it loses speed, the cyclone will weaken. But if the wind speed goes up, what are the preparations for that? I’ll tell you.”

In the next frame, she ‘storms’ into the screen holding an umbrella as the Florida hurricane video plays out in the backdrop. Watching the entire bulletin is a severe test of the audience’s ability for the willing suspension of disbelief, a faculty that was thus far considered necessary to enjoy a work of creative art.

Not a One-off Instance of Mindless Sensationalism

This is not the first time anchor Sweta Tripathi has seemingly thrown all journalistic decorum to the wind. As part of  Republic’s months-long ‘investigation’ into the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, she was seen hounding and bullying a watchman and others outside actor Rhea Chakraborty’s house.

They are innocent Watchmen of the building where #RheaChakrobarty stays. They have nothing to do with the case. Now just watch the video what type of journalism is this? Forget journalism what kind behaviour is this? pic.twitter.com/6aK8Ky58gE

— Saurabh Vaktania (@saurabhv99) August 27, 2020

In another part of the bulletin, she can be seen reporting from outside the gate of Chakraborty’s house. She says, “Rhea Chakraborty, thoda to sharam kijiye! (Have some shame)… We asked Rhea Chakraborty, “What is your drugs connection?”.

The media trial and witch-hunt of Rhea Chakraborty after her former partner Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was one of lowest points in the history of Indian television journalism.

Again, in September 2020, Sweta Tripathi chased actor Deepika Padukone’s car on the streets of Mumbai to ask her questions about her ‘drug addiction’. This was also related to the channel’s ‘investigation’ into Rajput’s death. In the bulletin, she can be herd screaming, “the black car, the black car…” Then, as the TV channel’s vehicle comes close to the actor’s car, she holds the boom out of the car window and screams at the top of her voice, ‘Deepika Padukone, tell us, do you take drugs’? The other car has its windows rolled up.

Kids, don’t do drugs. Or you may become a reporter for @republic pic.twitter.com/QxxKmmgevc

— Danish Aslam (@dan1shaslam) September 25, 2020

Taking the Viewer for Granted

At the heart of this trend to pass off anything as ‘breaking news’ lies the belief that the audience will accept whatever they are fed. Not to be left behind, Times Now Navbharat too put out a video placing presenter Shweta Srivastav inside a helicopter as she reported on the impending disaster.

#EXCLUSIVE: ‘बिपरजाॅय’ तूफान की महाकवरेज.. जमीन से आसमान तक ‘नवभारत’ पर देखिए, तूफान से जुड़ी हर अपडेट@NAINAYADAV_06 @PreetiNegi_ @SwetaSri27 #CycloneBiparjoy #Cyclone #CycloneBiparjoyUpdate pic.twitter.com/9Xt6Q7PZXK

— Times Now Navbharat (@TNNavbharat) June 15, 2023

The same confidence to take the audience for granted left Republic editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami red-faced after he had claimed on his show in 2021 that he had intelligence inputs about the goings-on on the fifth floor of Kabul’s two-storeyed Serena Hotel. And the same no-holds-barred craving for sensationalism had made top Times Now editors Navika Kumar and Rahul Shivshankar fall for a fake WhatsApp forward when they read out 30 names of ‘dead Chinese soldiers’ after the Galwan clash in 2020.

The post Cyclone Biparjoy: Republic anchor’s antics symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with Indian TV media appeared first on Alt News.

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

Coming from a background in writing and stringing together odd jobs and kitchen work, it offered a tactility in a creative professional realm I thought I would never have. It afforded me patience, both with learning from mistakes and the tediousness that comes with that type of work, which led me to explore how to manipulate an image or animate on film. Now I have knowledge that led me to work as a film projectionist where I handle precious prints and could even lead me to restoration or archival work. The experience gave me an understanding of how to take care of film. I used to let projects get dusty (physically or figuratively), and now I’m much more meticulous and keep my film, cameras and files in an organized and controlled space, which I never would’ve done previously. It helped me grow up and take myself seriously.

When it comes to your filmmaking, you’re extremely open to working within limitations and letting them influence the end project. Having worked with restricted and sometimes no budgets, you’ve always made something out of nothing. Can you explain?

I’ve always naturally leaned toward a sustainable, small-scale approach to filmmaking because if I was loftier in how I wanted to make films, I would talk myself out of it. By working with limitations, there’s more structure and ironically more room for creativity. Working at the lab in Toronto offered me an opportunity to explore a medium that not many people have access to because of its prohibitive expense. When I was unable to purchase film, I often used leftover expired film and even made music videos under these circumstances. 16mm also has a limited capacity (you only get three minutes or 10 minutes for one roll) so this offered me this opportunity to think about time: “What is possible within that time? What can be felt in that time?” When I process the film myself, it is time-based as well. There’s an anticipation where you’re in the dark then the negative is revealed to you in the light. It’s exciting but contained into one complicated medium which I find so enchanting.

When making a video for a musician, establishing the limitations with the person that I’m working with allows us to play and negotiate. I don’t like to assert very much control over performances when I’m making music videos. Offering the same limitations that I have to the person that I’m working with, I think frees them a little bit as well to understand that there’s only so much that you can do, but we do our best. On top of that, I feel like I’ve never really directed somebody. I’ve maybe directed where to stand or where to look or how to hold their body, but I’ve never tried to tell someone how to feel. I don’t necessarily know how to craft a perfectly exposed image or a perfectly in-focus image, but I let my body do the work in the same way that I want whoever I’m filming to have their body work. You don’t know exactly what the image will look like when you’re shooting film, understanding the degrees of mistakes that can occur from start to finish. In knowing that, I allow myself this spontaneous production, where every step of the way is an unconstrained risk.

From my perspective, you are very spontaneous when you shoot and during the editing process, you become very meticulous.

That’s true. Editing is my favorite part of the process because I black out and become scatterbrained when I’m shooting. I also work by myself which is, in many ways, a lot harder. If I had at least a couple of people on my team when I was shooting, I could direct or be on the technical side. But when I’m doing both, I can’t really be as present for a performance or as present technically and so there is a sacrifice on both accounts. I enjoy being meticulous when it comes to the edit because that’s when I really am able to control the space more.

That’s where I start getting influenced by the filmmakers I love, who like to expand the notion of space. I like to move a frame around or make an optical illusion or layer images on top of each other and surprise the audience. I feel like it’s a cop-out to say that it’s all intuitive, but I do kind of get into a meditation when I’m editing where I don’t know where my mind is going. I was editing a video for my friend Olivia Kaplan recently and I felt stumped and didn’t know what it would end up looking like. During the edit, I noticed an interesting pattern in the images I had gathered and let them dictate a “narrative.” It might be the case where nobody sees the intention behind my editing, but it’s so satisfying because I really like playing with illusion and creating continuity, but from more of an abstract place.

You touched on working alone, primarily. Why do you favor this way of working?

My pace is slow. I’m very much still learning, I like learning alone, and I unfortunately at this point don’t trust anyone to manifest what I have in my head. Any vision I have is kept in a tight caged. But that’s to my detriment, obviously. It makes me disorganized and I am in the process of letting that go and growing up and away from being so precious. I think I’ve just always been inherently uncomfortable with the designations in the film industry, of what different positions are and what they mean. Of course, there’s power in having a role of expertise on set, but I think I’ve always been stubborn to commit to a single role.

I like the idea of being fluid and having both creative control and technical control. But more importantly, in my learning process, I want to know how to do everything. If I want to be an editor, I still want to know what lenses or lighting to use for a particular shoot or how to color grade. My aspiration, or guised ego, is to possess extensive knowledge even if I don’t use it, so perhaps I can eventually be able to communicate that with a team.

So it’s about having the language?

Yeah, it’s about having the language, and I think it will make me a better collaborator in the long run. Me working alone is me learning, it’s not me thinking that I can only do things by myself.

Do you feel like you’re married to film as your primary medium or will you move away from it?

Definitely not married. With film, I’m mostly interested in innovating with as little money as possible and using the resources available to me. If the camera I have right now is my partner’s Sony PD150 with a broken microphone or my Arri SRI that sometimes turns on and sometimes doesn’t, I’ll risk it. Luckily right now, I go to a school where I can rent beautiful cameras so I can explore what it feels like to shoot with advanced digital technology. I’m learning how to actually craft an image in my aesthetic, but I find I seek and go after the imperfect image.

I aim to create something that can be understood by an audience. If an image is pixelated in a way where I’m shooting a landscape that kind of looks like Google Street View, I am comfortable because it’s digestible, the audience has a literacy in how to approach it. In addition, I like shaking the camera and making my presence known. I like the audience to feel that I’m leading them, otherwise, the experience is immersive in a manner I am not comfortable with. Some people can get away with it, but I don’t think I can.

Do you like including yourself in your own work?

For me it’s necessary. There are many discussions happening around documentary ethics and participatory documentary that are essential to any discussion around filmmaking. When you are relaying a story, whether it be yours or someone else’s objectivity does not exist. Anytime a camera enters a space, there is a power dynamic and a subjective gaze. And so, to create an illusion that illustrates an idea where self-reflexivity is absent can be read as manipulation. I think what I enjoy is the idea of mediating that manipulation with the acknowledgement of the filmmaker. I want people to understand how I’m making it, which is why I often expose a camera being seen or a set, or how I’ve done something. I don’t want there to be any sort of illusion that can’t be penetrated.

You’re currently working on a documentary. Would you talk a little bit about that?

I’m exploring the cryptic mortality of fish and ocean mammals as it relates to the maritime industry along the Canadian West Coast. For instance, I’m currently working with this one man who disentangles and performs autopsies on whales and teaches classes to civilians on how to save beached whales.

I was originally drawn to this topic because a couple of years ago, in the fall of 2020, there was an accident that occurred on the Capilano River next to where I grew up. A bunch of people, predominantly men, would recreationally fish for salmon just below a fish hatchery. One day the dam, which usually has an alarm when it opens, opened without warning, and the water came rushing down and killed two people. It was a tragic moment in the community and obviously was very affecting. I found myself thinking about how it could have been avoided, how the accident happened due to human interaction that was placed on the river in the first place due to the dam. I started contemplating infrastructure that interrupts nature, and how this fish hatchery on a river would ordinarily have had a natural reproductive salmon ecosystem.

Do you feel like as a filmmaker, having the position to share this story is a way that you can help repair as well?

I think it’s not so much about the act of trying to repair, for me, as filmmaking is an act of reveling in or creating dialogue on a subject or simulating reality and not trying to pretend it’s reparative. Even if I’m trying to tell the story, it doesn’t mean I’m doing anything to change the narrative. Though that’s bleak, I do feel like filmmaking itself is sort of a hopeless act. But that just could be my imposter complex and my preoccupation with failure and death right now.

Is there anything in your practice that makes you feel hopeful?

I guess when I’m talking about hopelessness I’m talking about trying to capture something that’s uncapturable, trying to capture a moment that’s already gone. But I think the chase is what’s exciting, and that’s what I’m interested in pursuing. Even though I know it’s not possible to capture something like the ocean or the water if I could, what would it sound like? What would it look like? It’s such a privileged space because it allows me to explore. It’s hopeful because I get to do it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

The post Josh Hawley’s New Book on Manhood is Wrong on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Okun.

“My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel: I know not where I am, nor what I do.”

— Shakespeare, Sir John Falstaff, “Henry VI”

There really is “no honor among thieves,” says the Bible in Proverbs 21:10-11.

“Our country is dying,” said the dishonorable Trump during his calamitous talk show appearance on CNN last week. Is he right?

Oh, that hour of infamy.

What does it mean for a country and what does it say about its people when someone who is running for president a third time was found liable by a jury of sexually abusing a woman, whose organization was convicted by another jury of tax fraud and a grand jury indicted him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records?

What does it say about honor, about trust, about respect, about fealty to our institutions, some of them hallowed over two centuries of valued integrity, to allow nothing more than a carnival barker, as Barack Obama correctly tagged him early on, to again run for public office when he has damaged so much of our country and its reputation both at home and abroad?

Ah, yes, honor. To be honorable. Is that merely another one of those attributes to be discarded on the heap of garbage to which we’ve been witness? Falstaff: “What is honor? a word. What is in that word honor? what
is that honor? air.”

 Isn’t that what Trump has made of honor? Air? Nothing.

 Falstaff identified, according to SparkNotes on Shakespeare: “Old, fat, lazy, selfish, dishonest, corrupt, thieving, manipulative, boastful, and lecherous, Falstaff is, despite his many negative qualities, perhaps the most popular of all of Shakespeare’s comic characters. Though he is technically a knight, Falstaff’s lifestyle clearly renders him incompatible with the ideals of courtly chivalry that one typically associates with knighthood.”

Just substitute president for knight. Remind you of someone?

