pain – Radio Free

Fear and Pain in Israel After Iran’s Retaliatory Missile Strikes

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 11:08:58 +0000

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

Asian nations fear pain from US tariffs, seek ways to placate Trump

Mike Firn for RFA — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 10:07:01 +0000

BANGKOK – U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs are likely to cause particular pain in developing Asian countries that rely on export industries to raise living standards and provide jobs for burgeoning youth populations.

Southeast Asian nations were some of the hardest hit by the tariffs announced Wednesday, at nearly 50% in some cases. The tariffs will be paid by U.S. importers and could have a range of consequences – from higher prices for American consumers to falling incomes for the exporting nations.

China, the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S., faces an additional 34% tariff on top of the 20% the U.S. imposed earlier this year when Trump demanded the country buy more U.S. goods and stop the flow of the deadly synthetic opioid Fentanyl.

“China firmly opposes this and will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests,” the country’s commerce ministry said Thursday, accusing Trump of adopting bullying and damaging tactics.

The tariff shock therapy is aimed at encouraging a revival of American manufacturing, which fell as a share of the economy and employment over several decades of global free trade and competition from production in lower-cost countries.

Any changes could take years as many U.S. corporations have made substantial investments in overseas production. Manufacturing in the U.S., like elsewhere, also is reliant on components produced in other countries.

The 49% duties imposed on Cambodian exports will force the country’s garment industry to slow to a near halt, according to Stephen Higgins, managing partner at Mekong Strategic Capital in Phnom Penh.

The broader economy is likely to suffer since the garment and apparel industries contribute more than one third of Cambodia’s gross domestic product. Higgins says production may shift to India, which only faces a 36% U.S. tariff and giving workers the skills to produce more high-end products may have little immediate impact.

“In the short term, things like tech innovation and training just aren’t going to shift the dial enough to help Cambodia, or any country, weather these punitive tariffs. Redirecting trade is going to take time, and in the interim, a lot of Cambodians who can least afford it are going to lose their jobs,” Higgins said.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it is that Washington is highly unpredictable these days. Hopefully once constituents in red (Republican) seats start seeing prices go up, or they start suffering from retaliatory tariffs from the E.U., they’ll put a lot of pressure on their representatives to do something about these tariffs. But I just don’t see that happening overnight.”

Vietnam, meanwhile, had the fourth-largest trade surplus with the U.S. last year at a record US$123 billion and faced growing pressure from Washington to lower it.

Hanoi lobbied unsuccessfully to try to avoid higher tariffs. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh met U.S. Ambassador Marc Knapper last month and promised higher imports of American products.

On Tuesday, Vietnam cut import duties on some American fuel, automobile and agricultural products, but that did not stop Trump targeting the country’s exporters with a 46% tariff, the second-highest in Asia.

Pham met with Trade and Industry Minister Nguyen Hong Dien on Thursday to discuss the impact on Vietnam’s economy and to look for ways of reducing the trade surplus, Tien Phong online reported.

Trump has a track-record of abruptly raising and lowering tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico and, according to Tien Phong, Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister Ho Duc Phoc is hoping to persuade him to roll back import duties when he visits the U.S. capital next week.

In Thailand, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said her government was working to help affected exporters and would set up a committee to negotiate with the U.S. over the 36% tariffs slapped on its exports.

She said Thailand was willing to lower the 72% duties the U.S. says Thailand charges, which include the effect of currency manipulation and market barriers.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mike Firn for RFA.

No, Harvard University did not claim Islamic act of prostration or ‘Sujood’ posture is remedy for back pain

Prantik Ali — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 11:17:01 +0000

Recently, a claim was being widely circulated on social media that Harvard University has named the ‘Sujood’ posture, which is essentially the act of prostration in Islamic prayers, as the best remedy for backaches.

Several Facebook accounts shared this claim.

Click to view slideshow.

Instagram account @taazakhabarofficial0, which describes itself as a ‘news and media website’ also posted this claim on its page. (Archived link)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taaza Khabar (@taazakhabaroffical0)

While checking for when this information was first shared, we found that the claim was not new and had gone viral in 2023 as well.

On August 16, 2023, X user @AllahGreatQuran had shared something very similar. The post garnered over 600,000 views and was reshared close to 5,000 times. (Archived link)

Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. Subhan’Allah pic.twitter.com/cLAcLI5n5e

— Allah Islam Quran (@AllahGreatQuran) August 16, 2023

Another verified X user @Al__Quraan also posted this around the same time. It has gathering over 850,000 views and reshared 5,700 times. (Archived Link)

Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. pic.twitter.com/y83Wnk9Ek4

— • (@Al__Quraan) August 18, 2023

We were able to find several other X posts from 2023, which propagated the same claim. (Archives 1, 2, 3)

Click to view slideshow.

Fact Check

To find the primary source related to the claim, Alt News ran a keyword search on X. This led us to an X post from Harvard Health’s verified X account (@HarvardHealth) from 2021. (Archive)

You might be considering surgery or other intervention to treat your back pain. But less may actually be more for this common problem, and in many instances the best medicine is good old-fashioned movement and exercise: https://t.co/kS15FLlj5F #HarvardHealth pic.twitter.com/TJv0YNtavv

— Harvard Health (@HarvardHealth) June 30, 2021

The post had a link to a 2020 article published by Harvard Health, which is affiliated to Harvard Medical School. While the article talks about the importance of regular exercise to keep spinal problems at bay, nowhere does it mention the ‘Sujood’ posture. However, we noticed that the image accompanying the article is similar to the Islamic practice of prostration during daily prayers.

Thus it is likely that a section of social media users may have misattributed the representative generic image in Harvard Health’s X post as Harvard Health promoting the ‘Sujood’ posture as a remedy for back pain and later shared the claim with an image of an Muslim person. The fact is that Harvard Health’s article, which talks about strategies to combat back pain, has no reference to the Islamic act of prostration, known as the ‘Sujood’, ‘Sijda’ or ‘Sejdah’.

The post No, Harvard University did not claim Islamic act of prostration or ‘Sujood’ posture is remedy for back pain appeared first on Alt News.

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

Motaz Azaiza, Acclaimed Journalist from Gaza, on Photographing War & Making “Art from the Pain”

Democracy Now! — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:19:09 +0000

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

Motaz Azaiza, Acclaimed Journalist from Gaza, on Photographing War & Making “Art from the Pain”

Democracy Now! — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:38:13 +0000

“I never expected the world will know my name [because of] a genocide of my people,” says Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who gained international acclaim for his work during the first 108 days of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. Since evacuating in January, Azaiza has brought his advocacy for Palestinian rights around the world. Democracy Now! speaks to him from Washington, D.C., where he has just wrapped up a nationwide speaking tour titled “Gaza Through My Lens” in support of UNRWA USA. “Israel is targeting our children. Israel is targeting our babies, targeting our mothers, targeting our families. I just want to show the whole world so maybe I can bring help to my people through my photography,” Azaiza says.

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

Motaz Azaiza, Acclaimed Journalist from Gaza, on Photographing War & Making “Art from the Pain”

Democracy Now! — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:38:13 +0000

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

CounterPunch is Feeling the Pain

Becky Grant — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 06:01:48 +0000

You already know that CounterPunch is a one-of-a-kind resource. You tell you to turn to CounterPunch year after year because you rely on CounterPunch to find different perspectives on the day’s issues. But did you realize we’re different behind the scenes as well? According to statistics, most donations to non-profits come from just six households.

We have never been on the receiving end of any of that money (we’re not complaining). Many donations also come through donor-advised funds. The problem with DAFs is that the bureaucracy created to manage the fund clogs the system… the money does not go directly to the cause! The crevasse between what the aim of the public good these donations are meant to create, and the actual needs they could fulfill is clogged by the bureaucratic traffic jam, losing a significant share of the original donation amounts along the way.

In other words, money that could make a difference is doled out to bean counters, pencil pushers, and office supplies. Furthermore, when folks trust donations given via a foundation that manages the funds, there is no obligation to give to a non-profit- they can sit on these funds and invest, usually by putting the money into stocks, which in turn increases the wealth of those six families and the rest of the one percent. Don’t get us wrong, there are a lot of great foundations supporting important causes, but when donations go from the giver’s hand directly to the cause, it’s far more effective. More than 95% of donations go directly to our mission. But, the drop in middle-class donations is a profound reflection of the fact that there are significantly fewer households in the middle class.

Consider a Small, Monthly Donation

Non-profits are being hit hard by this re-ordering of our economic strata – CounterPunch is feeling these pains. It also signifies that the voice of the people besides the 1 percent is less heard because the non-profits that the middle class donates to cannot survive in the decline of giving. We vote with our money… we invest in causes we back. It is the bedrock of grassroots movements and changes created from the ground up. Non-profits report far fewer mid-level donations – often the bread-and-butter that sustains small nonprofits. In response, some organizations are forced to choose to turn their full fundraising attention to mega-donors – with implications on how these organizations function.

For CounterPunch, the lion’s share of donations has always been less than $100, most of which are $25 and under. We can continue this formula, but we’re asking all of you to pitch in what you can afford. In the past few decades, as the CounterPunch readership has grown, our donations have come from less than one percent of our readers. This year, our goal is to receive donations from ten percent of our readers. Just 10%! We’re not greedy! But because donations are down significantly, the gap can be filled by more of you giving, even if the amount individuals can afford has dropped.

These times are difficult. The cost of a loaf of bread when CounterPunch first began 30 years ago was about $2.50. Now, finding a decent loaf for under $6.00 is difficult! Help us celebrate 30 years of being “The Best Political Newsletter in America”! We went from humble beginnings of sending out 2,500 xeroxed copies of a 6-page newsletter to the CounterPunch website you know well, reaching 3 million of you this last year!

Please, if You Have the Means
Donate Today

You can mail us a donation, or call our business office as well.

CounterPunch
PO Box 228
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If you have already donated thank you so much.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Becky Grant.

When We Ignore Women’s Pain, We Put Their Lives In Danger

Dara E. Purvis — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:08:36 +0000

If the doctors do not trust a woman who says that she is in pain, they are less likely to believe that her health is seriously threatened.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Dara E. Purvis.

Ponsonby march highlights Dawn Raids pain and overstayer uncertainty

APR editor — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 05:16:33 +0000

By Khalia Strong of Pacific Media Network

Dozens of Pacific Islanders and Palagi defied the bitterly cold wind and rain for a peaceful “remember the Dawn Raids” march along Auckland’s Ponsonby Road at the weekend.

The Savali ole Filemu march recognised the anxiety which currently faces overstayers, and the pain still felt from the Dawn Raids.

Tongan community leader Pakilau Manase Lua said coming to New Zealand to improve their lives should not be a crime.

“They took a risk, OK, they broke the law, but so is breaking the speed limit. It’s not a criminal act to come here and try and find a life,” he said.

Holding a photo frame of his late father, Siosifa Lua, Pakilau said they would remember those who had never got justice for how they were treated.

“We came to build this country, and we’re still building this country, and how are we treated? Like dogs!”, he shouted.

Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua offering a prayer at the Savali ole Filemu march in Ponsonby on Saturday. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Those days are over’
“Those days are over. Our children are here. The generations that build this country are here.”

Labour’s Papakura candidate ‘Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki says being an overstayer had personal consequences when her grandfather died in 1977.

“My mother was still an overstayer here, and she had to make a decision … return to Tonga to say farewell to her father, or remain here, for the betterment of the future of her children.”

The government apologised for the Dawn Raids in 2021, and the Labour Party is now promising an amnesty for overstayers of more than ten years, if elected.

But Polynesian Panther activist Will ‘Ilolahia says these political promises are too little, too late.

“We’ve got a deputy prime minister that’s a Pacific Islander, and now they’re bribing our people to vote for them so they can stay in. Sorry, you’ve missed the bus.”

Pacific Media Network news reporter Khalia Strong covering the Savali ole Filemu march in Ponsonby on Saturday. Image: David Robie/APR

Green Party candidate Teanau Tuiono agrees more should have been done.

“Healing takes time, it takes discussion, and it’s not just something that you can just apologise for and then it ends.

“Yes, the Dawn Raids apology was a good thing, but we also need to have an amnesty for overstayers and pathways for residency. Because let’s be clear, that amnesty could have happened last year.”

Mesepa Edwards says they are continuing the legacy of the Polynesian Panthers’ original members.

“I’m a 21st Century Panther. What they fought for, back in the 70s and 60s, we’re still fighting for today.”

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

This is a ‘Pain Grip’ Forcing the Hand Forward to put Intense Pressure onto the Wrist. #shorts #A22

Just Stop Oil — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 20:18:19 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Seventy Years On: Remembering Korea’s Pain

Nilantha Ilangamuwa — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 05:50:32 +0000

Amidst these precarious times, where our humanity is continuously put to the test, nothing holds greater importance than our inflexible dedication to pursuing peace. However, it is truly enraging to witness self-proclaimed guardians of peace traversing the globe, stoking the flames of conflict in countries such as Ukraine and sabotaging any attempts at negotiations between More

The post Seventy Years On: Remembering Korea’s Pain appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nilantha Ilangamuwa.

‘I will never forget the pain of being beaten’

By Khin Khin Ei for RFA Burmese — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:17:09 +0000

She knew she was being sought by authorities for reporting on anti-junta protests.

In the seven months since the military had carried out a coup d’etat in February 2021, Myanmar had descended into chaos, Her husband, a former journalist, had been detained for four days before being released.

Fearing for her safety, Thuzar San decided to buy a bus ticket from Yangon for the Thai border town of Mae Sot, due to depart on Sept. 2, 2021.

But two days before she was to leave, she was arrested by police while her taxi was stopped at a traffic light by plain clothes police officers.

“We were asked to put our hands on our heads on the side of the road while they searched the car and then they handcuffed us, forced us to get into a truck at gunpoint, and blindfolded us,” she told Radio Free Asia.

Thuzar was one of the locally-hired reporters at RFA Burmese Service’s Yangon office from 2013-2014.

“There was another woman with us. When we arrived at the [interrogation] center, they said, ‘Let the lady exit first,’ so I asked if it was me they were talking about. All of a sudden, they slapped me in the face.”

During that first night, Thuzar’s interrogators subjected her to brutal mental and physical abuse in a bid to learn what she knew about the junta opposition and other journalists who had covered the protests.

“Four guys circled me and whipped me with a bundle of three [bamboo] canes bound together,” she said. “They asked me the names of the two young men I met during the protest. I was friends with them on Facebook, but I didn’t know much about them.”

Her captors beat her five times with a bamboo sapling that evening and said the wounds on her thighs took “more than a year” to heal.

“I will never forget the pain of being beaten with the bamboo sapling,” she said.

Ruthlessly whipped

Later, she was taken from her cell, blindfolded and led outside, where she was made to kneel on the pavement. Again, her captors beat her, demanding to know how she planned to travel to Thailand, which organizations she had ties to and which reporters planned to flee along with her.

“Three guys circled me and whipped me with canes – it was so painful,” she said. “This time, they pierced my flesh with the [sharpened] tip of the bamboo sapling and it was agonizing.”

Myanmar freelance journalist Thuzar San was tortured after being arrested. Credit: A Hla Lay Thuzar Facebook

When Thuzar told the men that she had nothing to divulge about her fellow reporters, they threatened to videotape her forced confession as “evidence” that she was a junta informant and hold her daughter hostage.

“They told me that they could make me talk and said, ‘We’ll bring in your daughter and beat her in front of you,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally, they sent me back to my cell.”

Over the course of several days, Thuzar was interrogated by several people.

On the ninth day of her detention, her captors took her fingerprints and sent a statement to the local police station, saying that she took part in anti-junta protests while covering the event as a reporter.

To Insein Prison

She was kept in police custody for nearly a month on charges of reporting fake news and inciting the public against the government. On Nov. 22, 2021, she was sentenced to two years in Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison with hard labor.

Thuzar described life at Insein Prison as a constant violation of her human rights.

“I stayed in Female Ward No. 9, which was like a hall with closed circuit cameras installed in it,” she said. “We had to change our clothes and use the toilet there [in front of the cameras]. The prison officials regularly scolded us and used harsh words. Our rights were severely violated.”

Thuzar was released as part of a general amnesty on Jan. 4, 2023, after spending 15 months in prison.

As she was no longer safe in Myanmar, she fled to Thailand along with her family in March.

While she feels unmoored as a refugee in a foreign country, Thuzar said she stays strong thinking about the sacrifices of those who have given their lives in opposition to junta rule.

She vowed to return to Myanmar as soon as possible so that she can join together with those fighting for democracy and a better future in her home country.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Utility bill hike set to compound ordinary Ukrainians’ economic pain

Kateryna Semchuk — Wed, 24 May 2023 12:58:06 +0000

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

This Pharmacist Said Prisoners Wouldn’t Feel Pain During Lethal Injection. Then Some Shook and Gasped for Air.

by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson

This story describes executions and violent deaths.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Puffin Foundation.

Last winter, Dr. Gail Van Norman sat on the witness stand in the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, testifying as part of a trial that would determine whether Oklahoma’s lethal injection procedure was constitutional. Two weeks earlier, at the request of lawyers representing more than two dozen prisoners, Van Norman, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Washington, had attended the execution of a man named Gilbert Ray Postelle.

In the execution chamber, she testified, Postelle was lying face-up on a gurney with his arms stretched out beside him. Executioners injected him with midazolam, a drug that was supposed to knock him unconscious so he didn’t feel pain from two drugs that would soon paralyze him and stop his heart. It didn’t appear to work. For 2 1/2 minutes after receiving midazolam, Postelle continued to wiggle his hands and feet. His eyes remained open, blinking and looking up at the ceiling. Postelle’s breathing became increasingly strenuous and rapid. Van Norman said his trouble breathing was a result of the large dose of midazolam.

Minutes later, executioners declared Postelle unconscious and injected him with two syringes of vecuronium bromide, a drug that would paralyze him and stop him from breathing. They then flushed the IV line with saline, pushing any remaining drug into his system. That was when Van Norman saw him curl the fingers of his left hand and appear to try to make a fist. “This was not a reflex movement,” she said. “This was a conscious movement.” Officials then pumped a third drug into the IV, causing Postelle’s heart to stop.

Van Norman had reviewed documentation of three other executions that Oklahoma had carried out over the previous four months. “I conclude that they did experience extreme pain and suffering through the execution process,” she said. The feeling, she said, would be akin to suffocation. In previous testimony, other expert witnesses for the prisoners had said they would feel like fire was burning in their veins and as if they were drowning.

At issue was the use of midazolam, a sedative typically used to ease anxiety and produce drowsiness before medical procedures. In circumstances like major surgeries, the drug is paired with other medications, such as opiates, to achieve general anesthesia. But states have used midazolam alone — and at much higher doses — in executions since 2013, claiming the drug will render people insensate to pain before the administration of other lethal injection drugs. Research into how midazolam works at high doses has been limited because experimenting with such quantities on humans poses ethical problems. In executions, though, a number of prisoners have reacted like Postelle, gasping, moving or convulsing after being injected with midazolam — actions that have prompted medical professionals to raise concerns that prisoners could still feel pain. In Oklahoma, prisoners’ attorneys argued that these kinds of reactions showed that the state’s lethal injection protocol violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Attorneys for the state, however, responded with their own medical experts. Two were anesthesiologists who have regularly worked with the drug. The third was Daniel Buffington, a Florida-based pharmacist who had become a familiar, if divisive, face in the small pool of health care professionals who regularly testify for state governments on the merits of their execution methods. Since 2015, he had testified for seven states, which collectively paid him at least $354,541 for his services.

“I conclude that they did experience extreme pain and suffering through the execution process.”

—Dr. Gail Van Norman, anesthesiologist

In Oklahoma, Buffington testified that if the state administered its lethal injection procedure properly, prisoners would not feel severe pain. He disputed the argument of prisoners’ experts that midazolam had a “ceiling effect,” meaning that at a certain point, increasing doses will not increase the drug’s sedative impact. The pharmacist said there was no evidence of such an effect.

In what had become a familiar routine for Buffington, one of the prisoners’ lawyers challenged his qualifications. Had he ever authored any peer-reviewed articles on midazolam? Not that he was aware of, he said. Had he ever prescribed the drug? He didn’t remember.

Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot sided with the state, saying Buffington and the other experts had convinced him that midazolam would successfully render the prisoners unable to feel pain. He cleared the way for Oklahoma to continue carrying out lethal injections. The state then scheduled 25 executions, including that of Richard Glossip, the lead plaintiff in the case. Glossip is set to die by lethal injection on May 18.

Similar scenes have played out in courtrooms across the country: Facing constitutional challenges to their lethal injection protocols, states have tapped Buffington to vouch for the ways they execute prisoners, and judges are persuaded, in part by his testimony, even as the controversy over midazolam and other lethal injection drugs has grown. But an investigation by ProPublica and Type Investigations scrutinized the assertions Buffington has made under oath and found that, for years, as he crisscrossed the country to argue that midazolam ensured a humane death, he seemed to be exaggerating or misrepresenting the scope of what he could legally do as a licensed pharmacist.

Notably, on multiple occasions Buffington has testified that he has prescribed midazolam, which legal experts said could boost his credibility with judges.

But both Florida and Georgia, the states where Buffington is licensed, do not permit pharmacists to prescribe controlled substances, which include midazolam. In response to the news organizations’ questions, a spokesperson for Buffington said “the word and process of ‘prescribing’ controlled substances” is commonly misunderstood and encompasses advising, recommending and ordering medication in collaboration with physicians — a definition that Buffington has not always used in court.

Some experts in health law disagreed with the characterization of Buffington’s spokesperson. William Allen, an associate professor of bioethics and medical law at the University of Florida, said that Buffington was “trying to stretch the definition of prescribing beyond its normal — and I would say legally appropriate — use.” To be sure, there are provisions in Florida state law that permit pharmacists to prescribe some drugs under the guidance of, or in collaboration with, a physician. But those provisions do not allow pharmacists to prescribe controlled substances, a point that Buffington noted in a 2021 presentation to Florida medical professionals.

