This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel is accelerating its efforts to cement its permanent control over the West Bank through a number of sweeping legal and institutional changes, according to a new report from Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

The 87-page report, Legal Structures of Distinction, Separation, and Territorial Domination, describes the ways in which the Netanyahu government is rapidly building on a long-standing legal matrix that further threatens Palestinians’ right to self-determination. 

“These developments are not something new to us,” Dr. Suhad Bishara, Legal Director of Adalah and lead author of the report, told Mondoweiss. “All eyes are on Gaza, justifiably so,” she said. “However… it is important to highlight the intensity of the structural changes that have taken place since the current government took over in December 2022.”

“What is happening in the West Bank is dangerously fast-forwarding annexation policies in a blatant violation of international law,” Bishara said. “Israel is intensifying measures to change the status of the West Bank, the status of many Palestinians living in Area C who are subject to intensified displacement induced by settler violence and Israeli policies.” She said, “This is in addition to settler expansion and further restrictions on Palestinian development in the area.”

Thoroughly researched and footnoted, the report documents how the current extremist government has built on what Adalah describes as “foundational mechanisms through which Israel has entrenched a land regime that facilitates territorial domination and racial segregation.” 

Area C comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and is under full Israeli military control. 

Here are the mechanisms of territorial domination Adalah examines in these areas.

Civilian governance for Israeli settlers; military rule over Palestinians

Beginning in the late 1970s, Israel abandoned its security-based justifications for approving settlements and adopted a policy based on civil, not military grounds. The report describes how, soon after, the Civil Administration — the Israeli body governing the West Bank — was established to formalize the division between military and civilian affairs.

As a result, “Israel has steadily transferred governance over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from military to civilian control, entrenching permanent territorial dominance and greatly expanding the settlement enterprise,” according to the report.

Most recently, structural reforms — such as the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich to serve as both Finance Minister and a Minister in the Defense Ministry — have resulted in increasing legal authority for the pro-settler civil servants working with Smotrich in the West Bank. These reforms have cemented the two distinct legal structures that govern life in Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements: the former, in which the military rules, and the latter, administered according to Israeli law. 

1. Administration by local authorities

Adalah’s report dives into the weeds as it describes one of the more concerning mechanisms that reveals Israel’s intent to annex the whole of the West Bank. Having transitioned the settlements from military administration to civilian rule — and having handed over significant legal and administrative decision-making to pro-settler civil servants — Israel can argue that the settlements operate now under Israeli sovereignty. But applying Israeli law in occupied territory, Adalah maintains, is a violation of international human rights law and constitutes “a measure of de facto annexation.” 

2. Financial incentives for settlements 

Readers of the report won’t be surprised to learn that, as Adalah writes, “Israeli settlements receive extensive financial benefits through direct government subsidies, preferential policies, and financial incentives… [covering] multiple sectors, including land allocation, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture.” 

Still, it is remarkable—as documented in the Adalah report—how in contravention of international law, Israel continues each year to pour billions of shekels into the development of settlements in the West Bank. Readers of the report will learn of “the legal mechanisms behind these incentives and how Israeli law facilitates their distribution.” 

3. Declaring State land 

According to Adalah, Israel’s designation of State Land in the West Bank is “the primary legal mechanism through which Israeli authorities have taken possession of Palestinian land since the late 1970s.” Those already familiar with Israel’s use of this means of de facto annexation will be surprised by the extraordinary amount of Palestinian land so designated. The report includes information obtained by Peace Now through a Freedom of Information Act request that shows a shocking fact: in under a one-year period, Israel has designated more Palestinian land as State Land than it had in an 18-year period.

From 1998 to 2016, just over 21,000 dunams were declared as State Land. But in just over nine months (from the end of February 2024 through early December 2024), over 24,200 dunams were declared as State Land. This acceleration is historically unprecedented.

The planning system in Area C

Adalah includes an entire section on the legal and structural framework in place in Area C to further expand Israel’s settlement project, fulfilling one of the Netanyahu government’s guiding principles shared the day before his swearing-in as Prime Minister in December 2022: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” promising to expand settlements throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank. 