“Most popular of all of Shakespeare’s comic characters.” Isn’t Trump the Republican frontrunner for the forthcoming primary elections for the presidency?

Who are we that we let this happen to us? At the very least, there should be a code of honor that would disallow just anyone the right to run for president beyond having to be at least 35 years old and born in America. Almost no restrictions.

Yet this is about one of those hallowed institutions – the presidency and its White House, the people’s house. Amend the requirements for public office to disqualify anyone previously impeached by the House, for starters.

Whatever happened to Mom and apple pie and their concomitant American dream? Whatever happened to the Supreme Court, another hallowed institution, in this atmosphere of anything goes, including bragging by a presidential candidate of his sexual prowess?

What happened to the House of Representatives, which permitted an admitted fraud like Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., to be seated. The respected speaker, Sam Rayburn, must be quivering in his grave.

Sex once had its day in the court of public affairs, as it were.

It felled Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., in 1987 because of his dalliance with Donna Rice, when he was the front runner against Joe Biden in the primary for the 1988 presidency.

Or Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who withdrew from the presidential primaries in early 2008 three months after he admitted having an affair with Rielle Hunter, who worked on his campaign.

How times have changed, and so rapidly. It was only more than seven years between Edwards’ withdrawal and Trump’s gaudy escalator ride in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president.

Not only did the voters ignore his “Access Hollywood” tape in which he said, “when you’re a star, you can do anything” to women, but his fellow Republicans swore allegiance to him once he was elected.

Any lessons learned? Nah. This is the New America, where the two main political parties exist mostly side by side in a cold war that has resulted in the absence of gun control while people of all ages, in school and out, shoot up the country.

Fully 13,959 people have been killed this year by guns until May 1, according to the Gun Violence Archive, including 491 teens and 85 children. No strict federal gun laws between the Atlantic and Pacific. It’s all an OK Corral.

This is the country we live in. You think Trump will do anything about gun control? Think again. The Republicans have been bought by the NRA.

There is no Planet B.

If the Republicans were a true political party in the American tradition going back to the Founding Fathers, who risked their careers and lives by standing up to an empire, and had the guts and brains of those pioneers in democracy, they would dump Trump.

Republicans of any stripe can’t let Trump, with more than 30,000 lies under his bulging belt while president and knowing of his recklessness and unworthiness by years of experience, become president again.

Need an excuse? Whip up your dormant sense of doing what is right and tell him he’s got too many legal issues facing him to be a viable candidate for president of this magnificent country.

Like Falstaff, Trump is no knight in shining armor. Unlike Falstaff, he’s a lousy comedian.

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

Ideas about men and manhood have been evolving for more than 50 years, but Sen. Josh Hawley has not gotten the message.

Like so many others working to protect white male supremacy (see Carlson, Tucker; McCarthy, Kevin), he’s driving a gas-guzzling Cadillac on a road increasingly filled with EVs. Just as women are vigorously resisting returning to a pre-Roe v. Wade America, men aren’t going back either. Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.

The book—titled Manhood: Finding Purpose in Faith, Family, and—is a call for American men to “stand up and embrace their God-given responsibility as husbands, fathers, and citizens,” according to Regency, Hawley’s far-right publisher. If you want to know what not to embrace in considering American manhood, it’s all in the 256 pages of this book. Claiming that our country’s all-male founders believed that the U.S. “depends” on certain masculine virtues, ignores the realities of today. There is much to appreciate about men; still, we’d be much better off if we talked about positive changes—embracing gender equality and rejecting white male supremacy.

Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.

Calling men out as unemployed whiners, and trash-talking women while playing video games and watching pornography, misses the mark. Examples of new expressions of masculinity abound, from stay-at-home dads to younger men becoming curious about feminism.

Hawley’s thesis—that men are in crisis—does have a kernel of truth; there are men floundering, but that is not where the majority of younger men are headed. More and more men are abandoning expressions of masculine culture based on oppressing anyone not white or male. Sure, we still have a ways to go, but support among younger men for women’s reproductive rights, gay and trans rights, and voting rights, is on the rise.

There are organizations around the country and across the globe promoting gender equality; challenging men’s violence; and encouraging involved fatherhood—all while rejecting men as “Top Dog” at home, work, and houses of worship.

Danger does exist; just not what Hawley is concerned about. It’s in young men enamored of gun culture, sucked into social media echo chambers of hate. To see how out of touch Hawley is, there’s nothing in his book about perpetrators of mass shooting massacres—primarily young men.

“Ever since the January 6 committee showed the video of Sen. Hawley running from the insurrectionist mob he’d earlier encouraged with a fist in the air, we’ve all had a good laugh at his expense,” Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post.

Although caricatured as a “manhood-obsessed hypocrite,” make no mistake: Hawley is dangerous precisely because, as Capehart noted, “He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness.” His message may still resonate with older white men, but younger men, even those who may enjoy watching Ultimate Fighting, are tolerant, accepting of their gay and trans coworkers, and are supportive of colleagues who have had an abortion.

The future is not white male supremacy, in part because patriarchy is dangerous for men.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Rob Okun.

In 2019, Thea Riofrancos was splitting her time between researching the social and environmental impacts of lithium mining in Chile and organizing for a rapid energy transition away from fossil fuels in the United States. A political science professor at Providence College and member of the Climate and Community Project, Riofrancos was struck by the contrast: Lithium is essential to the batteries that make electric vehicles and renewable energy work, but mining inflicts its own environmental damage. “Here I am in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, seeing these mining-related harms, and then there I go in the U.S. advocating for a rapid transition. How do I align these two goals?” Riofrancos said. “And is there a way to have a less extractive energy transition?”

When she went looking for research that would help answer that question, she found none, at least not for the transportation sector, which was her area of focus. “I saw forecast after forecast that assumed basically a binary of the future,” she said. “Either we stay with the fossil fuel status quo and the existential crisis that that is causing for the planet and all of its people. Or we transition to an electrified, renewably powered future, but that doesn’t really change anything about how these sectors or economic activities are organized.”

Riofrancos wanted to look at multiple ways to design an electrified future and understand what the costs and impacts of different scenarios might be. So she linked up with other Climate and Community Project researchers and put together a report mapping out four potential pathways to electrification for the transportation sector. Titled “Achieving Zero Emissions With More Mobility and Less Mining,” the report concluded that even relatively small, easy-to-achieve shifts like reducing the size of cars and their batteries could deliver big returns: a 42 percent reduction in the amount of lithium needed in the U.S., even if the number of cars on the road and the frequency with which people drive stayed the same.

It’s the sort of thing politicians and electrification advocates need to think through now, when decisions can be made to guide the energy transition in one direction or another. It’s also critical to an underdiscussed component of climate action: demand for products and services and the role energy plays in fulfilling those demands. Which connects right up to another topic that American politicians don’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole: consumption.

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Electric vehicle charging stations are pictured in Monterey Park, Calif., on Aug. 31, 2022.

Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Between April 2021 and April 2023, automakers spent more than twice as much advertising large EVs as they spent on smaller, more efficient models. Source: MediaRadar

Graphic: Amy Westervelt and The Intercept

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Amy Westervelt.

On Friday, the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved a rule that would ban the sale of diesel big rigs in the state by 2036. The mandate, which will apply to about 1.8 million trucks — including those operated by Amazon, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service —  is reportedly the first in the world to require trucks to ditch internal combustion engines. The news came one day after California became the first state to adopt standards to limit pollution from trains. 

The regulations are intended to improve air quality and trim carbon emissions from transportation, the source of about half the state’s greenhouse gases. Trucks and trains spew diesel exhaust, full of soot that contains more than 40 cancer-causing substances, responsible for an estimated 70 percent of Californian’s cancer risk from air pollution. 

The trucking rule requires school buses and garbage trucks to be emissions-free within four years. By 2042, all trucks will be required to be “zero-emission,” meaning there’s no pollution coming out of their tailpipes. The deadline comes sooner for drayage trucks, which transport cargo from ports and railyards to warehouses — typically short routes that require less battery range. New drayage trucks must be “zero-emission” beginning next year, with the rule applying to all drayage trucks on the road in 2035. 

Currently, medium and heavy-duty vehicles account for a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions statewide. In August, California clamped down on pollution from passenger vehicles with a plan to end the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035.

People breathing pollution from freeways and warehouse hubs have long called for stricter air standards. In the port cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles, some 6,000 trucks pass through every day, exposing residents to high levels of ozone and particulate matter, pollutants linked with a range of problems including respiratory conditions and cardiovascular disease. Long Beach residents who live the closest to ports and freeways have a life expectancy about 14 years shorter compared to people who live further away.

The trucking industry, however, argues that California is moving to electrify trucking too fast, and that the state’s strict rules could drive small operators out of business. Battery-powered trucks can cost up to half a million dollars including taxes and fees, more than twice what a diesel truck costs, although the federal tax credits and state rebates for electric big rigs  soften the blow. Rail operators also say the regulations on train pollution are coming too soon and could cause the price of goods to spike, with the industry arguing that “there is no clear path to zero emissions locomotives.”

According to the new rules, the state is banning locomotive engines that are more than 23 years old by 2030. It also bans trains from idling for more than 30 minutes, provided that they are equipped with an engine that can shut off automatically.

The stage for the rule was set by a single line buried in the Biden administration’s proposed auto emissions rules, in which the Environmental Protection Agency said it was considering allowing states to regulate locomotives. Still, California’s new rules may spark a legal battle with the rail industry, which argues that the state doesn’t have the authority to make such sweeping changes.

Though railroads only account for about 2 percent of the country’s carbon emissions from transportation, switching to trains powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells would provide some benefits in the effort to tackle climate change. The public health gains would be even bigger: The California Air Resources Board estimates its new rules for trains, passed on Thursday, would lower cancer risk in neighborhoods near rail yards by more than 90 percent.

“This is an absolutely transformative rule to clean our air and mitigate climate change,” Liane Randolph, the chair of the air quality board, said ahead of the vote on the trucking rules on Friday. “We all know there’s a lot of challenges, but those challenges aren’t going to be tackled unless we move forward … if not now, when?”

The new mandates represent a big change in California’s approach to climate policy from two decades ago, when most environmental groups treated global warming and air quality as separate problems that required separate solutions. Back then, the state’s climate policies actually diverted resources away from addressing local pollution to limit carbon emissions. 

Environmental justice advocates in California, among the first to use the phrase “climate pollution,” were some of the first to argue that the two problems were inextricably linked and needed to be addressed together. The new rules that limit pollution from transportation are a sign that the state has come to embrace their perspective.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electrify everything, California says — including trucks and trains on Apr 28, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

The post What’s Wrong With Biomass Burning? Everything! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.

A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, is an ambitious work — like The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow — building on the radical anthropology of prehistoric man, and Graham Hancock’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, promising a radical rethink of both the how and why of Homo sapiens. We need a ‘new old’ vision, linking us with the 80% of our history that preceded private property, slavery, war, and, oh yes, cities.

Evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein use Chesterton’s fence as their central metaphor: try to understand things before changing them.

By disregarding the facts of evolved human nature, they argue, the modern world in all its novelty has destroyed the proverbial fence, leaving us miserable, sick and heading for social collapse. We eat junk food, prescribe too many drugs, raise and educate our children badly. Heying and Weinstein provide evolutionary advice to confront the mismatch between stone-age brains and hi-tech society.

They are not afraid of controversy, resigning from Evergreen College in Washington State in 2017, in a dramatic defiance of student radicals who were bringing the college to a halt. They accused them of immaturity, of being WEIRD (see below). But apparently they were adored by many students for their wild adventures in the jungle instead of ‘sterile boxes removed from the world’, one describing their classroom as ‘an ancestral mode for which I was primed, but didn’t even know existed.’

They are not above a good harangue at times. As teachers, you either love or hate such dynamic, unforgiving thinkers. They used themselves, their children, and their students’ personal experiences – disdaining a bulky cast for a broken arm, marveling at female students buried under a collapsed hotel in an earthquake in Bolivia, or Heather almost drowning near the Galapagos. They gave me pause for thought. Could I survive their unforgiving initiation rites? Their impatience with WEIRD American students and their postmodern cool is refreshing. I think I would risk the poison snakes.

Pulling no PC punches, they look back to our cultural origins, tested and put into practice over millennia, starting with the end of the last great ice age 10,000BC, and present a vision of robust social conservatism tempered by conscious collective and individual effort to deal with our many crises. For we are being forced into establishing a new cultural paradigm at this very moment.

It’s during transitional periods in our evolution in the past 100,000 years (epigenetic, not genetic), that our cultural rituals were undermined and reforged by natural or manmade disasters. We can’t afford to continue on autopilot during such crises. We have to use our rational thinking mode. It’s much slower but collectively we can stumble towards a way forward. We are in a deluge of hyper novelty, without any of the culture of the past with its inherent wisdom. This time around, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The authors start with the provocative claim that the human evolutionary niche is niche switching, plasticity. Paradox: we are both generalist and specialist. By unravelling the human paradox, we can unlock a conceptual framework that allows us to understand ourselves, and to navigate our lives with intention and skill.