The findings of the news organizations’ investigation raise questions about Buffington’s conduct as an expert witness and the credibility of the testimony itself, which has helped facilitate a number of executions where witnesses said prisoners appeared to be moving or struggling to breathe. They also highlight critical weaknesses in the judicial system, which relies on judges to act as gatekeepers for expert witnesses. When deciding whether to admit testimony, federal judges must determine that it is more likely than not to be reliable, but some jurists acknowledge this is a difficult duty when evaluating complex or technical science. Even when prisoners’ attorneys have raised concerns about Buffington’s qualifications or credibility, judges have often allowed him to testify.

“He’s certainly better able to understand and explain induction of anesthesia than I am,” said U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz in a hearing on Ohio’s lethal injection protocol, after a lawyer for prisoners argued that Buffington was inappropriately testifying about anesthesia.

In the cases Buffington has worked on, he has emerged as one of the most strident deniers of the claim that midazolam has a ceiling effect, arguing that concerns about prisoners feeling pain are “fundamentally defective.” But unlike some of his fellow state experts, who allow for the possibility of such an effect, Buffington, by his own account, has never induced or maintained anesthesia, nor witnessed an execution. His own research has focused mostly on topics such as administrative practices and health care policy.

In vouching for the effectiveness of midazolam in lethal injections, Buffington has repeatedly cited a 2005 study. But the study’s lead author, Dr. Richard Bulach, told ProPublica and Type that his work only dealt with doses that were a fraction of what prisoners receive in executions using midazolam. “Therefore any opinion re: ‘people unable to perceive pain’ becomes theoretical,” he said via email. “Not ideal if you want to be sure that the person you are executing is ‘insensate’ or better — completely anesthetized.” A spokesperson for Buffington said the pharmacist stood by his interpretation of the study, saying it demonstrated that midazolam is capable of inducing general anesthesia. Bulach, however, disputed that characterization.

The courts greenlit four executions. In three of those, prisoners lurched, moved or gulped for air.

Buffington declined to be interviewed about the findings of this investigation but said in a statement that he had served as an expert witness on a broad range of topics over his 30-year career, testifying for the defense, for plaintiffs and for the prosecution. “Though lethal injection cases constitute less than 1% of my expert testimony work, my overriding goal has always been to provide the most accurate, well-documented information on the accepted drug protocols commonly used in the United States,” he said. “I always have — and always will — call for greater transparency in the lethal injection process so that much-needed state-by-state oversight can be provided and problematic executions are avoided.”

His spokesperson noted that Buffington has testified in more than 120 capital murder cases and “in almost every instance, he has testified on behalf of the defendant to spare him from execution.” That testimony has included statements about how medications, drugs or alcohol could have impacted a defendant’s mental state or behavior at the time of their crime. But when he has testified about lethal injection on behalf of states, he has been squarely focused on their execution protocols. After judges approved the protocols being challenged in these cases, officials used those methods to execute 34 people, accounting for 19% of all executions nationwide since 2015.

Not all of those executions have gone as smoothly as Buffington predicted they would. In 2017, for example, Buffington was one of two health care experts who testified that Arkansas’ lethal injection protocol, which included midazolam, would ensure prisoners did not experience severe pain. The courts greenlit four executions. In three of those, prisoners lurched, moved or gulped for air. Likewise, in 2019, Buffington testified in support of Alabama’s lethal injection procedure after prisoner Christopher Lee Price argued it was unconstitutional. In a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Alabama attorney general cited that testimony as proof that midazolam would adequately anesthetize the prisoner. The court cleared the way for Alabama to execute Price that evening. According to witnesses, his stomach heaved and he lifted his head after midazolam started flowing into his veins. A reporter from The Montgomery Advertiser observed, “His left fist remained clenched throughout the execution.”

For more than a century, experts have helped propel the development of capital punishment. In 1889, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, testified on behalf of the state of New York as officials were preparing to carry out the nation’s first execution by electrocution. Lawyers for the prisoner, William Kemmler, alleged that the method violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Joining Edison in his approval of New York’s plan were physicians, future presidents of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and people who had been shocked by electricity. Like prisoners’ lawyers would do with Buffington more than a century later, Kemmler’s attorney attempted to discredit one of the state’s witnesses, pointing out that he did not have a formal education in electrical engineering, according to Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor, who wrote about the case in her 1994 article, “Is Electrocution an Unconstitutional Method of Execution?” The lawyer also jabbed at Edison’s credibility, forcing him to admit that though he said that electrocution would not be painful, he did not know anything about the conductivity of the brain or the body.

Several lower courts ruled against Kemmler’s challenge, and his lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which allowed the execution to move forward. The court ruled that electrocution was “not inhuman and barbarous” but the “mere extinguishment of life.” It did not go as planned. After shocks had pulsed through his body for 17 seconds, Kemmler was still alive; when a second current was applied for 70 seconds, the smell of burning flesh filled the room. Local newspapers declared the execution a “historic bungle.”

Nevertheless, grisly executions by electric chair, hanging, gas chamber and firing squad would proceed for the better part of the next century. Then, in 1977, Oklahoma became the first state to adopt lethal injection, offering governments a sanitized approach to executions. Rather than smelling charred flesh or watching the dark spectacle of the gallows, witnesses saw something that mimicked a medical procedure. Thirty-one states would eventually adopt lethal injection.

It also created a new dilemma though, as prisoners’ attorneys once again challenged the method as unconstitutional: States needed medical and scientific experts to defend lethal injection in court, but physicians’ Hippocratic oath — which includes swearing to “do no harm” — contradicted working in favor of executing people. In 1980, the American Medical Association made its opposition formal, and it has since prohibited its members from “participating” in executions — a term that it defines broadly to include providing technical advice to executioners as well as expert testimony on the efficacy of methods. Other medical organizations, such as the American Board of Anesthesiology, would follow in the AMA’s footsteps.

Some medical professionals teamed up with the government anyway.

But in the past decade, states hit another hurdle: pharmaceutical manufacturers stopped supplying them with lethal injection drugs. In 2011, the U.S.-based Hospira announced that it would cease selling sodium thiopental, a barbiturate that was used to render prisoners unconscious when administered as the first drug in a lethal three-drug protocol. The drug was being manufactured in Italy, and the European Union, which had outlawed capital punishment, grew concerned over its use in executions. A Danish manufacturer of another execution drug, pentobarbital, followed suit later that year, prohibiting sales for executions, and the British government banned the export of the drug to the United States.

“[The prisoner] remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than other people executed recently by lethal injection under the old formula.”

—The Associated Press, on the first execution using midazolam

Amid the drug shortage, states turned to midazolam, a sedative that’s widely available in the U.S. The medication is typically used to help patients relax before they are administered anesthetic agents. But in executions, midazolam is used differently; officials use much higher doses of the drug — enough, they say, to knock prisoners out and prevent them from feeling pain from the subsequent lethal injection drugs.

In 2013, Florida became the first state to use midazolam in an execution, but the drug did not produce the effect that officials promised. The prisoner, a man named William Happ, “remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than other people executed recently by lethal injection under the old formula,” reported The Associated Press, which was present.

Despite its apparent issues, midazolam was adopted by nine states in their lethal injection procedures, triggering a new round of legal challenges over the method of execution. Faced with lawsuits and mounting evidence that the drug didn’t work, states relied on a small pool of experts to defend the drug’s efficacy.

In 2014, Dr. Mark Dershwitz, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School who had served as an expert in court cases for more than 20 states, stopped testifying. His decision followed an Ohio execution in which the prisoner gasped and choked for more than 10 minutes. The entire execution lasted nearly half an hour — the state’s longest in 15 years. Dershwitz had previously vouched for the lethal injection protocol, which involved midazolam, and, according to a report in The New Republic, called it quits over concerns that the publicity surrounding the execution would lead the American Board of Anesthesiology to pull his board certification.

Dershwitz and the American Board of Anesthesiology declined to comment.

As new lethal formulations attracted a flurry of litigation, states tapped other medical experts, including some pharmacists. While the American Pharmacists Association “discourages pharmacist participation in executions on the basis that such activities are fundamentally contrary to the role of pharmacists as providers of health care,” its members are not bound by the Hippocratic oath or rules banning them from testifying in favor of lethal injection. But pharmacists aren’t medical doctors, and their experiences with midazolam and other controlled substances were largely limited to reading drug inserts, dispensing drugs or observing their use during procedures. “They’re not medically qualified,” said Denno, the Fordham law professor, who called states’ reliance on them “desperate.”

(Dominic Bodden, special to ProPublica)

In the early 1990s, Buffington started Clinical Pharmacology Services, a Tampa-based business that provides consulting for health care facilities, physicians and patients on medications, as well as expert witness services for court cases. Since then, retired pharmacist Paul Doering has encountered Buffington at professional events and courtrooms in Florida. The two served as expert witnesses on opposite sides of cases. And at first, Doering was impressed. Buffington, he said, was charming and confident, brimming with charisma.

Over the years, however, Doering said he was also troubled by something he noticed: Buffington seemed to overstate his experience and bend his opinions to fit his clients’ needs.

In 2011, for example, Buffington testified that he had the authority to prescribe a controlled substance “under specially collaborative practice” and that he was registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration, a requirement for prescribing or researching such drugs. That credential was relevant because he had been tapped by the defense in a capital murder case to talk about what effects various medications, including an opioid, would have had on the defendant at the time of an interview with law enforcement.

Florida prosecutor Peter Magrino challenged Buffington’s claim about prescriptive power, though, citing affidavits from the DEA. While Buffington did hold two DEA registrations at the time, neither granted him any prescriptive authority. One allowed him to study marijuana and the other allowed him to research additional controlled substances, according to the documents, which were reviewed by ProPublica and Type. Buffington pushed back, saying the registrations “involve the capacity as a clinical pharmacologist to manage and dispense and prescribe” certain controlled substances, “specifically for research purposes.” The judge quashed the debate at the time, concluding that Buffington had “given sufficient qualifications” to be accepted as an expert witness in the case. But a former DEA employee confirmed to ProPublica and Type that, as the affidavits indicated, Buffington has never had a DEA registration that would enable him to prescribe controlled substances.

Magrino was so troubled by Buffington’s testimony during the state case that he later wrote a letter to the dean of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where Buffington was a clinical associate professor, an unpaid role in which he supervised pharmacy students at his business. In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the news organizations, Magrino sent a transcript for the dean to review and invited him to take “any actions you feel appropriate.”

“He was overstating his credentials, which qualified him to render some ridiculous expert opinions.”

—Florida prosecutor Peter Magrino

“Having been an Assistant State Attorney since 1983 I have had many dealings with expert witnesses and rarely contact folks the witness is associated with,” Magrino wrote, “however this is one of those occasions.” In an interview, the prosecutor said that he never heard back from the dean. (The dean did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The university said it was unable to confirm receipt of the letter, but noted that Buffington remains in the same unpaid role he had in 2011.)

“He was overstating his credentials, which qualified him to render some ridiculous expert opinions,” Magrino told ProPublica and Type. A spokesperson for Buffington did not comment on the prosecutor’s remarks but noted that Buffington did not face any disciplinary action or ramifications “if such a letter was ever sent.”

In another case, in late 2013, Buffington testified at a personal injury trial against a physician who had caused an accident after he had fallen asleep while driving. (Doering testified for the defense.) The doctor had a prescription for a sedative called temazepam, which is commonly used to treat insomnia.

When the plaintiffs’ lawyer, who had hired Buffington, asked whether someone could take temazepam and drive, Buffington responded, “No, sir. … You would never want to take this medication and get behind the wheel.” Under cross-examination, he conceded that many people do use the drug and drive cars, but that “it is strongly cautioned against, because of the risk.”

Four months later, when Buffington testified for the defense in a murder case about medications detected in the victim’s autopsy, he offered a different opinion of temazepam.

This time, when asked about a person driving a car after taking the drug, which is also known by the brand name Restoril, he stated, “It is appropriate and it is done routinely.”

At one point, Miami-Dade County assistant state attorney Gail Levine accused Buffington of providing answers to benefit the defense case without providing data to back it up. “You have come here to say the victim in this case was not impaired because that’s what you have been paid to say; isn’t that true?” she asked.

“I take great offense at that,” Buffington responded.

Doering said the disparity in Buffington’s assessments was problematic. “I can’t condone Dan Buffington swinging like a weather vane on the top of a barn,” he said.

A spokesperson for Buffington said the “nature of these two cases was clinically very different and it is misleading to liken the two fact patterns.” The testimony in both cases was accurate and not contradictory, the spokesperson said.

Medical professionals in Florida also took note of Buffington.

In 2013, the pharmacist was called to testify on behalf of a defendant accused of beating a man to death. The medical examiner’s report stated that the victim’s cause of death was blunt trauma, which split the victim’s spleen and caused bleeding in his abdomen, broken ribs and head injuries.

“I can’t condone Dan Buffington swinging like a weather vane on the top of a barn.”

—Retired pharmacist Paul Doering

Buffington, however, had a different opinion. The victim was a long-term cocaine user and laboratory tests had found drugs, including cocaine, in his system. Buffington said the victim’s cocaine use was “equally plausible” as a reason for his death.

Dr. Jon Thogmartin, the medical examiner in the case and a board-certified pathologist, testified that it made no sense to suggest that the victim could have died from cocaine use “right around the time of” a brutal beating. “That’s just not how you practice forensic pathology,” he said in court. In an interview, Thogmartin said that he felt the court should not have allowed Buffington to testify about cause of death and that he thought “most experts should know the limits of their expertise.”

The judge who presided over the trial has since retired, and the Florida court where the case was heard did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Buffington said that disagreement between expert witnesses is “a hallmark of the American justice system” and called it “unremarkable” that the opposing side disagreed with Buffington’s testimony. According to the spokesperson, Buffington never said that blunt trauma didn’t cause the victim’s death and he stands by his testimony.

For a few years, Roswell Lee Evans, then dean of the Harrison School (now College) of Pharmacy at Auburn University, was a key expert for some states that were defending their execution protocols, testifying that high doses of midazolam would prevent an individual from feeling pain and would induce unconsciousness. But by 2015, that opinion was being called into question. The previous year, prisoners in two states showed what some medical professionals said were signs of consciousness during their executions. In Ohio, witnesses reported that a prisoner heaved and snorted. One Arizona execution lasted almost two hours.

Critics took aim at Evans’ qualifications. In one Florida case, he testified that he had never used midazolam during treatment and had never induced anesthesia. In a different case in Oklahoma, the reference section of his expert report contained over 180 pages of printouts from the consumer website Drugs.com. Prisoners’ lawyers filed a motion to limit his testimony in that case because it would have extended beyond the scope of his expertise.

Friot, the district court judge who also oversaw the case in which Buffington and Van Norman testified last year, denied the motion and allowed Evans to testify. Friot’s denial was ultimately affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, when it ruled that Oklahoma’s execution protocol did not violate the Eighth Amendment. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said Evans’ testimony was credible, noting that Evans had relied on multiple sources, not just Drugs.com. Justice Sonia Sotomayor harshly criticized the decision though, writing that Evans had offered “scientifically unsupported and implausible testimony” and made “wholly unsupported” claims about midazolam’s effect on the brain. (Evans did not respond to requests for comment on those criticisms and Friot declined to comment for this story.)

“[Midalozam] is incapable of rendering an inmate unconscious prior to the injection of the second and third drugs in the State of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol.”

—16 professors of pharmacology, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court

That year, Buffington accepted his first lethal injection case, according to a document he later submitted to a court. Attorneys at the Alabama attorney general’s office tapped both him and Evans to testify in defense of the state’s newly adopted lethal injection protocol. Thomas Arthur, a death row prisoner, had claimed the use of midazolam carried a substantial risk that he would experience the pain of a massive heart attack he said he was likely to suffer during his execution because of a health condition.

Like Evans, Buffington opined that high doses of midazolam would leave the prisoner unable to feel pain. Arthur’s lawyer, Adam Brebner, asked Buffington directly, “You have never prescribed or administered midazolam.”

“That is correct,” Buffington replied.

But later in the same deposition, the pharmacist contradicted himself.

“Are you entitled to write prescriptions for Class IV medication?” Brebner asked.

“Yes,” Buffington replied.

“Have you ever written a prescription for midazolam?” Brebner asked.

“Yes,” Buffington said. He had prescribed the drug to “a patient,” he said.

Later that month, lawyers for Arthur filed a motion to exclude, or at least limit, Buffington’s testimony. They argued that his report and testimony went “well beyond the expertise of a pharmacist” and his opinions on midazolam’s effects were “unreliable.” The district court did not consider Buffington’s deposition but decided the case in favor of Alabama, which executed Arthur in 2017.

Buffington went on to become one of a handful of experts that states tapped to testify in lethal injection litigation. And in some of those cases, he said that he had prescribed or could prescribe midazolam. His own accounting of his prescribing authority and experiences, however, varied from case to case, becoming a point of contention for prisoners’ lawyers.

In Ohio in 2017, he told lawyers that he had prescribed midazolam “probably three” times. Notably, he said he had done so only after his appearance in the Arthur case — a statement that contradicted his 2015 claim in that case that he had already prescribed the medication. But when subpoenaed by an Ohio federal public defender for details of his experience with the drug, he did not provide specifics, writing that he didn’t recall patient names and wasn’t aware of records from when he prescribed midazolam.

Three months after his Ohio testimony, he testified in Arkansas that he had prescribed midazolam during a clinical research procedure, though he clarified that he would call it an “order” — the term Buffington has sometimes used in court to describe prescribing medication in an in-patient setting. He said he couldn’t remember how many times he had done so.

But Buffington is not legally permitted to prescribe controlled substances. According to a DEA spokesperson, “a pharmacist’s ability to prescribe controlled substances is determined by state law,” and, by the agency’s count, neither Florida nor Georgia give pharmacists that authority. In response to questions for this story, the Florida Department of Health and the Georgia Pharmacy Board — along with several practicing and retired pharmacists, pharmacy professors and health law experts in the two states — confirmed those restrictions.

When asked about Buffington’s description of ordering controlled substances in an in-patient setting, health care law experts in Florida said that physicians — not pharmacists — are the ones who initiate such orders.

To be sure, Florida law has provisions that allow pharmacists to prescribe some drugs under the guidance of, or in collaboration with, a physician. But that power is strictly limited to noncontrolled substances for the treatment of minor conditions, like the flu and lice, or some chronic health conditions, such as asthma and Type 2 diabetes. Outside the courtroom, Buffington himself has underscored that very point. In a presentation that he prepared for the Florida Pharmacy Association’s 2021 annual meeting and convention, Buffington noted that those provisions of Florida law do not permit pharmacists to prescribe controlled substances, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by ProPublica and Type.

“Based on his education, training, and professional experience and licensure, Dr. Buffington simply has, in my view as an actual clinical pharmacologist, no expertise or qualifications that would support his rendering expert opinions on the basic and clinical pharmacologic issues in the present case.”

—Dr. David J. Greenblatt, pharmacologist

In response to questions, a spokesperson for Buffington said that the pharmacist had used the term “prescribing” to mean that he has “on numerous occasions advised, recommended and ordered patient medication … in collaboration with physicians.”

In some testimony, however, he has appeared to use a narrower definition of the term, distinguishing between prescribing and other actions. In Ohio, for example, he said in court he had only “recommended” midazolam during consultations before December 2015 but had since prescribed the drug. And in another case, in Florida, Buffington argued that the law allows him to actually write prescriptions for a wide range of medications. Specifically, in a 2017 hearing on the state’s lethal injection protocol, he said that under the right circumstances, he could write a prescription for morphine and midazolam, among other drugs, for the prison.

When asked about that testimony, the spokesperson said Buffington had never testified that he wrote an “outpatient” prescription and had never written a prescription for a controlled substance to be filled at a community pharmacy. Instead, “he has worked in concert with medical personnel in prescribing medication on an inpatient basis or special practice setting” in compliance with state and federal law.

Last year, his recollections of his prescribing history appeared muddier. Asked by an Oklahoma prisoners’ lawyer about whether he had written a prescription for midazolam, Buffington said the term had “broad meaning” but he did not remember whether he had prescribed the drug. “I would have to go back to look,” he said. “I said I don’t recall.”

In recent years, Buffington has won influential posts in state and national pharmacy groups, serving on the board of the American Pharmacists Association for three years and currently serving as chair of the Florida Pharmacy Association’s board. Representatives from both organizations did not comment on specific findings by ProPublica and Type Investigations, but Helen Sairany, the executive vice president and CEO of the Florida Pharmacy Association, wrote in an email, “Dan Buffington is a noble man and someone I look up to.”

Some of his peers on the lethal injection circuit have been less charitable. Experts in these cases often pick at the science presented by opponents. But in conversations with ProPublica and Type Investigations, and in expert reports submitted to the court, doctors and pharmacologists leveled an additional criticism akin to what Florida professionals had observed years ago: Buffington has testified beyond the scope of his education and training.

Buffington has a Doctor of Pharmacy degree and a master’s in business administration. And he has identified himself in testimony, depositions and court documents as a clinical pharmacologist and a toxicologist, specialties that can involve additional training and research into how drugs impact the body.

When asked to evaluate Buffington’s professional background, though, six professors who specialize in clinical pharmacology or toxicology felt his credentials did not meet the qualifications they would expect of someone who claims these titles. While Buffington did complete a yearlong clinical pharmacology fellowship after pharmacy school, experts noted his resume lacked other relevant markers, like robust research publication in their area of expertise and board certifications specific to their field.

In court, prisoners’ experts have challenged his opinions on similar grounds.

“Dr. Buffington is not a clinical pharmacologist; he is a clinical pharmacist,” wrote Dr. David J. Greenblatt, a pharmacologist who conducted some of the earliest research on midazolam, in a 2019 rebuttal report. “Based on his education, training, and professional experience and licensure, Dr. Buffington simply has, in my view as an actual clinical pharmacologist, no expertise or qualifications that would support his rendering expert opinions on the basic and clinical pharmacologic issues in the present case.”