Paralleling the judgments of the ICJ, UN experts, and international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights groups, the report ends by listing the five international crimes that Adalah finds Israel guilt of: violations of International Humanitarian Law; the deepening of the illegal mechanism of de facto annexation; the denial of Palestinian people’s right to self-determination; the deepening of the apartheid system in the occupied Palestinian territory; and the commission of war crimes and crimes of aggression on the part of Israel.

The most recent newsletter from Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO, describes Israel’s expanding control over illegally annexed East Jerusalem. Asked to comment, Tess Miller, Public Outreach staff at Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples” in Hebrew) told Mondoweiss that “the mechanisms of displacement that we monitor and advocate against within Jerusalem are not separate from the mechanisms seen today in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“What we are witnessing,” Miller said, “time after time, place after place, is violent control granted to those willing to advance the state’s agenda of expanding Jewish presence and diminishing Palestinian presence.” Ir Amim’s newsletter documents home demolitions, evictions, and starkly discriminatory housing and land confiscation policies.

“Together,” Miller said, “they all contribute to the accelerating erasure of the Palestinian people from their own cities, neighborhoods, and lands — enabled by the complicity of an increasingly radicalized Israeli public and the international community’s persistent refusal to take meaningful action.”

According to Adalah’s Dr. Bishara, it is hoped that the Adalah report, read by advocates for Palestinian rights, stakeholders, and states alike, “will generate international pressure against these long-term changes in the West Bank that violate international law and threaten the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jeff Wright.

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Over the past two decades, Tim O’Hare methodically amassed power in North Texas as he pushed incendiary policies such as banning undocumented immigrants from renting homes and vilifying school curriculum that encouraged students to embrace diversity.

He rode a wave of conservative resentment, leaping from City Council member of Farmers Branch, a suburb north of Dallas, in 2005 to its mayor to the leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party.

Three years ago, O’Hare sought his highest political office yet, running for the top elected position in the nation’s 15th-largest county, which is home to Fort Worth. Backed by influential evangelical churches and money from powerful oil industry billionaires, O’Hare promised voters he would weed out “diversity inclusion nonsense” and accused some Democrats of hating America. His win in November 2022 gave the GOP’s far right new sway over the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, turning a government that once prided itself on bipartisanship into a new front of the culture war.

“I was not looking to do this at all, but they came after our police,” he said in his victory speech on election night. “They came after our schools. They came after our country. They came after our churches.”

In Texas and across the country, far-right candidates have won control of school boards, swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs. O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government, offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.

Since he was elected county judge — a position similar to that of mayor in a city — O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach. He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.

O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically. In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time. Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.

“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like, and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism. “The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”

Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.

O’Hare declined multiple interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions emailed to him. His spokesperson instead touted a list of eight accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans. When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020, many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.

Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades. After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents. The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.

The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, Glen Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022. Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.

“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race. “You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”

In 2005, when O’Hare initially ran unopposed for a seat on the City Council in Farmers Branch, a small town just outside of Tarrant County, his platform included plans to revitalize the public library and bring in new restaurants. In 2006, however, O’Hare began taking positions that were outside of the Republican mainstream at the time. He pushed for the diversifying town to declare English its official language, ban landlords from renting to residents without proof of citizenship, and stop publishing public materials in Spanish.

“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of inflation,” O’Hare said at the time. “When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of their properties.”

Hispanic residents mobilized and sued to block the rental ban’s implementation. O’Hare doubled down: He pushed for Farmers Branch police to partner with immigration enforcement authorities to detain and deport people in the country illegally, and urged residents to oppose a grocer’s plan to open a store that catered to Hispanics, arguing it was “reasonable” to prefer “a grocery store that appeals to higher-end consumers.”

O’Hare was elected as mayor in 2008. Foreshadowing moves he’d make as Tarrant County judge, he abruptly ended a public meeting after cutting off and removing one resident who criticized him. He led opposition to the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and fought against a mentorship program for at-risk high school students that included volunteers from a Hispanic group that opposed his immigration resolution.

Meanwhile, the city continued to defend the immigration ordinance after it was repeatedly struck down by federal judges. As costs for the seven-year legal battle ballooned, Farmers Branch dipped into its reserves, cut nearly two dozen city employees and outsourced services at the library that O’Hare had campaigned on improving during his City Council run. “At the end of the day, this will be money well spent, and it will be a good investment in our community’s future,” O’Hare said after the town laid off staff in 2008.