How did we become know-it-alls about everything? We really are nature’s ultimate solution to … everything. We have all the comparative advantages, are specialists at everything, live everywhere, and steal everything from all other creatures and poor mother Earth herself! And without paying the usual costs of lack of breadth, or paying back anything at all to the rest of the world. How and why did we become so all-powerful and totally selfish?

Where did it really start?

Sitting around the hearth, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the convergence point of individuals with different experience, talents and insights. We share via language. Fire and language. Our connections allow us to transcend individual limitations, cooperate; hence division of labour. Understand ourselves to navigate lives with intention and skill. As a species we excellent at many things. At the boundaries between individuals, we consciously innovate and share ideas, then reify the best ideas for the current moment in the form of culture. For millennia around the campfire. Today’s equivalent is our flat screen computer or better, iPhone, the 21st century meeting place, hearth.

The tools the authors forge start with the tension between consciousness and culture. Individual consciousness developed with collective consciousness (culture) in parallel. Your consciousness is for communicating what’s happening. That means theory of mind, my ability to know what you‘re thinking. No other animals have language, fire, and very few have a theory of mind. It’s highly developed only in elephants, toothed whales, crows, primates.

In humans, it is at its highest state, allowing us to pass along information via our breath and vibrating throat (language). Using our theory of mind, it also allows us to outsmart others, think a few steps ahead, to checkmate without the opponent evening knowing s/he’s playing chess! Usually we don’t think about any of this, operating on autopilot, but when times are bad, we have to consciously look at our situation, question our culture, traditions. Are they failing us? Should we really be trying to fool everyone all of the time? Shouldn’t we be on the alert for how to solve our mounting crises?

How we became so brilliant

Genes are not the only form of passing on heritable info. Our collective consciousness, culture, serves genes, shapes our epigenetics (inherited behaviour), i.e., the way the genome is expressed. The same rule governs both molecular and cultural regulators in genome expression. The genome is in driver’s seat, but just barely, as we now accelerate cultural change, but without the eons and wise hand of nature keeping our fantasies of omnipotence in check.

Culture is universal in birds and mammals. It isn’t free. In humans it takes on an outsize role and that means its home, the brain, must be big too, and that means expensive to run. It is prone to error, frequently blocks off fitness-enhancing opportunities (e.g., 10 commandments). It effectively parasitizes, colonizes the genome. The nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. All is evolutionary.

The Omega principle explains culture. Epigenetic regulators (culture) are more flexible and can adapt to change in the environment more rapidly (via switching off/on genome expression). Culture serves the genome and any long lasting cultural trait should be presumed to be adaptive.

Corollary 1: if it ain’t broken, don’t fix. I.e., long-term cultural traits/ traditions are presumed adaptive.

Corollary 2: Chesterton’s wall precautionary principle: evaluate the risk of any action.

How we became so evil

Sucker’s folly: concentrated short-term benefit obscures risk and long-term cost. We are consuming more and more, resting on our cultural laurels, but in reality speeding toward disaster, lulled into a false sense of security, our sense of a collective consciousness faltering. Our many brilliant specialists lose track of where we’re going, in fact, have no idea where we’re going. The computerized campfire is a false simulacrum, dividing people rather than bringing them together to solve our collective problems.

Adaptive evolution improves the fit of creatures to their environment. But we have focused only on a) reproductive success and b) profit for fitness as a species. Short term fecundity and profit (sucker’s folly) risk failure, i.e., extinction. It’s persistence that shows real success, and neither more individuals nor profit from exploitation of nature and man are factors in the persistence equation.

Human lineage

Handbook traced our lineage from the first multicellular individuals 600,000,000 years ago from which we descend (always a tonic to remind ourselves). The paradigm from the get-go: stealing energy from others. All animals (and plants) are parasites. And with sex (love?), the result?

The wild and crazy plant and animal kingdoms are of unbelievable diversity, with man sitting on top, the king of parasites. Some traits evolved along the way and stuck, i.e., they have universal value. Once nature evolved a bony internal skeleton, it didn’t regress. Also neurons, hearts. Mammals, birds evolved new self generated insulation as endotherms, and REM sleep. Lizards undulate sideways. Mammals up/down to run and breathe at same time. But all this costs more energy.

Fast forward to humans. We can look into future even when natural selection cannot (or can it?). We have evolved via culture to assist in even hardwired evolution (CRISPR, GMO, i.e., playing god directly). Our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, give us a choice of violence (Hobbes’s bad anarchy) or peace (Kropotkin’s good anarchy). How can we move towards what we would like to be as a species, not blindly rushing into Armageddon, which nobody is seriously calling for, except maybe a few WEIRDers?

WEIRD vs NORMAL

Handbook contrasts WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) countries vs the rest of the world, which I presume makes the latter NORMAL. WEIRDers (or if you prefer WEIRDos) are in the driver’s seat in our world of corporations, but in fact are less capable on the whole, living in a WEIRD environment. Science now in WEIRD, psychology based on undergrad behaviour is WEIRD. Who would have thought that a fetish for right angles from running wood through sawmills would distort our perception?* Handbook points the finger at each of the western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic, the WEIRD social formation, and dissects each attribute. That the WEIRD are presumably the pinnacle of human evolution gives lots of pause for thought about our likely future (or lack of it).

Our science and medicine is riddled with WEIRDness. We are awash in scientism — turning everything into fake numeracy, where anything countable is used. Hence eugenics, social Darwinism, people as machines with fixed rules, codes. Calories are the diet gold standard, though calories from carbs, protein, fat, alcohol have very different effects. Rather we should look at what we have been and done in past. Exercise in our sedentary lifestyle is the most important medicine to bring us back to the health of hunter gatherers, who almost never got sick. We mistake understanding how for why, mistake identifying effect for understanding the effect.

Antibiotics and vaccines are examples of this reductionist tradition (we are machines). They zero in on one pathogen, promote a human-made cure, and have saved millions of lives. But they are overapplied, and side effects are evidence that nothing is without consequences.

Sucker’s folly: If we engage in only proximate questions with a bias to reductionism, our medicine is blindered. We think surgery, antibiotics, vaccines are magic bullets. There are no magic bullets.

WEIRDers no longer have a local cuisine, tastes being arbitrary rather than following a ‘tried and true’ tradition. We’ve torn down all our culinary walls. We can’t rely on culture anymore. The logic of commercial culture is what makes profit, what sells, not what is good for us as individuals or as a species, intending to live for millennia. More sucker’s folly. We as ‘consumers’ need conscious decision-making on what to eat. On everything! Profit is not any kind of ‘gold standard’ for human health. Only for the production of more gold.

We have to willfully overcome evolutionary impulses (i.e., gorging on fat), be on the watch for manipulation, so we don’t suffer from untested and probably harmful hyper-novelty. Our survival strategy involves hard conscious effort, will, to move towards a more ascetic lifestyle. Hyper-novelty and moral confusion call for consciousness on a scale that we have never seen before.

There is some sharing of insights among wolves, dolphins, crows, baboons. A form of theory of mind. But not in tree frogs, octopuses, or salmon. They are isolated individuals who meet only for mating and never see their offspring. In contrast, even on supposedly anonymous public transit, we people watch, fantasize what kind of guy, gal is so sad, so happy, and why. We are social by instinct. No man is an island. Nor is s/he an octopus. We are the ultimate social animal. That’s our only hope.

Fourth frontier

We have pretty well used up our historical frontiers, i.e., geographic (exploring), technological (temporary positive sum, allowing greater exploitation), transfer of resource, (imperialism, theft). The 4th frontier is consciousness. We must consciously agree on a social equilibrium, zero growth. Make a new culture. We are built, programmed, to have early vigor and then deteriorate, so our ‘goods’ should preferably last 100 years (or more if our children inherit and keep using them). And we must consume less of them. That is the only solution.

But we and the market want short term gratification. Markets explore, innovate, just like we do, but also manipulate, conspire, just like we do as helpless infants. Hunter-gatherers lived in small groups which minimized manipulation because group interests were one. So that’s a tall order. No more new territories to steal. Only conscious innovation and management of Mother Earth. Energy-wasting consumption appropriately expensive, but in the up side, we are freer to do interesting stuff, resistant to manipulation, not easily betraying core values.

Mayan civilization lasted 2500 yrs. Their city states were connected, their culture thriving when Socrates et al were creating what became our WEIRD group think. Both the Romans and Mayans peaked in 4th century CE. It was more Greek, not monolithic, like Rome. It too left behind giant public works, which over the millennia absorbed the surplus (in worship), controlled and motivated the population. But this was precapitalism. Can we make capitalism work for our conscious ends?

CO₂ has no smell but the body can detect it in high concentration, which triggers panic, essential when you lived in caves. We have that survival instinct, intuition, to ward off existential threats. As we choke on CO₂ on a planetary scale, we must switch into consciousness mode (i.e., PANIC) to address the ecological, population, war threats.

Our throughput society depends on insecurity, gluttony and planned obsolescence. Sensitivity to existential threats is a long-standing adaptive trait. There really is no choice. We must all ‘come together, right now.’ Society is obsessed with short term safety, as short term harm is relatively easy to detect. Sucker’s folly. Imagine a Carrington event that cooks all our electronic gadgets in the twinkling of an eye.

Perhaps that’s the only way we can cut through the Gordian knot of a robotized late capitalism. But you will look back fondly on monogamy, so despised by WEIRDos, as such a world devolved physically will surely be polygynous and brutal. Is that enough of an existential threat to get us into proactive consciousness mode?

We still haven’t gotten to the ‘why’? Why we are here, the most conscious of all God’s creatures? Heather and Bret don’t really get there either. They are very secular, though their subject matter is steeped in spirit, soul, sacredness. We need a religion. They agree that religion is an adaptation, a costly one so it must serve an important purpose. They warn about ignoring religion as an ‘efficient encapsulation of past wisdom wrapped in an intuitive, instructive and difficult to escape package.’ But that sounds tone-deaf. Their epilogue, their family’s new Hanukkah rules, reads like a boy scout’s manual, handbook.

Love is all you need

Such a study, handbook, needs grounding, ontology, belief. It’s not enough to posit a state religion like Rousseau or Robespierre. While there is much food for thought here – I definitely recommend reading – it still feels like a draft. It’s hopefully a harbinger of more new-old charts to navigate our murky waters. Their prescription fits Islam, the most robust religion around today, though they don’t mention it. Caring for nature is man’s God-given responsibility, keeping market relations honest but separate from worship, following the ‘straight path’.

The World Economic Forum conspiracy, the golden billion club, is happening, for sure. Designed for a capitalist elite, with population control for the wage slaves. Which means the need to outsmart them, like we first did gaming mommie and daddie for attention as 6 month old babies. Will our ability to manipulate beat our instinct to panic if there’s too much CO₂? We were forced many times in our 100,000 years to deal with the threat of extinction, and survived, but this time could be the last.

It’s hard to place Heather and Bret politically. They state quite boldly that liberty is ’emergent, not a single value, a consequence of having fixed the other problems’ (justice, security, innovation, community, stability). Children/ students should ‘boot strap their own program so they can become individually conscious.’ ‘Equality should be focused on the equal valuation of our differences. Not a bludgeon for uniformity.’ They are big on competition. They remind me of Jacques Cousteau or Leni Riefenstahl, romantic social conservatives worshipping nature, anarchists at heart.

It’s a handbook, a new Whole Earth Catalogue. But we need to be grounded, have an ontology, a base to build on. Love is that ontology of the spirit. And it’s not just epigenetic, culture. It starts with the divine spark entering matter, the real incarnation of God. God’s touch to Adam is that spark. Consciousness.

Biology is not competitive a zero-sum game. It is fractal, holistic, cooperative. Right down to the atomic level. The same positive sum logic is at work in humans too. We start by becoming conscious, imitating the divine love. It becomes sex, family, friendship, agape, embedded in cultures, all the time yearning to reunite with divine love.

Recent archaeology has discovered a civilization that existed in present day Ukraine, 8000 years ago, urban but not too urban. Donut shaped urban formations with the hole the meeting place. Hunter-gatherer with light market gardening. Egalitarian, no slavery, no writing or monoliths, so no history, and archaeology tricky. Our mythical garden of Eden? Such sites, including rock formations like Stonehenge are being found in Siberia, Finland, Asia. Whether we have time to learn their secrets before we fry is moot.