In particular, opposing experts take issue with Buffington’s research experience, noting that it does not appear related to benzodiazepines — the class of drugs to which midazolam belongs. Of the published work listed on his resume, much of it is about administrative practices and health care policy.

In response to written questions, a spokesperson for Buffington disagreed with those assessments, saying Buffington “has significant training and professional expertise in the areas in which he testifies as an expert witness.” The spokesperson said that those with a doctor of pharmacy degree “have the greatest amount of clinical pharmacology training among all health care professionals, including physicians.” The spokesperson also said board certification is not necessary for clinical practice or giving testimony and that “there is no threshold to determine practice, knowledge, or experience based on the number of publications a practitioner has authored.”

All of this matters because many lethal injection cases have involved highly technical debates about how midazolam works in the body. And Buffington’s opinion — that there is no evidence of a ceiling effect — represents a divergence from many experts in the field.

“It is widely recognized in the scientific and medical community that midazolam alone cannot be used to maintain adequate anesthesia for surgery,” reads a brief from 16 professors of pharmacology that was filed with the Supreme Court in 2015. The drug “is incapable of rendering an inmate unconscious prior to the injection of the second and third drugs in the State of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol.”

“[People with a doctor of pharmacy degree] have the greatest amount of clinical pharmacology training among all health care professionals, including physicians.”

—A spokesperson for Daniel Buffington

Judges in two other lethal injection cases have cited similar concerns in temporarily halting executions using midazolam. Notably, in Ohio, the judge observed that Arizona and Florida had abandoned their use of the drug after issues arose during executions there. Ohio’s use of midazolam, he wrote in a 2017 order, created an “objectively intolerable risk of harm.”

A spokesperson for Buffington said Buffington stands by his assessment. To be sure, prisoners’ expert witnesses acknowledge that there haven’t been studies on midazolam doses as high as the ones used in lethal injections, but they say that the ceiling effect has been shown in studies with lower doses.

Opposing experts, however, are not the only ones whose opinions diverge from Buffington’s. His fellow state experts have been less forceful in denying that midazolam has a ceiling effect and in vouching for its ability to anesthetize someone at high doses. Last year in Oklahoma, for example, Buffington testified that general anesthesia induced solely by midazolam would last approximately 60 to 90 minutes. But another state expert, an anesthesiologist, said that the drug alone cannot maintain general anesthesia. Under questioning from the judge, he said that he would only rely on midazolam alone to induce anesthesia — that is, without the addition of other drugs — for a short procedure “where it was going to literally take 30 seconds,” but not for a longer procedure. (Buffington did not respond to a question about this testimony.)

The same state expert has disagreed with Buffington’s assessment of another drug as well. In 2017, for example, Buffington said that the injection of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic used as the second drug in lethal injection in some states, would be a “peaceful experience.” The anesthesiologist working for the state, however, disagreed, testifying in the same hearing that the resulting method of death would be the inability to breathe. (Buffington did not respond to a question about this testimony.)

When asked about his qualifications in court, Buffington has sometimes referred to his academic experience. “I am the person who teaches an anesthesiologist on medications used for anesthesia, for analgesia, for maintenance, for recovery,” he said two years ago in the Oklahoma lethal injection case. Asked where he had done so, he replied that he had taught at conferences, consultations and colleges of medicine, including Emory University and the University of South Florida.

Emory did not return multiple requests for comment and a USF spokesperson said that the school could not speak to whether Buffington has taught anesthesiologists there. The spokesperson did note, however, that the university has not had a department of anesthesiology for about two decades.

In response to questions from the news organizations, Buffington’s spokesperson said that Buffington has “conducted lectures for anesthesiologists at USF and across the Tampa Bay area,” though, when asked, did not give any more specifics. As for the claim about Emory, the spokesperson said Buffington doesn’t have those records, which would be from over 30 years ago.

Records obtained from 10 other universities, which were listed on Buffington’s resume, show that his teaching experience primarily consists of presenting guest lectures or instructing a single class. None mention anesthesiology.

Buffington has also worked as a consultant outside the courtroom in several states, including some that have faced challenges over the viability and constitutionality of their execution methods.

His spokesperson told ProPublica and Type that California, Georgia, Ohio, Florida and Alabama had asked Buffington “about the pharmacologic properties of drugs used in lethal injection protocols.” Those states did not respond to requests for comment, declined to comment or could not confirm Buffington's role.

In November 2020, Alabama tapped Buffington’s company to consult on nitrogen gas, which the state is planning to use to execute prisoners via suffocation. In a brief interview early in ProPublica and Type’s investigation, Buffington denied involvement with Alabama’s execution protocol, but confirmed that the state had asked him questions about “the pharmacology” of inert gasses. He blamed problems in past lethal injections on executioners who carried the procedure out improperly, not on the drugs that were used. Nevertheless, nitrogen, he said, would make it easier to ensure that nothing would go amiss. “I think that the use of the inert gasses represents a viable and effective alternative that may be quicker and potentially have fewer potentials for administration challenges,” he said.

In February, the state’s prison commissioner said that the department of corrections “should be” finished developing a nitrogen hypoxia protocol by the end of 2023. Alabama’s use would be the first time a state used such a method in an execution.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma is moving forward with lethal injection. It plans to execute Richard Glossip in May, roughly one year after a judge ruled against him based, in part, on the testimony of Buffington and the other state experts. In an interview with ProPublica and Type, Glossip said he was not surprised by the ruling. He had challenged the state’s execution method as cruel and unusual before, in 2014, and lost then too. He said he was now focusing on his family and bracing himself for the death chamber. “I tried to put as much of that behind me,” he said of the legal case, “because I know it’s a possibility that I’m gonna go back up there.”

Richard Glossip (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP)

Glossip, 60, has been scheduled for execution eight times before. Once, in September 2015, he was within hours of receiving the lethal injection when then-Gov. Mary Fallin called it off because Oklahoma had acquired the wrong drug.

More recently, officials have postponed the execution for other reasons. Glossip has long claimed that he’s innocent of the 1997 murder of a motel owner that sent him to death row, and last year, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers signed onto his cause, hiring a Texas law firm to investigate the case. The firm concluded that “no reasonable jury hearing the complete record would even have convicted Glossip.” In November, Gov. Kevin Stitt granted him a temporary reprieve so that an appeals court could have more time to consider his case. The state’s attorney general, raising concerns about the evidence behind the murder charge, also asked the Oklahoma court of criminal appeals to throw out Glossip’s conviction and order a new trial. The court, however, rejected that request last week, saying Glossip’s case “has been thoroughly investigated and reviewed.”

On Wednesday, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Glossip’s petition for clemency. His attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay his execution and have called on the governor to grant another temporary reprieve.

Still, correctional officers have told Glossip to start thinking about his last meal. In fact, he has eaten the same thing — a Baconator from Wendy’s, fish and chips, and a strawberry shake — so many times that they have recommended he try something new this time around: a local pizza place.

While his case plays out, Glossip spends the majority of his day confined in a small cell, where he has a TV and a digital tablet, which enables him to make calls. He talks to his wife, Lea, while eating dinner, and they watch old movies like “Rebel Without a Cause” together. On Sundays, she uses her phone to broadcast church services to him.

Since the court’s decision last year, Oklahoma has executed four prisoners: James Coddington, Benjamin Cole, Richard Fairchild and Scott Eizember. Each time, the cellblock grows quieter, Glossip said. And for those who are left, a key question about the execution process remains. “What if it goes wrong?” Glossip asked.

How We Reported This Story

To learn more about how Buffington became a regular on the stand in lethal injection cases over the last seven years, ProPublica and Type reviewed more than 14,000 pages of court transcripts, legal filings, personnel records, syllabi, emails, research studies, payment records and government contracts. We also communicated with and interviewed more than 100 people, including physicians, lawyers, legal experts, expert witnesses, scientists and professors. Some of those sources were involved in cases where Buffington also testified, including lethal injection cases and other civil and criminal litigation.

Nina Zweig and Maha Ahmed of Type Investigations contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

This Pharmacist Said Prisoners Wouldn’t Feel Pain During Lethal Injection. Then Some Shook and Gasped for Air.

by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson

This story describes executions and violent deaths.

“I conclude that they did experience extreme pain and suffering through the execution process.”

—Dr. Gail Van Norman, anesthesiologist

Notably, on multiple occasions Buffington has testified that he has prescribed midazolam, which legal experts said could boost his credibility with judges.

The courts greenlit four executions. In three of those, prisoners lurched, moved or gulped for air.

Some medical professionals teamed up with the government anyway.

“[The prisoner] remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than other people executed recently by lethal injection under the old formula.”

—The Associated Press, on the first execution using midazolam

Dershwitz and the American Board of Anesthesiology declined to comment.

(Dominic Bodden, special to ProPublica)

Over the years, however, Doering said he was also troubled by something he noticed: Buffington seemed to overstate his experience and bend his opinions to fit his clients’ needs.

“He was overstating his credentials, which qualified him to render some ridiculous expert opinions.”

—Florida prosecutor Peter Magrino

Four months later, when Buffington testified for the defense in a murder case about medications detected in the victim’s autopsy, he offered a different opinion of temazepam.

This time, when asked about a person driving a car after taking the drug, which is also known by the brand name Restoril, he stated, “It is appropriate and it is done routinely.”

“I take great offense at that,” Buffington responded.

Doering said the disparity in Buffington’s assessments was problematic. “I can’t condone Dan Buffington swinging like a weather vane on the top of a barn,” he said.

Medical professionals in Florida also took note of Buffington.

“I can’t condone Dan Buffington swinging like a weather vane on the top of a barn.”

—Retired pharmacist Paul Doering

The judge who presided over the trial has since retired, and the Florida court where the case was heard did not respond to a request for comment.

“[Midalozam] is incapable of rendering an inmate unconscious prior to the injection of the second and third drugs in the State of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol.”

—16 professors of pharmacology, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court

“That is correct,” Buffington replied.

But later in the same deposition, the pharmacist contradicted himself.

“Are you entitled to write prescriptions for Class IV medication?” Brebner asked.

“Yes,” Buffington replied.

“Have you ever written a prescription for midazolam?” Brebner asked.

“Yes,” Buffington said. He had prescribed the drug to “a patient,” he said.

—Dr. David J. Greenblatt, pharmacologist

In court, prisoners’ experts have challenged his opinions on similar grounds.

“[People with a doctor of pharmacy degree] have the greatest amount of clinical pharmacology training among all health care professionals, including physicians.”

—A spokesperson for Daniel Buffington

Buffington has also worked as a consultant outside the courtroom in several states, including some that have faced challenges over the viability and constitutionality of their execution methods.

Richard Glossip (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP)

How We Reported This Story

Nina Zweig and Maha Ahmed of Type Investigations contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

Zelenskyi postpones energy price pain for Ukrainians – but for how long?

Serhiy Guz — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:21:02 +0000

The Ukrainian government says the rich are taking advantage – but poorer people are likely to lose the most

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Serhiy Guz.

INTERVIEW: ‘If I don’t speak up on their behalf, I’ll always be in pain’

By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 20:16:38 +0000

A Nov. 24 fire in an apartment block in Xinjiang's regional capital, Urumqi, sparked protests across China, with many people expressing condolences for the victims of the fatal lockdown blaze and others hitting back at ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy.

Huang Yicheng was among them, turning up at a spontaneous protest at Shanghai's Urumqi Road, only to be detained and mistreated by cops, who hung him upside down at one point, as he described in an earlier interview with Radio Free Asia given under the pseudonym Mr.Chen.

Now in Germany, Huang spoke to RFA Mandarin about his plans for the future:

Huang Yicheng: I'm from Shanghai. I am 26 years old and a graduate of the Chinese department of Peking University. I am currently a postgraduate student at the University of Hamburg, Germany. On Nov. 27, 2022, I was arrested by the police on Urumqi Middle Road, Shanghai, put onto a bus, and then escaped from the bus. Then a white man helped me escape the scene.

RFA: You were interviewed by me on Nov. 27, the weekend when the "white paper" movement took place. You were interviewed anonymously then, so why did you choose to disclose your real name and appearance now?

Huang Yicheng: This is because I have now left China. I saw that there were so many people around the same age as me who took part in the white paper movement with me, who have been arrested and imprisoned. So I feel that I will always be in pain and have uncontrollable anxiety if I don't stand up and speak out on their behalf, even though there are great risks involved in doing so.

Protesters shout slogans in Shanghai, China, during a protest Nov. 27, 2022. Credit: AFP screenshot from AFPTV

I hope that everyone can call for the release of Cao Zhixin and the other peaceful demonstrators who are now behind bars.

The government should tell us how many people were arrested in each city after the white paper movement, and issue a complete list of names for each city, so the rest of the world knows exactly what is going on.

RFA: You just said that you are aware of the great risk of doing so. How would you deal with this risk?

Huang Yicheng: This is very hard to think about, because now I have revealed my true identity, educational background and my true appearance. But I want to use this to encourage others in the same boat. But I also think it's almost impossible to remain entirely anonymous in the current online environment. So instead of talking about how scared we are, we should face up to the risk and the fear.

In that way, I hope that the next generation, or our own generation, within the next 10, 20 years or even sooner than that, will get to live in a society without the need for such fear, where we are free to express our thoughts without fear.

RFA: Did you decide to study abroad due to safety concerns, or were you planning to do that anyway?

Huang Yicheng: I had originally planned to study abroad, but it was very, very difficult to get a visa during the zero-COVID restrictions. I started this application before the Shanghai lockdown [of spring 2022], and it took more than a year to come through.

This delay was one of the reasons that I took part in the white paper protests in the first place, as well as the three-month lockdown in Shanghai. It was an experience that changed my life.

RFA: Were you worried that you might be prevented from leaving the country because you had taken part in the protest?

Huang Yicheng: Yes, yes I was. I think everyone else had similar worries. They had already taken away two busloads of detained protesters from Urumqi Road in Shanghai between the evening of Nov. 26 and the early morning of Nov. 27. The video clips being shot at the time were very worrying. I never thought going into it that I would get detained. That's why I want to speak out in support of the people who were detained. Hopefully we can put some pressure on [the authorities] and get them released.

RFA: When I interviewed you on Nov. 27, when you had gotten back home, you said that you were very worried that the police would come looking for you, so you asked for anonymity. Did they come looking for you?

Huang Yicheng: No, they didn't. My identity was kept well hidden, and they didn't find me.

Cao Zhixin, an editor at the Peking University Publishing House, was arrested after attending a Nov. 2022 protest in Beijing’s Liangmahe district. Credit: Screenshot from video

RFA: How did you manage to protect yourself?

Huang Yicheng: I just hid at home and cut off all contact with friends at home and abroad. I don't know if they used facial recognition or anything like that. I also made a video statement to be posted in case I got arrested and gave it to a friend I trust. He would have posted it if I had been detained.

RFA: Given that you were actually caught by the police and put on the bus, it's pretty lucky that you managed to escape – a fluke, wasn't it?

Huang Yicheng: When I think about it now, I can hardly believe it. It was a bit dream-like. When I was detained and put on the bus, it was parked on the southwest side of the intersection between Urumqi Road and Wuyuan Road. I was probably in the second row, near the door.

Protesters are taken away by police in a bus on Urumqi Road in Shanghai on Nov. 26, 2022. Credit: Associated Press

The policeman got off the bus and went to detain other demonstrators, but he didn't handcuff us. We could see from the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher” that there was a trans woman at the back of the bus. The police attacked her repeatedly then closed the bus curtains to stop people filming the attack from outside. Some people filmed the attack with their phones and posted the video of the violence against the transgender person. Some people might think it incredible that we could still shoot video like that after being detained on the bus. But they didn't handcuff us and they didn't watch us very closely, which meant I had an opportunity to escape.

RFA: You mentioned the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher,” which is run by a Chinese student studying in Italy. Do you think the videos he posted were credible?

Huang Yicheng: All the photos he posted were real, and I think at least two were taken by me. One was a street sign of Urumqi Middle Road with someone holding flowers and a candle. The other was a white placard calling for artistic freedom. I sent both of those photos to him. I didn't dare to shoot the video of the police attacking protesters, as the atmosphere was very tense at the time. But I basically saw everything that he posted [on the ground].

RFA: Did anyone you know get arrested?

Huang Yicheng: No one I knew directly was arrested. However, Cao Zhixin works at Peking University Press, so I can confirm that Cao Zhixin is indeed still in custody through my connections with Peking University alumni, and that she hasn't been released yet.

RFA: We have confirmed this via other channels, too. Did you ever expect to be treated like this by the Chinese government?

Huang Yicheng: No, no, because I was thinking about the situation in Hong Kong [during the 2019 protest movement], where they had the brave defenders on the front line, with the peaceful demonstrators behind them. The only reason I went there was to call for the release of those detained. I didn't even hold up a blank sheet of paper, and I didn't shout any slogans other than calling for them to release people. I stood further back to protect myself.

I met a lot of inexperienced people there who went to stand in the front row, but I told them not to stand there, that they should try to protect themselves, because they always start detaining people who are in the front row.

What makes me want to cry the most is that all of the people standing in the front row were women. All the people holding up the sheets of blank paper were women, standing there in front, facing off with the police. There were almost no men there. They took away about one woman every 10 minutes on average. Some men were detained, but very few – it was almost all women. They went for the women every time, not always the ones in the front row.

People protest with blank sheets of paper on a street in Shanghai, Nov. 27, 2022. Credit: AFP

There was a tall plainclothes cop ... people were talking about him on Twitter because he was the one who said "I just can't understand you people." He was communicating with someone via a walkie-talkie, and he would suddenly point at a person, maybe in the second or third row, and then all the officers with earpieces would rush to grab them. That's how I got detained.

RFA: Why do you think it was mostly women in the front row and not men?

Huang Yicheng: It wasn't just young women, but also queer people and other sexual minorities. They had the strongest presence in the white paper movement, maybe because China's political system is highly patriarchal. So I think they weren't just challenging the government, but also the patriarchy.

One thing that made a huge impression on me was three women hugging each other and crying on the eastern sidewalk of Urumqi Road. I asked them, "Why are you crying? Did your friend get taken away yesterday?"

But they replied: "No, none of our friends were taken away, but we saw on Weibo that there was a little girl who burned to death in Urumqi, part of the Uyghur family."

RFA: This wasn't the first time your classmates were detained, was it?

Huang Yicheng: A whole bunch of people from the Peking University Marxist Society were detained in 2018, maybe a dozen or as many as 20. Out of them, I had the closest relationship with [labor activist] Yue Xin. I have so many memories of her. I want to write more about that, so we can remember what happened. So many young people in China have lost their personal freedom just because of their thinking ... including Cao Zhixin mostly recently.

I burst into tears when I saw Cao Zhixin's video, because I feel that, if she is in prison, then so am I. She's the same age as me. So now I've managed to get away, I should say a few words for her.

A man is arrested as people were gathering on a street in Shanghai, Nov. Nov. 27, 2022. Credit: AFP

RFA: Would you call yourself a young leftist?

Huang Yicheng: I did take part in the Peking University Marxist Society, and I made some posts to their official social media account. But gradually I moved further away from that stance. The white paper movement wasn't just about leftists. It was mostly young people who were dissatisfied with the zero-COVID policy.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper movement was a political movement?

Huang Yicheng: I think so. We can see from the slogans of various cities that Shanghai's slogans were relatively radical, but we still saw a number of ... political appeals in other cities. Human rights were a very important issue, because countless tragedies were caused by the lack of human rights during zero-COVID. The white paper movement that followed had solid public support. Even though not that many people took part in Shanghai, there was a huge base of support there.

RFA: Do you think that the white paper moment brought about the end of the zero-COVID policy?

Huang Yicheng: I think it must have. Because the zero-COVID policy in China had totally ended just two weeks after the white paper movement. It was a total U-turn.

But the heartbreaking thing is that while the Chinese government may actually meet our demands, they still insist on punishing everyone. I think this has been their logic for thousands of years, not just under the Communist Party. So it means that all of our bravest people, who are willing to stand up and plead on behalf of ordinary people, and push for freedom, get eliminated [from further social activism].

So who will speak up the next time we get such insane government policies in China? We have to keep the focus on those people, and call on the rest of the world to put pressure on China.

We have to stand up bravely, and express our true thoughts, and then people all over the world will respect us. If we all just go along with their lies, then as a nation we won't be worthy of respect.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.

Analysis Spotlights the Lasting Pain Inflicted by Reagan’s Social Security Cuts

Jake Johnson — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:09:27 +0000

In 1983, just before signing legislation that cut Social Security benefits, then-President Ronald Reagan declared that "we're entering an age when average Americans will live longer and live more productive lives."

But Reagan's assumption of ever-rising life expectancy in the U.S. turned out to be false, according to a new analysis, a fact with painful consequences for those who saw their Social Security benefits pared back thanks to the 1983 law's gradual increase of the full retirement age—the age at which one is eligible for unreduced Social Security payments.

As Conor Smyth wrote Monday for the People's Policy Project, a left-wing think tank, the Social Security Amendments of 1983 hiked the full retirement age "from 65 in 2000 to 67 at the end of 2022."

"What this actually meant was not that the age at which people could retire and start drawing Social Security benefits changed—that remained at 62," Smyth explained. "Instead, by raising what's called the full retirement age (FRA) by two years, the law effectively cut benefit levels across the board, regardless of the age that any particular individual began claiming Social Security benefits. The result is that those retiring at 62 today face a 50% greater penalty for retiring before the change than they would have before 2000."

The 1983 law was an outgrowth of a special presidential commission headed by Alan Greenspan, a right-wing economist who would go on to serve as chair of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades.

Smyth noted that before final passage of the measure—which cleared the House and Senate with bipartisan support, including from then-Sen. Joe Biden—"a popular argument for raising the retirement age was that life expectancy had increased, so people should work for longer."

"The presumption was that the increase in life expectancy since Social Security's implementation would continue as the retirement age rose. But, in reality, something peculiar happened," Smyth wrote. "Over the same period during which the 1983 law forced the retirement age up from 65 to 67, life expectancy in the U.S. actually declined. In 2000, U.S. life expectancy was 76.8 years. According to data released last December, life expectancy in 2021 was 76.4 years. This was the second consecutive year of significant life expectancy decline."