O’Hare stepped down as mayor in 2011. Three years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, Farmers Branch stopped defending the ordinance. It was never enforced, but the related lawsuits cost the town $6.6 million, city officials said in 2016.

After leaving office, O’Hare moved his family a few miles away to Tarrant County, where demographic changes have dropped the share of white residents from 62% of the county’s population in 2000 to 43% in 2020.

Home to some of the nation’s most influential evangelical churches and four of former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers, the county is an epicenter for ultraconservative movements in Texas, including those that call for Christians to exert dominance over all aspects of society. In 2016, O’Hare was elected chair of the Tarrant County GOP. Under him, the party distributed mailers that listed the primary voting records for local candidates — breaking with the longstanding nonpartisan tradition of county elections.

In 2020, following a series of racist incidents at the mostly white Carroll High School in Southlake — including one viral clip in which white students chanted the N-word — O’Hare co-founded a political action committee that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust school board members who supported the Carroll Independent School District’s plans for diversity and inclusion programming. The dispute helped catapult the small Tarrant County suburb into the national spotlight amid Republican panic over critical race theory and “gender ideology,” and created a blueprint for right-wing organizing that was copied in suburbs across America.

In 2021, O’Hare launched his campaign for Tarrant County judge, squaring off in the GOP primary against the more moderate five-term mayor of Fort Worth, whom he painted as a RINO, or “Republican in name only.” O’Hare rode a wave fueled by backlash to COVID-19 mandates, baseless election fraud conspiracy theories and opposition to what he called “diversity inclusion nonsense,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. O’Hare’s campaign was condemned by moderate Republicans, including Whitley, the outgoing judge, who accused him of trying to “divide and pit one group against another.” O’Hare won the primary by 23 percentage points.

Whitley and other longtime Republican leaders declined to endorse O’Hare in the 2022 general election. It didn’t matter; by then, he was backed by a coalition of far-right megadonors, pastors and churches. His top campaign donors included a PAC funded by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. The two west Texas oil billionaires have given tens of millions of dollars to candidates and groups that oppose LGBTQ+ rights, support programs that would use public dollars to pay for private schools, and have led efforts to push moderates out of the Texas GOP.

O’Hare received another $203,000 from the We Can Keep It PAC. The PAC’s treasurer is an elder at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, whose leaders have endorsed multiple GOP candidates, including O’Hare. The church’s pastor has claimed Democrats can’t be Christian and dared critics to complain to the IRS that the church was flouting federal prohibitions on political activity by nonprofits.

O’Hare took office in early 2023, as Republicans continued to question President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win in Tarrant County two years earlier. A 2022 audit by Texas’ Republican secretary of state found no evidence of widespread fraud and that Tarrant County held “a quality, transparent election.”

Despite that — and while saying he had no proof of malfeasance — O’Hare immediately set out to prevent cheating he claimed was responsible for Democrats’ steady rise in the long-purpling county. Soon after taking office, he helped launch an “election integrity unit” that he’d lead with the county sheriff who had spoken at a “Stop the Steal” rally in the days after the 2020 presidential election.

No Democrats were initially on the unit. Nor was the county’s elections administrator, Heider Garcia, who by then had faced three years of harassment, death threats and accusations of being a secret agent for Venezuela’s socialist government by election fraud conspiracy theorists. Garcia opted for radical transparency — making himself accessible to answer questions about the election process and earning praise from across the political aisle for his patient public service.

But Garcia lasted only a few months under O’Hare: In April 2023, he resigned his position, citing his relationship with O’Hare in his resignation letter. “Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on these values is not an option for me,” Garcia wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision is to leave.”

Garcia, now the Dallas County elections administrator, did not respond to an interview request.

One day after Garcia resigned, O’Hare told members of True Texas Project — a group whose leaders have sympathized with a white nationalist mass shooter and endorsed Christian nationalism — that he was encouraged by the potential for low turnout in that year’s upcoming elections, which he said would help Republicans win more local seats. (O’Hare previously served on True Texas Project’s advisory team, according to a 2021 social media post by the group’s CEO, Julie McCarty).