Conscious future – Heaven or Hell?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

Arriving amidst a nationwide deluge of over 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed or introduced by a malignant GOP last year - most taking aim at trans youth by restricting health care, sports participation, bathroom use or Medicaid coverage - last week's signing of the Tennessee anti-drag bill led the way for at least 10 other GOP-led states pushing similar moves to restrict/ban male performers from playing with gender norms by - sweet Jesus - dancing, singing, or lip-synching in often-flamboyantly feminine dresses and make-up. Using inflammatory rhetoric about "groomers," supporters of these noble efforts - it turns out "straight from history's playbook" - inevitably frame them as "protecting the children," who are clearly averse to the notion of dress-up and who could be scarred for life by too much glitter and greasepaint; in happy contrast, they'll be just fine seeing classmates gunned down in cold blood by a school shooter. Tennessee's bill restricts "adult cabaret performances" in public or in the presence of children; it defines such performance as featuring topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers or "male or female impersonators who (appeal) to a prurient interest." Because even GOP lawmakers, who control the state House and Senate, have evidently heard of the First Amendment and aren't eager to enter the legal morass that comes with violating it, they didn't try to ban such shows outright, but carefully added revisions requiring it be "harmful to minors."

By way of defiant response, enter the Texas-based, six-piece, manly-man Vandoliers - "Socially punk. Fiscally country" - who in a "small act" of solidarity performed their set at a Maryville, Tenn. smokehouse, juke joint and Harley shop last week in dresses, and generous beards and tattoos be damned. Recently returned from the Outlaw Country Cruise and now on tour, they hit the stage the same day Lee signed the bill to Shania Twain's "I Feel Like a Woman!" and launched into a set-list that included, "Don't Tell Me What To Do." A few bigots left, but "tons of old timers and alpha bros (came up) saying, 'Man, that was fun.'" "Friends and fans in the LGBTQ+ community (are) a big part of my heart," said singer Joshua Fleming. "(This was to say) we see you, we stand with you, and we’ll fight alongside you." Still, he acknowledged, "It was a terrible drag show - the drag community is much better than us." Afterwards, they auctioned off all six dresses, raising $2,277 for Knox Pride and the Tennessee Equality Project. Online, their fans cheered: "This is the original definition of outlaw," "Y'all are the best," "This...is...everything." The Liberal Redneck also did a drag show fundraiser, in high school in "my beloved Tennessee...No, I did not win. My most redneck-ass buddy won by totally slutting it up." Today, he slams his state for "throwing the funnest people you know in jail for dressing like Dolly Parton." "These people's bigotry is ancient," he says. "It's not the practice they hate, it's the person. A guy in a dress must be kidding, a gay in a dress must be stopped. But we know what they're doing - they're trying to legislate these people out of existence."

How the Vandoliers usually lookVandoliers photo

Gov. Bill Lee (the tall one) as "The Hard Luck Woman" during high school in 1977.Yearbook photo unearthed by The Tennessee Holler

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Having banned abortion and trans medical care, Tennessee is "upping their shame game" with the nation's first (ludicrously ambiguous, likely unconstitutional) law criminalizing drag shows as part of the GOP's histrionic assault on all things trans, queer or "other." As critics blast the move as hateful “political theater” meant to "legislate gender non-conformity out of existence," the country-punk band Vandoliers took a more direct, hairy approach, donning dresses for a Tennessee show and declaring, "Fuck a drag bill."

Arriving amidst a nationwide deluge of over 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed or introduced by a malignant GOP last year - most taking aim at trans youth by restricting health care, sports participation, bathroom use or Medicaid coverage - last week's signing of the Tennessee anti-drag bill led the way for at least 10 other GOP-led states pushing similar moves to restrict/ban male performers from playing with gender norms by - sweet Jesus - dancing, singing, or lip-synching in often-flamboyantly feminine dresses and make-up. Using inflammatory rhetoric about "groomers," supporters of these noble efforts - it turns out "straight from history's playbook" - inevitably frame them as "protecting the children," who are clearly averse to the notion of dress-up and who could be scarred for life by too much glitter and greasepaint; in happy contrast, they'll be just fine seeing classmates gunned down in cold blood by a school shooter. Tennessee's bill restricts "adult cabaret performances" in public or in the presence of children; it defines such performance as featuring topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers or "male or female impersonators who (appeal) to a prurient interest." Because even GOP lawmakers, who control the state House and Senate, have evidently heard of the First Amendment and aren't eager to enter the legal morass that comes with violating it, they didn't try to ban such shows outright, but carefully added revisions requiring it be "harmful to minors."

By way of defiant response, enter the Texas-based, six-piece, manly-man Vandoliers - "Socially punk. Fiscally country" - who in a "small act" of solidarity performed their set at a Maryville, Tenn. smokehouse, juke joint and Harley shop last week in dresses, and generous beards and tattoos be damned. Recently returned from the Outlaw Country Cruise and now on tour, they hit the stage the same day Lee signed the bill to Shania Twain's "I Feel Like a Woman!" and launched into a set-list that included, "Don't Tell Me What To Do." A few bigots left, but "tons of old timers and alpha bros (came up) saying, 'Man, that was fun.'" "Friends and fans in the LGBTQ+ community (are) a big part of my heart," said singer Joshua Fleming. "(This was to say) we see you, we stand with you, and we’ll fight alongside you." Still, he acknowledged, "It was a terrible drag show - the drag community is much better than us." Afterwards, they auctioned off all six dresses, raising $2,277 for Knox Pride and the Tennessee Equality Project. Online, their fans cheered: "This is the original definition of outlaw," "Y'all are the best," "This...is...everything." The Liberal Redneck also did a drag show fundraiser, in high school in "my beloved Tennessee...No, I did not win. My most redneck-ass buddy won by totally slutting it up." Today, he slams his state for "throwing the funnest people you know in jail for dressing like Dolly Parton." "These people's bigotry is ancient," he says. "It's not the practice they hate, it's the person. A guy in a dress must be kidding, a gay in a dress must be stopped. But we know what they're doing - they're trying to legislate these people out of existence."

How the Vandoliers usually lookVandoliers photo

Gov. Bill Lee (the tall one) as "The Hard Luck Woman" during high school in 1977.Yearbook photo unearthed by The Tennessee Holler

\u201cON TENNESSEE BANNING DRAG SHOWS\u201d

— Trae Crowder (@Trae Crowder) 1677528630

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

For the World Health Organization (WHO), providing humanitarian support is the key priority during conflicts and other crises, said Dr. Jarno Habicht, the agency’s representative in the country. 

Ahead of the grim anniversary, he spoke to UN News’s Andrei Muchnik about WHO’s ongoing operations amid missile and drone attacks, and how many local colleagues “have lost everything except their work”. 

Dr. Habicht began by explaining what initially brought him to Ukraine. 

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

Peacemonger is a collection of essays about the much travelled Aotearoa peace activist and researcher Owen Wilkes, who died in May 2005. Wilkes was an extraordinary peace campaigner who discovered a foreign spy base at Tangimoana and was once charged with espionage in Norway and again while on a cycling holiday in Sweden.

After he took up beekeeping near Karamea on the West Coast in 1983, it was discovered that Customs was helping the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service to read his mail, apparently worried about his legendary ability to snuffle out secret installations by foreign powers in countries from New Zealand to Norway.

They were right to note his impact – this book explains just how enormously influential Wilkes was.

• READ MORE: Other Owen Wilkes book reports

Many of these short essays are by big names in the Aotearoa peace firmament, such as Maire Leadbeater, Murray Horton, David Robie, Nicky Hager and Peter Wills. Each chapter contains gems; some hilarious, others sobering.

Wilkes was a rare beast, a man who could be, as Mark Derby writes, “unpretentious, fearless, indefatigable, at times insufferable.”

Hager, a phenomenal investigative journalist, has contributed the chapter “The Wilkes How-to Guide to Public Interest Researching’.

Coming from Hager, one of the greatest public interest researchers in the country, this should be catnip to a new generation of proto-Hagers, Thunbergs and Wilkeses.

The last chapter, “Memories of Owen”, was written by his partner, peace activist May Bass.

It is a heartfelt send-off to a human comet who lit up everything he touched, one who may never have realised in his arc across the sky what a void he left behind him, not just in the peace movement, but in the hearts of his friends and loved ones.

• Peacemonger: Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby (NZ$35.00, Raekaihau Press and Steele Roberts Aotearoa). ISBN 9781991153869

Jenny Nicholls writes reviews for The Listener and this review has been republished from the Waiheke Weekender with permission. She is also a graphic designer: designandtype.org

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

In 2019, Berkeley, California passed the nation’s first ordinance banning new buildings from hooking up to the natural gas system. That required homebuilders and developers to install electric heat pumps, electric dryers, and, perhaps most controversially, electric stoves. The city council considered it a necessary step to cut carbon emissions, about a tenth of which here in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels inside homes, offices, and other sites. 

Less than four years later, this approach has proliferated. If you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a good chance you live somewhere that has followed Berkeley’s lead. A report published Wednesday by the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to getting fossil fuels out of buildings, estimates that one in five Americans now reside in a place that encourages or requires landlords and developers to eschew gas.

“We’ve officially moved into the second phase of the movement,” Panama Bartholomy, the organization’s executive director, told Grist. “If the first phase was categorized as no awareness, no policies, no programs, and a limited supply of product, I think we’ve officially moved into the second phase.”

Public awareness about the benefits of electrification shot up in January, after a study found that one in eight cases of asthma can be attributed to gas stoves and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said it would investigate their health risks. Stories about the benefits of switching to modern electric cooktops, called induction stoves, proliferated.

But evidence suggests gas already was falling out of favor in the U.S., at least when it comes to keeping warm. Sales of electric heat pumps grew 15 percent last year, with shipments outpacing those of gas furnaces for the first time in at least 20 years, according to data collected by the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute. “That’s massive,” said Bartholomy. The Inflation Reduction Act, which contains billions of dollars in tax credits and rebates to help people swap gas heaters, dryers, and stoves for electric appliances, is likely to accelerate the trend.

According to the coalition’s report, 98 municipalities and four states — California, Washington, Maryland, and Colorado — have adopted electrification policies. Some have enacted a ban on gas hookups in new buildings similar to Berkeley’s. Others have set energy efficiency or emissions-based requirements that would be hard to meet without embracing electric appliances. Still others focus on achieving targets with rebates and other incentives, like Maine’s goal of installing 100,000 electric heat pumps by 2025. 

Some officials are even beginning to contend with the roughly 70 million existing homes that burn fossil fuels. Last year, California regulators adopted rules effectively banning the sale of natural gas heating systems statewide beginning in 2030, forcing homeowners to go electric when they eventually replace their furnaces. New York is considering doing the same.

Not everyone is pleased about the rise of electrification. The natural gas industry, facing an existential threat, has earned the sympathies of Republican lawmakers in at least 20 states that have passed laws preempting municipalities from restricting the use of gas. The American Gas Association, the largest trade group for gas companies, argues the industry can lower its carbon footprint by eventually delivering alternatives like renewable natural gas, which is methane derived from rotting waste and manure, and clean hydrogen.

Advocates of electrification say going electric is a cheaper, more effective solution that can lower emissions today. Even though most of the country still generates its electricity by burning fossil fuels, in many cases switching from a gas furnace to a more efficient electric heat pump will reduce emissions. A recent analysis by the clean energy think tank RMI found that new, all-electric buildings are less expensive to operate and generate lower emissions than buildings that use gas in at least nine U.S. cities.

Now that electrification is in phase two, Bartholomy said there’s pressure on the movement to get it right, and eventually reach stage three — much broader adoption. The Building Decarbonization Coalition’s report outlines three things needed to ensure electrification succeeds. Because going electric can incur high up-front costs, more funding must be directed to low income households to ensure the transition is equitable. Even climate-forward states still have policies and subsidies that favor gas, and should adopt reforms that align with their emissions targets. Lastly, the group argues for a nationwide phase-out of gas appliances, similar to the one California has adopted, to give the industry a clear timeline.

“This gives the market — everything from the manufacturers, to the distributors to the installers — clarity,” said Bartholomy, “so that they can then start to make plans on how to change their business.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the “electrify everything” movement went mainstream on Feb 17, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

They came to Washington last week ready to represent the constituents who had given them the honor of serving in Congress. They were 39 freshman Republican House Members.

Harsh reality quickly set in.

Last week, they sat around as a Greek chorus while 20 extremist Republicans forced 15 ballots – the most since 1859 – before permitting Kevin McCarthy to be elected House Speaker. In the process the extremists drained away much of the Speaker’s powers.

Following this debacle, as a first order of business on Monday, the newbies were presented with the opportunity to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), an effective House Office that has been key for more than a decade to House ethics rules being enforced.

Without presenting any case against OCE—because there is none—House Republicans, including the 39 Republican freshmen, acted to cripple the agency for only one apparent reason: to enable House Republicans to take actions, free from any oversight or accountability for breaking House ethics rules.