"That's a drop of 0.4 years over a time span when the FRA rose by nearly two years," Smyth observed. "So not only have Americans seen their benefits cut by an increase in the FRA, they now also face a particularly morbid version of a benefit cut in the form of shorter lives."

(Image: People's Policy Project)

The new analysis comes as some congressional Republicans are openly advocating further increases in the retirement age, with one GOP lawmaker recently declaring that people "actually want to work longer."

In a policy agenda released last year, the House Republican Study Committee (RSC) echoed Reagan-era arguments in favor of raising the full retirement age to 70—a change that would cut Social Security benefits across the board at a time when many retirees are struggling to afford basic necessities.

The RSC agenda states that Republican legislation known as the Social Security Reform Act would "continue the gradual increase of the normal retirement age that current law has set in motion at a rate of three months per year until it is increased by three years for those reaching age 62 in 2040, 18 years from now."

"This adjustment," the document claims, "would begin to realign the Social Security full retirement age to account for increases in life expectancy since the program's creation."

President Biden and congressional Democrats have pledged to reject any proposed cuts to Social Security, which Republicans have threatened to pursue in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

In addition to urging Biden and Democratic lawmakers to stand firm against Social Security cuts, advocates are calling on the president to embrace a Social Security expansion plansuch as the one recently proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, which would fund benefit increases by raising the payroll tax cap so that wealthier Americans contribute a more equal share to the program.

"President Biden campaigned on a promise to expand Social Security's modest benefits, while dedicating more revenue to it. Most Democratic senators and members of the House support that as well. Yet the mainstream media fails to take those proposals seriously," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, wrote in an op-ed for Common Dreams last week.

"If the Biden administration championed an expansion plan, unveiled at a White House event with major stakeholders in attendance," Altman added, "that could not be ignored."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

More than a “Syndrome”: Trauma, Distress, and Pain

Paul Haeder — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 16:10:54 +0000

I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, the soldiers, sure, and the definition of soldier is:

1. a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.

2. an enlisted person, as distinguished from a commissioned officer: the soldiers’ mess and the officers’ mess.

a person of military skill or experience: George Washington was a great soldier.

verb (used without object): to act or serve as a soldier.

Informal. to loaf while pretending to work; malinger:

3. a wingless caste of ant or termite with a large specially modified head and jaws, involved chiefly in defense.

Soldiers? Mindless individuals? Bizarrely propagandized patriotic fools? Blood lust wannabes? Mercenaries in the employ of dirty, grotesque nations? Those who would rather wrap themselves in flags, swastikas, Ukrainian blue and yellow ribbons, and then, shoot to kill, shoot anything that moves, Murder All Military Aged Men? But they are being pushed around territories and lands by the War is a Racket Money Kings and Queens (do you want to see if your school, business, your own measely money investments are into one of these Top 100 War Profiteers? How about My Lai?

Hit men, one and all, whether from one of the Military Academies, or just from the dungeons of mercenary hell; hired on, persuaded by incompetents — generals and chiefs of staff and politicians and heads of the war profiteers and the civil servants in the revolving door scam. Teary eyed songs on Veterans Day/Armistice Day. Pathetic selling war, more war, and ZERO negotiations — many of them do not care about civilians, fighters, museums, churches, land, et al. Truly ruthless, in that they dehumanize their own babies, daughters, wheelchair-bound grandfathers, their own pets, all of it, it is open season. Sure, not THEIRS directly, but those children, babies, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, old and young, moms and pops on the OTHER side. Oh, that’s right, only kill those deemed the enemy? Nakba anyone?

Barbaric, brutal, and, if they went into uniformed, armed “service” with any humanity in their bones, any guts that states war is evil, well, well, well, they come out natural-born killers, warped, broken, disassociated from people, angry, psychotic, psychologically wounded, and, then, that shell shock we talked about early in the days of nascent psychology. Do not judge too harshly those youth that get caught up in gangs, who have nothing of a family unit, who have nothing to live for but guns, macho, abuse, drug running, following a leader, and murder. Which Faustian Gamble is the Best Faustian Bargain?

Beware, though, as you watch Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro in Sicario I, II, or III, because that macho shit — and it includes brutality, murdering, execution, rape, pedophilia, torturing, soldiering on, i.e., looking up to a male or male-like leader — might make the viewer forget the ones in suits and with briefcases and Harvard MBA’s and JD’s and political positions that they are the killers. Desensitized? Habituated? Normalized? Shows with action and no discussion board? Yeah, that’s Entertainment. I’ve met Perkins, and he too is not anything more than a hit man in mea culpa profit-making land mode. Can you really fix the sins of your own life, and the sins of your father? This fellow, again, gets on Democracy Now and into Green Festivals, vaunted as some hero (NOT).

You know, so many of us did not sign up to be murderers, never joined the economic draft, never bought into fraternities and macho Friday Night Football horror; or lusted after CIA, Criminal Injustice Outfits. Many of us never sought to work for any of those alphabet agencies of despair/disgust/ disasters/death: DoD, FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, HHS, and on and on, including DOJ. The Faustian Bargain has been signed, sealed and delivered daily by the tens of thousands for those people who want to gain, abuse, get one over on “them,” and who want to be part of the disaster capitalism shock troops of whichever form of abuse and trauma deliver one might find herself or himself in.

Oh Faustus!

Sure, Chuck Bowden was amazing, died semi-young (in his sixty-ninth year) and was a true hero of the journalistic kind.

I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one’s head, from dreaming in the fort of one’s home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.

― Charles Bowden,Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

I’ve been to a couple of Bowden’s talks, and spoke with him in El Paso a very long time ago, it seems, when I was a journalist and teacher and, well, we will not get into THAT other thing. He’s not my guru, but he held some gravitas for me in the world of writing and journalism and speaking out against the crimes of the many set upon us all by the criminals in high office, the lobbies, the corporate boards, even the local and state agencies populated by big and small Eichmann’s, you know, little Eichmann’s. The drug gangs, lords, thugs, and politicians in Mexico are facilitated by, well, you guessed it, Military!

Let’s look at maltreatment of our children. Here and everywhere. Yes, the dirty dealings we set out for our own children and the collective children.

So, the pop-psychology headline, “Childhood Maltreatment Linked With Multiple Mental Health Problems” Jan. 10, 2023 just illustrates how slow witted, how dum downed and how flippant the entire show is, and when I mean show, I mean mainstream and internet feeds/news/games/ propaganda/marketing/ PR/advertising/yellow journalism.

The findings suggest that preventing eight cases of child maltreatment would prevent one person from developing mental health problems.

Corresponding author, Dr Jessie Baldwin (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences), said:

“It is well known that child maltreatment is associated with mental health problems, but it was unclear whether this relationship is causal, or is better explained by other risk factors.

“This study provides rigorous evidence to suggest that childhood maltreatment has small causal effects on mental health problems. Although small, these effects of maltreatment could have far-reaching consequences, given that mental health problems predict a range of poor outcomes, such as unemployment, physical health problems and early mortality.

“Interventions that prevent maltreatment are therefore not only essential for child welfare, but could also prevent long-term suffering and financial costs due to mental illness.”

Think hard Americanos, pro-Capitalists, pro-war drumming fools the absolute trauma of any conflict, that is, armed including those of the suited economic hit men as well as those tatooed hitmen children of the Pablo Escobar-El Chapo variety. Think of the Holly-Dirt images and storylines that show those folk, and it is Mario Puzo on steroids, because there is true admiration of the Mafia and the Sin City Juarez sicarios. Really, when it comes to Holly-Dirt. What about guys like Cormac McCarthy and his “No Country for Old Men” novel-turned-into-hit-movie?

What is trauma, then, those childhood maltreatments? Researchers define childhood maltreatment as any physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect before the age of 18. Imagine the life and times of a Palestinian, or a Yemeni? Imagine the life and times of those children in Donbass after the Chosen People’s Maiden coup under the auspices of the religious zealots of the Zionist variety — Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, et al?

Imagine what maltreatment is when in that Juarez neighborhood where familes are broke by booze, bounty, poverty, machoism, the unholy trinity of materialism, war, and greed? Think about how difficult it is to be a hero in your own family, neighborhood, school, job, state, country.

Thnks of all that trauma the USA inflicts on children before age 18. School lunches are not being cut, and school districts across the land are holding the proverbial hundreds of millions of dollars owed bag. Think hard how a Republican cuts the school lunches, and how dysfunctional schools are with a counselor for every 250 or more elementary students. Think of your community and try and find one qualified child psychologist with real work under her belt.

Student meal debt is rising rapidly in many school districts across the country.

The reason: now that federal funding that made school meals free for all students during the pandemic has ended, families are either struggling to pay for school meals or aren’t even aware that the program ended and they are now obligated to pay.

The end of universal free school meals comes as inflation and rising labor costs are driving up food prices for both schools and families.

No anger yet, over this messed up reality while the multimillionaire Nazified War Thug Zelenskyy gets billions and billions from U$A?

Maltreatment! Think of all the news, all the parents’ fears coming home to the child. Think of yelling, cursing, whipping, swatting, all of that, including how little attention and interaction adults have with those developing spirits-bodies-brains. So many adults are checked out, infantilized, Disneyfied and vapid and vacant. Fear and anger, the ugly mix with greed, that pretty much do it.

Think think think how corrupted adults are, and how foolish even people who want to do good are when they spend time worrying or reading about body shaming at the Golden Globes when their own communities lack childcare, day care, domestic abuse care, health care, mental care, activities care.

Who are the monsters? The kiddos surviving the hell on the streets? Dodging the violent adults? Hiding from the murdering cops? Are they kings of their own world?

Kings of the World? How does this film about teenagers in Columbia questing for the land one lad’s grandmother once owned but who had the land taken away? Of course, at the end of the flick, they make it to the land, and find gold miners polluting it, and, then, bam, all the kids get murdered. That is not a spoiler alert, my fine socialist readers, I hope!

Here’s the Indie Wire BS:

Before “The Kings of the World,” the latest feature from Colombian writer-director Laura Mora, inserts us in the bustling streets of Medellín, where teenagers wield machetes to protect themselves, a shot of a fairy-tale-appropriate white horse introduces the dreamlike atmosphere of this ferocious fable about five adolescent street boys denied basic humanity.

Homeless and with no blood family to guard them, the young souls at the forefront of this electrifying social drama fend for themselves in a gritty urban environment. Their only comfort comes from the brotherly affection they display for one another. That state, caught between tenderness and violence as they navigate an inhospitable reality, defines the visceral energy of “The Kings of the World,” Colombia’s most recent Oscar entry.

The leader of the group, 19-year-old Rá (Carlos Andrés Castañeda), has just learned that the land his grandmother was forcefully evicted from many years in the past has finally been returned to him, the sole heir, as part of the government’s land restitution policies. As Rá, Castañeda exudes an air of innocence wrapped in determination. Heroically not bitter despite the harshness he’s faced, his large, expressive eyes illuminate a path forward.

The reality is that these boys are abused, man, and they drink and smoke, and get their asses kicked and beat up and knifed. The reality is they are the street urchins of Dickens or Bowden, the victims of maltreatment after maltreatment. The movie might have that Lord of the Flies undertone, but the reality is we the view should be steaming under the collar looking at how messed up Latin American countries are with the rich and oligarchs and the Americanos messing with the majority of the good people . . . . Until, generations of young men end up anchorless, stuck in the cycle of guns, drugs, knives, duking it out, dog-eat-dog, ugliness of one and then another and then a thousand maltreatments foisted upon them by parents, family, town, state, country, the world.

Think hard now how deeply that shell shocking does, and how wide it is cast, with the elites, the ones in suits and with suites, determining the extent of history and the future. This is this horror machine, this murderer in a suit, telling the world, telling unborn generations, or young generations, what shall be: No more Russia, no more diplomacy. Imagine that maltreatment having an even deeper affect on each new cycle of Harvard bound sad sake, taught by the Georgetown University Chosen People that history is determined by money, murder, war and elites gaming the systems, full stop.

If you do not wake up angry every day, then your are living in your organic (sic) granola world of inhuman existence. I’m not saying to go around with that anger as your operating position, but it should be there, somewhere, when intercoursing with the humanity and systems around you. This picture is worth a thousand words, and I can’t keep barraging the reader with more and more words, since I am not hearing the readers deploying those words to describe these felons for who they are — murderers, perversions of humanity, the maltreatment engines of today’s generation and generations to come (Stoltenberg and Biden):

Yeah, yeah, you gotta be laughing, for sure, at these Anglo Saxons of the highest degenerate order. But you ain’t pissed yet? Come on. See the memorial for children murdered in Donbass from 2014 to 2021?

No? Ahh, shucks, another Slav Chosen Person, Madeline, uh? Remember those cold eyes, those cold hands, wrapped on the money bags, as people, children, THOSE kiddos, are destroyed by more economic hit men and West Point brass?

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.

—60 Minutes (5/12/96)

Or, this absurdity?

“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”

Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.

“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.

Read all about this, which is never covered in Western Media: “More than 150 children killed in Donbass since 2014”

The lack of curiosity in the monopoly media is far from a lack of thinking: It is a full-fledged attack on people, on history, on truth, on the Fourth Estate’s ability (once) to affect change, to get people motivated to throw the buggers out.

A Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the Albright quote–in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01). This omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden; his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01). The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale–a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends–does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media. (Source)

Ahh, read an old piece on how massively corrupt the media are then, when USA military and planners attacked water treatment plants and restricted chlorine for keeping water safe. Read about the effects of sanctions, the very price was worth it on those children. Do you not believe that Albright, like an ocean liner’s worth of others just like her, is not a criminal of the very worst Dante’s Circles of Hell kind?

Yes, maltreatment, in early childhood?

Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started. It analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace. Mentioning that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that “Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,” something that the United States disallowed for many years.

Combined with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for “postwar leverage,” a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91).

A Dow Jones search for 2000 finds only one mention of this evidence in an American paper–and that in a letter to the editor (Austin American-Statesman, 10/01/00). Subsequent documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result. “There are no operational water and sewage treatment plants and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels,” one post-war assessment reported; “further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation,” another predicted.

Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called “1051 list” of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare–or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so. (The Madison Capitol Times–8/14/01–and the Idaho Statesman–10/2/01–ran op-eds that cited Nagy’s work.)

— Source, Nov.1, 2001, “We Think the Price Is Worth It — Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects–there or here” by Rahul Mahajan.

Who makes money off of all the pain, the disease, all the epigenetic harm, all the chronic illnesses, all the psychotic breaks, all the PTSD a la Shell Shock? Who makes money or hay from meth or coke addiction? Crime pays, right, for the criminal justice systems of oppression, suppression, plea agreements, revolving door private prison complex.

Read all about it, that Sophisticated, High Brow, Articulate, Shakespeare-Producing Anglo Saxon Murder Incorporated, with the King and Queen and Lords looking over them. Makes those street kids I used to talk with in El Paso and Juarez, you know, spooks or huffers, using glue and even gasoline to get high:

Caroline Elkins’ accounts of British soldiers ramming broken bottles into the vaginas of female Kenyan prisoners during the Kikuyus’ Mau Mau revolt is not, by any stretch, the worst example of Albion’s imperial violence she recounts. Because this 870 page book is awash with similar instances of systematic war crimes by the British administration in Kenya, in Nigeria, Jamaica, South Africa, Malaya, Palestine, Cyprus, Nyasaland, India and countless other outposts of empire, justifiable comparisons between the British and the Nazis arise time and again.

And, although many Nazis were brought to book for their crimes, no British were, even though General Sir Frank Kitson, one of the most notorious of these Grade A war criminals, who hopscotched about from one colonial killing field to the next, is still alive and, no doubt, still plotting the murder of others. The book makes it plain that the British had a bunch of such military and civil service troubleshooters, psychopathic thugs like Kitson and Bomber Harris they were prepared to send, almost at a moment’s notice, to any part of their rotten empire where the “natives” had to be duffed up, a euphemism for barbaric tortures derived from Douglas Duff, one of their Satanic number.

Many of these savages, such as Percival and Montgomery, served alongside the Black and Tan terrorist group in Ireland, before moving on to Palestine, India and Malaya where they honed their torture techniques, which resembled those devils use in medieval paintings.

— “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” (at Strategic Culture, banned from FU Book)

Is it this face you are afraid of? Baby-faced: These are the incredibly young-looking ‘hit men’ at the helm of Mexico’s feared Gulf Cartel.

Or do these fellows really scare the shit out of you?

Ahh, there are so many houses of horrors, in the millions, man, that would scare the pants off of any sicario:

Sacred Yet? And I am big on NOT letting a teachable moment pass, a bit of Jewish Zeaotry tied to the origins of the word, “sicario,” which Jewish Holly-Dirt writers and producers and directors might never let the Netflix public see. (Curious, no, why you see no movies, dramas or otherwise, on the Top platforms or from movie studies on the murdering of families and youth and pets by the Jewish Occupiers? )

The Sicarii (Modern Hebrew: סיקריים siqariyim) were a splinter group of the Jewish Zealots who, in the decades preceding Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 CE, strongly opposed the Roman occupation of Judea and attempted to expel them and their sympathizers from the area. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and alleged Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection.

The Sicarii are regarded as one of the earliest known organized assassination units of cloak and daggers, predating the Islamic Hashishin and Japanese ninja by centuries. The derived Spanish term sicario is used in contemporary Latin America to describe a hitman.

Eight of the Deadliest Assassin Groups in History

Shell Shocked?

Martin Luther King’s Birthday?

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968 . . . . Born in 1929, King’s actual birthday is January 15 (which in 1929 fell on a Tuesday).

Book Review: Refugees and ‘the Pain of Not Telling’

Lisa Mullenneaux — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:29:23 +0000

In ‘Map of Hope and Sorrow,’ journalist Helen Benedict and her co-author Eyad Awwadawnan lace fact-laden analysis with heartstopping firsthand accounts.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Lisa Mullenneaux.

Media Falsely Prescribes Pain to Workers as Only Solution to Inflation

Luca GoldMansour — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:31:53 +0000

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit's prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.

When inflation hits, this is because of the conditions upon which profits are made. It's not the fault of profit-making itself. The problem is a "labor shortage," or "too much demand," which forces the invisible hand to raise prices—and not a shortage of dignified work, or a surplus of people living paycheck to paycheck. Maximal profits are a given, and scarcity for ordinary people is a requirement.

This catechism means that, even if reporters in corporate media are sympathetic to working people's struggle with the increasing costs of living, the group that inevitably needs to take a hit to curb inflation is, you guessed it, still working people.

This dynamic plays out in the media like a bait and switch, in which reporters acknowledge and sympathize with the pain of ordinary people, but prescribe them more pain as the only way out.

Such was the case when USA Today (11/2/22) ran its front-page headline, "Latest Fed Rate Hike: More Pain Coming." The article starts by saying that inflation is at its "highest in a generation"; the online version links to another story (10/13/22) with working people rightly bemoaning the increases in their cost of living:

Michael Rossini, 57, of Randolph, Massachusetts, is shelling out an additional $55 or so a week on groceries. And filling up his pickup truck now costs $170, up from $100 before the inflation spike, even after the summer drop-off in pump prices….
"I've got to provide for my family," he said. But, he said, "my quality of life has gone down…. I can't get this time back."

But as "More Pain Coming" makes clear, USA Today provides no option for people like Michael but the Rube Goldberg–esque conveyor belt Powell and the Federal Reserve have constructed to cull the bloated American economy.

According to the article, "consumers should expect their costs to head even higher and job losses to mount as economic growth slows" as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. The Fed's moves will "ripple through the economy and ultimately, hit businesses and consumers and slow demand and inflation."

That the Fed decided to use its incredible influence over the US and global economy is of course deserving of coverage. But to pay lip service to the needs of ordinary Americans, as if that's what's driving the Fed's decision to burden them further, obscures the class war being waged. It's a bait and switch that works to convince people that the scarcity they feel is an inevitable consequence of natural forces, not a political decision that need not be.

Corporate greed a 'red herring'

Despite corporate media's best attempts, polls show the vast majority of Americans lay blame on corporations for needlessly driving inflation (Navigator, 7/26/22). This didn't stop NPR (11/29/22) from characterizing this view as one of "economists and politicians on the left." NPR's "The Mystery of Rising Prices. Are Greedy Corporations to Blame for Inflation?" was written like a "whodunnit," but if the protagonist detective was too inept to discover that their anonymous employer was in fact the murderer staging a cover-up.

NPR business correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith somehow came within point blank range of the "smoking price gun" of corporate price-setting, only to acquit these corporations and blame regular people in a verdict that takes the bait and switch to another level.

From pointing out that corporate profits "reached an all-time high this year" to detailing the "confessions" of corporate executives at companies like Kroger, AutoZone and Hostess, who "bragged about how much they were able to raise prices," the author/detective seemed hot on the trail of how corporate profiteering has produced a cost of living crisis. They even acknowledge that corporations have "murdered the competition," with the four companies that "control about 80% of the beef and poultry market" having "settled lawsuits over price-fixing just this year."

But after laying all this out, our detective consulted an expert witness whose view is that blaming corporate greed is a "red herring."

"Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity," the economist Justin Wolfers said. Once again, greed and the resulting pain and scarcity working people feel is natural. There's nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Profits are a given.

Further, greed is good:

"The only reason we're not all paying $800 for a pair of socks or a cheeseburger is simply due to greed in another form: competition. 'That greed forces them to offer low prices because they're trying to muscle out their competitor,' says Wolfers."

Despite having just detailed the corporate tendency to reduce such competition, as with the case of the meat industry, this is enough to lead her to her verdict.

The killer, our detective determined, is consumers:

As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery…. "Inflation is coming from demand," says Wolfers.

It's your own damn fault, people! But the good news? "Prices will fall and inflation will ease." Why? In order to make ends meet,

our collective savings has been shrinking and household debt has been on the rise…. But, until demand drops, companies will push prices up as much as they can. It's elementary.