In June 2024, the election integrity unit reported that, over the previous 15 months, it received 82 complaints of voter fraud — or about 0.009% of all votes cast in the 2020 presidential election in Tarrant County — and that none had resulted in criminal charges. Meanwhile, O’Hare has proposed a number of changes to the election system that Tarrant County GOP leaders have said were intended to help Republicans or hurt Democrats.

In February, O’Hare and fellow Republicans cut $10,000 in county funding to provide free bus rides to low-income residents, a program that Tarrant GOP leaders decried as a scheme to “bus Democrats to the polls.”

O'Hare said he opposed the funding on fiscal grounds. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” he said before the vote.

A few months later, commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about left-leaning organizations holding registration drives. Democrats and voting rights groups assailed the moves as attempts to lower voter turnout.

In September, O’Hare proposed eliminating voting locations on some college campuses that he called a “waste of money and manpower.” But this time, his Republican allies on the Commissioners Court said they could not go along with the vote and joined Democrats to defeat the measure. Tarrant County Republican leaders condemned the recalcitrant commissioners in a public resolution that made it clear they saw the effort to close polls on college campuses as a move that would help them in November. The GOP commissioners, the resolution claimed, “voted with Democrats on a key election vote that undermines the ability of Republicans to win the general election in Tarrant County.”

Manny Ramirez, one of those Republican commissioners, said in an interview he thinks the GOP should try to win college students with their conservative ideas rather than limit on-campus voting.

“We’ve been providing those same exact sites for nearly two decades,” Ramirez said. His role as commissioner, he added, is to provide “equal access to all of our citizens.”

Less than a year into his term, O’Hare began targeting long-established nonprofits whose websites and social media accounts contained language the county judge considered politically objectionable on issues of gender and race.

In October 2023, he moved to block a $115,000 state grant to Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, for its Girl Power program offering summer camps and mentoring to help participants focus on stress management, hygiene and self-esteem.

About 90% of the youth served by Girls Inc. of Tarrant County are people of color and come from families making less than $30,000 a year, according to the organization’s website.

Four months earlier, the national Girls Inc. group, which has chapters across the country, had tweeted out its support for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ pride, which conservative media and activists seized upon.

“Girls Inc. is an extremist political indoctrination machine advocating for divisive liberal politics,” Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, told commissioners. Patriot Mobile is a Christian nationalist cellphone company whose PAC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of far-right candidates across Tarrant County, including O’Hare.

Local leaders of Girls Inc., who did not respond to requests for comment, said at the time their chapter is independent of the national organization. They told commissioners they were reviewing their affiliation with the parent organization.

In denying the funds, O’Hare told the Commissioners Court the government shouldn’t support “an organization that is so deeply ideological and encourages the children that they are teaching to go advocate for social change.”

Commissioners killed the contract on a 3-2 party-line vote.

Six months later, O’Hare raised questions about another local nonprofit, Big Thought. It provides youth in the Tarrant County juvenile detention system with summer and after-school programs aimed at helping them get their lives back on track through music, acting and performance arts. Big Thought has had a contract with the county for the past three years and says on its website that youth who go through its programs reoffend at a lower rate than those who don’t, potentially saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in juvenile detention costs.

At an April meeting of the Tarrant County Juvenile Board, O’Hare raised questions about the program’s advocacy for “racial equity” after reading the organization’s website, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (The board’s meetings are not streamed or recorded).

Asked about O’Hare’s concerns, a Big Thought spokesperson said in an email that the organization focuses on the realities facing at-risk youth in Tarrant County. “Young people in our communities experience challenges like economic inequality, racism, and more, and it is our responsibility to provide a safe place to build the skills they need so they can thrive,” said Evan Cleveland, Big Thought’s senior director of programs.

The county’s juvenile probation director, Bennie Medlin, who has not responded to requests for comment, told board members the program had not had any “negative results” during the partnership, according to minutes of the meeting. Members of the board were not swayed and voted not to renew the program.

Three months later, at the juvenile board’s July meeting, O’Hare and a district judge proposed ending a contract with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs after probing the nonprofit about the position it had taken in briefs to the Supreme Court, its opinion on school choice and police in schools, and whether “they work to eliminate systemic racism,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Board members voted to cut ties with the nonprofit, which had worked with the county for over three decades to provide mentoring, job training and substance abuse counseling as alternatives to detention.