I am confident in saying that none of those 39 Republican freshmen campaigned on a platform of gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics. But that didn’t stop them from voting to trash the House ethics rules by gutting the House office that is essential to making the House ethics rules work.

As a result, the 39 new Republican House Members quickly earned their place in the House Hall of Shame.

Mr. Smith did not come to Washington with this class of House Republican freshmen.

The most infamous member of this class is Rep. George Santos of New York.

He ran and won as a complete fiction, lying about nearly every aspect of his life. Santos is facing multiple calls for House ethics investigations (including one from Democracy 21), and federal and local law enforcement bodies are already investigating him.

While the House Ethics Committee will continue to have the power to determine whether ethics rules have been broken and to recommend sanctions, the Ethics Committee had been a burial ground for ethics complaints and investigations prior to the creation of the independent OCE in 2008.

If the OCE concluded the Ethics Committee should pursue an investigation, it put pressure on the Committee to do so. If the Committee failed to act, it knew that OCE’s report to the Committee would become public, putting further pressure on the Committee to take appropriate action.

OCE has done an effective job of preventing the Ethics Committee from deep-sixing ethics problems and has greatly improved ethics oversight and enforcement. And that is why the House Republicans gutted it.

While House Republicans were trashing ethics oversight, they were at the same time creating a “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” In reality, they are weaponizing the House to attack the Biden-led executive branch for purely partisan purposes.

Hypocrisy barely serves to describe these two actions. House Republicans want to investigate and ensure so-called “oversight and accountability” for the executive branch while eliminating effective oversight and accountability for themselves.

Furthermore, in true Orwellian fashion, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) will head the subcommittee to investigate the January 6th Committee and Justice Department investigators of the Trump coup attempt.

In 2016, Jordan led a spectacularly unsuccessful effort to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, one of the nation’s finest public servants. Jordan’s efforts were rejected by an overwhelming bipartisan House vote of 342-to-72. There was no evidence and no basis for impeaching Koskinen. But evidence is not something that matters to Jordan, as we also saw in his effort to deny the presidential election to Biden.

Jordan is about to embark on an irresponsible attack on the federal government in general and the Justice Department and FBI in particular. As an election denier and a serious participant in supporting Trump’s coup attempt, Jordan is riddled with conflicts of interest in leading this effort.

This subcommittee should not exist and Jordan certainly should not be serving on it.

The infamous two-year House Republican Benghazi investigation into Hillary Clinton ended in 2016 with a whimper, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Clinton.

We can expect that House Republicans will again wildly overreach in their partisan investigations that will end with a similar whimper.

This column first appeared in Wertheimer’s Political Report.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Fred Wertheimer.

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated

Read over 400 magazine and newsletter back issues here

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Susie Day.

Enter the Matrix: the New World Order Global Surveillance Documentary

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

It is no secret that the United States and NATO are engaged in a proxy war with Russia, perhaps to be fought to the last Ukrainian. In June, as heads of state gathered in Madrid for the Alliance's annual summit, I joined more than 10,000 activists from across Spain and around the world for mega anti-NATO peace conferences and a massive No to NATO rally. Their focus was not only NATO's roles in the Ukraine War but also its transformation into the world's dominant GLOBAL alliance whose new strategic concept also prioritizes containing China. Highlighting this transformation, the Prime Ministers of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea joined the summit for the first time in the Alliance's history.

LESSONS FROM THE EUROPEAN LEFT

Before turning to NATO's history and decisions taken at the summit, there were a number of lessons I took from the European Left while  in Madrid and elsewhere during my recent travels in Asia and Europe.

• There are divisions in Europe over the Ukraine War that mirror those in the United States, but there is unanimity that NATO's expansion to Russia's borders was a provocation that contributed to Vladimir Putin's decision to launch his invasion. There is also near unanimity that the invasion must be condemned as a gross violation of the U.N. charter and other international laws. European peace movements call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations leading to guarantees that Ukraine will endure as a sovereign and neutral nation. Some urge that the future status of Crimea and the Donbass remain in limbo, to be resolved in negotiations over the course of years. There are also calls for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, see more below) to convene a summit in 2025 to begin the negotiations for a new security architecture for Europe.
• Contrary to the image of NATO being more unified than ever, there are fault lines. The Baltic and Eastern European nations demand a harder line, including Russia's defeat in Ukraine, while the core nations of France, Germany and Italy press for a negotiated end to the war. There are also deep concerns that the severe reduction of imported Russian oil and gas will leave people's homes freezing and factories without power in the coming winter. This, it is expected, will lead to protests and openings for the far right to gain influence and power in Europe.
• Among Germans who value ties built with Russia beginning with Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, there is a belief that German economic success was built less by German expertise than by cheap Russian energy which will no longer be available.
• With U.S. gun violence, near-daily mass shootings, and the rash of horrendous Supreme Court decisions, Americans are increasingly seen as barbarians at the gate.
• For Europeans, especially Spaniards, there is horror and outrage at the death toll of immigrants—most recently in Spain's Melilla enclave—as European and NATO forces enforce bans on desperate non-white immigrants
• There is a deepening critique of European and NATO military spending, including the addition of 100 billion euros to Germany's military budget  which will make Berlin the world's third greatest military spender, and which will transform the European military and political landscapes.
• When Donald Trump  questioned the future of the NATO alliance, France and Germany placed greater emphasis on building an independent European military. That dynamic is moving forward, now fueled by multiple interests and uncertainties about who will be in the White House following the 2024 presidential election and by fears of Russian imperial ambitions. There is debate over whether this will result in a division of NATO and EU military labor—especially in North Africa and the Middle East—or whether the EU military will emerge as a rival to NATO over the longer term.
• I began my odyssey in Mongolia where a conference led by the country's former president and national security advisor celebrated and reinforced the country's 30-year old unique single nation nuclear weapons-free zone. In addition to the Zone's contribution to creating a nuclear weapons-free world, it was initiated to help guarantee Mongolia's independence from both China and Russia. I also learned that Mongolia's  first national security priority is keeping China's investments to less than 30% of the nation's total, again to preserve Mongolian independence. This was a lesson about China's Belt and Road Initiative and the enduring tradition of China's tributary approach to empire.

HISTORY & NATO's NEW STRATEGIC CONCEPT

In the United States, public perceptions of NATO remain rooted in the Cold War misconception that NATO is an exclusively defensive alliance. In Europe there are  recent memories of NATO's aggressions in Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, and Iraq. There is also memory of NATO's first General Secretary's, Lord Hastings Ismay, who stated that the purpose of NATO was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."  

Hasting's observation helps us understand why NATO was not retired when the public rationale for its existence, defense of Western Europe from possible Soviet invasion, evaporated with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor. provided a more detailed  explanation in his seminally important primer about how to maintain the United States' "imperial project," The Grand Chessboard. Reaffirming the geopolitical theory that whoever controls the core of Eurasia will be the world's dominant power, and noting that the United States, like Britain before it, is an "island power," he explained that NATO is critical to U.S. global dominance. It provides the "toehold" on Eurasia's western periphery, reinforced by its other toeholds in the Middle East and Central Asia, and by  its Asia-Pacific allies. Even before Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. had 100,000 troops and hundreds of military bases and installations deployed across a still functionally militarily occupied Europe.

While Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an unacceptable and deadly violation of the U.N. Charter and other international laws, it also appears to have been driven by two primary forces: Moscow's perceptions of Russia's strategic vulnerability given NATO's expansion to its borders( including deepening integration of Ukraine into NATO's systems) and by the desire to restore much of the Russian imperium that was lost with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Few in the United States are aware of Europe's 1990s Common Security commitments and the vision of a "Common European Home," which included Russia. In 1990 the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), inclusive of both the United States and Russia adopted the Paris Charter. This commitment was reiterated in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and again in the 1999 OSCE Charter for European Security. And, despite it never have been committed in writing, in the U.S.-Russian negotiations leading to German reunification on West German terms, the GHW Bush Administration committed not to move NATO a centimeter closer to Russia's border.

Why was this  important to Russia? Just as deep as our national memories of Washington crossing the Delaware, of our deadly Civil War, and of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, are Russian memories of catastrophic invasions from the West, first by Napoleon and later by the German Kaiser and Hitler.

Yet as Russia's political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin's rule, and in the tradition of the arrogance of power, despite George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War containment doctrine's  warning that it would lead to disastrous conflict, in 1999 President Clinton initiated the campaign to enlarge NATO. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became alliance members. Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations in 2004. In 2007, despite his senior advisor Fiona Hill's warning that inviting Ukraine and Georgia would lead to war, and against the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced the invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO's 2007 summit. In its immediate aftermath, the Georgia-Russian war followed. It has been reported the Putin began his planning for the Ukraine invasion in response to the welcome mat put out by NATO for Kiyv. Baltic and other Eastern and Central European nations were also welcomed to NATO.

Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, U.S. and German military forces were deployed and conducted military exercises along Russia's borders, and U.S. and Russian warships and warplanes conducted provocative and extremely dangerous military "exercises" in the Baltic and Black Seas.

Yet, even as NATO was expanding eastward toward Russia, it also became a global alliance. Today German, Dutch, English, French, Japanese and even Indian warships join provocative U.S. naval "exercises"in the South China Sea. "Partners"including Columbia, Australia, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Mongolia and even Pakistan were added to the alliance. NATO's webpage tells us that these partners "are part of many of NATO's core activities, from shaping policy to building defense capacity, developing interoperability and managing crises."The Alliance also has formal partnership frameworks including the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue, and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, each of which serve similar purposes to the formal partnerships. 

SUMMIT DECISIONS & NATO'S NEW STRATEGIC CONCEPT

As our movements recalibrate in order to address the growing threat to what remains of constitutional democracy, human and political rights and existential nuclear and climate threats, we need to bear in mind NATO's impacts on the new era of great power confrontation and what Michael Klare terms "blockification." In addition to NATO becoming global, Russia is increasingly dependent on China, and a new movement of non-aligned nations is trying to be born.

At the Madrid Summit, NATO Leaders took what they described as "transformative decisions"with the "biggest overhaul"of the "allied collective defense"since the Cold War and set the Alliance's strategic direction for the near and long-term future. Contrary to earlier expectations that the Alliance's focus on Russia would be downgraded, with China being named as NATO's #1 priority. But with the Ukraine War NATO's Strategic Concept named Russia as the "most significant and direct threat." It was followed by China being  named for the first time as a threat to the rules based order, followed by the  challenges of  terrorism, cyber and hybrid warfare. (It is important to remember that the post-war Bretton Woods "order" was imposed without meaningful Chinese input when the Middle Kingdom was impoverished and weak. Like any other major power, it seeks to advance what its elite identifies as the country's national interests.)

Commitments to continuing arming and supporting Ukraine were reiterated at the summit, as well as deepening Ukraine's integration with the Alliance by supporting its transition from Soviet-era military equipment to modern NATO equipment. More troops and more pre-positioned equipment and weapon stockpiles will go to Eastern Europe and the Baltics, with NATO's eight multinational battlegroups growing exponentially from 40,000 to 300,000 troops. NATO was reaffirmed as a nuclear alliance. The alliance doubled down on Ukraine and Georgia, reaffirming the commitment to NATO's "Open Door" policy for aspiring members. As part of the "Open Door," Sweden and Finland were invited to join the alliance, doubling the length of NATO's border with Russia. Member states committed to spending at least 2 per cent of their national GDPs by 2024 for their militaries. And new support commitments were made for "other partners at risk", including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and the Republic of Moldova. 

With no apparent sense of shame or acknowledgment  of what George Orwell termed "double speak,"the allies reiterated their "strong commitment to the rules-based international order and Allies' shared values of individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law." Missing from photographs of the assembled national leaders must have been the smirks on the faces of Turkey's, Hungary's, and Poland's leaders, not to mention President Biden and Secretary Blinken as they contemplated planned summits in Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

There is no denying that we are moving into an increasingly dangerous period. NATO, Russia and Ukraine are committed to fighting a long war which could escalate geographically or to the possible use of weapons of mass destruction. The Democratic Party is unquestioningly supporting an endless proxy war and has been reluctant to press President Biden to prioritize a negotiated settlement to the war. The illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court majority and those associated with the January 6 insurrection are plotting to secure white supremacist, medieval Christian, and corporate power for the long term.. And the war, the contest for primacy with China, and the recent Supreme Court EPA decision are sentencing future generations to climate catastrophes. 

Noam Chomsky reminds us that these crises were created by humans and that we know their solutions: Impose a cease fire and negotiate a just settlement of the war. Abolish nuclear weapons. Invest in clean energy and protect our coastal cities against surging tides instead of funding the Pentagon with more the military spending than the world's next 10 biggest military spenders COMBINED!  Expand and defend an inclusive if imperfect democracy. Restore a progressive graduated income tax to weaken the oligarchs and provide economic security.