The only way out is through.

To 'dent the job market'

The New York Times (11/1/22) also ran a story examining evidence that corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices on consumers, but unlike our "whodunnit," shied away from deciding on a guilty party for inflation writ large. The subhead was forthright enough:

Some companies and restaurants have continued to raise prices on consumers even after their own inflation-related costs have been covered.

The Times' acknowledgement of corporate greed, though, didn't affect its conviction that consumer demand must take a hit to bring prices down. In a piece assessing the Fed's interest rate hikes, the Times (11/18/22) reported on the difficulty the continued resilience of both the labor market and consumer demand poses for the Fed, without so much as a word considering an outcome that doesn't require kicking people out of their jobs:

Rate increases have yet to seriously dent the overall job market…. "The shocking part is, for as much as we've raised rates in six months, we're really just still not seeing much in the labor market," Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said at a recent event….
In theory, shoppers should be pulling back as money becomes more expensive to borrow and uncertainty about the future mounts. But so far, businesses continue to invest, and consumers are hardy.

With these inflation indicators "lagging," the Times says the Fed is trying to "thread the needle" so as to not impose supposed unneeded costs on the economy:

So far, "it appears tighter money has not yet constrained business activity enough to seriously dent inflation," Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in an essay on Tuesday. "While there are risks that our policy actions to tame inflation could induce a recession, that would be preferred to the alternative."

How being so determined to bring inflation down that you are willing to cause a recession, a far worse outcome that would throw millions out of work, just to bring inflation down is "threading the needle" remains a mystery. That that outcome "would be preferred to the alternative" just goes to show at whose behest the Fed is operating. Rich people, of course, are never unemployed. However, their giant piles of money do lose value as inflation persists. So a recession would be preferable to them—and only them.

So even though working people are already shouldering the heaviest burden of inflation, and even though the Times (11/1/22) previously reported on how many companies are taking advantage of the situation, it doesn't propose that those corporations should be made to shoulder more of the burden of deflationary efforts.

'Stomach for the fight'

But where the Times sees the Fed "threading the needle," the Economist (12/1/22) questions whether policymakers have "the stomach" to go even further. One cannot describe their take as a bait and switch, given they make no effort to appear sympathetic to the needs of ordinary people. Instead, they invoked the legacy of Carter/Reagan Fed chair Paul Volcker, whose excessive fight against the high inflation of his time led to a recession and drove unemployment to 10.8%.

The Economist stated that central bankers today should draw "three lessons" from the experience of the '80s:

First, inflation can take a long time to come down. Second, defeating inflation requires the participation not just of central bankers, but other policymakers too. And third, it will come with huge trade-offs.

It's the second and third lesson which give the most pause here.

The second lesson, that other policymakers must be engaged alongside central banks in order to adequately curb inflation, seems benign until you realize which policymakers and which policies the author is referring to: namely the "liberalizing reforms" of the 1980s, the austerity, deregulation and disempowerment of labor that took place under the Reagan administration.

The third lesson, about trade-offs, amounts to a call to remain firm on kicking millions of people out of their jobs:

The third lesson of the 1980s is that disinflation is painful. The world economy did not benefit from a "soft landing," where inflation falls without provoking recession. Average unemployment across the rich world doubled in the five years after 1979….
Do policymakers today have the stomach for the fight?… Fighting inflation is hard. It requires all hands on deck, and immense courage over a long period of time. It is also, unfortunately, almost inevitable that some groups lose out, if only in the short term.

Lenin's description of the Economist as "a journal that speaks for the British millionaires" really holds up. Asking if policymakers today have the guts to serve power is not a question requiring too much investigation. If it were, history would have turned out a lot different.

Journalists should instead be asking if policymakers have the guts to serve those who bear the brunt of inflation, who don't set the prices, and who don't make record profits. The answer is a resounding no.

'For wages to come down'

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed unleashed an era of cheap money for the rich, inflating shareholders earnings without prompting significant reinvestment or wage increases (Project Syndicate, 9/21/22). Unfathomable inequality has followed.

This continued uninterrupted for over a decade. But labor's more recent moderate increase in wages is being treated as public enemy number one by the Fed and commentators.

At a September press conference, Fox Business' Edward Lawrence asked Powell how long Americans should be prepared to feel the "economic pain" the Fed has imposed. The Fed chair responded by openly stating that it was going to take as long as was necessary to crush wages:

I mean, it really depends on how long it takes for wages, and more than that, prices to come down, for inflation to come down.

This argument that the Fed continues to make, that too much demand and a "wage price spiral" are exacerbating inflation, gets unquestioningly parroted in the media (e.g., New York Times, 12/14/22). But it ignores data showing that aggregate demand has mostly fallen below historical trends, and would not be excessive if not for supply shocks—and that, crucially, real wages are declining—as laid out in a recent Roosevelt Institute report (12/6/22).

As the report's authors, Joseph Stieglitz and Ira Regmi, document, inflation has mostly been brought on by "supply shocks and sectoral demand shifts, not by excess aggregate demand." This warrants a different set of policy tools than the "blunt" hand of monetary policy that would drive unemployment "unnecessarily high."

While "restoring interest rates to normal levels" not seen since before the '08 collapse has "distinct advantages"—because zero or negative interest rates subsidize corporate speculation—going further than that, as the Fed seems intent on doing, "will not substantially lower inflation unless they induce a major contraction in the economy, which is a cure worse than the disease."

When corporate media appear to be sympathetic to the ordinary people that face the brunt of inflation, but only offer policy ideas that would further widen the gap between wages and inflation, and between rich and poor, they are engaging in a bait and switch that only serves the powerful.

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

Media Prescribe More ‘Pain’ for Workers as Inflation’s Only Cure

Luca GoldMansour — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 23:13:55 +0000

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.

When inflation hits, this is because of the conditions upon which profits are made. It’s not the fault of profit-making itself. The problem is a “labor shortage,” or “too much demand,” which forces the invisible hand to raise prices—and not a shortage of dignified work, or a surplus of people living paycheck to paycheck. Maximal profits are a given, and scarcity for ordinary people is a requirement.

This catechism means that, even if reporters in corporate media are sympathetic to working people’s struggle with the increasing costs of living, the group that inevitably needs to take a hit to curb inflation is, you guessed it, still working people.

The fact that “job openings increased to 10.7 million in September,” USA Today (11/3/22) reported, “can continue to give the Fed a headache.”

This dynamic plays out in the media like a bait and switch, in which reporters acknowledge and sympathize with the pain of ordinary people, but prescribe them more pain as the only way out.

Such was the case when USA Today (11/2/22) ran its front-page headline, “Latest Fed Rate Hike: More Pain Coming.” The article starts by saying that inflation is at its “highest in a generation”; the online version links to another story (10/13/22) with working people rightly bemoaning the increases in their cost of living:

Michael Rossini, 57, of Randolph, Massachusetts, is shelling out an additional $55 or so a week on groceries. And filling up his pickup truck now costs $170, up from $100 before the inflation spike, even after the summer drop-off in pump prices….

“I’ve got to provide for my family,” he said. But, he said, “my quality of life has gone down…. I can’t get this time back.”

But as “More Pain Coming” makes clear, USA Today provides no option for people like Michael but the Rube Goldberg–esque conveyor belt Powell and the Federal Reserve have constructed to cull the bloated American economy.

According to the article, “consumers should expect their costs to head even higher and job losses to mount as economic growth slows” as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. The Fed’s moves will “ripple through the economy and ultimately, hit businesses and consumers and slow demand and inflation.”

That the Fed decided to use its incredible influence over the US and global economy is of course deserving of coverage. But to pay lip service to the needs of ordinary Americans, as if that’s what’s driving the Fed’s decision to burden them further, obscures the class war being waged. It’s a bait and switch that works to convince people that the scarcity they feel is an inevitable consequence of natural forces, not a political decision that need not be.

Corporate greed a ‘red herring’

NPR‘s story (11/29/22) had a twist ending: “As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery.”

Despite corporate media’s best attempts, polls show the vast majority of Americans lay blame on corporations for needlessly driving inflation (Navigator, 7/26/22). This didn’t stop NPR (11/29/22) from characterizing this view as one of “economists and politicians on the left.” NPR‘s “The Mystery of Rising Prices. Are Greedy Corporations to Blame for Inflation?” was written like a “whodunnit,” but if the protagonist detective was too inept to discover that their anonymous employer was in fact the murderer staging a cover-up.

NPR business correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith somehow came within point blank range of the “smoking price gun” of corporate price-setting, only to acquit these corporations and blame regular people in a verdict that takes the bait and switch to another level.

From pointing out that corporate profits “reached an all-time high this year” to detailing the “confessions” of corporate executives at companies like Kroger, AutoZone and Hostess, who “bragged about how much they were able to raise prices,” the author/detective seemed hot on the trail of how corporate profiteering has produced a cost of living crisis. They even acknowledge that corporations have “murdered the competition,” with the four companies that “control about 80% of the beef and poultry market” having “settled lawsuits over price-fixing just this year.”

But after laying all this out, our detective consulted an expert witness whose view is that blaming corporate greed is a “red herring.”

“Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity,” the economist Justin Wolfers said. Once again, greed and the resulting pain and scarcity working people feel is natural. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Profits are a given.

Further, greed is good:

“The only reason we’re not all paying $800 for a pair of socks or a cheeseburger is simply due to greed in another form: competition. ‘That greed forces them to offer low prices because they’re trying to muscle out their competitor,’ says Wolfers.”

Despite having just detailed the corporate tendency to reduce such competition, as with the case of the meat industry, this is enough to lead her to her verdict.

The killer, our detective determined, is consumers:

As it turns out, consumers might be the guilty party in the inflation mystery…. “Inflation is coming from demand,” says Wolfers.

It’s your own damn fault, people! But the good news? “Prices will fall and inflation will ease.” Why? In order to make ends meet,

our collective savings has been shrinking and household debt has been on the rise…. But, until demand drops, companies will push prices up as much as they can. It’s elementary.

The only way out is through.

To ‘dent the job market’

The New York Times (11/1/22) also ran a story examining evidence that corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices on consumers, but unlike our “whodunnit,” shied away from deciding on a guilty party for inflation writ large. The subhead was forthright enough:

Some companies and restaurants have continued to raise prices on consumers even after their own inflation-related costs have been covered.

The New York Times story (11/18/22) concludes that a recession “would be preferred to the alternative”: that is, continued low unemployment with rising prices.

The Times’ acknowledgement of corporate greed, though, didn’t affect its conviction that consumer demand must take a hit to bring prices down. In a piece assessing the Fed’s interest rate hikes, the Times (11/18/22) reported on the difficulty the continued resilience of both the labor market and consumer demand poses for the Fed, without so much as a word considering an outcome that doesn’t require kicking people out of their jobs:

Rate increases have yet to seriously dent the overall job market…. “The shocking part is, for as much as we’ve raised rates in six months, we’re really just still not seeing much in the labor market,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said at a recent event….

In theory, shoppers should be pulling back as money becomes more expensive to borrow and uncertainty about the future mounts. But so far, businesses continue to invest, and consumers are hardy.

With these inflation indicators “lagging,” the Times says the Fed is trying to “thread the needle” so as to not impose supposed unneeded costs on the economy:

So far, “it appears tighter money has not yet constrained business activity enough to seriously dent inflation,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in an essay on Tuesday. “While there are risks that our policy actions to tame inflation could induce a recession, that would be preferred to the alternative.”

How being so determined to bring inflation down that you are willing to cause a recession, a far worse outcome that would throw millions out of work, just to bring inflation down is “threading the needle” remains a mystery. That that outcome “would be preferred to the alternative” just goes to show at whose behest the Fed is operating. Rich people, of course, are never unemployed. However, their giant piles of money do lose value as inflation persists. So a recession would be preferable to them—and only them.

So even though working people are already shouldering the heaviest burden of inflation, and even though the Times (11/1/22) previously reported on how many companies are taking advantage of the situation, it doesn’t propose that those corporations should be made to shoulder more of the burden of deflationary efforts.

‘Stomach for the fight’

The Economist (12/1/22) asks, “Do policymakers today have the stomach for the fight?”—meaning, are they willing to throw millions of people out of work?

But where the Times sees the Fed “threading the needle,” the Economist (12/1/22) questions whether policymakers have “the stomach” to go even further. One cannot describe their take as a bait and switch, given they make no effort to appear sympathetic to the needs of ordinary people. Instead, they invoked the legacy of Carter/Reagan Fed chair Paul Volcker, whose excessive fight against the high inflation of his time led to a recession and drove unemployment to 10.8%.

The Economist stated that central bankers today should draw “three lessons” from the experience of the ’80s:

First, inflation can take a long time to come down. Second, defeating inflation requires the participation not just of central bankers, but other policymakers too. And third, it will come with huge trade-offs.

It’s the second and third lesson which give the most pause here.

The second lesson, that other policymakers must be engaged alongside central banks in order to adequately curb inflation, seems benign until you realize which policymakers and which policies the author is referring to: namely the “liberalizing reforms” of the 1980s, the austerity, deregulation and disempowerment of labor that took place under the Reagan administration.

The third lesson, about trade-offs, amounts to a call to remain firm on kicking millions of people out of their jobs:

The third lesson of the 1980s is that disinflation is painful. The world economy did not benefit from a “soft landing,” where inflation falls without provoking recession. Average unemployment across the rich world doubled in the five years after 1979….

Do policymakers today have the stomach for the fight?… Fighting inflation is hard. It requires all hands on deck, and immense courage over a long period of time. It is also, unfortunately, almost inevitable that some groups lose out, if only in the short term.

Lenin’s description of the Economist as “a journal that speaks for the British millionaires” really holds up. Asking if policymakers today have the guts to serve power is not a question requiring too much investigation. If it were, history would have turned out a lot different.

Journalists should instead be asking if policymakers have the guts to serve those who bear the brunt of inflation, who don’t set the prices, and who don’t make record profits. The answer is a resounding no.

‘For wages to come down’

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed unleashed an era of cheap money for the rich, inflating shareholders earnings without prompting significant reinvestment or wage increases (Project Syndicate, 9/21/22). Unfathomable inequality has followed.

This continued uninterrupted for over a decade. But labor’s more recent moderate increase in wages is being treated as public enemy number one by the Fed and commentators.

At a September press conference, Fox Business’ Edward Lawrence asked Powell how long Americans should be prepared to feel the “economic pain” the Fed has imposed. The Fed chair responded by openly stating that it was going to take as long as was necessary to crush wages:

I mean, it really depends on how long it takes for wages, and more than that, prices to come down, for inflation to come down.

“I wish there were a completely painless way to restore price stability,” the New York Times (12/14/22) quotes Fed chief Jerome Powell. “There isn’t.”

This argument that the Fed continues to make, that too much demand and a “wage price spiral” are exacerbating inflation, gets unquestioningly parroted in the media (e.g., New York Times, 12/14/22). But it ignores data showing that aggregate demand has mostly fallen below historical trends, and would not be excessive if not for supply shocks—and that, crucially, real wages are declining—as laid out in a recent Roosevelt Institute report (12/6/22).

As the report’s authors, Joseph Stieglitz and Ira Regmi, document, inflation has mostly been brought on by “supply shocks and sectoral demand shifts, not by excess aggregate demand.” This warrants a different set of policy tools than the “blunt” hand of monetary policy that would drive unemployment “unnecessarily high.”

While “restoring interest rates to normal levels” not seen since before the ’08 collapse has “distinct advantages”—because zero or negative interest rates subsidize corporate speculation—going further than that, as the Fed seems intent on doing, “will not substantially lower inflation unless they induce a major contraction in the economy, which is a cure worse than the disease.”

The post Media Prescribe More ‘Pain’ for Workers as Inflation’s Only Cure appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

Higher Interest Rates Only Brought More Pain

Joseph Stiglitz — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:10:50 +0000

In the name of taming inflation, central banks have deliberately set themselves on a path to cause a recession—or to worsen it if it comes anyway.

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

Netflix’s “Farha” and the Palestinian Right to Process Pain Through Art

Murtaza Hussain — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 11:00:27 +0000

The Jordanian film “Farha,” released this week on Netflix, tells the story of an individual tragedy that took place during the 1948 war to create the state of Israel — where Palestinians, who remember the event as the Nakba, or catastrophe, were expelled from their homes by the hundreds of thousands.

A 14-year-old Palestinian girl, nursing dreams of breaking out of the traditional gender expectations of her village to attend school at a nearby city, is forced into hiding by her father after their quiet settlement is attacked by soldiers of the newly created Israeli Defense Forces. Hiding inside a locked pantry while waiting for her father to return, she watches through a small opening in the wall as Israeli soldiers execute a Palestinian family — including two young children and a baby.

Filmmaker Darin Sallam’s debut, “Farha” is also the Jordanian entry for the 2023 Academy Awards. Sallam has said that the movie is based on the true story of a friend of her mother, who, living years later as a refugee in Syria, recalled her experience as a young girl during the Nakba. Sallam describes the film as a means of helping process a painful memory of that time.

“I’m not afraid to tell the truth. We need to do this because films live and we die,” Sallam said in an interview last winter following the film’s premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival. “This is why I decided to make this film. Not because I’m political, but because I’m loyal to the story that I heard.”

Cancel Campaigns

Predictably, the film — and the attention that it is now getting on a major platform like Netflix — has angered Israeli officials, who have denounced “Farha” and even threatened consequences for its airing.

“It’s crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie whose whole purpose is to create a false pretense and incite against Israeli soldiers,” outgoing Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman said in a recent statement. Lieberman also took steps to revoke state funding to a theatre in the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa that screened the film, with the “goal of preventing the screening of this shocking film or other similar ones in the future.”

Various other Israeli officials have denounced the production of “Farha” in public statements. In response to its screening on Netflix, there has been coordinated downvoting of its ratings online, as well as a social media campaign calling on people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions.

Many people do not want “Farha” to be seen under any circumstance. Yet this attempt to shut down screenings of the film seems to reflect an unfair denial of yet another basic human right to Palestinians: the ability to process their trauma through art. Rather than gratuitously attack Israelis, the creator of “Farha” has said that this personal impulse was at the core of why the film was created.

“The story traveled over the years to reach me. It stayed with me. When I was a child, I had this fear of closed, dark places, and I kept thinking of this girl and what happened to her,” Sallam said following the film’s release. “So when I grew up and became a filmmaker, I decided that this would be my debut feature.”

The desire to use art as a means of dealing with pain — including historical traumas passed down through generations — should be familiar to Israelis, many of whom are descendants of genocide survivors from Europe, about which there is a voluminous history of cultural production continuing into the present day.

Despite the documented fact of the Palestinian refugee exodus, the individual accounts of those who suffered these events have often been suppressed, only recently receiving halting recognition from the broader public, decades after the fact. The Palestinian film industry, which has achieved popular success in recent years, has emerged as a vital tool for capturing the historical memory not just of the Nakba, but of the continued traumas suffered by millions of Palestinians living as occupied subjects of the Israeli military.

Acknowledging the Other Side

The pivotal scene in “Farha” showing the murder of a Palestinian family depicts the wartime Israeli military in a poor light. Yet far from being unthinkable, such incidents have been documented by Israeli historians as common during the Nakba.

“The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death,” the historian Ilan Pappe wrote in his book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” describing accounts of a massacre that took place in the Palestinian village of Dawaymeh.

Despite attempts to shut down its production, there is a strong case to make that “Farha” should be seen.

The massacre in Dawaymeh was just one of countless incidents of ethnic cleansing during this period, many of which have survived in the memory of Palestinians but are only now being recognized by others.

That the people who suffered through the Nakba and their children have a right to memorialize their experience through art should not be denied, even if, as is likely, the stories they tell make some people uncomfortable in the present day.

“Farha” is now available to millions of people to watch on Netflix. Despite attempts to shut down its production, there is a strong case to make that it should be seen — though not to deepen hatred over terrible events that cannot be reversed. Rather, the film should stand as an acknowledgement of the other side of a historic story about the creation of the state of Israel that has too long been ignored or denied: the story of its victims.

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

AFL-CIO Economist Warns Fed Is Using ‘Flat Wrong’ Analysis to Inflict Pain on Workers

Julia Conley — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 13:58:39 +0000

The top economist for the largest labor organization in the United States on Wednesday said the Federal Reserve's decision to continue raising interest rates is a "political" one based on a flawed analysis of the causes of inflation.

"The Federal Reserve is doing the greatest harm I could ever imagine," William Spriggs, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, told The Hill. "I consider what they're doing right now politics, and they are making a political statement about the economy, and they are wrong. Their analysis is flat wrong."

The Federal Reserve has claimed a labor shortage, increased wages, and struggles within global supply chains are to blame for inflation, which currently stands at 8.2%. In response, the central bank has increased interest rates several times this year, most recently by three-quarters of a percentage point last month.

Spriggs denounced the bank for ignoring external factors that are driving inflation, including the effects of the climate crisis on global agricultural production.

As The Hill reported, Spriggs "pointed to a major drought affecting rice-growing regions in China, a heat wave in Europe that destroyed much of the corn crop, and massive flooding in Pakistan that wiped out huge swaths of different crops, including 20% of the cotton harvest."

Those crises have pushed global commodity prices up by more than 55% this year, with food commodities up nearly 24%, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. For U.S. consumers, grocery prices are up more than 13%.

"It's dangerous to the moment to tell the American people that the source of inflation is endogenous to the system, that it is related to excess demand," Spriggs told The Hill. "Nothing could be further from the truth. Diverting us from the actual conversation that we need to be having—we, meaning human beings—is so dire."

In addition to the impact of extreme weather—as well as Russia's invasion of Ukraine—on global crops and the price of food and fuel, multiple economists have pointed to corporate profiteering and price gouging as key factors that are driving inflation.

As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Tuesday in a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, such corporate behavior is not impacted by interest rate hikes, and the central bank must take action to "promote stable prices and maximum employment" for working Americans.