Gary Ivory, the organization’s president, said that a week after the July vote, he met with O’Hare for about a half-hour in O’Hare’s office. He said O’Hare questioned him about his personal views on the LGBTQ+ community and “hot-button cultural war issues." Also during that meeting, O’Hare pulled up Youth Advocate Programs’ website, Ivory said, and asked him why the group takes funding from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

“They are saying if anybody is too woke in Tarrant County, we are going to put them in the dustbin of history and they won’t exist anymore,” Ivory said.

On Oct. 1, Tarrant County commissioners voted to sign a similar contract with another nonprofit. At the meeting, O’Hare denied pushing to kill Youth Advocate Programs’ contract “because of a phrase on a website.” Instead, he claimed Ivory told the juvenile board that 15% of the money Tarrant County gives the program goes to lobbyists and to “law firms to file amicus briefs against many of the things the people in that room that voted disagree with.”

Ivory said that is incorrect. “I said generally 85 cents on a dollar stays in Tarrant County and 15 cents goes to overhead,” he said. “And I made it clear that YAP doesn’t spend any of that 15 cents on the dollar for lobbying.”

Phil Sawyer, a longtime juvenile probation officer in Tarrant County who retired two years ago, said the program was well respected within the department and helped give badly needed services that the department could not provide. “It’s a shocker,” he said of the county’s decision to cut ties with the group. “Without them, it would just be insanity. There are things we can do as probation officers, but it’s not the same.”

In recent months, O’Hare has taken aim at private citizens who disagree with him, ordering several political opponents removed from Commissioners Court meetings and calling for the firing of a local college professor.

As Ryon Price’s allotted three minutes of public comment during the July 2 Commissioners Court meeting expired, O’Hare issued a sharp warning to the man, a local Baptist minister who was a frequent antagonist of O’Hare’s at such meetings: “Your time is up.”

It’s not uncommon for residents to go over their allotted time during public comment sessions. But after Price continued criticizing conditions in the Tarrant County Jail for an extra eight seconds, O’Hare ordered sheriff’s deputies to step in: “He’s now held in contempt. Remove him.”

As Price was escorted out of the meeting, someone in the audience booed. “Was that you?” O’Hare snapped. “Well, try me.”

Price said that in the lobby, sheriff’s deputies handed him a trespassing warning that banned him from the premises. “I think it’s symbolic of a broader, more authoritarian shift” in Tarrant County government, Price said of his removal. “And I have to wonder if he really wants to govern this place, a place that splits red and blue evenly, or just please some higher-ups in his own party.”

Price appealed his ban to the Tarrant County sheriff’s department and said the appeal was granted in August, allowing him to resume addressing the court during public comment sessions.

Minutes after Price was escorted from that July meeting, Lon Burnam, a Democrat who served nine terms in the Texas House, approached O’Hare to confront him about his decision to cut off another commissioner who was requesting information about sheriff department policies. Burnam later received a trespass warning from sheriff’s deputies and said he is banned from public meetings until Jan. 1.

At their meeting two weeks later, commissioners amended public speaking rules as O’Hare warned residents that “refusal to abide by the Commissioners Court’s order or my order as the presiding judge or continued disruption of the meeting may result in arrest and prosecution under the laws of the state of Texas.”

O’Hare said the changes were needed to ensure civility in the meeting room. “This is not in any way shape or form attempting to stifle free speech,” he said during the meeting.

Also in August, O’Hare called for the firing of a Texas Christian University professor over social media posts from 2021 that called for police to be abolished. The professor, Alexandra Edwards, drew the ire of local right-wing activists after writing about them and the pro-Christian nationalism conference that O’Hare attended in July. Not long after, a local right-wing website published an article about her “antifa” views in which O’Hare called her a “radical” and said Edwards should be fired.

“The full force of the repression of the Tarrant County GOP and the various right-wing extremists kind of came down upon me,” Edwards said in an interview, adding that she was inundated with threats and harassment.

Such crackdowns are a sign that the local GOP has been taken over by extremists, said Whitley, the county’s Republican former judge.

“They’ve gone so far to the right that most folks who used to be adamant Republicans are not so much anymore,” he said, adding that some in the GOP are too afraid of retaliation by O’Hare to speak out publicly.

O’Hare’s term doesn’t end until 2027. But this year’s elections will decide which party controls the powerful commissioners court and, in some ways, will be a referendum on the first two years of his tenure in county government.