Where then are sources of hope and inspiration? There are no easy answers in this dark time. On the one hand, I wish that I could transmit the commitments and surging energy of the thousands who rallied in Madrid. The Poor People's Campaign here in the United States provides a model and foundation for intersectional organizing and advocacy. There is inspiration to be taken from the centuries of African-Americans daily struggle for liberation and freedom against oppressive political and social systems stacked against them. Having had the extraordinary privilege of working with women and men who resisted Nazi rule in Hitler's Europe, nonviolently and otherwise, I take inspiration from their quiet courage. There is also the reality that within the oppressive rule of Soviet commissars in Eastern Europe and U.S.-backed oligarchs across Latin America people built culture and foundations for greater freedom. 

And there is Leonard Cohen's poetic insight that "There is a crack in everything/that's how the light gets in."

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

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

— Hunter S. Thompson, “September,” Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p. 413.

Imagine, just how programmed are we, and this is it for an excuse?

So, the electricity will be shaky here, there, and everywhere. The excuse is, of course, supply chain. Ports are cloggged. Container ship chaos. They will not admit to the real reason for economic and spiritual collapse:  CAPITALISM and PRICE gouging. It’s Putin’s fault.

Mass shootings, Roe v. Wade down the drain, empty shelves at hardware and food stores. It’s all Putin’s fault, including the price thieving for these electrical transformers, right? The $6 a gallon for gas in USA and $10 a gallon in Denmark, Putin’s fault. Mindless media midgets, and here we are: Western culture trapped in their own lies, inside their own self-fulfilling nightmares. Or continuous requiems for our dreams!

The lies and the shallow inquiries and the lack of curiosity, right up there with everyone is a used car salesman.

Journalism has always been dead in the mainstream:

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s,  November 6, 2003.

But back to other lies, and other lackeys lacking an inquiring mind. Local news from the local rag I publish my columns in, has stories about the local happenings. No pushback, just inverted triangle reporting. Referencing the local Public Utilities District here in Lincoln County:

Like utilities nationwide, Central Lincoln is being greatly challenged by supply chain delays, material shortages and massive cost increases for materials delivered. Demand for electrical supplies is robust, while transportation bottlenecks and raw material constraints are causing us significant concern over our ability to meet construction timelines. As we address these issues, Central Lincoln will strive to maintain supply levels to meet customer needs, while still maintaining emergency inventories.

We’ve all seen supply chain issues impact many aspects of life today. In some cases, lead times for Central Lincoln have increased six fold in the last two years when we’ve placed orders for materials. For example, new residential transformers typically took four months for delivery prior to the pandemic, and now they take between one year to 20 months to arrive. Costs for materials are also soaring — transformers that were $2,500 two years ago are now $15,000 each, and the cost is continuing to increase. This is not an exaggeration. (source)

Read that again: $2,500 for necessary transformers two years ago now SIX times more, at $15,000?

This is what defines USA, Biden, Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, Carson or Maddow, the entire shit show that is the American stupidity show. And how unprepared are we? This is the colonized mind, and this is the state of the American culture, as well as UK’s and Canada’s and EU’s. If all of this were true, and if we were guided (sic) by sane and humane folks, there’d be massive movements and masterful national plans to nationalize industries and rejigger the entire mess of capitalism for a world, a nation, that works for the people.

Now, shifting over to Scott Ritter, military lover, but still, smart.  He’s not on mainstream TV, in mainstream news. Again, the plastic hair and the Botox lips and the grappling girdles on these airhead TV presenters match their plastic brains. Here (below), he talks about how stupid Americans are (about world issues), and that includes what Yanquis do not know or want to know about the Nazi Ukrainians and this special military operation that Russia FINALLY had to unleash on that disgusting Ukraine and that perverted Zelensky and his crew.

But before Scott’s interview, how about  a little black robe insanity. Here we are now, with that un-Supreme Court, doing their shit show decision to get into the uterus of the female persuasion. Eichmanns, one and all.

Imagine that? Supreme (not) Court now determining the legality of obesity, the calories, the sorts of foods, the environmental effects on the male perusasion. Will the male be held criminally libel for what they ingest and what they do to their bodies, their sperm, the RNA?

Let’s be consistent here, perverts?

There is substantial evidence that paternal obesity is associated not only with an increased incidence of infertility, but also with an increased risk of metabolic disturbance in adult offspring. Apparently, several mechanisms may contribute to the sperm quality alterations associated with paternal obesity, such as physiological/hormonal alterations, oxidative stress, and epigenetic alterations. Along these lines, modifications of hormonal profiles namely reduced androgen levels and elevated estrogen levels, were found associated with lower sperm concentration and seminal volume. Additionally, oxidative stress in testis may induce an increase of the percentage of sperm with DNA fragmentation. The latter, relate to other peculiarities such as alteration of the embryonic development, increased risk of miscarriage, and development of chronic morbidity in the offspring, including childhood cancers. (source)

Preparing for American Roe v. Wade protests in DC. Imagine that, Plywood USA. DC Police Gauntlets. AmeriKKKa.

This all connects, really, these issues of local electrical power outages, and war. War against Russia, and, well, local costs soaring: War against the people. Supply chain excuses. Oh, where oh where are those Republican pukes and Democratic pukes serving us, the people? Electrical outages? Check that one failure of leadership for massive deaths and injuries in simple households?

Ritter talks about Nato using nuclear weapons, talks about the stupidity of Americans, and actors and the cultural cancelling.

Here you go, Gonzalo Lira: Israel Provokes Russia

Because I’ve lost access to all my accounts and channels to the SBU (Ukraine’s secret police), I don’t have any way to promote my content—so please be so kind as to share this video with anyone whom you think might learn something. GL

He talks about how Jews, not just Zionists and those in Occupied Palestine, seem to collectively hate Russians. It’s racism, of course, to hate an entire people: Russians? And, will this YouTube be taken down? For the opinion of Lira saying that Jews seem to hate Russians, or, for, another reason?

So, on the Scheer Post, we get all sorts of mixed bag aggregated articles on Russia and Ukraine. Many are like this: “China Will Decide the Outcome of Russia v. the West: Is Putin the Face of the Future or the Final Gasp of the Past?”

John Feffer wrote it, and he is bought and sold — co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The original article came from Tom Dispatch. Feffer is self-described Jewish gay.

Look up George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Look up DSA’s stance on pouring weapons and death into Ukraine. DSA is all for billions of weapons to Ukraine, and billions for ZioLensky to “operate” the Ukraine government, err, Mafia. This is how these pencil necks see their world:

In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact.

No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.

Here some comments at Scheer Post, pushing back on this guy, and I won’t republish mine:

Robert Sinuhe:

This is what happens when you are seriously ignorant of facts. He seems to know what Mr. Putin is thinking which should prompt Mr. Putin to ask this fellow what he’s thinking. Complete nonsense!

Roger Hoffmann:

What a disappointing read from Scheerpost. As others have already noted the repeated falsehoods (Russiagate) and baseless claims (Russia wants to swallow Ukraine) and others, I won’t waste the time addressing them either.

I will only say that it is apparent that this writer, in stating a narrative that overlaps much with that of Washington and its mouthpieces, seems oblivious to (or else, dishonestly chooses to ignore) much of the actual history of this conflict- the context in which it emerged, the pleas and warnings not only by Russia but of many seasoned U.S. officers from military, Intel and Diplomatic corps alike, and that of Russia-expert western scholars; and the actions of the U.S. since 2014 at least.

My advice to the writer: please don’t write about things that you know so little about, especially if you want to persuade those who’ve taken the time to become informed.

Terrence Bennett:

Tom Dispatch is a now sadly Pro Nazi source for regressives.
I urge Robert Scheer to monitor and reject many former progressives who now appear on organs like the late great Tom Dispatch

So, taking it in the rear? The back alley abortions. The behind the box store automobile trunk deals for prescriptions and diapers. The people have a choice in what money goes here and there? No massive strike, rolling strikes, rebellion? Our lives are gutted more and more each day!

Rents? Is that on the Republicans’ and Democrats’ agenda?

Gerardo Vidal, who has lived in the same apartment in Queens, New York, with his family for 9 years, recently received a $900-a-month rent increase this year.

“It means having to uproot my entire family, given the fact we’re still having a difficult time earning money due to the pandemic and loss of jobs,” said Vidal. “It’s unfair that we are being basically forced out of places we lived in for nine years and that landlords can get away with this.” (source)

We’ll finish with Richard Wolff, on Capitalism and US Empire now that USA-Klanada-EU-UK are dumping their weapons on the world, and then a Brit who has been in Donbass reporting on the ground:

“The Economic, Political and Social Crisis of the United States.” One hour!

Here you go, the Nazi Zio-Zelensky using USA-French-German-Nato weapons to, well, bomb neighborhoods, bomb apartment blocks, bomb universities, bomb bomb bomb, and there are NO military targets in these volleys.

Graham Phillips: “20+ Minutes in Donetsk Under Shelling Just Now – Uncensored, Love Donbass, do what you can to help Donbass.”

Reality therapy. So, those transformers cost so much, uh? How many transformers in Donbass have been imploded by the USA-UK-France-Germany? Keep reading:

“National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices… the Latest Phase of its Long-Term Strategy to Divide and Control the Left” on Dissident Voice, by Stansfield Smith 

These secret US government and CIA operations have been detailed in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers, The Cultural Cold War, and AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?

In 1977 Carl Bernstein revealed CIA interconnections with the big business media. More than 400 journalists collaborated with the CIA, with the consent of their media bosses. Working in a propaganda alliance with the CIA included: CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, Miami Herald, Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times still sends stories to US government for pre-publication approval, while CNN and others now employ national security state figures as “analysts.”

Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat operate similarly, participating in covert British government funded disinformation programs to “weaken” Russia. This involves collaboration with the Counter Disinformation & Media Development section of the British Foreign Office.

The CIA pays journalists in Germany, France, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to plant fake news. Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest German newspapers, showed how the CIA controls German media in Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA. Ulfkotte said the CIA had him plant fake stories in his paper, such as Libyan President Gaddafi building poison gas factories in 2011.

The CIA was closely involved with the long defunct National Students Association and with the trade union leadership. The AFL-CIO’s American Institute of Free Labor Development, received funding from USAID, the State Department, and NED to undermine militant union movements overseas and help foment murderous coups, as against President Allende of Chile (1973) and Brazil (1964), as well as defended the rule of their masters at home. This continues with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which receives $30 million a year from NED.

The CIA created publishing houses, such as Praeger Press, and used other companies such as John Wiley Publishing Company, Scribner’s, Ballantine Books, and Putnam to publish its books. It set up several political and literary journals such as Partisan Review. This CIA publishing amounted to over one thousand books, mostly geared to a liberal-left audience, seeking to bolster a third camp left, and undermine solidarity with the once powerful world communist movement.

Ahh, those transformers:

No national movement to, well, nationalize the construction and deployment and installation of these valuable electrical units? Summer, heat, fridges, AC, fans, oxygen machines, well, you get how valuable electricity is and how dangerous disruption of it kill.

No Marshall Plan for that? For clinics in all neighborhoods? Social workers and counselors for millions of students? Aging in place adults, no help for them? All those with Complex PTSD?

Again, one little Oregon County, and, shit-show number 9,999,999, coming to a city-town-county-place near-by.

Footnote: So, I went to pick up some vital medications at the Walgreens in Newport. Lo and behold, that electrical outage a few days ago fried the Walgreens’ computer — here, in Newport, and then, in Lincoln City. So, there were  people lined up, freaked out since some of their meds are, well, life saving. That’s it for America, and it will only get worse as I wait in a line of 20 at the small USPS office in Waldport, where signs say, “Don’t leave junk mail here since we do not have a janitor . . .  We are short staffed so we have to cut Saturday pick up window services . . . Please be patient as we are understaffed.”

USPS, and Trump and Biden. Whew! Ben Franklin is turning in his grave. The light is out on his kite. Remember, USPS is a public service, and it is one foot in the grave:

What this report finds: The United States Postal Service is a beloved American institution that provides an essential public service to communities and good middle class jobs for workers. It is a model of efficiency and responsive to changing customer needs. But the conflicting demands made upon it by Congress and regulators put it in a precarious financial position even before the pandemic. Anti-government ideologues and special interests have long sought to privatize, shrink, or hobble the Postal Service. The Trump administration revived these efforts, spurred by the president’s opposition to mail voting and his animus toward Amazon, a major customer.

What needs to be done: The Biden administration and Congress must act to undo the damage and allow the Postal Service to adapt to meet unmet needs, including the revival of postal banking. (source)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

“These are not merely abstract philosophical questions,” Táíwò lectured. “People are fighting wars over, among other things, different answers to these questions.”