Progressives have called for policies to provide relief for working families, including legislation that would crack down on corporations that price-gouge, and the reinstatement of the expanded child tax credit.

The Federal Reserve is expected to continue raising interest rates in the coming months, with a 4.6% rate anticipated next year—up from the current 3.08% effective rate.

In his comments to The Hill Wednesday, Spriggs reiterated an analysis he shared on social media in June after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates by 75 basis points.

"The Federal Reserve characterizing American inflation as unique, and caused by excess demand, prevents discussing policies to ameliorate higher prices for stressed American households navigating these novel supply shocks and policies to address them," Spriggs said. "It is a political statement."

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

‘Pain isn’t an essential part of being trans… but it can be a minefield’

Lou Ferreira — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 09:56:23 +0000

Transphobia is compounding existing inequalities in housing and work, as one young Scot explains

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lou Ferreira.

Ignoring Pain for Workers, Bloomberg Editorial Openly Endorses Fed-Induced Recession

Jake Johnson — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 16:34:01 +0000

With the Federal Reserve expected to impose another large interest rate hike on Wednesday, the editorial board of Bloomberg openly encouraged the U.S. central bank to demonstrate that it is willing to "cause a recession" in order to get sky-high inflation under control.

Critics were quick to note that the Wednesday editorial, which claims "wage growth will need to slow" and unemployment will need to rise for inflation to come down, doesn't grapple with the severe damage a recession would inflict on workers who would face job losses, pay cuts, and other consequences in the case of a Fed-induced downturn.

"This editorial doesn't mention workers, families, and communities—the lifeblood of our economy and the people who will bear the brutal costs of a recession."

"Imagine my absolute shock that this editorial doesn't mention workers, families, and communities—the lifeblood of our economy and the people who will bear the brutal costs of a recession—at all," Claire Guzdar, managing director of campaigns and partnerships at the Groundwork Collaborative, wrote in a sarcasm-tinged Twitter post.

The editorial from Bloomberg, a publication founded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, argues that while the Fed's stated goal of lowering inflation without hurling the economy into recession is "a worthy goal," reining in runaway price increases "almost always involves a temporary contraction of output together with higher unemployment."

"The central bank can't afford to equivocate about the need to slow the economy," the editorial continues. "Wage growth will need to slow substantially for inflation to gradually settle back at the Fed's 2% target. That, in turn, is likely to require short-term interest rates that peak at well over 4% and, unfortunately, a somewhat higher rate of unemployment. The Fed surely understands all this. But it needs to show it understands—and won't balk at the prospect."

In his recent public remarks, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has hardly been coy about his willingness to push the economy into recession and cause "pain" for households and businesses in his effort to tame inflation.

"Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth. Moreover, there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions," Powell said during his closely watched speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last month. "These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation."

By endorsing a recession as an acceptable outcome in the fight against inflation, Bloomberg's editorial board joins a group of media outlets, analysts, and pundits that economist Dean Baker has dubbed "the recession lobby."

"There is a large recession lobby in Washington these days that seems to view a recession as a positive good for the economy and society," Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in a blog post earlier this month. "The basic story is that we have seen a big jump in inflation associated with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. They argue that a recession will be needed to bring inflation back down to acceptable levels."

"I, and others, have pointed out the enormous human costs associated with a recession," Baker added. "Unemployment is traumatic for everyone, but we know that the people who are most likely to lose their jobs in a recession are those who are most disadvantaged in the labor market, such as Blacks, Hispanics, people with less education, and people with a criminal record."

The Bloomberg editorial was published hours before the Fed's announcement on its latest interest rate hike, which is expected to be 75 basis points following a hotter-than-expected August inflation reading.

Economists have warned for months that the Fed's rate-hiking frenzy, which other powerful central banks around the world have replicated, risks a destructive global recession. The World Bank cautioned last week that a worldwide recession is becoming increasingly likely as interest rate increases take their toll on demand.

Writing for Project Syndicate last week, Baker and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called on the Fed to pause its rake hikes, arguing that "it would be irresponsible for the Fed to create much higher unemployment deliberately."

"With inflation and inflationary expectations already dampening," they wrote, "the Fed should be assigning more weight to the downside risk of additional tightening: namely, that it would push an already battered U.S. economy into recession."

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

‘This Is Nuts’: Critics React as Fed Chair Justifies Coming ‘Pain’ for Working Families

Jake Johnson — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 17:54:38 +0000

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a closely watched speech Friday that the U.S. central bank is ready to inflict "pain" on households as it continues to fight inflation, remarks that drew widespread backlash from experts who warned the Fed appears poised to spark a devastating recession and mass layoffs.

"The Fed apparently won't stop raising rates until millions more are unemployed."

Addressing a symposium of financial elites gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Powell said that "there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions"—euphemistic phrasing for higher unemployment—as the Fed aggressively jacks up interest rates, slowing demand across the economy by making borrowing more expensive.

"While higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses," Powell continued.

But the Fed chief argued that such pain would be worth it because "a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain."

Economist Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, responded bluntly to Powell's comments: "This is nuts."

"True, inflation is near a four-decade high," Reich wrote in a blog post. "But the Fed's aggressive effort to tame it through steep interest rate hikes—the fastest series of rate hikes since the early 1980s—is raising the risk of recession. If it raises rates again in September by another three-quarters of a point, which seems likely given Powell's remarks today, the risk becomes larger."

"The pain is already being felt across the land," Reich added. "Most Americans aren't getting inflation-adjusted wage increases, which means they're becoming poorer."

"Aggressive rate hikes can't address the root causes of inflation."

Powell's speech was seen by many observers as his most fiscally hawkish message yet as the central bank attempts to rein in inflation with a blunt tool that is unlikely mitigate the causes of price surges in the U.S. and globally, something the Fed chair has openly admitted to lawmakers.

"The Fed's problem remains that constraining demand can't do anything about the primary drivers of inflation—supply chain snarls, the war in Ukraine, and corporate profiteering," tweeted Claire Guzdar of the Groundwork Collaborative. "Our problem remains that the Fed apparently won't stop raising rates until millions more are unemployed."

Rakeen Mabud, Groundwork's chief economist, echoed that message, noting that "aggressive rate hikes can't address the root causes of inflation."

"Mass unemployment is not the path forward to a healthy and inclusive economy," Mabud added. "Let's be clear: aggressive rate hikes aim to bring down prices by increasing unemployment. Fed Chair Powell is ready to throw workers under the bus to save the 'economy.' But we are the economy."

The Fed has thus far shown no indication that it's prepared to change course despite evidence of slowing economic growth, decelerating wage increases, and cooling inflation.

As CNBC reported Friday ahead of Powell's address, the Fed's preferred inflation measure showed that price pressures eased in July, building on better-than-expected Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released earlier this month.

But in his speech Friday, Powell said he and other central bank officials are drawing on lessons learned from high inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, when then-Fed Chair Paul Volcker infamously imposed high interest rates that hurled the economy into recession and sent unemployment soaring.

"The successful Volcker disinflation in the early 1980s followed multiple failed attempts to lower inflation over the previous 15 years," Powell said. "A lengthy period of very restrictive monetary policy was ultimately needed to stem the high inflation and start the process of getting inflation down to the low and stable levels that were the norm until the spring of last year. Our aim is to avoid that outcome by acting with resolve now."

William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, warned in a social media post Friday that Powell's speech is "bad news."

"Two straight quarters of falling GDP, falling real disposable income, falling real wages, falling government expenditures and the Federal Reserve, in the face of these headwinds, continued global supply shocks, and weakened world growth, is seeing ghosts," Spriggs wrote.

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

Pain at the pump for Myanmar motorists as fuel shortage sends prices soaring

By RFA Burmese — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 20:00:21 +0000

A fuel shortage has forced gas stations to close in major cities in Myanmar and sent prices soaring to their second highest level since the coup, prompting criticism that the junta’s restrictions on imports and manipulation of the exchange rate are to blame.

On Friday, the Fuel Import, Storage and Distribution Supervision Committee under the junta’s Ministry of Energy announced that fuel shortages had driven prices up by 600 kyats (U.S. $0.30), or nearly 40% in the five days since Aug. 7.

A liter (.25 gallons) of diesel and 92 octane that cost an average of 1,970 kyats (U.S. $0.94) and 1,615 kyats (U.S. $0.77) on Sunday cost 2,550 kyats (U.S. $1.21) and 2,245 kyats (U.S. $1.07), respectively, on Friday.

The shortage driving up prices has led gas stations in major cities in most states and regions, including Myanmar’s largest cities Yangon and Mandalay, to close as they run out of fuel supplies, while others have been forced to limit their sales.

Sources told RFA Burmese that procuring fuel had become a nightmare.

“This morning, when I went looking for fuel, I found some shops selling only diesel oil, some shops selling 95 [octane] and some shops closed,” said a resident of northern Shan state’s city of Muse, near Myanmar’s border with China.

“Some shops outside the city limits sell 92 octane for 2,850 kyats (U.S. $1.36) a liter, and they were selling 2,000 kyats (U.S. $0.95) worth to each motorcycle, and 20,000 kyats (U.S. $9.53) worth to each car. There were also roadside vendors selling small bottles of gas at various prices.”

The resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that motorists in Muse had to pay anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 kyats (U.S. $3.33 to $4.76) for a 1.5 liter bottle of fuel “depending on the vendor,” while smaller bottles were selling for anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 kyats (U.S. $1.43 to $2.38).

He called the fuel situation “the worst I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Other sources told RFA that crucial services provided by charity organizations to make up for the junta’s shortfall in administration were being curtailed as a result of the shortage.

A spokesman for a Yangon-based charity group that provides assistance to those in need of medical care told RFA that he had been forced to turn away requests for lack of fuel.

“In our work, it’s hard to refuse when you get a call from a patient,” he said. “I can’t help wondering if a person had called because they were desperate and really needed us.”

The spokesman said that even when the price of fuel is affordable, organizations like his don’t have enough money to buy more than what can fit in their gas tanks.

“When the prices rise, we have much bigger problems to deal with,” he said.

A driver fuels his vehicle in Yangon, Myanmar, Aug. 12, 2022. Credit: RFA

Junta mismanagement

Despite domestic fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices, junta chief Snr. Gen Min Aung Hlaing on Aug. 8 announced to a governmental work coordination meeting that the regime is seeking to reduce expenditures by cutting down on its U.S. $1.3 billion annual imports of oil and petroleum products.

A fuel distributor, who declined to be named for security reasons, said the fuel shortage and rise in prices is the result of the junta's restrictions on foreign imports.

“The dollar has become so scarce that procuring gasoline has become difficult. When a certain amount becomes available, we are forced to buy it as a group and later divide it among ourselves,” he said.

“In the past, we made the purchases ourselves, individually, not as a group. … We can't do that anymore. Instead, we have to get our supply through the [junta]. It's going to get worse if things continue this way.”

Economists told RFA that the fuel shortage is also the result of controls and fixed U.S. dollar exchange rates set by the junta.

One U.S. dollar cost 1,850 kyats in April, but the junta changed the rate to 2,100 kyats on Aug. 5.

“Since the official rate has risen, the price of imports will surely go up. And as fuel oil is one of the imports, other prices of imports will also go up,” said one economist, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“I believe that's why they changed the exchange rate, so that fuel importers would be able to get supplies. Otherwise it’d be too difficult because the price is too different.”

Economists also noted that the rising cost of fuel is increasing prices across the board for other basic goods as transportation becomes more expensive.

Attempts by RFA to contact the Ministry of Energy’s Fuel Import, Storage and Distribution Supervisory Committee for comment went unanswered Friday.

According to gas station records, on Jan. 31, 2021, the day before the military seized power in a coup, a liter of diesel cost 720 kyats (U.S. $0.34), a liter of 92 octane cost 695 kyats (U.S. $0.33), and a liter of 95 octane cost 815 kyats (U.S. $0.39).

Shortages have caused fuel prices to rise steadily since the coup.

By May 31, 2022, diesel cost 2,330 kyats (U.S. $1.11) per liter, 92 octane cost 2,225 kyats (U.S. $1.06) per liter, and 95 octane cost 2,340 kyats (U.S. $1.11). Many gas stations ran out of fuel.

In early July, fuel prices began to drop but never went below 1,650 kyats (U.S. $0.79) per liter.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

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

After Receiving Millions in Drug Company Payments, Pain Doctor Settles Federal Kickback Allegations

by Charles Ornstein — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:20:00 +0000

by Charles Ornstein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A dozen years ago, a Santa Monica, California, pain doctor named Gerald M. Sacks emerged as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s top paid speakers — anointed to extol the virtues of a variety of drugs, even though several experts in pain medicine said they’d never heard of him.

His drug company haul had occurred largely under the radar until 2010, when ProPublica started digging into what the firms were paying physicians to deliver talks and consult on their pills. That’s when we consolidated the payments from seven companies, most of which had been forced by government settlements to make them public, in a database we called Dollars for Docs.

Sacks turned out to be a big winner, and we wrote about how little in his resume explained why. He was even a focus of an op-ed we wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how patients are often unaware of the relationships their doctors have with drug companies.

Nevertheless, companies continued to pay Sacks large sums. From 2015 to 2021, he received more than $2 million from companies to speak and consult on their behalf, including spending on travel and meals, federal data shows.

But last month — 12 years since we first wrote about him — Sacks’ puzzling role as one of the drugmakers’ chosen pain doctors took a different turn: Federal prosecutors allege he’d been paid to prescribe.

Sacks agreed to pay more than $270,000 to resolve allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that he’d accepted kickbacks from drug companies Purdue Pharma and DepoMed to prescribe their products. Purdue is the maker of OxyContin and pleaded guilty in 2020 to, among other things, conspiring to provide kickbacks to doctors. The Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits doctors from prescribing drugs in exchange for speaking or consulting payments from drug manufacturers.

From 2015 to 2018, Purdue paid Sacks more than $70,000 for speaking and consulting. DepoMed, which changed its name to Assertio Therapeutics in 2018, paid him more than $285,000 for speaking and consulting from 2015 to 2018, according to the federal government’s Open Payments database. Neither Assertio nor its predecessor, DepoMed, has been accused by the government of wrongdoing.

Sacks writes a few thousand prescriptions a year, including refills, to patients in the federal Medicare program. Among the tally in years past were hundreds of prescriptions for the drugs for which the government accused him of taking kickbacks.

Sacks denied wrongdoing in the settlement and did not return phone calls seeking comment. Neither Purdue Pharma nor Assertio returned emails seeking comment.

“Physicians are prohibited from accepting kickbacks designed to influence their decision making,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael D. Granston said in a news release. “Adherence to this prohibition is especially crucial with regard to dangerous drugs like opioids.”

The allegations against Sacks relate to his prescribing of the drugs Butrans, Hysingla and OxyContin, made by Purdue, to patients on Medicare between December 2010 and October 2021. They also cite his prescribing of the drugs Gralise, Lazanda and Nucynta, made by DepoMed, to Medicare beneficiaries in 2016.

Experts say the evidence is now overwhelming that there is a strong association between drug company payments and doctor prescribing. This link is worrisome, they say, because doctors should prescribe medications solely based on what’s best for the patient, not because they receive money from the company that makes a drug. Some prescription drugs may be more expensive or have greater side effects than cheaper or generic alternatives.

Today, the federal government collects information on payments from all drug and device makers in its Open Payments database. Researchers say such payments show that patients and regulators need to be on guard.

In a research article last month in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the authors note it’s not just one study that found a troubling link between drug company cash and what doctors prescribe. “Every published, peer-reviewed study that has evaluated the association between payments and prescribing using a causal inference framework has found evidence that receipt of industry payments increases physicians’ prescribing,” they wrote. They call on a variety of parties, including doctors, the drug industry and regulators, to take action to reduce these conflicts.

Dr. Aaron Mitchell, one of the authors and an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said the ever-growing list of research findings upends the presumption that payments to physicians, particularly small ones like meals, don’t influence doctors’ prescribing.

“The legal interpretation of a kickback has long been that industry payments and other transfers of value to physicians are OK as long as they don’t influence prescribing,” he said. “We now have overwhelming data that such payments do influence prescribing. In light of that we need to seriously reexamine the status quo.”

Mitchell suggested that regulators, like the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, review their guidance related to industry payments and “be clear to everyone that these are going to be under increased scrutiny and increased risk of prosecution than they have in the past.”

The OIG’s Office of Counsel said in a statement that it “has long expressed concerns over the practice of pharmaceutical manufacturers providing anything of value to physicians in a position to make or influence referrals to manufacturers’ products.” The office issued a special fraud alert in 2020 that discussed the risks of speaker program payments to physicians and other practitioners by drug and medical device companies.

“OIG has pursued, and will continue to pursue, abusive financial relationships between pharmaceutical manufacturers and physicians,” the statement said.

In 2021, the most recent year for which there is publicly available data on payments to doctors, drug companies paid Sacks more than $84,000.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Charles Ornstein.

Top US homeschooling advocates say parents have ‘right’ to inflict pain

Diana Cariboni — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:44:16 +0000

America’s homeschooling movement also has links to groups that oppose women’s and LGBTQ+ rights

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Diana Cariboni.

To Ease Pain at the Pump, Biden Urged to Declare Emergency Halt of US Oil Exports

Jake Johnson — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 17:24:34 +0000

With gas prices surging to unprecedented levels across the United States, President Joe Biden on Thursday faced fresh calls to use his authority to temporarily halt crude oil exports that—in addition to damaging the climate—have contributed significantly to rising costs at the pump.

In 2015, the Republican-controlled Congress crammed into an omnibus spending bill a provision that ended the four-decade ban on U.S. crude oil exports, a decision backed by the oil and gas industry. Democratic President Barack Obama signed the measure into law despite pushback from climate advocates.

"It's time for the president to act, declare an emergency on behalf of working families, and limit exports of petroleum."

On Thursday, more than six years after the export ban was lifted, the Wall Street Journal reported that a "rapid rise" in the nation's fuel exports this year "has helped push gasoline prices to a record $5 a gallon and is pressuring U.S. prices of natural gas, which hit the highest levels in over a decade earlier this month."

"In recent months, companies and commodities traders have shipped more U.S. gasoline and diesel to Latin America and other foreign markets, reaping higher prices than the fuel could fetch domestically," the Journal noted. "The jumps in fuel shipments abroad are further draining U.S. inventories that were already languishing at low levels after output cuts during the worst of the pandemic."

That news came as no surprise to Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's energy program. In 2015 congressional testimony, Slocum warned that lifting the crude oil export ban would "erode surplus domestic stockpiles and allow domestic oil producers to sell oil overseas for higher prices than what they are able to charge domestically," resulting in "higher gasoline prices for U.S. motorists and small businesses."

In a statement on Thursday, Slocum said "unfortunately this is happening today"—but stressed that Biden has the tools necessary to mitigate the pain.

Specifically, the 2015 law that lifted the oil export ban contains a provision giving the president the power to "impose export licensing requirements or other restrictions on the export of crude oil from the United States for a period of not more than one year, if the president declares a national emergency and formally notices the declaration of a national emergency in the Federal Register."

"It's time for the president to act, declare an emergency on behalf of working families, and limit exports of petroleum," said Slocum. "Record oil and natural gas exports have realigned the U.S. fossil fuel industry to prioritize maximizing profit for international markets, turning them away from serving the American consumer or providing energy independence. They cannot be relied upon to deliver affordable energy, as their calls to expand production will only fuel exports and drive domestic prices higher."

Reuters reported in December that the Biden administration was not considering halting U.S. oil exports in an attempt to bring down the price of gas, which at the time was around $3.34 per gallon nationally. In a December letter to the president, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers—including Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Texas), who later resigned to join a lobbying firm that has worked on behalf of the oil and gas industry—implored Biden not to restrict oil exports, claiming it would make the crisis worse.

Since then, the national average price per gallon of gas has surged past $5, pushing overall inflation higher and ramping up pressure on the Biden administration to act.

Asked last month about possible limits on oil exports, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that Biden "is not taking any tools off the table." Granholm had previously signaled to the National Petroleum Council, a major fossil fuel industry group, that the administration had ruled out an export ban.

Thus far, Biden has released millions of barrels of crude from the nation's strategic reserves and pleaded directly with major U.S. oil companies to boost domestic production—actions that fall well short of what Democratic lawmakers and outside progressives have demanded.

"We called for banning oil exports seven months ago!" Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted last week, referring to a letter he sent along with nine other Democrats back in November. "This will lower prices and make the U.S. less dependent on the global price. The [U.S. government] isn't powerless to bring gas prices down."

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

Demand Grows for Windfall Profits Tax as Goldman Sachs Predicts More Gas Pump Pain

Kenny Stancil — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:22:18 +0000

Progressives are arguing that Wall Street's new prediction of worsening pain at the pump for U.S. consumers this summer underscores the need for Congress to pass Democratic lawmakers' overwhelmingly popular bill to impose a windfall profits tax on Big Oil.

"The public knows oil and gas billionaires are responsible for the pain at the pump."

According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, "oil prices will surge to $140 a barrel this summer, with a drop in Russian production and a gradual recovery in Chinese demand adding to the pressure on already low supplies," Insider reported Tuesday.

"But they said consumers will feel as though oil has hit $160 a barrel," the news outlet continued, "because a lack of capacity at refineries means gasoline and fuel prices are rising more than would normally be expected, adding to costs across the economy."

Oil prices have already increased by roughly 50% this year as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and mismatches in supply and demand. As of Tuesday, Brent crude, the international benchmark, and WTI crude, the U.S. benchmark, traded at approximately $119 and $118 a barrel, respectively, while the nationwide average price for a gallon of gas hit $4.92.

Since consumer demand returned following a brief pandemic-driven decline in 2020, investors have pressured oil giants to suppress production to push prices higher. Last year, as average gas prices in the U.S. steadily climbed—reaching about $3.40 per gallon in December 2021, up from $2.10 a year before—25 of the world's biggest fossil fuel corporations enjoyed a record $205 billion in profits.