Whitley said he hopes it will be a unifying moment for voters from across the political spectrum. “I want us to be Americans, to be Texans and to not just care about parties,” he said. “I hope people will vote for the best person and not just vote for the party.”

Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica and Juan Salinas II of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting. Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

As we’ve driven around, stopping at seven rural towns that were destroyed by the storm, we’ve run into one man over and over again: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who mounted a full-court press of disaster response in the days following the storm.

Helene is by no means the first hurricane that DeSantis has had to navigate during his second and final term as governor. But the Category 4 storm is the first major hurricane DeSantis has confronted since his short-lived — and failed — bid for president. It’s also the strongest hurricane on record to ever make landfall in the Big Bend region. With just two years left in his term and another presidential run in the future likely, how DeSantis responds to Helene could make a big difference in whether he can shore up the Republican nomination for 2028.

Which may explain why, at one of the governor’s first public appearances following the storm, he dodged questions about the role of climate change in driving more frequent and intense hurricanes to the region. This approach is clearly at odds with his messaging to date on the subject. Earlier this summer, not only did he pass legislation that deletes most climate change references from state law, scrubbing emissions reduction goals from energy policy, and prohibiting local governments from limiting the use of natural gas, among other anti-mitigation measures, he has repeatedly denied that human-caused warming is making hurricanes stronger. In fact, after 2023’s Hurricane Idalia, he told Fox News that “they act like this is somehow unprecedented. And it’s not.”

“I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to why the storms, you know, have come here in the last year and a half or so,” said DeSantis in a press conference Saturday at Dekle Beach. “No one asked to be put in this situation. You know, I don’t have any explanation as to why we would have storms that would track into this particular part of Florida over a year and a half period. But what I do know is there’s work to do. And so we’re going to get back into the business of doing it.”

The following day, DeSantis made another appearance in the nearby town of Suwanee, where he met local officials at a Baptist church. Afterward, he helped volunteers distribute barbecue to local residents, first saying a prayer that Florida would not be hit by another storm. As DeSantis scooped out helpings of pulled pork, he threw in the occasional request for support on his efforts to defeat Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would enshrine a right to abortion. Most of those who took food greeted him warmly, saying, “Thank you for everything you do for us,” and “We love you.”

But not everyone was perfectly satisfied with the governor’s response. As DeSantis prepared to leave, a Suwanee resident named Billy Mincks approached him and pleaded with him to pay more attention to the region’s poorest residents. He had just come from mucking out his flooded house, he said, and he needed help. DeSantis responded by assuring him the state would offer assistance with home repairs.

“I like the man, I’m glad he’s our governor, but I’m tired of the little man getting looked over,” Mincks told Jake after the fact. “I hope he heard us out.”

By that time, the governor’s motorcade had already rumbled up the road toward the highway, stirring up a cloud of dust as it went.

Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina

As of Monday, flooding and mudslides triggered by Helene had killed at least 47 people in North Carolina and caused catastrophic damage that is still being tallied. Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, is no stranger to storms — he’s dealt with two 500-year flood events and a 1,000-year flood in the past two years alone. At an event at The New York Times building in New York City last week, Cooper spoke about the coming storm with resigned familiarity.

“We have one coming up in the Gulf now, Helene, that I’ll go back and declare a state of emergency in North Carolina,” he said last Wednesday, a day before Helene made landfall. “We’ll get a lot of rain in our mountains, and we’ll have to deal with that.”

It’s becoming clear that Hurricane Helene will go down in North Carolina history as one of the worst storms the state has ever experienced, far eclipsing anything Cooper has confronted in his seven-year tenure as governor, and one of the most expensive storms in U.S. history.

“I think people along the eastern coast of North Carolina are listening to the issues about climate change and how we need to respond to these storms,” Cooper told the Times. Whether the western portion of the state, the part hardest hit by the hurricane-fueled flooding, undergoes a similar political transformation remains to be seen.