Remarkably, many of these wars were won by those on the side of “free and equal,” Táíwò pointed out. Think of the American and French revolutions: Their ideas about inalienable rights and consent of the governed quickly transformed from heresy to common sense. This common sense, however, failed to provide the promised rights and freedom to most of the world. Women in the U.S. only won the right to vote more than a century after the American Revolution, and around 750 million people lived under some version of colonial rule by the middle of the 20th century. Even as they gained independence, redrawing the borders of the modern world, disparities endured. Black South Africans, for instance, didn’t secure voting rights until 1994.

“Just for reference,” Táíwò said, pausing for emphasis, a large beaded necklace with an Africa-shaped pendant hanging over his gray T-shirt, “I’m older than that. That happened in my lifetime.”

This tension between what philosophy says about the world and the ways the world actually works is what animates Táíwò’s teaching and writing. A 32-year-old assistant professor, he’s already one of the country’s most publicly prominent philosophers, and he’s certainly the most vocal philosopher working on issues related to climate change. Less than five years ago, he was toiling in relative obscurity on his PhD at UCLA; today he publishes regularly not only in professional philosophical journals, but also in publications like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and too many others to list. His first two books, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture, have both been published within the last six months. He tweets to his 48,000 followers daily.

When I first called Táíwò on the phone in February, I told him that, if I had to gloss Reconsidering Reparations, I would call it “a theory of everything for the social justice left.” I didn’t mean this to sound flip. If anything I meant it as a compliment about the book’s deftness in connecting issues as seemingly disparate as disability rights, fossil fuel divestment, basic income proposals, and police reform.

“Just for the record,” he responded, laughing, “that doesn’t sound flip at all.”

That Reconsidering Reparations became a “theory of everything” with climate change at its center is something of an accident. When he sat down to write his first book, Táíwò was interested in staking a position in a far narrower debate: Under what conditions could a program of reparations for those disadvantaged by the legacy of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade actually achieve justice? 

Táíwò’s notion of justice is broad. While many philosophers have traditionally conceived of justice as concerned above all with the resources available to people, Táíwò thinks the concept must be expanded to consider their “capabilities” — what kind of lives they are empowered to lead, not just the money and goods they have. If you want to achieve justice in a sense this expansive, he argues, redistributing cash and other material resources will only get you so far.

Over and over again, the question of how to realize this justice led Táíwò to climate change. Given its disproportionate effects on populations for whom the legacies of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade loom the largest — think the tens of millions of Bangladeshis who stand to be displaced by sea-level rise, or the unique vulnerability of the entire African continent to temperature rise and decreased rainfall — each additional degree of global warming seemed to undermine the good that any reparations project could do.

“Are any of these other measures that we take toward racial justice going to have staying power in a world that’s 3 degrees hotter?” he has said. “In a world where there is rampant instability in our energy and housing systems? In a world of mass human displacement? In a world where the elites of the world feel very threatened?”

Though Táíwò is loath to declare loyalty to a particular ideology, he readily identifies as a leftist, and his views on climate change perhaps sit most comfortably under the umbrella of eco-socialism. Still, he is willing to follow his philosophical arguments to positions that are controversial in some leftist quarters. He has argued, for example, that carbon removal is an essential tactic in the pursuit of environmental justice, and he has opposed calls for bans on solar geo-engineering research, calling such arguments “performatively colonial.” What he opposes most of all is moralizing: If political purity gets in the way of improving the actual life experience of people now and in the future, then it has no place in his account of justice.

“He’s not a doctrinaire anything, in the end. You really see this in his interest in climate politics. He’s like, ‘Let’s just do whatever works when it comes to this really urgent problem,’” said Daniela Dover, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford who taught Táíwò when he was a graduate student. “I don’t feel like I can predict what he’s going to say.”

While Táíwò’s ultimate vision is of a world where economic and political power is massively redistributed, it’s clear that he thinks rapid decarbonization is the world’s most immediate priority. Every degree of warming puts his conception of a just world further out of reach. 

“It’s very difficult to not treat climate change as one of the central questions confronting philosophers and people in general,” he told me.

What sets Táíwò’s work apart is that he thinks the English-speaking world’s traditional accounts of justice are increasingly useless — and that the challenges posed by climate change can demonstrate why.

Anglo-American political philosophy still operates in the shadow of John Rawls, whose 1971 doorstop A Theory of Justice single-handedly revived an academic field that many considered dead. Rawls argued that justice consists of whatever principles all of a society’s members would agree to if they were to assume what he called a “veil of ignorance” — in other words, if they did not know the exact circumstances under which they would live.

The idea is that a state could pursue justice by basing its laws and rules on principles that people would endorse if they knew nothing in advance of facts like their race or income. If every country operated on these grounds, then we would live in a just world. Whether or not you’ve heard of Rawls, if you have an idea that justice is more or less synonymous with something like fairness — and that the laws of states and governments should be set up in a way that advances this fairness — your thinking bears the mark of his influence.

Táíwò thinks this approach might make sense if we all lived in completely autonomous countries with representative and functional governments. But we don’t. Given this, Táíwò argues that we cannot pursue justice without recognizing that we live in an interconnected world that distributes risks and benefits in profoundly unequal ways, regardless of what any of the 193 members of the United Nations might want. This is largely, Táíwò argues, because we are still living out the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and European colonialism, which established global patterns of wealth and resource accumulation that push some countries toward failure and others toward success, decades after many colonized countries gained independence.

Indeed, the very fact that we live in a world composed of nation-states — and the shape and institutions of those states themselves — is the product of these worldwide historical developments. Africa’s present-day borders, for instance, are largely the work of colonial administrators. (In 1885, European leaders staged a now-infamous conference in Berlin to hammer out the details; no Africans were invited.)

When looking at contemporary disparities, like the two-decade gap in life expectancy between an American and a Nigerian, Táíwò sees the winds of this history at work, delivering unearned benefits to some and unwarranted burdens to others. Sometimes, those currents scramble our moral expectations, our tidy accounts of heroes and villains. One chapter in Reconsidering Reparations notes that some early Georgetown students’ parents leased the labor of enslaved Africans to the university to cover their tuition, and that Georgetown itself sold hundreds of enslaved people to balance its books. Right after that, however, Táíwò observes that the benefits Georgetown accumulated in part through the slave trade now flow directly to him, a Black man, paying his salary and lending him the institutional prestige that helped him secure the contract to write this very book.

This paradox is at the core of Táíwò’s argument about the perils of a certain kind of identity politics, an argument he makes in a recent essay that became his latest book, Elite Capture, published in May: Identifying a single person who can accurately and fully represent the voices of a marginalized group is easier said than done.

“Treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford,” he writes. In the worst cases, this well-meaning presumption can enable the “elite capture” of justice-oriented projects. That might look like the Black mayor of Washington, D.C., having “Black Lives Matter” painted onto city roads while sidestepping the demands of protests on those same streets. For Táíwò, the emerging norm in social justice organizations and universities of automatic deference to people like him risks uplifting an already-privileged few in place of actually improving the lives of the oppressed.

​“Perhaps,” he writes, “after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside. But probably not.”

The story of Táíwò’s own ascent to the chattering class underscores not only the moral perils he sees in a certain brand of identity politics, but also the ways that history tees up life outcomes in ways that only become visible in retrospect — another major theme of his work.

President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a sea change in U.S. immigration policy, making “skilled labor” the primary determinant of an individual’s ability to immigrate, rather than ethnicity and national origin. Large-scale immigration from countries in Asia and Africa became possible, and Táíwò’s parents left Nigeria in the early 1980s to pursue graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Táíwò was born. His childhood memories start in the suburban Midwest. His mother’s career as a pharmacologist took the family from the affluent suburbs of Cincinnati to the affluent suburbs of Indianapolis and then to nearby Muncie — “Parks and Rec Indiana,” as Táíwò calls it. As a kid, he was absorbed by Ender’s Game, the mythology of the Star Wars expanded universe, and Super Smash Brothers Melee.

The legacy of anti-colonial independence movements loomed large in the memories of Táíwò’s parents — they taught their children the pan-African anthem — but so too did the 1967 Nigerian Civil War, which saw the country fracture along ethnic and religious lines as the predominantly Igbo populations in the southern Biafra region seceded following ethnic cleansing in the Muslim-dominated north. Táíwò recalls that many of the other Nigerian-Americans he knew in the Midwest “had genocide in living memory.” As they struggled to convince him to practice the piano, Táíwò’s parents reminded him how lucky they were to own one: In Nigeria, they’d had to leave their piano behind after the war broke out.

This backdrop shaped how Táíwò experienced political events in the U.S. In April 2001, when Táíwò was 11 years old, an unarmed 19-year-old Black man named Timothy Thomas was shot by police officers in a Cincinnati neighborhood a few miles from Táíwò’s home. The community uprising that followed bore a striking resemblance to those that would follow Michael Brown’s death in Missouri in 2014, and George Floyd’s in Minnesota in 2020. It shook Táíwò’s inchoate sense that American life could be insulated from the kind of violence his parents had left behind in Nigeria. In neighborhoods not far from their quiet Ohio suburb, it often wasn’t.

An experience later that year, however, underscored the vast privilege that accompanied the family’s American citizenship. After finding out that hijackers had steered planes into the World Trade Center, Táíwò began stashing Pop-Tarts and other imperishables in his bedroom. His parents, mystified, asked him what he was doing. He explained that this is what he’d picked up from them about what war meant: needing to prepare for deprivation and insecurity. They laughed — such precautions were not necessary in a country like the U.S. They wouldn’t be leaving their piano behind.

“Part of the point of their immigrating here,” he reflected in an interview as an adult, “was to become the sort of people that war didn’t happen to.”

These experiences informed a principle at the core of Táíwò’s philosophical viewpoint: that justice is a question of how both resources and personal security are distributed between different countries and communities as well as within them.

A “directionless and unmotivated” student, in his own words, Táíwò aced standardized tests but got unremarkable grades — he didn’t like being told what to do, and even less being told what to think — dashing the Ivy League hopes of his parents. Still, he was able to get into Indiana University on a scholarship. He started out studying economics and political science, thinking those were the disciplines that could answer his nascent questions about why society was organized the way it was. He quickly became disillusioned, and that disillusionment crystallized one day while he was studying macroeconomics. The textbook offered as an example a man in Bangladesh who worked as a taxi driver, tailor, and an array of other odd jobs.

“The book was like: Why is this person poor?” Táíwò said to me. “I expected an answer that would have to do with anything about Bangladesh. And the answer was like: ‘This guy doesn’t understand the principles of specialization and trade.’”

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“Their assumptions seemed to background stuff that I thought should be foregrounded,” he remembered of those courses. “I just figured philosophy was the place you went to think about background assumptions.”

With his first philosophy courses, Táíwò was hooked. Applying to graduate school to continue studying philosophy after he earned his bachelor’s degree in 2012 was a natural choice, given the ambient pressure he still felt from his parents to pursue higher education. But he had little investment in making a career as an academic. His stint as a saxophonist in his high school band led to him dabbling in a handful of other instruments, including guitar, and he was more interested in becoming a musician. (He’s described his musical sensibility as “somewhere between The Roots and Miles Davis.”) UCLA didn’t seem like a bad place to make that happen. He took a year off before grad school to try his hand at it.

“Failing to become a musician was a very good thing for me,” he admitted.

At UCLA, Táíwò studied under philosophers who encouraged him to pursue the broad, big-picture questions that animated him — questions about how contemporary society is structured, and how it could be restructured in a just way — rather than reorienting himself toward the arcana associated with academic philosophy. The wide scope of Táíwò’s inquiry led him to take much of his coursework outside his home department, in classes on history and cultural studies. Táíwò’s dissertation advisor, the philosopher AJ Julius, described their time together as the “uncommon experience of watching someone in permanent revolution.”

“He came into it knowing he was always going to be an outsider to the institutions of professional philosophy, but determined to use those institutions for his own purposes,” said Dover, who sat on Táíwò’s dissertation committee. “I didn’t feel I had anything to teach him at all.”

Though this approach may make Táíwò an outsider to contemporary philosophy, with its emphasis on ever-narrower definitional questions, it also makes him more like the classic conception of a philosopher — Táíwò’s ambition is no less than Aristotle’s when the latter sat down to spell out exactly how to live the good life. In asking questions about things as fundamental as the nature of justice, Táíwò found himself arguing with some of the philosophical tradition’s towering figures — an argument that plays out, among other places, in the pages of his first book, Reconsidering Reparations, where he takes on John Rawls.

Táíwò thinks Rawls’ famous theory of justice is wrong on multiple counts. The first is its focus on states. Táíwò argues that many governments are incapable of securing just or fair outcomes for their citizens, because many of the biggest disadvantages they experience are imposed externally: Think here of the tiny Pacific island nations that stand to disappear altogether due to sea-level rise caused largely by emissions from early-industrializing countries like the United Kingdom. History has set some states up to succeed, and others to fail.