Oil and gas companies have hiked prices even further in 2022—especially after President Joe Biden's early March announcement of a U.S. ban on imports of Russian fossil fuels. Accusations of war profiteering have grown since petroleum executives in April bragged about their "best quarter ever."

A report published last month by the watchdog group Accountable.US found that "in the first three months of the year, 21 oil and gas companies made over $41 billion in profits, more than doubling profits from just a year ago. This is, on average, $1.2 billion more per company than the same time last year thanks to—as the companies themselves say—high oil prices and the crisis in Ukraine."

Chevron and ExxonMobil respectively raked in $6.3 billion and $5.5 billion in the first quarter of this year, meaning that they quadrupled and doubled their profits compared with the previous year even as the U.S. economy contracted.

"We need a windfall profits tax on Big Oil," Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted Tuesday.

Petroleum executives have faced increased scrutiny from Democratic members of Congress and New York's attorney general in recent weeks, but Jamie Henn, a spokesperson for the Stop the Oil Profiteering (STOP) campaign, has long argued that "the clearest and most popular way to get direct relief to the public and to check Big Oil's rampant war profiteering is with a windfall profit tax."

In March, congressional Democrats led by Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax in an effort to crack down on what progressive lawmakers have condemned as "shameless" price gouging by fossil fuel corporations.

According to survey data released just days after the legislation was unveiled, a whopping 80% of U.S. voters—including 73% of Republicans—support the measure, which would hit large fossil fuel companies with a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019. An estimated $45 billion in annual revenue would be redistributed to U.S. households in the form of quarterly rebates.

"There is vast, bipartisan support for this policy," Henn said in late April, "because the public knows oil and gas billionaires are responsible for the pain at the pump."

Despite being brought to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress about their role in jacking up gas prices, U.S. fossil fuel executives—projected to reap up to $126 billion in extra profits this year—have not been shy about how they are capitalizing on the war in Ukraine.

After rewarding themselves and other shareholders with billions of dollars worth of stock buybacks and dividend bumps last year, industry leaders are on track to do more of the same in 2022.

To put an end to such behavior, dozens of progressive advocacy groups have been urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to support the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said can help Democrats avert "big losses" in November's pivotal midterms.

The STOP campaign, for its part, tweeted Monday that a windfall tax on Big Oil's skyrocketing profits provides a "straightforward" solution to high gas prices.

Khanna highlighted recent reporting that the Biden White House is "engaging in conversations with" congressional lawmakers about the design of a potential windfall profits tax.

"This tax would help rein in Big Oil's profiteering and put money directly in the pockets of consumers," Khanna said Monday on social media.

Last month, Britain's Conservative government announced that the U.K. will impose a 25% windfall tax on oil and gas profits, which is expected to raise $19 billion to support low-income households struggling with a significant spike in the cost of living.

"If Britain's Conservatives can do it," Reich said Monday, "so can Biden."

However, Khanna and Whitehouse's proposal faces long odds in the Senate, where the anti-democratic filibuster rule requires 60 votes to advance debate on most legislation. Not only is the support of at least 10 Republicans unlikely to materialize, but questions remain about whether corporate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) would back the bill.

"The president is asking for Congress and others for potential ideas," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Tuesday. "But the reality is that there isn't very much more to be done... The president has already taken very bold moves."

Henn, meanwhile, has argued that Biden's moves to release millions of barrels of oil from the nation's strategic reserves and suspend seasonal regulations on ethanol blending won't halt "Big Oil's coordinated campaign to gouge Americans."

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

Desperation, Pain Drives Debate Over Making Photos of Mass Shooting Carnage Public

Brett Wilkins — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 14:55:09 +0000

While some say showing what high-caliber bullets do to children's bodies could spur change, others warn that it risks traumatizing viewers—and re-traumatizing victims and their loved ones.

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

Wives Of Azovstal Soldiers Tell Of ‘Horrors, Pain’ Of Mariupol Siege

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Tue, 31 May 2022 17:28:42 +0000

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

Saratoga Explosion: Stories of Pain and Hope

Alejandra Garcia — Tue, 10 May 2022 23:37:07 +0000

Rescue workers continue to comb through the rubble for signs of life (Photo: Bill Hackwell)

Havana — It is Mother’s Day in Cuba, but in Havana there is no music or merriment as usually happens on this date. The city has been in mourning since Friday, when a massive explosion shook the Saratoga Hotel, in Old Havana, collapsing part of its facade and spreading terror among neighbors in the surrounding communities.

The images of the catastrophe hurt: the smoke, the destruction, the fear. The whole city is in shock and follows the news closely with the hope of not recognizing any victim from the list of deceased people, which grows every day and has already reached 30 names.

More than 42 hours after the disaster, firefighters and rescuers continue searching for missing persons while removing tons of debris in the vicinity of the hotel, placed nearby Havana’s Capitol.

The search is a slow process. It is necessary to go little by little, stone by stone, to avoid the collapse of the structures. But there are still relatives and friends of nearby neighbors missing, and authorities will not rest until they are sure that there’s no one left in the Saratoga wreckage.

The grief is shared. The suffering of others is felt as our own. We all saw with a lump in our throats the image of a fireman who could not bear the pain and had to kneel down to cry amidst so much horror. It shows us that even the bravest, the ones who save lives, also break down, cry, and need to take a deep breath.

He got up afterwards, supported by his comrades, and went on with more strength, but he had to cry to release that deep weight he felt.

All Havana also follows closely the story of a young man, a medical student, son of the Saratoga storekeeper. Since May 6, he has been sitting in front of the hotel without moving anywhere, not even to get some sleep. He is also a hero and does not lose hope of finding his father alive.

His dad enters the hotel every day at the same time, very early in the morning. He works in the basement because that’s where his storeroom is. “I know he’s in there. That’s why I don’t move from here, because I hope to hug him one more time,” he told a reporter.

But there are stories that give hope amid the pain, like that about the feat of the Cuban doctors who saved from the death a two-year-old boy who got injured during the explosion. They managed to extract a splinter of wood that had almost completely penetrated his skull.

“The wood splinter was about a quarter of the way in maybe a little less, but only a few centimeters were visible outside the skull. The rest had penetrated the baby’s head. Now he is awake and with no signs of brain damage,” said Dr. Marlon Ortiz Machín, a neurosurgery specialist at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital.

Today, ten other children injured by the explosion, were discharged from the Juan Manuel Márquez pediatric hospital in the capital.

This Sunday, it was also reported that two puppies, Sultan and Chuza, were rescued alive from the rubble and are now receiving veterinary attention. Although they are not physically injured, they are very nervous and scared. An animal protection team has already reached the scene to take care of them.

We are alive! Repeat it over and over again was the exclamation of the 70 people evacuated from the buildings next to the Saratoga hotel, which are in danger of collapse due to the explosion. They were taken to another small hotel nearby and will remain there until their homes are repaired with the local government’s resources.

“We couldn’t take anything of value, more than a couple of items of clothing. Everything stayed there. But I am thankful that my daughter, my mother, and I were able to survive this tragic accident. We are alive thanks to the quick action of the authorities,” said Sila Suarez, a neighbor of 508 Zulueta Street, a few meters from the Saratoga.

Meanwhile, Manuel Beber, the head of the construction team in charge of repairing the Dona Concepcion elementary school that was severely damaged by the explosion, assured that by May 28 it will be ready to receive students once again.

The headquarters of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Havana was closed today but that did not stop an unsolicited steady stream of people who brought by donations of usable items for the people who have been displaced by the explosion.

Little by little, Havana will resume its daily tranquility, although the pain of the deaths will remain intact. But hopeful stories will also prevail, as well as the tranquility that Cubans are not alone, because their leaders are always in the front line. We won’t forget the courage of the rescuers and of ordinary citizens, who were the first heroes, the first ones to start saving lives from the rubble. This wound will heal.

• First published at Resumen Latinoamericano (English)

The post Saratoga Explosion: Stories of Pain and Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alejandra Garcia.

Russia Inflicts “Maximum Pain” as War Drags On, 11 Million Ukrainians Displaced

Democracy Now! — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 15:03:01 +0000

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

Russia Inflicts “Maximum Pain” as War Drags On, 11 Million Ukrainians Displaced

Democracy Now! — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 12:41:44 +0000

We speak with Lyiv-based professor Volodymyr Dubovyk about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, where Russian attacks have displaced more than 11 million people, including two-thirds of Ukraine’s children. Russian forces “want to inflict the maximum pain on Ukraine,” says Dubovyk. President Biden described Russia’s actions in Ukraine as “genocide” on Tuesday, prompting State Department spokesperson Ned Price to say on Wednesday that international lawyers would have to determine whether Russia’s actions in Ukraine constitute genocide. Dubovyk says proving genocide is best left to experts, not politicians, but he rebukes French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim that Russia and Ukraine are incapable of such crimes because they are “brotherly nations.”

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

Russian Sanctions, Corporate Profits, and the Globalized Economic Pain of the Ukraine War

Jan Toporowski — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 11:03:12 +0000

Russia’s catastrophic attempt to gain re-entry into the league of great powers, after its re-entry into capitalism reduced the country to a raw materials supplier to stronger economies, calls to mind Kalecki’s remark about the fascist promise to humiliated nations after the First World War, that ‘roads to glory lead to war.’ In the violence into which this latest ‘road to glory’ has descended, it is sometimes forgotten that Russia may possess the largest army in Europe (and possibly in the world, depending on how much weight is given to reserve soldiers). But economically it has not recovered from the loss of the peripheral republics of the old Soviet Union, and the ‘shock therapy’ of economic liberalization after the Russian government abandoned socialism. The World Bank estimates that Russia now is merely the 11th largest economy in the world, not only after the United States, China, and Japan, the European behemoths of Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but also the ‘emerging markets’ of India and South Korea.

Economic sanctions against Russia are adding to a major redistribution of income from workers and middle-class consumers to profits in international trade.

Russia’s claim to great power status is therefore based on its stock of nuclear weapons, its economic function as a petrol pump for Europe, and an army that is far from sweeping all before it in Ukraine. It is to prevent the use of these weapons (and save on military casualties among their own citizens) that the powers in Europe and North America have preferred to use economic sanctions, in the hope that further impoverishment degrades the national dignity that is being restored with such violence and might evoke mutiny in the Russian elite. The possibility of such a mutiny cannot be accurately assessed by anyone outside the Kremlin. And further impoverishment will be significant but will affect largely the consumption of the wealthier middle classes, who have the most to lose from payment restrictions on imported goods and the joys of foreign travel. Although there are reports of Chinese banks refusing letters of credit to Russian customers out of fears that they may be declined facilities by US banks or face fines of their subsidiaries in the US, Russia retains access to the international payments system of China. And the Indian government is helping to set up a system for the exchange of rouble-rupee payments, although Indian banks will also be wary of possible retaliation by the US. Russian foreign exchange controls require traders to surrender 80% of their foreign earnings for conversion into roubles, and the Russian government has demanded payment for Russian oil in roubles. This is helping to stabilize the rouble exchange rate, after it fell to nearly half of its pre-war value against the US dollar, while international prices of oil and natural gas are benefitting from additional supplies.

However, much of these restrictions on foreign exchange transactions are journalistic hyperbole: The demand for payment in roubles is actually a requirement to deposit dollars in Sberbank or Gazprombank to buy the roubles required to pay for oil. And the obligation placed on traders to surrender dollars means that the Russian foreign exchange market has in effect been brought onto the balance sheet of the Russian central bank, where the central bank decides the rate at which it buys those compulsorily exchanged dollars.

The talk in the commodity markets is of the emergence of a two-tier system in which a fairly high official price is paid for energy and raw materials, but half the price is charged for such products from Russian sources. Similarly, Russian consumers may expect to pay well above the market price outside Russia for their imported goods. In the food-deficient Middle East, food prices are already rising and will rise further, as war affects Ukrainian agriculture. This coincides is the breakdown of cheap off-shore manufacturing, as global supply chains are disrupted: At the beginning of March, Volkswagen temporarily stopped production of electric cars in its factory in Zwickau due to the failure of supplies from Ukraine.

These unprecedented shifts in international markets have moved our business and financial leaders, on whose wisdom and foresight our prosperity is supposed to depend, to declare a new (inflationary) era in world economic affairs. Towards the end of March, as the war entered its fifth week, Larry Fink the Chief Executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote to his shareholders at the end of March that ‘The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades… A large-scale reorientation of supply chains will inherently be inflationary.’ (Financial Times 26 March 2022). Fink had in mind the disruption to cross-border supplies due to the war and revulsion against doing business with Russia.

But globalization is more than this, and less. It is more than just ‘global supply chains’ assuring cheap raw materials and components to assembly plants on the fringes of industrial centers. Behind this is a system of worldwide payments, necessary for settling trade and debt obligations in different countries. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, is a network of 11,000 banks around the world through which most cross-border payments are routed. Although ostensibly a co-operative of member banks, it has agreed to remove select Russian banks from its messaging system, through which cross-border payments are made. However, Sberbank and Gazprombank have so far been spared expulsion from the payments system because German oil and natural gas importers pay for their imports through those banks. Pressure is now building up in Germany and Austria to eliminate such imports. But as long as imports continue, the banks through which they are paid have to be allowed to transfer such payments.

The US Federal Reserve also offers currency swap facilities to selected other central banks, in Europe, but also in Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and South Korea, allowing those central banks to draw dollars that are necessary as backing for many international transactions. The central banks outside the US, benefitting from these facilities, will of course be careful not to jeopardize their access to currency swap facilities by allowing commercial banks to make payments that bypass US sanctions. This is in addition to the freezing, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, of up to 40% of Russian reserves held in markets outside Russia.

It is possible to argue that this international payments system is really at the heart of what is called globalization because it is the system that allows money and capital to flow between countries. In the heady years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Francis Fukuyama celebrated the end of history, this international integration of finance underpinned the globalization announced by Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman. But the lived experience of globalization was always less than this. Russia and China did eventually join the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. But the development of free trade and international payments systems was largely regional, most notably in Europe with the establishment of the European Union and its Single European Market, and in North America with its North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (superseded in 2020 by the US Mexico Canada Agreement), with other regional agreements in the cone of South America, in West Africa, Southern Africa, and South-East Asia. Most of the world’s population, in India, China, and the poorer countries of the world, make no use of international payments and live in countries where cross-border trade and its associated payments are strictly controlled. In those countries, only a wealthy minority with financial assets in off-shore territories, such as Mauritius and tax havens in the Caribbean, can move their deposits freely around the world. And even in countries where such payments are unrestricted, that freedom is only within the territories of associated countries. ‘Globalization’ always promised more than it delivered.

This system of regional trade and payments areas was already fragmenting before the War in Ukraine. The most spectacular case has been the departure of Great Britain from the European Union, ‘going global’ to set up barriers to international trade and payments. But perhaps the biggest push towards that fragmentation has been the use of economic sanctions by the United States as an alternative to military persuasion, which is perhaps Donald Trump’s most significant innovation in statecraft. Sanctions require only an Executive Order signed by the President of the United States. But US banks also have a central position in the international financial system. US commercial banks provide dollar-based foreign exchange swaps (between commercial banks, backed also by central banks’ currency swaps with the Federal Reserve) as security for credit transactions in other currencies. This means that banks in other countries cannot bypass US sanctions without losing the foreign exchange swap facilities with US banks that foreign banks need to conduct their business. This banking and financial power will now ensure that most banks around the world fall into line with US sanctions.

Over time, the economic sanctions imposed in support of Ukraine will have important economic consequences. The cost of living in virtually all countries of the world will rise, on top of the price inflation that was already taking off even before the war started. This will be blamed on the war, and declared by all right-thinking people to be part of the sacrifice that is necessary to defend democracy and peace against autocracy and war. But, short of rationing, natural catastrophe (such as Covid), and war, there is very little that makes people change their patterns of day-to-day expenditure, even if they may now season their expenditure with complaints about the prices now being paid for their customary shopping. This will allow the government of Russia and its friends to declare that the economic impact of sanctions has been contained and they are not really working.

However, there is something else that is happening that is no less real than inflation, even if it is less obvious than the rise in inflation. When international markets and payments systems fragment, it is the arbitrageur who makes money, at the cost of producers and consumers. Consider the market for luxury imported goods in Russia, such as German cars or French wines. These will not cease to be available in Russia. But they are already becoming much more expensive, both because of the depreciation of the Russian rouble against the Euro, and because of the more roundabout methods now necessary to secure shipments of these goods and pay German and French exporters for them. In the oil market, traders will seek out Russian oil that they can buy at a much lower price, in devalued roubles perhaps because of sanctions, but refined products like petrol will be supplied at a price above the much higher price for non-Russian oil.

In short, economic sanctions against Russia are adding to a major redistribution of income from workers and middle-class consumers to profits in international trade. It reinforces the boost to profits in the armaments industries as governments around the world expand their military capabilities and supplies to the combatants in Ukraine. This shift in distribution comes at a time when, in the recovery from Covid, business corporations are raising their prices to recover revenue lost due to measures taken by governments to suppress Covid, and to repay the debts run up by those corporations during the pandemic. Profiteering from military and economic warfare needs to be exposed and challenged. Given the existing institutions of international capitalism, it is difficult to suppress such profiteering. But it can be taxed, as such profits were in Britain and the United States during the Second World War, to pay the costs of aid to Ukraine, refugee relief and the reconstruction of health services, and to protect the living standards of the less well off. Our captains of business and generals of finance should welcome the opportunity to contribute to the defense of liberal values. The Ukrainians are paying for their democracy with their blood and their lives; working people and their families around the world should not also have to pay for the profits that are made out of that struggle.

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

Pain at the Pumps Originates in the Paycheck

Joanne Samuel Goldblum — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 15:35:47 +0000

At the height of Covid, diaper banks across the US upped their diaper contributions to communities by 86%, and we have no intention of scaling back, because the need did not diminish alongside the daily positivity rate. There are new stressors on families, of course, like rising gas prices. But if paying another 50 cents a gallon for gas means that you can no longer afford diapers for your baby, the price of gas is not the problem. Removing federal and state taxes on gas might ease the pain incrementally, but it won’t end the ongoing crisis that is poverty.

Charitable organizations must provide people with the basic stuff of life because far too many US workers are not paid a living wage.

More than 225 community-based diaper banks work with the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) to get diapers to the one in three US children whose families lack the money to buy them. Many of those members, along with other nonprofits, also belong to our Alliance for Period Supplies, providing free menstrual products, which about one in four people who need them cannot afford. These organizations exist in every state. Some large cities have more than one diaper or period supplies bank, in addition of course to food pantries, fuel banks and other non-profits that help people span the gap between their paychecks and their needs.

I am proud of the work that this philanthropic community does to get our neighbors the things they need to thrive. But as the saying goes: Rather than just fish people out of the river, we need to go upstream and find out why they are falling (or being pushed) in. This is not about gas, so much as gaslighting. The likes of Kim Kardashian tell folks that they need to work harder. I get anonymous messages lecturing me about how “those people” should get a job. People in poverty do work, often harder than I’ll ever work, in multiple physically demanding jobs.

Yet charitable organizations must provide people with the basic stuff of life because far too many US workers are not paid a living wage. Changing that is the single most effective thing that we can do to advance justice and put our entire country on track to prosper.

The Diaper Bank of Connecticut did a study in 2016 in cooperation with NDBN and The Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis which found that in a majority of families receiving free diapers, there was a working adult. The labor participation rate—defined as adults working or looking for work—was slightly higher among households receiving diapers (70%) than the state average for all adults in Connecticut (67%). Unemployment was higher among these families than among the general population. But again, most worked. Working did not keep them out of poverty.

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2008. (During the study period in Connecticut, it was $9.60. Better than the federal minimum but still not enough to support a family in one of the highest cost states.) Since 2008, inflation has increased 34%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure was calculated in February and so does not include the recent surge in gas prices. Before the newest consumer stressor, workers had gotten their pay cut in constant dollars by one third since 2008.

Actually, workers had been losing ground since the late 20th century. Real wages of line workers have fallen as CEO pay has risen to dizzying heights. In 1969, CEOs made 61 times what their lowest paid workers did. In 2020, the ratio was 351 to 1. Though some employers have lately offered higher wages to recruit in a tight labor market, those gains have been more than offset by inflation.

Rather than address gas prices as an isolated problem, policymakers should act on wages. Fair pay would turn this crisis into an inconvenience. Better yet, it would give families the resilience to face things that can easily pull them into destitution now: an illness, a temporary layoff, an unexpected repair.

Corporate profits have been on an upward trajectory throughout the 21st century, which been marked by stock buybacks. Paying employees a living wage is more likely to stimulate the economy than harm it. I love my job. I would also love it to be unnecessary. In this rich nation, it can be – and it should be.

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

Big Oil Is Creating ‘Pain at the Pump’ to Boost Profits: Report

Kenny Stancil — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 18:05:33 +0000

As President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered the release of one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for six months in a bid to reduce surging gas prices, Public Citizen released a report that details how Big Oil is intentionally creating "pain at the pump" to boost profits.

"Numerous executives have emphasized that shareholder profits, rather than expanding domestic production, is their top goal."

While the fossil fuel industry has tried publicly to pin the blame for soaring gas prices on the Biden administration's ostensibly strict environmental regulations, oil executives have admitted behind closed doors that they are suppressing production to maximize shareholder returns.

"Oil and gas companies lost a ton of money between 2010 and 2020, mainly by borrowing way too much to fund an expansion of drilling using expensive oil and gas fracking technology," Alan Zibel, fossil fuels research director at Public Citizen and author of the report, said in a statement. "The result was unsustainable overproduction and massive losses when oil prices plunged, as they did two years ago at the start of the pandemic. Now the industry is keeping production down and making consumers pay."

After a brief coronavirus-driven decline in 2020, demand returned, but shareholders pressured oil producers to restrict supply to push prices higher. Last year, as average gas prices in the U.S. steadily increased—hitting around $3.40 per gallon in December 2021, up from $2.10 a year before—25 of the world's biggest fossil fuel corporations raked in a record $205 billion in profits.