— Zoya Teirstein

What we’re reading

Florida’s flood capital: Jake reported on the ground from Shore Acres, a low-lying neighborhood in St. Petersburg that has flooded dozens of times in the past few years. Helene delivered a historic storm surge to the neighborhood, likely tanking the real estate market there even further and forcing a sell-off of homes.
Read more

The forgotten towns of the Big Bend: Jake and Ayurella joined a fire chief in the rural town of Inglis as she examined Helene’s damage. The small towns of the Big Bend have struggled through three storms in 13 months, and they often lack the ability to rebuild after big disasters.
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Congress pinches pennies for FEMA: The stopgap bill that Congress passed last week to avoid a government shutdown did not include a planned $10 billion infusion of cash for FEMA, reports E&E News. The agency has curbed all non-emergency programs already as its main relief fund runs low and could be out of money by the end of the year.
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The climate battleground states: Getting climate policies passed is one thing; protecting them from Republican-led opposition is another. As climate change has been dragged into the climate culture wars, a shift in the political winds can put established efforts to reduce emissions in peril. Our colleague Kate Yoder wrote about the key states where the upcoming election could make or break critical climate policies.
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Reforming disaster assistance: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, have teamed up on a bill that would reform how FEMA distributes disaster assistance. Perhaps most notably, it would allow communities to qualify for aid based on the cumulative damage they suffer from several small disasters. Right now, these communities often don’t receive help from FEMA in rehousing displaced people or rebuilding public infrastructure.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Governing after Hurricane Helene on Oct 1, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Ron DeSantis officially launched his presidential campaign Wednesday, pitting the Florida governor against his former ally Donald Trump and at least five other Republicans in a fight for their party’s 2024 nomination. His formal announcement came in a Twitter audio stream hosted by the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, and was beset by technical problems. As governor of Florida, DeSantis has signed a slew of bills targeting reproductive rights, immigrant rights, the transgender community, and diversity programs in schools. He has also recently signed legislation to weaken the power of public sector unions. For more, we speak with Alphonso Mayfield, president of SEIU Florida Public Services Union. “People are hurting. … And instead of dealing with those issues directly, he’s punching down and focusing on the most marginalized aspects of our community and the people who are actually working and trying to create a better life for their families and their communities,” says Mayfield.

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

The post The Rise of the Consultant Governing Class appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Embracing the inner voodoo of consultancy had the effect of discouraging in-house contributions and solutions within government and the broader economy. The result was a strange plea to those outside the public sector, resulting in what can only be described accurately as the consultacracy.

In the 1970s, the new priesthood of outsourced mandarins began stirring. Within decades their power and reach had become global. Four firms came to dominate: Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG and PwC. Lacking much in the way of transparency regarding reporting requirements, they remain private partnerships marshalled against the public interest and emboldened by self-interest.

Latest to come out on the rise of this specific class of advisor is a work by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. The authors make their intentions clear in the loud unmistakable title The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. Their studies are pointed and troubling to the government-corporate fold which has expended billions in cash bringing in the outsider capable of working magic, be it in correcting the books, cutting staff, or introducing any measures to advance efficiency.

What, then, of the ultimate object of using such outfits? Supposedly, at least regarding advice to governments, it is to achieve policy goals in an efficient, timely way. Consultancies are also meant to offer good returns for their advice. The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) in the UK suggests that for every £1 spent on consulting fees, the client can expect £6 in return. That very sense of self-confidence is something to behold.

Certain areas have seen a glut of consultants, with health care being a truly rich field for exponential growth. As Politico’s Joanne Kenen, writing in 2018, explained, the health sector has generated a vast “market for consultants, advisers and a whole universe of ancillary experts who don’t practice medicine but promise to help navigate a landscape that seems to change every six weeks.”

Deloitte played an instrumental role in the botched pandemic Test and Trace Programme deemed by the UK Public Accounts Committee as “overly reliant on expensive contracts”. The fee for their services was hefty: something in the order of £40 million.

In 2021, the National Audit Office found that only 17% of people received their test results in 24 hours as opposed to the set target of 90%. This was despite Deloitte being tasked with handling logistics across testing sites and working with such private firms as Boots and Serco. Targets were not met, and local hospitals found themselves having to take over dysfunctional centres.

The defects of consultancy were also laid bare in the hiccup-filled rollout of the healthcare.gov website as part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration.

The deep irony here is that health care consultants have fostered a culture of inefficiency and costliness. A study on the role played by management consultants for the National Health Service in Britain is far from glowing. Of 120 NHS English trusts examined, the bodies had expended in the order of £600m on management consultants between 2009/10 to 2012/13, rising from £313 million in 2014. This led to a “significant” rise in inefficiency and a poorer return of services. This was a god that failed.