Second, Táíwò argues that Rawls proposed a “snapshot view” of justice: It establishes what a just set of outcomes would be at a single point in time, failing to recognize that circumstances today were often created in the past — and that what looks like justice to people alive today may harm their grandchildren. Building out coal power, for example, might make sense to present-day residents of a country like India — it’s cheap electricity that can power air-conditioning on increasingly scorching summer days — but such decisions contribute to global warming that will bring suffering to future generations.

“The nature of the system is that it moves resources from yesterday to today to tomorrow,” Táíwò writes.

To answer skeptics of his account of the guiding role that historical forces play in the present, Táíwò asks simply that we take a look at the best available data about the world around us (which is helpfully laid out in Appendix B of Reconsidering Reparations): The vast majority of former colonial powers, like the U.K. and France, have average incomes well over twice that of many of their former colonies. Metrics on life expectancy, maternal mortality, dietary adequacy, literacy, sanitation access, civil liberties, and political rights follow similar patterns. Taken together, these disparities make formerly colonized countries most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change — an ironic outcome, given that their late industrialization makes them least responsible for climate change in the first place. 

Environmental injustice and climate change, in other words, dole out damage in profoundly unequal ways. This is visible not just between countries, but also within them; the theft of land from Indigenous peoples in North America, for instance, has made their descendents more vulnerable to extreme heat and drought. Much of this sounds familiar, or at least intuitive, to those immersed in the rhetoric of the environmental justice movement. It’s all connected. But Táíwò provides a grand unified theory that explains why it’s all connected, and points to ways of remaking the world in accordance with philosophical principles of justice.

To some, a philosophy that accounts for the combined injustices of all of modern history might appear to put an ideal world out of actual reach. But although Táíwò is most thorough in his account of the way the world actually is, he doesn’t lose sight of the ideal. Instead, he ratchets his ambitions for the ideal higher. Because the colonial world order remains a force in people’s lives, a reparations project that achieves justice cannot simply compensate for past and present damages — it must be what Táíwò calls a “worldmaking project,” concerning itself not just with wealth and resource distribution but with building and maintaining environments that allow everybody to flourish within them. In this sense, he considers his project a “constructive” approach to reparations.

Táíwò thinks that this is best pursued by prioritizing the self-determination of individual communities, their ability to chart the course of their own destinies. On the local scale, he’s spoken approvingly of citizen assemblies in contrast to the mass electoral politics we normally associate with democracy. (Recent experiments in this form have contributed to securing abortion rights in Ireland and wind power in Texas.) On the global scale, he calls for reviving egalitarian visions of an alternate international system, such as the New International Economic Order that Ghana, Nigeria, and dozens of other decolonized countries demanded of the United Nations in the 1970s.

These ideals may seem far off, but much of Táíwò’s time and energy is spent arguing for concrete, intermediate steps toward these goals. He recently teamed up with three other academics to publish a proposal outlining the possibility of a publicly owned, democratically controlled carbon removal authority in the U.S., which could be modeled after municipal water or trash systems, or regional electric cooperatives. In April, he co-authored a report documenting the ways that the U.S. and other rich countries could immediately restructure or cancel debt owed by poor countries as a first step in a program of climate reparations.

“Climate reparations should not be thought of simply as compensation for past environmental, economic, and social damages, but as world making,” the report reads. “Debt justice and enhanced climate finance should help build a platform for countries in the Global South to achieve low-carbon development and robust, resilient infrastructure.”

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On a cursory read, the sweeping history of what Táíwò calls “global racial empire” could lead you to think there’s no room in his account for human agency, for bucking the course of history and changing the world right now. But Táíwò doesn’t think history dictates what people do. History may create the constraints and boundaries within which people make choices, but they still make choices. The more those boundaries are expanded, the more actions that are available to people, Táíwò’s argument goes. And, perhaps, if people are more free and empowered, they will be more likely to coordinate and solve big problems like climate change.

In our conversations I got the sense that, if there’s one thing about Táíwò’s account that keeps him awake at night, it’s how close this belief is to an article of faith, rather than a reasoned philosophy. He knows there’s no guarantee that greater human freedom and empowerment will stop climate change, or bring about justice. If given more choices, people might pick the wrong ones. Nevertheless, Táíwò thinks it only makes sense to let them try.

“He’s hoping to find a common-sense radicalism,” Julius told me. “I think he’s trying to help radical thought and common sense to recognize themselves in each other.”

The day I visited Táíwò in Washington, the city’s famous cherry blossoms were in early bloom. The gray sky delivered ominous bursts of wind, warnings of the tornado that would touch down just across the Potomac River later that evening. Nevertheless, we successfully avoided rain as we walked past Georgetown’s tony townhouses to Martin’s Tavern, a watering hole for the city’s well-heeled. Táíwò patiently and thoughtfully fielded my questions as fragments of chatter about registering kids for prep school floated by from other tables. Sensing my anxiety about leaving the right amount for a tip, he quietly threw a few extra bills on top of the check as we walked out. Knowing the correct amount mattered less than giving someone a little more money right now. It might not have been ideal, but it got us part of the way there.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything on Jun 21, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John Thomason.

Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.
— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As the Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have is a government of wolves.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.

Brace yourselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become enemies of the Deep State.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Many consumers are now looking for increased accountability. “How many companies have said ‘Black Lives Matter’ with no Black people that work there?” says Xavier, a 30-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia. Xavier was interviewed along with other young adults, youth activists, brand leaders, and business experts for a new report by BBMG and GlobeScan, called “Leading Regenerative Brands: Five Paradigm Shifts to Thrive in a World in Flux.” 

Others acknowledge the scale of the challenges companies face. “We need our leaders to care. And I think it’s really hard,” says Melody, a 24-year-old from New York City. “Capitalism and social good conflict a lot. One thing I learned is many of our leaders have crippling climate anxiety. They don’t feel like they’re sustainability experts. They don’t know what to do, so they’re just going to do nothing, because it’s a huge PR risk to do the wrong thing these days.” 

Nevertheless, many brands are proactively tackling these critical issues, leveraging their reach and resources to take on problems like climate change, racial justice, health equity, and mental health—all issues that BBMG and GlobeScan’s interviews and survey identified as particularly critical to young people under age 30. 

“I think we have to embrace our interdependence and recognize that the individual is actually not the fundamental unit of life, that nothing exists apart from community,” Dave Rapaport, Global Social Mission Officer at Ben & Jerry’s, shares in the report.

Five paradigm shifts

“Leading Regenerative Brands” is part manifesto for why it’s imperative to build a purpose-driven company, and part handbook for how to do it. It shares a vision for regenerative leadership inspired by extensive interviews and a global survey of over 30,000 people in 30 international markets. It outlines five shifting paradigms that brands must navigate in order to thrive through this time of change.

1. Power: Giving voice, choice, and ownership to those with the most at stake.
2. Space: Closing the distance between the people and places that make, sell, and use our brands.
3. Time: Slowing down, moving with intention, and becoming good ancestors.
4. Leadership: Welcoming vulnerability, embracing ‘not knowing,’ and turning challenges into quests. 
5. Relationship: Widening the circle of connection to thrive together with all of life.

“We’re experiencing new social and environmental conditions on a daily basis, and we believe brands can respond with a human-centered ethos—a spirit of care, of learning together, of building connection, of honoring our mental and physical health, and co-creating responses so that we can find our way to richness, meaning and rejuvenation,” says Raphael Bemporad, BBMG’s Founding Partner.

BBMG is a brand and social impact consultancy dedicated to working with leaders who won’t wait on the things that can’t wait. With a team of strategic creatives and creative strategists, culture experts, and design thinkers, we build Regenerative Brands that are aware, additive, and alive to transform the world we’re in and create the future we want. BBMG is a Certified B Corporation with teams in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Brands have a role in global regeneration. But first they must rethink everything. on Jun 7, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The horrific Uvalde massacre, and the Republican non-response, confirms what many of us have thought: the U.S. political process is broken. Not "strained" or "damaged" but rather "rent asunder." America's political process can't be repaired by applying duct tape. It needs reconstructive surgery.

Unfettered capitalism has taken democracy captive. Republicans refuse to allow new gun-control legislation because they've sold out to the pro-gun lobby.

The Uvalde massacre had tragically familiar components: a mentally-ill, socially-isolated gunman who had been bullied; ready access to weapons of mass destruction; targeting of innocents; and a shameful police response. It was a horrific metaphor for the Republican response to the plight of our nation's less fortunate citizens—the "99 percent." The Party of Trump responds to tragedy with "hunker down, snowflake; it's going to get worse." And then dances.

The vast majority of Americans want common-sense gun reform. Republicans block this reform. (Trump's response was: "defund Ukraine; fortify schools.")

Because our political process is broken, we need to take strong measures.

1. Put people before profits. The U.S. political system has been corrupted by big money. Unfettered capitalism has taken democracy captive. Republicans refuse to allow new gun-control legislation because they've sold out to the pro-gun lobby.

In 2022, the United States has two political parties. Democrats, who mostly support democracy (although there are "big-money" interests in the party).  And Republicans, who are the party of unfettered capitalism; the party where "money talks and principle walks."

It's no secret that Republican politicians can be bought.  Consider Sens. Ted Cruz or Ron Johnson or (shudder) Mitch McConnell, among others.  The GOP leader is Donald Trump who has no principles at all, whose credo is "I'll say whatever you pay me to say, for a big check." The Republican Party is for sale to the highest bidder.

The only way to resolve this situation is to get money out of politics. The only way to achieve this objective is for the Democrats to not only hold onto the House and Senate but to add seats. Congress has to pass significant campaign-finance reform and this will only happen if Democrats prevail in November.

2. Expand the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, because of the Trump "presidency," the Federal judiciary is packed with ultra-conservative judges. Therefore, it won't be sufficient to simply pass reform legislation, because it will eventually be blocked in the Supreme Court. (Blocked by the judges that the Republicans bought.) Democrats have to expand the Supreme Court by at least three judges.

3. Protect voting rights. Restrictive voting rights favor Republicans; common-sense voting rights favor Democrats. The GOP attack on equitable access to the ballot favors the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

Heading into the November election, it is vital to pass laws to protect election workers, same-day registration, and early voting. It is also necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures' electoral power grab.

4. Pass common-sense gun control. The vast majority of Americans want common-sense gun reform. The place to start is with mandatory background checks for gun purchases and a reinstated ban on assault weapons.

5. Pass real economic reform. The first four corrections are essential but not sufficient to repair our broken democracy.  The United States needs real economic reform.  Democracy doesn't work in societies where there is extreme economic inequality. Sadly, that's what has happened to the United States.

The nation's inequality is at a historic high. Compared to our European partners (England, France, and Germany) the US has a much greater gap between the rich and the poor. The ultra-rich—think Elon Musk—have so much more money than most Americans that they are buffered from economic turmoil. During the pandemic, rich Americans got richer and everyone else got poorer.

Republicans, the Capitalist Party, seek to increase the power of the one percent. If you ask Republicans why they supported Donald Trump, they will typically respond: "I don't like him personally but he did a lot of good things." By "a lot of good things" Republicans mean: Trump helped McConnell pack the judiciary with conservative judges and Trump signed tax reform that massively favors the interests of the "one percent" and corporations. Trump didn't do very much as "president" but what he did do favored the interests of the rich.  This needs to be reversed. Democrats should sponsor concrete actions to secure a more equitable society.

Summary: To repair our broken political process, we need to do two things.

First, get out the vote in November.  It's imperative that Democrats retain control of Congress.

Second, we must improve our messaging. Democrats should say, "We put people over profits. We represent the 99 percent not the richest one percent."

Democrats should also say clearly: "Republicans have sold out to the rich. Republicans have sold out to big oil. Republicans have sold out to the NRA. Republicans have sold out to white male supremacists." 

It needs to be made clear: "Democrats are the Party of the people. Republicans are the Party of the dollar."

This moment requires direct action. "Thoughts are prayers" are woefully insufficient.

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Addison Post.

The post Putin has Gambled Everything on His Snap-Invasion of Ukraine, Now His Political Survival in Russia is in Doubt appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

• President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump diagnosed with covid-19
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• Attorneys General in California and Pennsylvania say Trump is doing everything he can to intimidate voters
• Governor Gavin Newsom signs series of police reform bills
  
• Leading members of California’s Latinx community announce opposition to Proposition 20

The post President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump diagnosed with covid-19; Fire crews continue to fight the Glass Fire Incident burning in Napa and Sonoma counties; Attorneys General in California and Pennsylvania say Trump is doing everything he can to intimidate voters appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.