Oil and gas companies have hiked prices even further during the first three months of 2022—especially in the three weeks since Biden announced a U.S. ban on imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, leading to growing accusations of war profiteering. The average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is now hovering around $4.23.

With other countries also taking steps to restrict imports of Russian oil and gas, U.S. fossil fuel executives have expressed excitement at the prospect of using ongoing geopolitical crises as an excuse to force consumers to accept higher costs for the foreseeable future, and they are projected to reap up to $126 billion in extra profits this year. After rewarding themselves and other investors with billions of dollars worth of stock buybacks and dividend bumps last year, industry bosses have made clear they intend to do more of the same in 2022.

Big Oil Should Pay Windfall Tax to Offset Pain at the Pump

Jamie Henn — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:31:15 +0000

There’s a word for this sort of action to restrict an essential supply like energy during a crisis: profiteering. And when it's done in a coordinated way? That's called racketeering.

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

Author Caren Beilin on finding inspiration in your pain and illness

Maddie Crum — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Your book Revenge of the Scapegoat is about many things, including the experience of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis. This isn’t your first book describing pain and illness. What initially drew you to those subjects?

My own pain and illness did, which is an amazing thing about pain, that you don’t think about it until you have to. And then when you have to, you really have to. It stops the other conversations and makes itself very known. Pain came into my life like a shock. Even though I’d grown up with a sick parent, even if you know other people. Once you actually experience pain, it’s like a comedy. You can’t even believe people are going around in pain. Like, what? And that came into my life in 2015.

It’s amazing that other people can’t feel your pain. You’re having a conversation or working, or in front of your students or whatever you’re doing, and somebody’s stabbing you in the foot or something, and it’s a very odd sensation to just be the personal kind of caretaker, or tender, to something that nobody else can see. Especially with these more invisible illnesses. And it’s a comedy. It’s hilarious that there’s this whole other story going on that you’re just sort of managing or is consuming you while there are so many—I would have to say very comedic multiplicities happening that feel outstanding.

It seems like a really difficult thing to translate into language. Are there other writers on illness or pain or disability who you admire?

So many. Yeah. I really love Denton Welch’s A Voice Through a Cloud. He was meant to be a painter, but then got into this horrific bicycling accident and ended up writing these novel-memoirs about his pain and his extreme sensitivity. And then he struggles so much with that moment in illness where you’re supposed to be so communal. You’re supposed to lean on others. You’re supposed to be so docile and taken in by what your needs are. And he didn’t want to be that way. He was not that much of a people person. And what does it mean to not like people that much, but then to need them so much? I love writers who are kind of grumpy and he was just such a good grump about what was going on.

And I really love how Samantha Irby talks about chronic illness. She writes these comedic essays about growing up with a mom with multiple sclerosis, which is something I grew up with. I teach a narrative medicine class, and I start with some of her essays and it’s the perfect place to start. She just really welcomes people to be human.

You’ve mentioned comedy a few times, and you approach your protagonist’s illness with humor. Where do you think that impulse comes from for you?

I think that it is true that I have humor, and oftentimes, just in my life, like to tell funny stories. I have a self-deprecating style of being. But honestly the experience of—not writing this book, but publishing this book, has been a revelation to me: that I am a funny writer. I did not know that, which is very funny, but even while I was talking to Danielle and Marty, the publishers of Dorothy, and I increasingly saw that the marketing around it was going to be about it being a comedy, I was sort of confused. I was like, “Oh, okay. That’s an interesting angle. This is all really serious though.”

I think that if I am being humorous, it’s coming from me being committed to being deadly serious and being willing to say what’s serious to me. I feel very serious about everything. But also, I don’t feel protective of that. I think it’s good to laugh, but I wasn’t making jokes.

And I think that Revenge has a few different origin stories. I think that’s true of any writing project. You could think of different moments when it began. But one of them is the silliest moment ever, where I got way too stoned on some hot chocolate or some chocolate or whatever. And I was so out-of-my-mind stoned for like eight hours, and my partner was walking me through being alive. And then I finally was coming down enough to sort of just be okay.

I don’t even think I was diagnosed at this time with rheumatoid arthritis. I was just in bewildering pain going to work every day. I was working at a bookstore. I could hardly carry the books. I was just really bewildered by pain and fear. It was such a hard time. I finally found somebody who would sell me some edibles. But I was doing everything at this moment to try to…I don’t know, I was in a lot of screaming pain.

And I’m sitting there just feeling so silly, finally coming down a little bit from being so stoned, and I’m just in the bed, and I all of a sudden I just think that my feet are Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, who are two of my favorite characters in literature. And I just start putting on the silliest little puppet show with them talking to each other, and it was just silly. And my feet were—I could hardly walk. And I was devastated and really scared. And it was just such a good moment to be silly with my feet, because I was really scared of my feet from what was happening to them. And so that’s very funny, but it’s arrived at through kind of desperation.

I really enjoyed the dissonance in the book between the craft advice that the narrator gave her students and her students’ lived experiences.

The book has all kinds of nonfiction in it. And I was working as an adjunct at an arts college in Philadelphia for a while. And yeah, I mean teaching is a very, very humorous and just lastingly humbling experience, and whatever you think you’re doing in the classroom, or directing people toward, there’s just something amazing happening that you don’t understand that’s also happening, or eight million things that are also happening. And it’s such a comedy.

Teaching is buffoonery. You just put forward these ideas you have, or that your professors in graduate school had that you want to have now. And students are so wonderfully undercutting, and they are wonderfully undercutting because they’re amazing in their thinking and they have all these thoughts that are not yours, but also the university experience is undercutting because people are in massive debt and it’s not quite working and there are just other things in the classroom that will always undercut your ideas about literature. You just have to be so humble and think of it as maybe a comedy, but hopefully a redeeming comedy. I think it’s redeeming to all be there together doing whatever we’re doing.

Working with students who are of this younger generation, Generation Z, they’re quick in places that I’m not quick. They’re aware of things in a quicker way than I am. They have a different temporality to them entirely. Their impatience is really interesting. Where are they impatient? Where are they even willing?

And I find myself writing toward my students. I don’t think my students are the perfect audience for my work. But I need their impatience. Their impatience helps me understand what I need to say and what I shouldn’t say, and how quick I need to be, or when I need to put things deeply on the ground so that everybody can be okay with it or know what I’m saying. Their quickness… I don’t know if it’s quickness. Impatience. Something. Something about writing into that group or somehow thinking of them, holding them in mind, holding their attention and what they can and are willing to attend to in mind, somehow has helped my writing quite a lot.

You also write about adjuncting specifically. And you mentioned that you have worked as an adjunct. How has that precarious work affected your writing?

Adjuncting is…god, what is adjuncting? It’s very grossly underpaid labor. You’re doing something so special. And so giving and you’re holding up the university. In almost every instance that’s true. You’re holding up the university. You’re holding that college up with your energy.

I was adjuncting in Philly, and it was really unstable labor. I never knew if I was going to be offered the classes. I was fortunately on Obamacare, and this was the first leg of Obamacare where it wasn’t bad yet. So it was pretty good, the Obamacare. I don’t know how I would’ve been an adjunct without Obamacare. It would’ve been a complete impossibility.

I was having a really good time in a lot of ways, but I think I was privileged enough to be adjuncting, too. I didn’t have college loans. I wasn’t in debt. Which is horrible to say. I don’t think adjuncts are privileged, but it’s just an impossible situation.

That reminds me of a quote from your book from the character Ray: “It’s a privilege to be a good person or even to seem like one.”

Yeah. And Ray’s language in the book is Ray’s language transcribed, and that’s something that Ray deeply believes.

I wanted to ask: what is your relationship to the categories of memoir versus autofiction versus novels from life? Are you interested in those categories? Or not so much?

I have some interest in that. I think I don’t really relate to memoir-writing because I think of memoir as being a very sincere or earnest space of wanting to convey something that has happened, or tell out a truth of some kind. Whereas I think more meta spaces, like an autofiction space, are more upfront in saying, “I’m using maybe my name and maybe nonfiction things or things that come from life. I’m putting my name in the mix, or something about my biography is in the mix here, but I’m using it to do something I want to do with literature. I’m playing with my biography.”

There’s something sort of insincere about autofiction that I really require. And I mean, there’s all kinds of sincere heartbreak and real tenderness coming from me in the book. But to be able to use your biography to play, that is a very redeeming, helpful, healing thing to do. So I like that mode a lot more than, “Let me use my biography to tell or to profess or to confess.”

How do you manage to maintain space in your life for writing?

I think the point of these interviews is in part to acknowledge people’s labor and the disarray of work options and ways of survival available to you as a creative of person. That just becomes really a bombarding thing in one’s life. And you feel fear and panic and shame a lot of the times. And then, add on top of that just the internet and social media and things that take our attention or make us feel kind of worried and ashamed and panicked.

As a concrete example, when I was starting to write Revenge of the Scapegoat and I felt quite a little amount of space in my life, I just felt bombarded by all of these other kinds of emotions that were not creative emotions or things that were really going to help me. And I couldn’t write, and I hadn’t been writing for a long time, for me. I just felt pretty stalled and blocked. And one of the first things that I started doing that allowed me to write again was that I would meditate in a chair in my room, and I would meditate for 20 minutes, and I would just do this mindfulness meditation with my eyes open, just calmly staring at the corner of my bed.

What is something you wish someone told you when you began to make art?

That’s a really cool question, because I think we all have different traumas of what people did tell us when we began making art. So it’s really fun to think of a corrective. Okay, I have an answer that I feel very certain of, but it’s not that cool of an answer. It’s not really good, but it is what I wish. It’s so genuinely what I wish.

One of my regrets in my writing life is that I was not exposed to the writers who I really, really use and need and liberate me as a writer very early. I didn’t have a particular writing teacher who just saw me and knew that I needed to read these particular books, and it would’ve been so awesome if somebody had recommended these writers to meet earlier, because I think I would’ve loved to be a younger reader of these writers. It would’ve been such a perfect hit, and it would’ve really liberated me from some of the stuff that I was exposed to at that time, which was a little more traditional.

And I’m specifically thinking, one of my regrets in life is that I wasn’t a young reader of Dennis Cooper. And I wish I read him in high school. I wish I was around with some of his work. I wish somebody had handed me that, and I feel the same way about Violette Leduc. She’s somebody I discovered only recently, and I should have been reading her when I was young. It would’ve been really instructive. Just her freedom of personality and the way she expresses that in her sentences. I mean, I’m happy to know her now. You can’t change fate or timing, or maybe it was the right time to meet new books, but I just think that I would’ve been more radically open at a younger age, given more permission.

Caren Beilin Recommends:

Medical narratives and creative work that intervenes in some sense on the medical industrial complex:

Hilary Plum’s recent essay here.

Samantha Irby, specifically essays from her collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

Carolyn Lazard’s essay “The World is Unknown”

A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch

We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman

Joan is Okay by Weike Wang

Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maddie Crum.

My Midnight Breakthrough and the Pain of Being Human

Robert C. Koehler — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 16:54:01 +0000

Wars rage, countless humans suffer, the rich get richer, life goes on. I still have my morning coffee. But not yesterday.

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

Ordinary Russians are Already Feeling the Pain of Sanctions

Peter Rutland — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 08:54:20 +0000

The daily life of ordinary Russians – not just the country’s political elite or super rich oligarchs – is already being impacted by economic measures imposed by the international community in response to the invasion of Ukraine. As a scholar of Russia’s political economy, I was surprised by the speed and severity of the Western More

The post Ordinary Russians are Already Feeling the Pain of Sanctions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

‘Pain at the pump’: The highly flammable politics of American gas prices

Eve Andrews — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 11:15:00 +0000

“Pain at the pump. Pain at the pump! PAIN AT THE PUMP!!!!!” This refrain, manically employed by American politicians and pundits to bemoan rising gas prices, is so common that a foreign visitor might assume that we are only allowed to fill up our cars at the gas station after first submitting to a kick in the shins.

But of course, in our hallowed American rhetoric, the most discussed pain is of the economic variety. That was apparent at this week’s State of the Union address, when President Joe Biden made sure to assuage Americans’ biggest fears about the war in Ukraine – namely, that the conflict would adversely affect their gas prices.

“Tonight, I can announce that the United States has worked with 30 other countries to release 60 million barrels of oil from reserves around the world,” Biden said. “I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming to all Americans. But I want you to know that we are going to be OK. We are going to be OK.”

President Joe Biden speaks during his 2022 State of the Union address to a Joint Session of Congress. Saul Loeb – Pool / Getty Images

The price of a gallon of gas has increased, in increments of a few cents at a time, by about a dollar over the past year. If you were to examine the forces behind each of those increases, you would indeed find a great deal of pain of the physical and psychological variety: The widespread death and illness caused by COVID-19 that were treated as an inconvenience to production; the mounting, devastating evidence of climate change that has caused more and more investors to question the feasibility of gas companies’ business models; and now, the war in Ukraine.

And sure enough, President Biden’s State of the Union Address brought the conflict in Ukraine back to the ever-present theme of “protect[ing] American businesses and consumers.” Those who subscribe to a particular brand of optimism may have hoped to hear the president use this opportunity to propose — instead of rolling more barrels of oil out of the reserves — renewed commitment to non-fossil fuel sources of energy. But even for a so-called “climate president,” Biden’s choice to focus on how we maintain the status quo is not surprising, particularly with midterm elections looming.

If the past two years of anti-mask and anti-vax hollering have proven anything, it’s that Americans consider change very, very painful — even when the refusal to change causes real and enormous pain to others. And history has certainly demonstrated that voters will not kindly suffer a fool who threatens their God-given right to drive.

If you are still struggling to understand what war in Ukraine has to do with gas prices at home, here is an extremely simple explainer: Russia is blessed with massive oil and gas reserves, which constitute a complicated bargaining chip for President Vladimir Putin. On one hand, Russian fossil fuels provide a crucial proportion of energy for a number of European nations such as Germany, which pulls more than half of its gas needs from across the Urals. But the Russian economy is also heavily dependent on its oil and gas exports, which makes it vulnerable to sanctions.

And while world leaders have so far hesitated to impose such sanctions on oil and gas in particular, a number of private corporations such as Shell, BP, and Exxon have cut off business with Russia. To that end, oil markets have already begun to anticipate widespread rejection of Russian reserves, which all boils down to the resurgence of the aforementioned bogeyman of … high gasoline prices.

Gas stations are seen in Bethesda, Maryland on February 23, 2022. Wall Street stocks fell February 22, 2022, after President Biden unveiled fresh sanctions on Moscow, while a surge in oil prices was limited by expectations the measures would not impact Russia’s crude production. MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images

Let us turn back in time to 1979, which parallels our current moment. The violence and upheaval of the Iranian Revolution, in which the Ayatollah Khomeini took power and established an Islamic government, interrupted oil production, resulting in a reduction in the oil-rich country’s exports. But the more significant cause of the ensuing dramatic price surge, economists have said, was an ongoing growth in demand combined with oil hoarding in anticipation of further unrest in the Middle East.

Then-President Jimmy Carter preached a message of conservation to his fellow Americans. He instituted gas rations and established the Department of Energy. He famously addressed the nation in a televised address in front of a fireplace: “We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren,” he said. “We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources.”

Even at present, a few days after the publication of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report that says we are very close to running out of time to avert truly catastrophic degrees of global warming, that seems like a shocking ask from a sitting president. In 1979, it was especially unwelcome. Arguably as a result of the ensuing gas shortage, President Carter was not reelected, and his successor Ronald Reagan campaigned on a message that “‘less’ is not enough,” while singing the praises of deregulating the American oil industry.

Gasoline dealers demonstrate in front of the White House against the U.S. government’s oil policy on August 1, 1979. Marion S Trikosko / US News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection / PhotoQuest / Getty Images

In June 2008, the price of a gallon of gas hit an all-time high point in American history: just north of an average of $4 a gallon, which would be about $5.22 today. President George W. Bush addressed the nation on the topic, noting that “for many Americans, there is no more pressing concern than the price of gasoline.” After some tsk-tsking of the Democrats in Congress for their role in the “painful levels” of gas prices, President Bush went on to give a rousing argument for accelerated, deregulated domestic oil and gas production that included, among other things, a hearty defense for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The climate consequences of increased oil and gas consumption were already well underway. At the very moment that Bush addressed the nation on the need for more drilling, a swath of the Midwest was underwater due to a 24-day period of torrential rains. The disastrous flooding was concentrated primarily in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri and killed 11 people, the majority of whom died in their cars. In a postmortem study of the unusual hydroclimatological circumstances that created floods, researchers with the American Geophysical Union wrote: “The occurrence of the 2008 flood event raises the question of whether its occurrence provides further evidence for a changing character of Midwestern hydroclimatology due to anthropogenic influences.”

But it was, again, gas prices that would prove a more pressing issue. In the spring of 2011, the price of gasoline shot up again, very nearly reaching the $4-per-gallon mark, and it would hover around $3.75 for the next three years. In President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address, he sang the praises of the burgeoning shale gas boom that “has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” which he considered a motivation for his administration to “keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.” He expressed a commitment to “free our families and businesses from the painful spikes in gas prices we’ve put up with for far too long.”

Ukraine’s military is outgunned but can still inflict a great deal of pain on Russian forces

APR editor — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 03:00:07 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Frank Ledwidge, University of Portsmouth

Ukraine’s ramshackle military offered no resistance to the Crimean annexation in February 2014. Since then the poorly equipped but well-motivated Ukrainian Army has taken thousands of casualties while fighting separatist forces in the eastern Donbas region.

In the meantime, the country has embarked on an often haphazard reform programme of its military which has made it — while still vulnerable in many vital respects — a rather more formidable force.

Since 2014-15, Ukraine has tripled its defence budget and attempted to modernise its forces — not only to defend themselves against Russia, but to comply with the standards demanded by Nato as an entry requirement.

The results have been mixed. On paper their army looks impressive — with 800 or so heavy tanks and thousands of other armoured vehicles protecting and transporting a regular force of about 200,000.

These are far better trained troops than in 2014. They have good leadership, especially in the crucial non-commissioned officer cadre — the backbone of any army. Vitally, most observers report high morale and motivation.

But this is only part of the story. Most of their armour and equipment is relatively old and, although factories have been turning out modernised versions of old models such as the T72 tank, these provide little in the way of effective opposition to the far more modern Russian tanks and armoured vehicles — some of which are equal or superior to the best Nato stock.

A Russian armoured personnel carrier crippled in the opening exchanges of the invasion. Image: Ukrainian Defence Ministry handout/EPA-EFE/

Further, the Ukrainian army is vulnerable both to Russian artillery, traditionally the Red Army’s most formidable arm, and the threat posed by Russian strike aircraft.

Recent gifts of Nato hand-held anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry will impose losses on Russian forces — but are not gamechangers.

Ukraine’s air force possesses a considerable fleet of Cold War-era aircraft and personnel are well-organised and trained. But Russia has configured its “aerospace forces” to gain and maintain crucial control of the air using, among other systems, the fearsome S400 long-range anti-aircraft missiles.

These systems give the most advanced Nato air forces serious pause for thought, let alone the 1990s vintage fighters and bombers of Ukraine.

Advanced Russian fighters and missiles will dominate the sky in due course although the Ukrainians have achieved some successes against the expectations of many.

There are credible reports that Ukrainian fighters are still flying and remarkably have shot down several Russian jets. Their old — but in the right hands still effective — anti-aircraft missiles have also caused Russian losses, according to Ukrainian sources.

The navy is now militarily insignificant — the more so since much of it appears to have been sunk in harbour within 24 hours of the beginning of hostilities.

Strengths and weaknesses
But this is not a foregone conclusion. Ukrainian generals are highly unlikely to play to Russian strengths and deploy forces to be obliterated by their artillery or air power.

They have seen all too much of that in the past. In July 2014 a formation of Ukrainian troops was destroyed by a rocket artillery strike in eastern Ukraine.

What was notable was the way the rockets were guided to their targets by drones operated by Russian-supported separatist troops.

Focusing on equipment quality or quantity alone is always a big mistake. In the UK, military thinking outlines “three components of fighting power”. These are the moral (morale, cohesion, motivation), conceptual (strategy, innovation and military “doctine”) and material (weaponry).

It is one thing having the advantage in the material component of war, it is quite another to turn it into success. The Ukrainians will try to exploit Russia’s vulnerability to having to wage a lengthy military campaign with the potential to sustain politically damaging heavy casualties.

Many Ukrainians have a basic awareness of weapon handling — the several hundred thousand reservists called up as Russia invaded certainly do. They may be light on modern tanks and sophisticated weaponry, but may well have the edge in the moral and conceptual domains.

There is a strong tradition of partisan warfare in Ukraine where ideas of “territorial defence” — insurgent groups fighting small actions on ground they know well backed up, where possible, by regular army units — are deeply ingrained.

In the early days of the Cold War after the country had been liberated from German occupation, the anti-Soviet “Insurgent Army” was only finally defeated in 1953. During this time they caused tens of thousands of casualties.

It may have been largely forgotten by the rest of the world, but this conflict is well remembered in Ukraine.

The vaunted Russian armed forces have already deployed a large proportion of their ground troops, and have a very limited capability either to occupy ground contested by insurgents or — even more importantly — to sustain operations beyond the first “break-in” phase of the war.

The last thing Putin wants is a protracted war, with bloody urban combat and echoes of Chechnya — which is what Ukrainian forces are likely to give him.

War takes its own course, but the likely and sensible Ukrainian approach will be to trade land for time. They will hope to inflict casualties and draw Russian forces into urban areas where their advantages are less pronounced.

In the event of defeat in the field, Ukraine’s defenders could well default to a well-armed, highly-motivated and protracted insurgency, probably supported by the West. This is Putin’s nightmare.

The other side of that particular coin is that Western support of such “terrorism” could attract an unpredictable and highly dangerous response.

In his “declaration of war” speech, Putin threatened “such consequences as you have never encountered in your history” to those who “try to hinder us”, clearly referencing Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal. In the face of defeat or humiliation rationality may be in short supply.

Dr Frank Ledwidge is senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy, University of Portsmouth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.