Part of the problem is that such consultancies create work to fill the space that supposedly requires them. The brand seeks a response from the vulnerable client, irrespective of the need for supply. Importantly, the trick goes to convincing the organisation in question that they have no feasible, reliable route within its own ranks.

Organisational complexity supposedly creates instances where expertise is required, a sage-like insight into the arcana of practices that constitute the modern government department or corporation. This can then lead to suggested reorganisations that become perpetual and self-perpetuating, enabling the consultants to be kept in permanent employ. They help reorder your mess to enable them to disorder it. As the authors of a splendid contribution to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine concluded after examining the vast literature on this dismal subject, there were “many reasons for repeated reorganizations, the most being ‘no good reason’.”

Rather than being conducted within the organisation, eyes are cast outwards and beyond to the independent outsider, one who supposedly has the worth and ability to give independent advice in a fully professional, informed capacity. This is something of a fiction, given that many such consultancies, notably in the government context, are linked to government, be it through a public sector capacity or as a political representative. Conflicts of interest prove unavoidable, and the independence of the advice becomes highly questionable.

The Big Con, despite its bleak examples, strikes an optimistic note in the form of a clarion call. The public sector, argue the authors, should not be afraid of following expertise within their own offices and departments in the form of in-house consultancies. Bring that expertise lost to the consultant firms back into the fold. The same applies to non-government bodies. But reversing this trend, and the door through which these problems open, will be a huge challenge.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Changing attitudes after Ukraine

Beijing-based political commentator Wu Qiang said Zelenskyy appears to be aligning himself with U.S. policy goals in the Asia-Pacific.

"All countries are making these comparisons, but Zelenskyy is making a point of making them," Wu said. "I believe he is reciprocating [in return for U.S. support]; he is supporting the strategic goals of the United States in the Indo-Pacific region."

"During the past few months, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have continued to emphasize that the long-term competitor of the U.S. in future will be China," he said.

He said Zelenskyy's comments are also representative of a change of attitude in Eastern Europe and the EU to Taiwan, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"It's more appropriate for him to represent this change in the EU's position," Wu said of Zelenskyy.

Chen Chi-chieh, associate professor of political science at Taiwan's National Sun Yat-Sen University, said Zelenskyy has been fairly careful to avoid provoking Beijing, however.

"He is smart enough not to want to provoke China, so he can't speak out very clearly on the Taiwan question, so he had to answer it in a subtle way," Chen told RFA.

He said there are many areas in which Ukraine relies on Chinese assistance, and will likely rely on it for post-war reconstruction.

"Ukraine's relationship with Taiwan isn't that close, so he doesn't need to sacrifice the relationship between Ukraine and China to support Taiwan, at least not very clearly," Chen said.

Austin also made it clear that the United States is still committed to maintaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, as well as its commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires Washington to help Taiwan to defend itself.

The war in Ukraine  featured prominently during sessions at the Shangri-La Dialogue.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told participants that the invasion of Ukraine "indefensible," and "a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil."

China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe delivered scathing remarks about the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy in a speech in Singapore on Sunday, calling it an attempt to form a clique to contain China.

In his speech on "China’s vision for regional order" at the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum he hit back at Austin’s remarks a day earlier, saying China firmly rejects America’s accusations and threats.

Wei said the Indo-Pacific strategy was "an attempt to build an exclusive small group to hijack countries in our region” to target one specific country – China.

“It is a strategy to create conflict and confrontation to contain and encircle others,” said the minister, who is also a general in China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Chen said Wei is trying to prevent the U.S. from being too good an ally to Taiwan.

"[Beijing] wants to deter Taiwan from getting too close to the United States, and also hopes that the United States will stop selling arms to Taiwan, especially advanced weaponry," Chen said.

"That's why they are using such harsh words."

But Wu said Wei doesn't hold a very powerful position in the Chinese military establishment.

"Wei Fenghe is not even a member of the CCP's Politburo, but plays quite a secondary role," Wu said, adding that bilateral dialogue between Wei and Austin at the Shangri-La Dialogue could yield little of substance because it wasn't a meeting of equals or counterparts.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hwang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin.