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

BANGKOK - A Vietnamese Buddhist monk on a barefoot pilgrimage from his homeland to India has given up on his attempt to walk across Myanmar and is heading to Malaysia for the next leg of his journey, a fellow monk said.

Thich Minh Tue and a group of companions are on a 2,700-kilometer (1,600 mile) trip to the place where Buddhism began 2,500 years ago but they have run into some very modern problems including visa regulations and civil war in Myanmar.

Minh Tue -- “Thich” signifies that he’s a monk – became an internet celebrity in Vietnam last year as he walked across the country, carrying a rice cooker pot to collect alms.

Late last year, he left Vietnam to embark on a journey by foot to India, the birthplace of Buddhism. After crossing Laos, he entered Thailand about two months ago and has been walking about 20 kilometers (12 miles) a day, often on scorching asphalt, through the countryside.

But with Thai visas running out and worries about the safety of trying to cross war-torn Myanmar, Minh Tue and his entourage debated what to do while in northern Thailand this week, said one of the monks in his party, Phuc Giac, who has emerged as a spokesman for the pilgrims.

With crossing into Myanmar not possible, the party had then considered crossing northern Thailand’s border with Laos, with the idea of then returning to Thailand with new Thai visas. But they soon ruled that out too.

“We were afraid that if we went to Laos, we would not be able to re-enter Thailand. Therefore everyone agreed,” Phuc Giac said, referring to a new plan, to head all the way south through Thailand to Malaysia.

The party set off in a bus on Wednesday bound for Thailand’s southern border.

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State media report

From Malaysia they can try and find a boat to India or Sri Lanka, although there are no ferry services from Malaysia or Singapore across the Bay of Bengal. Or they can fly.

Minh Tue’s party includes five monks practicing the 13 ascetic Buddhist disciplines who have been accompanying him since the beginning of the pilgrimage, and various supporters, some of them chronicling the journey on social media.

Minh Tue and his simple lifestyle struck a chord in Vietnam last year where social media posts of his barefoot walks went viral and well-wishers came out in droves.

Vietnam’s state-sanctioned Buddhist sangha has not officially recognized him as a monk, but he has nonetheless garnered widespread admiration and support.

At one point, Vietnamese authorities, leery of his popularity, announced he had “voluntarily retired.”

Vietnamese state media had not broadcast any news about Minh Tue’s pilgrimage -- until Feb. 22, when Hanoi Television posted a report on its YouTube channel titled “YouTubers Cause Chaos to Monk Thich Minh Tue’s on-foot Pilgrimage.”

The report focused on the YouTubers following the monk group, accusing them of spreading “sensational” and “divisive” information for “personal gain.”

It also highlighted what it described as “internal conflicts” within the group, calling it a “clash of group interests.”

Minh Tue’s group “disturbed the security and public order” in areas they passed through and the local police had to “take them to their headquarters for resolution,” according to the report.

When RFA contacted YouTubers accompanying the monk in Thailand about Hanoi Television’s claims, one YouTuber named Tran Nguyen said that he and others are adhering to Thai law, and not disturbing public order.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese and Pimuk Rakkanam for RFA.

Pyongyang fired what it called a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, which flew for about 87 minutes, the longest-ever flight of a North Korean ICBM, and landed in waters off northwest Japan, the South Korean and Japanese militaries said.

It was the first ICBM test since December, and the seventh in as many years.

“North Korea is getting ever more dangerous missile technology thanks to its new alliance with Russia, and I think yesterday’s test goes a long way to proving that,” Harry Kazianis, of the Washington-based Center for the National Interest thinktank, told RFA Korean.

Kazianis said it seemed like Pyongyang was gaining billions of U.S. dollars in economic aid and missile technology, or even nuclear weapons technology from Moscow.

He said that it appeared that neither Washington nor Seoul could do very much to address the threat posed by the Russia-North Korea alliance.

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“With Russia now bankrolling the Kim [Jong Un] family and China looking the other way when it comes to sanctions there is little that can be done—North Korea is in the drivers seat," said Kazianis, adding that Russia’s interest in North Korea would wane if war in Ukraine were to end.

“The longer the Ukraine war goes the more powerful Kim Jong Un’s missile will become,” he said.

South Korea, Japan and the United States condemned the test, North Korea’s latest violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at curbing its development of nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them around the world.

ICBM test timeline

North Korea first tested an ICBM in July 2017. It would test two more that year, including one in November that traveled for 50 minutes and reached an altitude of 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles).

Over the next five years, Pyongyang would not test any more ICBMs, but in March 2022, it launched another ICBM that blew up shortly after takeoff.

North Korea tested four more ICBMs in 2022 and 2023, and Thursday’s test was the first of 2024.

The launch came less than a week before the U.S. presidential election.

But regardless of who wins the election, Washington’s North Korea strategy will not be heavily influenced by missile tests, David Maxwell, vice president of the Washington-based Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told RFA.

“It is doubtful that either Harris or Trump will be influenced to change policy in a way that will benefit [North Korean leader] Kim [Jong Un],” said Maxwell. “But does KJU think that Trump would serve him better? I think he would be mistaken and disappointed. I do not believe either he or Harris will provide the concessions he desires.”

Maxwell said that South Korea and the U.S. should recognize and counter Kim’s political warfare strategies and attempts to drive a wedge between them.

Reporting by Kim Soyoung for RFA Korean.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Eugene Whong for RFA.

In response, Food & Water Watch Policy Director Jim Walsh issued the following statement:

“The lack of transparency from EPA about this leak is alarming but unfortunately in line with a failure of federal oversight for the entire carbon capture industry. Waiting a month to notify the public of this violation is especially egregious given the major health and safety risks associated with carbon dioxide contamination in air and water.

“Carbon dioxide Injection wells are a dangerous endeavor, even if EPA does not capitulate to industry demands to rush permitting. This incident puts an exclamation point on concerns communities across the country have been raising for years about the dangers the CCS industry poses to public safety and drinking water.

“The reality is this: CCS is a technologically unsound and economically unviable scheme, perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry to allow oil and gas companies to keep on drilling, keep on fracking, and keep on polluting our planet.”

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

The Israelis are not targeting Hamas, nor are they interested in returning their captives, who pose tremendous liability upon their release, as they often have good things to say about their captors.

Math is useful to prove what I’m saying

So here are some numbers to start.

Destroyed buildings

• As of April 2024, approximately 360,000 buildings have been destroyed, of which are 405 schools and universities, 700 hospitals and health facilities, 290 mosques and three churches. Given the estimation by the United Nations monitoring group OCHA that 12 buildings are destroyed every hour in Gaza, the adjusted number to account for May and June is 377,280 buildings.

Death and injuries from direct fire

• The reported number of martyrs on Wednesday this week was 37,718. It’s important to note that this number only includes martyrs who have been identified by name and civil ID number through the beleaguered health ministry in Gaza. Given the breakdown of reporting systems due to heavy destruction of infrastructure and personnel, this number, even with its limited parameters, is a gross underestimation. Based on more accurate figures of approximately 370 people killed daily, multiplied by 264 days of genocide, the actual number is closer to 97,680 martyred. (Per OCHA estimate of 15 martyrs per hour: Over the course of 264 days, which amounts to 6,336 hours, this number would roughly be 95,040).

• The adjusted estimate of martyrs is 260 percent more than the stagnant reported number. It is reasonable to adjust the number of injured (currently 86,377) by the same percentage, bringing that value to 224,580. (Per OCHA estimate of 35 injured per hour, this number comes to 221,760).

Death from lack of medications and chronic conditions

• Importantly, the number above does not include the thousands of unidentified martyrs, some of whom were uncovered from mass graves; those who arrived headless or in impossible pieces; those who were buried by their loved ones without going through the hospital system; those who have died of starvation; those who have died from lack of access to critical medications; those who have died from infections or communicable diseases.

• Taking into account 1,100 dialysis patients, 2,000 cancer patients and 341,000 individuals who depend on medication to manage chronic illnesses (45,000 cardiovascular disease, 71,000 diabetes, 225,000 hypertension), the extreme shortage of life-saving medication has and will continue to lead to deaths from Israel’s withholding of supplies. If a very conservative estimate of 5 percent of these patients die as a result (if they have not already), that’s an additional 17,050 people.

• However, a more accurate all-cause mortality rate for unmanaged diabetes is 13.6 percent (putting mortality at 9,869 people); 37 percent for uncontrolled hypertension (translating to 83,250 people); untreated dialysis and cancer patients will have a high mortality rate. A conservative estimate for this group is 30 percent or 930 patients.

• Taken together, this is 94,049 people (I didn’t consider cardiovascular disease alone, since patients tend to have co-morbidities and there would be natural overlap in these numbers).

Dead or dying from starvation

• According to a recent UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, approximately 495,000 Palestinians in Gaza are facing “catastrophic” hunger, which means they suffer extreme lack of food leading to acute malnutrition in young children, imminent risk of starvation and death. If we make a conservative 5 percent estimate of death from starvation among this population, that’s 24,750 people dead or dying from starvation.

• Data-driven mortality for acute malnutrition is approximately 20 percent. However, the current classification has not yet reached full-blown famine levels, making the current estimate reasonable.

Missing, presumed dead or kidnapped

• Approximately 21,000 children are missing and unaccounted for. Some are trapped under the rubble, some have been kidnapped by Israeli soldiers, while others are simply lost in the chaos. Given the relative equal ratio of adults to children in Gaza, it is safe to assume the same number of adults are likewise unaccounted for, doubling this number to 42,000 people missing overall.

Death from disease

• Due to the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure, coupled with restrictions on aid entering Gaza, Israel’s assault has led to the spread of communicable and water-borne diseases such as acute jaundice (due mostly to hepatitis A), acute diarrhea (with bloody stool), scabies and lice, skin rashes, smallpox and acute respiratory infections, which totaled 1,440,805 cases as of 10 June. If only 1 percent of these patients succumb to these serious conditions, that’s 14,408 people likewise killed indirectly by Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza.

• Mortality for acute jaundice or hepatitis A is low (2.5 percent in adults and less than 1 percent in children; thus a 1 percent mortality estimate is appropriate for this category, or 817 people); mortality for diarrhea ranges from 4.27 percent to 12 percent (20,722-58,238 people); smallpox mortality is 1-30 percent, depending on strain (854-2,561 people); mortality rates for acute respiratory disease range from 27 percent to 45 percent depending on severity (or 233,592-389,320 people). Taken together, adjusted for scientific data, the range for this category of martyrs is 255,985-450,936 people.

Estimate summaries

Based on these estimates, both conservative and data-driven, respectively, the actual figures are likely as follows:

•377,280 buildings destroyed completely or partially
•95,040-97,680 martyred
•221,760 injured
•24,750 dead or dying from starvation
•42,000 missing (presumed dead, kidnapped by Israel’s occupying forces or possibly trafficked).

The following ranges represent conservative estimate or lower range of data-driven population estimates:

•17,050-94,049 with chronic illnesses dead from lack of medication
•14,408-255,985 dead from epidemics resulting from Israel’s assault

This means the actual number of dead is closer to 194,768-511,824 people, with 221,760 injured. And counting.

This does not include the thousands who have been kidnapped and are being tortured in Israel’s gulags, at least three dozen of whom have been tortured to death or died from harsh conditions.

Some lives matter

The estimates here are reasonable but on-the-ground studies must be conducted immediately. International institutions must urgently assess the actual all-cause mortality resulting directly and indirectly from Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Thus far, of the 240 Israeli captives in Gaza, Israel has allegedly killed 50 of their own, both directly (shooting them) and indirectly (bombing the buildings they are in) and secured the release of 112 captives, 105 through negotiated agreements with Hamas, and seven via “rescue” missions.

The most recent direct “rescue” mission resulted in the release of four captives in Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza. A total of 274 Palestinians and several Israeli captives were killed in the same operation.

At least one US lawmaker believes sacrificing hundreds of Palestinians for four Israelis is worth it, because, it seems, only some lives matter.

I’ll leave it to readers to do the math to see the level of death and destruction inflicted on Gaza per captive or per Hamas fighter.

There can be only one of two conclusions. Either the Israeli military is the most incompetent force to ever walk this planet – and has no reliable intelligence gathering capability – or Israel is a sadistic nation intent on genocide of the indigenous population, much as all settler colonial projects have been throughout history.

• First published in The Electronic Intifada

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Susan Abulhawa.

• News

Hit in DNA Database Proves Leonard Mack’s Innocence After 47 Years of Wrongful Conviction

Unreliable witness identifications along with racial bias and tunnel vision led to Mr. Mack’s wrongful conviction, the longest to be vacated based on DNA evidence.

Breaking news 09.05.23 By Innocence Staff

Unreliable witness identifications along with racial bias and tunnel vision led to Mr. Mack’s wrongful conviction, the longest to be vacated based on DNA evidence.

Breaking news 09.05.23 By Innocence Staff

Leonard Mack in 2003.

Leonard Mack at Elmira Correctional Facility in 1978.

(September 5, 2023 — White Plains, NY) Leonard Mack was exonerated today nearly five decades after he was wrongfully convicted of rape and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in March 1976. New DNA testing of crime scene evidence found in a post-conviction investigation by the Innocence Project and the Westchester County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit proved Mr. Mack did not commit the crime. Mr. Mack’s wrongful conviction is the longest to be overturned based on new DNA evidence known to the Innocence Project. The DNA profile developed from the evidence was uploaded to the state and local DNA database and yielded a hit. The actual assailant identified by this search has since confessed to the crime.

This case contains virtually every common contributing factor in wrongful convictions. Eyewitness misidentification, the leading cause of wrongful convictions, played a central role, in addition to misleading forensic testimony presented by the State’s forensic analyst at trial, racial bias, and tunnel vision. Despite alibi witnesses and serological evidence from the victim’s underwear that excluded Mr. Mack in 1976, he spent seven-and-a-half years in prison and has since lived with this wrongful conviction for 41 years.

“Today, indisputable DNA evidence proves that Leonard Mack is innocent. Nearly five decades later, he finally has some measure of justice,” said Mary-Kathryn Smith, one of Mr. Mack’s Innocence Project attorneys. “Mr. Mack’s resilience and strength is why this day has finally come. We want to thank the Westchester County District Attorney and its Conviction Review Unit for their cooperation and commitment to search for the truth.”

“I want to first thank God for this day. Next, I want to thank the Innocence Project. Today has been a long time coming. I lost seven-and-a-half years of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit and I have lived with this injustice hanging over my head for almost 50 years. It changed the course of my life — everything from where I lived to my relationship with my family. I never lost hope that one day that I would be proven innocent. Now the truth has come to light and I can finally breathe. I am finally free.”

Westchester County District Attorney Miriam E. Rocah said, “Today we’re asking the courts to find Leonard Mack actually innocent for a rape he never committed; for which he unjustly served more than seven years in prison. We were able to prove Mr. Mack’s innocence, in large part, due to our independent Conviction Review Unit’s commitment and Mr. Mack’s unwavering strength fighting to clear his name for almost 50 years. This exoneration and the new DNA evidence confirm that wrongful convictions are not only harmful to the wrongly convicted but also make us all less safe.”

Leonard Mack in 1993.

Multiple Eyewitness Misidentifications

On May 22, 1975 at 3:00 p.m., two 12th-grade students from Woodland High School were walking home from school near a wooded area in Greenburgh, NY, when a man approached them and held them at gunpoint. He told them not to scream or he would kill them, and proceeded to use their belt and shreds of jacket to blindfold, gag, and restrain both girls’ wrists and ankles. He then raped one of the girls twice and threatened them again as he left the scene. The girl who was not raped broke free and ran to a nearby school where a teacher called the police. The second victim, who was raped, freed herself and ran home, where her sister also called the police, before being taken to the hospital where a rape kit was collected.

The Greenburgh Police Department issued a dispatch for officers to be on the lookout for a Black male suspect in his early 20s, close cropped hair, clean shaven with a medium build, wearing black pants, a tan jacket, a black hat with a white brim, and a gold earring in his left ear, and carrying a .22 or .32 caliber handgun.

Roughly two-and-a-half hours later, Officer James Fleming pulled over Mr. Mack, who was wearing a black fedora hat and had a gold earring in his left ear, on Harney Road. Officer Fleming told Mr. Mack he matched the profile of a rape suspect, although his clothing did not match the description the teenagers gave to police. Mr. Mack denied any involvement in the crime and explained he was with his girlfriend at the time of the attack, which she corroborated. Officer Fleming searched Mr. Mack’s vehicle and, finding a .22 revolver in the trunk, placed him under arrest. Both girls were then asked to identify him in a series of highly suggestive and problematic identification procedures. 

One of the victims was brought to Harney Road, where Mr. Mack was in handcuffs and surrounded by Officer Fleming and six police cars. At first, unsure, the girl asked police to reposition him, at which point she identified Mr. Mack as the assailant. She was then taken to Greenburgh Police Station and presented with a photo array containing seven photos of Black men, including that of Mr. Mack. His was the only photo showing his face and clothing, along with a distinctive May 1975 calendar hanging in the background, clearly differentiating it from others. The girl selected Mr. Mack’s photograph. 

In a third identification attempt, the same girl was taken to the Parkway police station later that evening where police conducted a show-up — when witnesses are presented with only one suspect for identification — through a one-way mirror. According to Officer Fleming’s testimony, it was not “feasible” to put together a line-up of Black males in the “basically white” Greenburgh area. Not surprisingly, the girl identified Mr. Mack, later describing him as the person she was supposed to identify. The girl later mentioned that Mr. Mack was wearing the wrong clothes, upon which police showed her clothing options allowing her to pick out the right clothes for Mr. Mack to wear. She again identified him as her assailant. 

The same suggestive photo array was later shown to the other victim after she left the hospital and was taken to the Greenburgh police station. This girl was legally blind and had stated that she was unable to tell the gender of a person unless they were within 10 feet of her and could not see the color of someone’s clothing unless they were within five feet. She told detectives she recognized one man’s shirt, referring to Mr. Mack’s photo, but could not be sure of her identification. 

She was then taken to the Parkway police headquarters, where she viewed Mr. Mack through a one-way mirror with the other victim, who told her, “That’s him.” The girl could not identify Mr. Mack, saying only, “It could be, I think so.” She said that Mr. Mack was the same “size, shape, and color” as the man who had attacked her. Given the limitations of her identification, she asked if she could hear Mr. Mack’s voice. At that point, police had Mr. Mack repeat what the attacker said to the girls through a door: “Don’t scream, don’t turn around or I’ll kill you.” Based on this, the girl identified Mr. Mack as the assailant.

Eyewitness misidentification, as in this case, is the leading contributing factor of wrongful convictions and has contributed to 64% of the Innocence Project’s 245 exonerations and releases. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, intentionally suggestive witness identifications occur twice as frequently in the cases of Black and Latinx exonerees as they do in the cases of white exonerees.  In 2017, New York passed a law adopting standards and best practices, advocated for by the Innocence Project, around eyewitness identification procedures that law enforcement agencies were required to implement. 

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The post Hit in DNA Database Proves Leonard Mack’s Innocence After 47 Years of Wrongful Conviction appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Julia Lucivero.

A newly published assessment from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns that three of the most commonly used neonicotinoid insecticides threaten the continued existence of more than 200 endangered plant and animal species.

"The EPA's analysis shows we've got a five-alarm fire on our hands, and there's now no question that neonicotinoids play an outsized role in our heartbreaking extinction crisis," Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said Friday in a statement.

"The EPA has to use the authority it has to take fast action to ban these pesticides," said Burd, "so future generations don't live in a world without bees and butterflies and the plants that depend on them."

The agency's new analysis found that clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam likely jeopardize the continued existence of 166, 199, and 204 plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), respectively. This includes 25 distinct insects, more than 160 plants reliant on insect pollination, and dozens of fish, birds, and invertebrates.

"The Biden administration will have the stain of extinction on its hands if it doesn't muster the courage to stand up to Big Ag and ban these chemicals."

Species being put at risk of extinction include the whooping crane, Indiana bat, Plymouth redbelly turtle, yellow larkspur, Attwater's greater prairie-chicken, rusty patched bumblebee, Karner blue butterfly, American burying beetle, Western prairie fringed orchid, vernal pool fairy shrimp, and the spring pygmy sunfish.

"The EPA confirmed what we have been warning about for years—these neonicotinoid insecticides pose an existential threat to many endangered species and seriously undermine biodiversity," Sylvia Wu, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety (CFS), said in a statement. "Unfortunately, this dire news is what we have told EPA all along. EPA should be ashamed that it still has yet to ban these life-threatening pesticides."

The EPA is well aware of the risks associated with the three neonicotinoids in question. One year ago, the agency released biological evaluations showing that the vast majority of endangered species are likely harmed by clothianidin (1,225 species, or 67% of the ESA list), imidacloprid (1,445, 79%), and thiamethoxam (1,396, 77%). Its new analysis focuses on which imperiled species and critical habitats are likely to be driven extinct by the trio of insecticides.

As CBD pointed out: "For decades the EPA has refused to comply with its Endangered Species Act obligations to assess pesticides' harms to protected species. The agency was finally forced to do the biological evaluations by legal agreements with the Center for Food Safety and the Natural Resources Defense Council. After losing many lawsuits on this matter, the EPA has committed to work toward complying with the act."

"Given the Fish and Wildlife Service's refusal to lift a finger to protect endangered species from pesticides, we commend the EPA for completing this analysis and revealing the disturbing reality of the massive threat these pesticides pose," said Burd. "The Biden administration will have the stain of extinction on its hands if it doesn't muster the courage to stand up to Big Ag and ban these chemicals."

CFS science director Bill Freese said that "while we welcome EPA's overdue action on this issue, we are closely examining the agency's analysis to determine whether still more species are jeopardized by these incredibly potent and ubiquitous insecticides."

As CFS explained:

Chemically similar to nicotine, neonicotinoids kill insects by disrupting their nervous systems. Just billionths of a gram can kill or impair honeybees. Introduced in the 1990s, neonicotinoids have rapidly become the most widely used insecticides in the world. Neonics can be sprayed or applied to soil, but by far the biggest use is application to seeds. The neonic seed coating is absorbed by the growing seedling and makes the entire plant toxic. CFS has a separate case challenging EPA's regulation of these seed coatings.

Bees and other pollinators are harmed by exposure to neonic-contaminated nectar and pollen, with studies demonstrating disruptions in flight ability, impaired growth and reproduction as well as weakened immunity. Neonic-contaminated seed dust generated during planting operations causes huge bee kills, while pollinators also die from direct exposure to spray.

Neonics are also persistent (break down slowly), and run off into waterways, threatening aquatic organisms. EPA has determined that neonics likely harm all 38 threatened and endangered amphibian species in the U.S., among hundreds of other organisms. Birds are also at risk, and can die from eating just one to several treated seeds.

Neonicotinoids have long been prohibited in the European Union, but as recently as a few months ago, a loophole enabled governments to grant emergency derogations temporarily permitting the use of seeds coated with these and other banned insecticides. In January, the E.U.'s highest court closed the loophole for neonicotinoid-treated seeds—a decision the post-Brexit United Kingdom refused to emulate.

In the U.S., neonicotinoids continue to be used on hundreds of millions of acres of agricultural land, contributing to an estimated 89% decline in the American bumblebee population over the past 20 years.

According to Freese, "EPA has thus far given a free pass to neonicotinoids coated on corn and other crop seeds—which represent by far their largest use—that make seedlings toxic to pollinators and other beneficial insects."

"Our expert wildlife agencies—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service—have the final say on this matter," Freese added, "and may well find that neonicotinoids put even more species at risk of extinction."

A 2019 scientific review of the catastrophic global decline of insects made clear that a "serious reduction in pesticide usage" is essential to prevent the extinction of up to 41% of the world's insects in the coming decades.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

The post Clarence Thomas Proves It’s Time for Supreme Court Term Limits appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

The Supreme Court keeps tripping over its own robes. Last week, ProPublica revealed that a conservative megadonor has been secretly subsidizing the lifestyle of Justice Clarence Thomas. In a rare public statement, the justice claims he asked others on the Court and in the judiciary, who assured him he need not disclose such beneficence.

It’s not clear which is worse: if this is true, or if it isn’t.

Thomas said all this merely involved “personal hospitality” from a friend (albeit a billionaire who befriended Thomas only after he was appointed to the Court). That might evoke a dinner party or a weekend at a friend’s lake house. Hardly: Thomas frolicked on Harlan Crow’s superyacht, flew on his personal jet, vacationed at his private resort, and traveled with him to Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in California. According to ProPublica, the largesse was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Thomas claimed to want to avoid chichi vacations. “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.” They say hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

This all shows the perils of DIY ethics. The Supreme Court is the only court in the country with no enforceable code of ethics. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has pointed out that the Court quickly launched a formal investigation of the leak of the Dobbs decision last year. It could do so again. If the Court will not craft a set of ethics rules — and pronto — Congress can and should do so.

Congress should also investigate. There’s ample precedent: Justice Abe Fortas, too, was found to be receiving support from a wealthy benefactor, and the controversy proved so intense that he resigned.

But beyond stronger rules, the scandal shows how lifetime tenure can engender justices with a startling sense of entitlement and a belief that they are beyond accountability. Thomas almost certainly knows that cavorting around the globe in a superyacht isn’t “personal hospitality” in the spirit of current rules. After briefly disclosing the trips and causing a minor stir in 2004, he decided it would be better to keep them to himself. He was confident he could avoid consequences.

Where did that confidence come from? At least in part from the assurance that comes with years of accumulated power and influence.

Few government jobs anywhere in the world are quite like that of U.S. Supreme Court justices: nine unelected people who dictate wide swaths of national policy. And if they’re put on the Court at a young age, they get to do so for many decades with no real risk of removal. Only one justice has ever been impeached (Samuel Chase in 1804). None has ever been convicted. Supreme Court justices are, in this way, more akin to royalty than public servants. Only a single U.S. state mirrors the federal system — the rest have either fixed terms or mandatory retirement.

We can make a change, as I recently argued in the Los Angeles Times. There is a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of term limits for Supreme Court justices. Justices would serve for up to 18 years, with each president allowed two appointments per presidential term. I describe all this in my upcoming book, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America.

Term limits would ensure that the composition of the Court better mirrors the preferences of American voters and stop presidents from influencing national policy decades beyond their terms in office. Term limits would also prevent any individual from accumulating unaccountable power, as Thomas seems to believe he has.

George Washington understood the rationale when he stepped away from the presidency after two terms, establishing a norm that no public official should hold that much power for too long. When presidents stopped complying with that norm, it was written into law. It’s time to bring the same accountability to the Supreme Court.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Michael Waldman.

After at least six major freight train derailments occurred across the United States over the past week, the need for stronger rail safety rules couldn't be clearer, an interunion alliance of rail workers said Monday.

"The recent uptick in derailments across the U.S. highlights the dire need for stricter regulations on the length and weight of trains, as well as a focus on preventing unsafe operational practices such as precision scheduled railroading (PSR) which prioritizes short-term financial gains for Wall Street over the safety of communities and railroad workers," Jason Doering, a locomotive engineer and general secretary of Railroad Workers United (RWU), said in a statement.

The past week "was not a good one" for the nation's Class 1 rail carriers, RWU observed.

On Sunday, March 26, a Canadian Pacific train carrying hazardous materials careened off the tracks outside Wyndmere, North Dakota, spilling liquid asphalt and ethylene glycol and releasing propylene vapor.

Last Monday, a Union Pacific iron ore train reached 118 miles per hour as it ran away down Cima Hill in the Mojave Desert before wrecking on a curve, destroying two locomotives and 55 cars in San Bernardino County, California.

On Wednesday, a Canadian National iron ore train derailed in Butler County, Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, a BNSF train carrying ethanol and corn syrup crashed near Raymond, Minnesota, causing a fire that forced local residents to flee.

On Friday, a Norfolk Southern train went off the tracks in Irondale, Alabama.

One day ago, a train operated by the Class 2 regional Montana Rail Link—soon to be owned by BNSF—derailed on the banks of the Clark Fork River in Paradise, Montana.

"The recent uptick in derailments across the U.S. highlights the dire need for stricter regulations on the length and weight of trains, as well as a focus on preventing unsafe operational practices such as precision scheduled railroading."

"Rail workers are not surprised to see the dramatic increase in rail incidents following the widespread cuts to the industry," said locomotive engineer and RWU steering committee member Paul Lindsey.

"Each year these companies siphon billions into share buybacks, dividends, and bonuses rather than into the vital maintenance and infrastructure growth we need to grow a safe, modern, and thriving rail industry," Lindsey added.

Norfolk Southern has become the poster child for freight industry greed as the toxic aftermath of February's fiery train derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff continues to unfold in East Palestine, Ohio.

Questioned last month at a U.S. Senate hearing about the ongoing public health and environmental disaster, Norfolk Southern president and CEO Alan Shaw refused to commit to giving workers seven days of paid sick leave or halting stock buybacks.

More Perfect Union has calculated that payouts to Norfolk Southern's shareholders soared by more than 4,500% over the past 20 years, from $101 million in stock repurchases and dividend bumps in 2002 to $4.7 billion in 2022.

Shaw also refused to commit to ending PSR, the profit-maximizing scheduling system that forces fewer workers to manage longer trains in less time, even though unions and progressive lawmakers argue the Wall street-endorsed model makes the U.S. rail system more dangerous and contributes to the 1,500-plus derailments seen nationwide each year.

Although Norfolk Southern epitomizes how railroad executives prioritize profits above all else, the corporation is far from alone in pushing for deregulation and implementing anti-worker, pro-investor policies.

An OpenSecrets analysis published last month found that the rail industry spent more than $713 million lobbying against enhanced rail safety rules at the federal and state levels between 2002 and 2022. Top spenders include the Association of American Railroads trade group, CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and BNSF's parent company Berkshire Hathaway, which is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett.

While RWU has made the case for nationalizing the railroads, it has also outlined a plan for reforms that can be quickly implemented in the absence of such a sweeping transformation. Specific provisions the alliance has called for include sufficient staffing; limits on train length and weight; adequate maintenance and inspections; and better training and employee benefits.

Last week, Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced the Railway Accountability Act, which includes some of the measures sought by RWU and is supported by unions including the Transport Workers of America (TWU), the National Conference of Firemen & Oilers (NCFO), and the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers-Mechanical Division (SMART-MD).

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Follow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by The Jimmy Dore Show.

Friday, January 27th, marks 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords by representatives from the United States, North and South Vietnam effectively ending American participation in the Vietnamese civil conflict. What the Georgetown University international relations scholar Charles Kuphan calls an “isolationist impulse” made a “significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus.”

As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish Polish-born national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as “a nice man but burned by Vietnam.” Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of Vietnam which shaped their approach to the world. And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, were set up as a kind of break on unnecessary military adventures.

But only hours after the successful conclusion of the First Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

And kick it Bush did: In the decades following his 1991 pronouncement, the United States has been at war in one form or another (either as a belligerent or unofficial co-belligerent as is the case with our involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen and in Ukraine) for all but 2 of the 32 years that have followed.

The political-media atmosphere that now prevails in Washington makes it exceedingly difficult to believe such a thing as a ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ ever existed. Indeed, President Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine has been met with rapturous approval from the Washington media establishment, winning plaudits from all the usual suspects.

But what kind of success is it really, when the entire thing might have been avoided by judicious diplomatic engagement? Are we really to believe that a war resulting, so far, in 200,000 dead and 8 million displaced, has been worth an empty promise of NATO membership?

While the war has currently ground to a stalemate, the legacy media and various and sundry think-tank-talking-heads issue regular assurances of steady progress in the field and victory soon to come.

• Writing in the Journal of Democracy this past September, political scientist and author of the End of History and The Last Man Francis Fukuyama exulted: “Ukraine will win. Slava Ukraini!”
• Washington Post reporter Liz Sly told readers in early January 2023 that “If 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year — or at least enough territory to definitively end Russia’s threat, Western officials and analysts say.”
• Newsweek, reporting in October 2022, informed readers by way of activist Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian parliament, that “Russia is not yet on the brink of revolution…but is not far off.”
• Rutgers University professor Alexander J. Motyl agrees. In a January 2023 article for Foreign Policy magazine titled ‘It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse’ Motyl decried as “stunning” what he believes is a “near-total absence of any discussion among politicians, policymakers, analysts, and journalists of the consequences of defeat for Russia. … considering the potential for Russia’s collapse and disintegration.”
• Also in early January, the former head of the U.S. Army in Europe, Lt. General Ben Hodges told the Euromaidan Press that, “The decisive phase of the campaign…will be the liberation of Crimea. Ukrainian forces are going to spend a lot of time knocking out or disrupting the logistical networks that are important for Crimea…That is going to be a critical part that leads or sets the conditions for the liberation of Crimea, which I expect will be finished by the end of August.”

As Gore Vidal once quipped, “There is little respite for a people so routinely—so fiercely—disinformed.”

Conspicuous by its absence in what passes for foreign policy discourse in the American capital is the question of American interests: How does the allocation of vast sums to a wondrously corrupt regime in Kiev in any way materially benefit everyday Americans? Is the imposition of a narrow, sectarian Galician nationalism over the whole of Ukraine truly a core American interest? Does the prolongation of a proxy war between NATO and Russia further European and American security interests?

In truth, the lessons of Vietnam were forgotten long ago. The generation that now largely populates the ranks of the Washington media and political establishment came of age when Vietnam was already in the rearview. Today, the unabashed liberal interventionists who staff the Biden administration came up in the 1990s when it was commonly thought the United States didn’t do enough, notably in Bosnia and in Rwanda. As such, and almost without exception, they have supported every American mis-adventure abroad since 9/11.

The caution which, albeit all-too-temporarily, stemmed from the “Vietnam Syndrome” is today utterly absent in the corridors of power in Joe Biden’s Washington. The Vietnam Syndrome is indeed kicked: Dead and buried.

But we may soon regret its passing.

This article is distributed by Globetrotter in partnership with the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Carden.

Billionaires, in particular, have seen their wealth explode since 2020, adding around $1.7 million to their net worth for every $1 in wealth gained by a person in the bottom 90% of the global income distribution. According to Oxfam, billionaires' fortunes have grown by an average of $2.7 billion per day since 2020.

Meanwhile, nearly 2 billion workers across the globe likely saw inflation rise at a faster pace than their wages, resulting in a real pay cut that has increased poverty, hunger, and other hardships.

"While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. "Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires—a roaring ‘20s boom for the world's richest."

Oxfam's report also spotlights how corporations have taken advantage of crises such as pandemic-induced supply chain woes and Russia's war on Ukraine to drive up prices for consumers around the world, making it more difficult for billions of people to afford basic necessities.

The analysis finds that at least 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, bringing in $306 billion in windfall profits and dishing out 84% of it to their shareholders.

"The Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion over the last year," Oxfam notes. "Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth soar by $42 billion (46%) in 2022 alone. Excess corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K."

"Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

To combat skyrocketing inequality produced by excess corporate profits and the disproportionate wealth gains of the ultra-rich—who also contribute far more to the climate crisis than the rest of humanity—Oxfam argues that governments around the world should institute "a systemic and wide-ranging increase in taxation" targeting billionaires who often pay astonishingly low tax rates.

The new report cites the example of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who—according to Internal Revenue Service documents obtained by ProPublica—paid a true tax rate of just over 3% between 2014 and 2018.

By comparison, Oxfam observes, "Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%."

The aid group's report makes clear that Musk is hardly alone among billionaires in reaping massive wealth gains—much of it unrealized stock appreciation—while paying little tax.

"Every billionaire is a policy failure," the report says. "The very existence of booming billionaires and record profits, while most people face austerity, rising poverty, and a cost-of-living crisis, is evidence of an economic system that fails to deliver for humanity. For too long, governments, international financial institutions, and elites have misled the world with a fictional story about trickle-down economics, in which low tax and high gains for a few would ultimately benefit us all. It is a story without any basis in truth."

It's unclear whether the Davos summit—dominated by individuals and corporations committed to preserving and growing their wealth—will feature discussion of anything close to the tax policy that Oxfam recommends. Specifically, the group calls on policymakers to "permanently increase taxes on the richest 1%... to a minimum of 60% of their income from both labor and capital, with higher rates for multi-millionaires and billionaires."

Oxfam also urges governments to "tax the wealth of the richest 1% at rates high enough to significantly reduce the numbers and wealth of the richest people, and redistribute these resources. This includes implementing inheritance, property, and land taxes, as well as net wealth taxes."

Taxation is not mentioned in an overview of the World Economic Forum's central topics.

In a statement, Bucher said that "taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today's overlapping crises."

"It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

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

One of the most explosive revelations in the just released House Oversight Committee report on Big Oil disinformation is that the oil industry never saw methane, what they euphemistically rebranded "natural gas," as a "bridge fuel" to a clean energy future: they always saw it as a "destination," an ongoing addiction they planned to do everything in their power to maintain.

What the "bridge fuel" fantasy always ignored was the terrible impacts that gas has up and down its supply chain.

For years, oil companies, politicians, and even some environmental groups, promoted gas as a "bridge fuel" to a clean energy future, the idea being that gas could help "bridge the gap" between an energy system stuck on coal and renewable energy that wasn't ready for prime time. For a brief moment, one could be forgiven for believing this narrative: the CO2 emissions from gas are indeed lower than coal and in the early 2000s clean energy was still significantly more expensive than fossil fuels. The idea of gas being a "bridge" was so compelling that President Obama made it a central part of his administration's strategy to reduce emissions.

What the "bridge fuel" fantasy always ignored was the terrible impacts that gas has up and down its supply chain. From the fracking needed to produce the gas (which contaminates water and poison communities), to the leaking pipelines that transport it (which spew planet heating methane into the atmosphere), to the burning of it in our homes and power plants (which releases dangerous chemicals like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde), gas has always a climate wrecking poison.

Even as these impacts became unignorable, and the price of renewables and batteries rapidly dropped, making them the cheapest source of new energy, the fossil fuel industry worked hard to not only maintain the "bridge fuel" narrative—but simultaneously try and reframe gas as not only a "bridge" but a "destination." 

One of the documents released by the House Oversight Committee on Friday is the slide from a 2017 strategy presentation made for BP by the Brunswick Group, a leading fossil fuel PR firm. In the presentation, Brunswick frames the goal of their "campaign" as to "advance and protect the role of gas—and BP—in the future of energy conservation." A different internal BP document, titled the "Role of Gas," describes BP America's goal as to, "Prevent further erosion of near-term support for gas vs. other fuels, protect role of gas as a bridge in a low-carbon transition, and position gas as a destination fuel for the long term" (emphasis added). In another email, BP executives told their colleagues not to "concede the point" that gas didn't have a future by "referring to it mainly as a 'bridge.'"

Other documents show the great lengths the industry has gone to try and make gas a permanent part of our energy mix. In 2021, the American Petroleum Institute released what was branded as a comprehensive "Climate Action Framework," but according to internal emails obtained by the committee, the real purpose of the framework was "the continued promotion of natural gas in a carbon constrained world."

We've all seen the results of this strategy: nonstop advertising campaigns on TV and across social media platforms touting the benefits of gas and pretending it's a key climate solution. While one rarely sees a commercial for old fashioned crude oil, "natural gas" has become the friendly face of the fossil fuel industry.

The documents released by the committee cut through this greenwash and show gas for what it really is: the industry's latest ploy to keep us hooked on their product. Gas was never meant to be a "bridge," that whole rhetorical frame was simply a way to deepen our dependence on a dangerous fossil fuel and hold back real climate solutions.

Our job now is to educate the public about what gas really is: climate wrecking methane. Another dirty fossil fuel which is putting our families and communities at risk. A poisonous gas that the industry has piped into our homes, harming the health of our children and ourselves. An increasingly volatile and expensive source of energy, especially now that cheaper and safer alternatives exist.

That's the important work of campaigns like Gas Leaks, which is combating gas industry propaganda, Clean Creatives, which is going after the PR and advertising agencies that greenwash gas and other fossil fuels, and Rewiring America, who are pushing to electrify homes, schools and buildings across the country.

By revealing gas for what it really is, today's House Oversight Committee Report is a boost to all those efforts. The industry may want methane to be our final destination, but we can choose to move in a different direction. Let's go.  

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

The headline in the Washington Post ahead of Nicaragua’s local elections hinted at skepticism: “Nicaragua Ruling Party Seeks to Expand Hold in Local Votes” (11/6/22). The story itself, taken from an Associated Press report filed from Mexico City, was worse, framing the elections as a “farce” carried out “under the absolute control” of the governing Sandinista party.

AP (Washington Post, 11/6/22) presented Nicaraguan local elections as a “consolidation of the totalitarian regime of Daniel Ortega.”

Why, one might ask, would the Post be interested in municipal elections in a small Latin American country, if not to support Washington’s attempts to discredit its government? The reality, that the elections again demonstrate that there is a thriving democracy in Nicaragua, has to be twisted into an argument that they represent a “consolidation of the totalitarian regime of Daniel Ortega.”

On Sunday, November 6, as a Nicaraguan resident for 20 years, I went to vote, and later toured various polling stations in Masaya, Nicaragua’s fourth-largest city. At the start of a new four-year electoral cycle, mayors and councilors were being chosen for every city hall in the country, from the smallest to the largest—the capital city of Managua.

Nicaragua has a well-organized system for supplying all those aged 16 or over with identity cards, which automatically put them on the electoral register. On polling day, 3,722,884 people were eligible to vote.

In the last general election, a year ago, 65% of registered voters took part. This time—not surprisingly, given that these elections were local—the percentage was smaller (57%). Yet it was still very respectable in international terms: Neighboring Costa Rica’s last local elections brought only a 36% turnout. Across the US, only 15% to 27% of eligible voters cast a ballot in their last local election. In Britain, turnout in local elections is usually about 30%, and only in Scotland have a few small districts seen turnout exceed 57%.

Reflection of success

Here is a summary of the provisional results. On the day, 2.03 million valid votes were cast. (Some 3.8%, or 80,000, were judged to be invalid or spoiled.) Of the total, 1.49 million (73%) went to the Sandinista coalition, and the remainder to opposition parties. The vote for President Daniel Ortega’s party was sufficient to win the mayoral vote in every district, although the makeup of each local council will depend on the proportionate split of the vote between parties.

In the national tally, the next largest share of the votes was that of the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC); its 256,000 votes represented almost 13% of the total. Four small parties took the remainder. There were four small towns where the total opposition vote exceeded that for the Sandinistas, but in each case, the vote was split between different parties, and the Sandinista candidate was elected as mayor.

That the governing party nationally won all 153 mayoral posts was no surprise, since it had been making steady advances over the last two decades. As commentator Stephen Sefton (Tortilla con Sal, 11/7/22) reports, in 2000 the party captured the Managua council for the first time, together with 51 other councils. By 2004, the number had increased to 87; by 2008 it was 105, in 2012 it reached 127, and by the last election in 2017, 135.

The number of mayoralties won by the Sandinista party has been rising for years, even before the Sandinistas returned to power on the national level in 2006. (Chart: Bases Sandinistas.)

Given that in the 2021 general election, the Sandinistas won 75% of the vote, Sunday’s result was fully expected. It reflects both the governing party’s success in stabilizing the country after the violent coup attempt in 2018, the enormous program of social investment it is carrying out (for example, building 24 new public hospitals in the last 15 years) and the country’s successful emergence from the Covid pandemic with less damage to its economy than neighboring countries experienced. The municipalities, which administer 10% of the national budget, have made important contributions to these efforts.

Of course, this is far from the image created by Ortega’s opponents. Brian A. Nichols, US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said before polling that

Nicaraguans will once again be denied the right to freely and fairly choose their municipal leaders. As long as opposition leaders remain unjustly imprisoned or in exile, and their parties banned, there is no choice for the Nicaraguan people in yet another sham election.

Unsurprisingly, he ignored the crimes committed by so-called “opposition leaders,” for which they had been tried and convicted. While a conditional amnesty in 2019 released from prison those convicted of crimes in the 2018 coup attempt, some who organized violence had begun to do so again in the run-up to the 2021 elections, or had been convicted of money laundering, or of actively seeking US intervention or sanctions. None of those “leaders” had ever run in local elections, nor were they members of registered political parties.

Ludicrous assertion

As is usually the case, reports in the corporate media followed the same line. According to the Washington Post, the vote followed “an electoral campaign without rallies, demonstrations or even real opposition.” Various other media used the same story—for example, ABC News (11/6/22) and the British Independent (11/6/22). Yet it was a complete lie: Scores of pro-Sandinista rallies and demonstrations had taken place across the country in the preceding weeks, as did far smaller opposition ones.

The party that gained most opposition votes, the PLC, was unquestionably the “real” opposition, as it had held power nationally only two decades ago, and has won seats in all recent municipal elections. On the Caribbean coast, the regional Yatama party also gained more than a third of the vote in several cities and it, too, has recently held power.

Who is Urnas Abiertas? Where does it get its funding? Its website gives no clue.

As they did a year ago, the corporate media quoted the “evidence” supplied by an obscure body called Urnas Abiertas (“Open Ballots”)—cited in five of the AP piece’s 22 paragraphs. No one knows who this group is or where its money comes from. (Its website gives no clue.)

In a report quoted in  corporate media, it claims that people queued at polling stations only because they were forced to vote. This relied on various messages allegedly from public sector officials urging their employees to vote—but of course if they voted, they did so in a secret ballot, and were at liberty to support one of five opposition parties, or to spoil their ballot paper. In any case, as I visited several polling stations, I could see that people were voting enthusiastically, not out of compulsion.

Oddly, in a claim that appears to contradict its main one, Urnas Abiertas also ludicrously asserts that a huge 82% of people abstained from voting and that “the streets were empty.” In an article for Council on Hemispheric Affairs (11/16/21), I showed that similar claims made after last year’s election were baseless. In any case, social media offered plentiful evidence of large numbers of people going to voting stations on November 6.

If the claim had been correct, it would imply that the government faked nearly 1.5 million votes. Urnas Abiertas fails to provide any evidence of how this was done, in an electoral process that is tightly administered, involves around 70,000 officials and where all the contesting parties have representatives scrutinizing each stage. Nor, apparently, did AP think to question Urnas‘ claims.

Washington talking points

COHA (6/29/22): “The empirical evidence indicates that migration to Costa Rica has almost certainly fallen sharply.”

Other elements of the AP report simply repeat Washington talking points. Apparently, “Nicaragua has been in political and social upheaval” since 2018, something invisible to people who actually live in the country. The government has “shuttered some 2,000 nongovernmental groups and more than 50 media outlets as it cracked down on voices of dissent,” a misrepresentation previously analyzed by FAIR (6/16/22). And “more than 200,000 Nicaraguans have fled the country since [2018], most to neighboring Costa Rica,” an assertion I debunked in an article for COHA (6/29/22).

Corporate media are so in thrall to the State Department’s propaganda about Nicaragua that they can’t ask simple questions: Could this election and the previous one mean that Nicaraguans really do endorse their government’s record? Why is Washington so exercised about a small country’s local elections? Is it that, once again, Nicaragua’s democratic achievements pose the “threat of a good example”? After all, in countries which claim to be superior democracies, a far smaller proportion of their electorates actually manages to vote. Instead of subjecting Nicaragua to ever-tougher sanctions, Western countries should ask whether they might perhaps learn something from a government that manages to win and sustain such a high level of popular support.

The post For Corporate Media, Sandinistas’ Electoral Success Proves Their Repressiveness appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Perry.

Democratic governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin won reelection, beating three Trump-backed Republican candidates who campaigned on varying platforms and ideologies that would have derailed plans to decarbonize in all three states. Minnesota challenger Scott Jensen, for example, had proposed rolling back the state’s “clean cars” regulation, and Wisconsin challenger Tim Michels had deep ties to the oil and pipeline industries.

Addressing a crowd in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, Evers, a former public school superintendent with a penchant for vanilla ice cream, said “some people call it boring, but you know what, Wisconsin? As it turns out, boring wins.”

These races saw landmark funding from the candidates’ coffers, with over $33 million spent in Minnesota, $32 million in Michigan, and $115 million in Wisconsin, the most in state campaign history. In addition to their focus on climate, all three governors also campaigned on increasing access to abortions and reproductive health care, especially in Wisconsin, where abortion bans are being challenged by the current administration.

Without clean energy opposition in the statehouse, these governors will now have the opportunity to keep their states on course to achieve various deadlines. 

Wisconsin plans for all electricity consumed in the state to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2050 in accordance with an executive order Evers signed in 2019. Whitmer signed an executive order in 2020 to make the state’s entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050 and has been a staunch opponent of the Line 5 petroleum pipeline, which cuts across Upper Michigan, Wisconsin, and Great Lakes waters. Walz is behind various clean energy initiatives in Minnesota, such as a push for more electric vehicle sales in the state starting in 2024, and plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050.

And with the incumbents’ reelections, these states will be closer to clean energy deadlines with seemingly climate-friendly governors at the helm.

Walz has supported expanding solar panel manufacturing in partnership with the state legislature, which released $5.5 million in a bipartisan effort to expand a Northern Minnesota production facility, slated to be one of the biggest in the country. In Michigan, Whitmer has pushed for more electric vehicle and charging station production in an effort to maintain the state’s deep ties to the automotive industry. She recently announced $10.2 million in tax incentives and grants for EV manufacturing in Detroit.

Whitmer, Walz, and Evers will now also be able to determine what to do with the money coming to their states from the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s “most significant” climate bill in United States history. The bill contains funding for low-carbon energy sources, as well as investments in a clean economy and manufacturing.

Holly Burke, a spokesperson for climate change advocacy group Evergreen Action, said that the results in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan are a clear indicator that governors that lead on climate policies are popular candidates and they should take tonight’s results as a mandate from voters to pursue stronger environmental and clean energy standards. 

“In one of the most competitive swing states in America, Governor Evers didn’t run from climate action—he leaned into it,” Burke said in a statement. “This election shows that climate leadership is a political winner in Wisconsin.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Midwest governors, climate leadership proves a ‘political winner’ on Nov 9, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Remember when federal, state and local governments actually seemed poised to do something about the great teacher exodus plaguing our schools?

With an influx of money earmarked to help schools recover from the pandemic, many expected pay raises and bonuses to keep experienced teachers in the classroom.

Ha! That didn’t happen!

What we have here is a crisis that cuts to the very heart of America’s identity as a nation.

Not in most places.

In fact, the very idea seems ludicrous now – and this was being discussed like it was a foregone conclusion just a few months ago at the beginning of the summer.

So what happened?

We found a cheaper way.

Just cut requirements to become a teacher.

Get more college students to enter the field even if they’re bound to run away screaming after a few years in.

It doesn’t matter – as long as we can keep them coming.

The young and dumb.

Or the old and out of options.

Entice retired teachers to come back and sub. Remove hurdles for anyone from a non-teaching field to step in and become a teacher – even military veterans because there’s so much overlap between battlefield experience and second grade reading.

And in the meantime, more and more classroom teachers with decades of experience under their belts are throwing up their hands and leaving.

Stop and think for a moment.

This is fundamentally absurd.

If you have a hole in your pocket and you keep losing your keys, wallet and other vital things from out of your pants, the first thing you do is sew up the hole! You don’t keep putting more things in your pocket!

But that’s only true if you’re actually interested in solving the problem.

Maybe you prefer the status quo. Maybe you even like it or see it as an opportunity to change your wardrobe entirely.

It’s a simple matter of cost.

The educators who have been in the classroom the longest are also the highest paid. So if we just let them go, we can save some money for other things.

Of course the problem of getting excellent teachers in the classroom is only compounded by such thinking. You don’t get more seasoned teachers by letting them leave and putting increasing pressure on those who stay.

And make no mistake – experienced teachers are incredibly valuable. That’s not to say new teachers don’t have their own positive aspects, but the profession’s expert practitioners are its heart and soul.

Think about it.

Like any other profession, the longer you practice it, the better you usually get. For example, no one going under heart surgery would willingly choose a surgeon who had never operated before over a seasoned veteran who has done this successfully multiple times.

But we don’t value the work teachers do nearly as much as we do surgeons. Or lawyers. Or almost anything else that requires a comparable level of education.

That’s really the core issue.

We don’t care about quality teaching. In fact, in many cases we actively don’t want it to occur.

Republicans are literally running a political platform on weakening teachers, schools and education because they need the poorly educated to make up their voting base.

When Trump was President, he actually praised the badly educated because they supported him more than any other demographic.

And even those who aren’t actively against education are more concerned with privatizing the public system for profit. They like it when public education fails because it gives them an excuse to push for more charter schools, more school vouchers, more cyber schools – anything where they can siphon away tax dollars earmarked for education into their own private pocketbooks (and no holes in there even to pay their own taxes)!

So the teacher exodus isn’t being fixed on purpose.

It is a political and economic plot against increasing the average intelligence and knowledge of voters, stealing government funding for personal gain and refusing to increase the quality of a government sponsored service.

In the meantime, more teachers are leaving every day.

There is a cost to becoming a great nation and not just emblazoning the idea on a hat.... That cost is education.

A February 2022 report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the numbers of public school teachers had gone from approximately 10.6 million in January 2020 to 10 million — a net loss of around 600,000 teachers.

In August, the national Education Association (NEA) sounded the alarm that an additional 300,000 educators had left since the report was issued. And it’s only getting worse. An NEA union poll found that 55% of educators were considering leaving education earlier than they had originally planned.

In my own district, there are several teachers who have taken leaves of absence or are sick and had to be temporarily replaced with long term subs. We’re located in western Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh, just across the river from a plethora of colleges and universities with teacher prep programs. Yet it was pretty difficult to find anyone to fill these positions or serve as day-to-day subs.

There is so much we could be doing to encourage seasoned teachers to stay in the classroom beyond increased pay.

You could cut all unnecessary tasks like formal lesson plans, stop holding staff meetings unless an urgent need presents itself, refrain from new and unproven initiatives, and/or cut duties where possible to increase teacher planning time.

And that’s before we even get to the lack of respect, gas lighting, scapegoating, and micromanaging teachers go through on a daily basis.

What we have here is a crisis that cuts to the very heart of America’s identity as a nation.

What do we want to be? A capitalist experiment in school privatization whose only regulation is the free hand of the market? Or a nation supported by a secure system of education that took us to the moon and made us the greatest global superpower the world has ever known?

What do we want to be? A nation of dullards who can be easily manipulated by any passing ideologue? Or a country of critical thinkers who can accept new evidence and make rational decisions based on facts?

There is a cost to becoming a great nation and not just emblazoning the idea on a hat.

That cost is education. It is paying, supporting and respecting veteran teachers.

Are we still willing to pay it?

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

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz.

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

They've become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can't rightly be called a lawmaker, for he's not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies.

Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: Fictional icons. He's been padding his right-wing credentials by going after Mr. Potato Head, Mickey and Pluto, and, believe it or not, the Muppets.

This U.S. senator has dedicated the power and public resources of his office to demonizing popular creatures on "Sesame Street," specifically Big Bird and loveable little Elmo. Ted rants he has proof that Muppets are covert tools of "government propaganda." So, this ridiculous excuse of a senator is saving America from… Muppets.

But for a whole bag of assorted nuttiness, you can't beat Senator Rick Scott's 11-point plan to "Rescue America." A disgraced former healthcare mogul, Cruz's mega-millionaire colleague reinvented himself as a wingnut Florida senator, and he now chairs a policy arm of the Republican Party.

In February, Scott set forth a stunning agenda of far-out right-wing extremism that he says his party will push if they retake the Senate this November, including:

•   Implementing new federal taxes on the poorest half of Americans. So—as Scott puts it—they'll "have skin in the game."
•   "Stopping socialism" by terminating Social Security and Medicare.
•   Spending unlimited billions to build Donald Trump's folly of a border wall (and, ironically, naming the scam after The Donald).

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

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

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz.

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

They've become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can't rightly be called a lawmaker, for he's not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies.

Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: Fictional icons. He's been padding his right-wing credentials by going after Mr. Potato Head, Mickey and Pluto, and, believe it or not, the Muppets.

This U.S. senator has dedicated the power and public resources of his office to demonizing popular creatures on "Sesame Street," specifically Big Bird and loveable little Elmo. Ted rants he has proof that Muppets are covert tools of "government propaganda." So, this ridiculous excuse of a senator is saving America from… Muppets.

But for a whole bag of assorted nuttiness, you can't beat Senator Rick Scott's 11-point plan to "Rescue America." A disgraced former healthcare mogul, Cruz's mega-millionaire colleague reinvented himself as a wingnut Florida senator, and he now chairs a policy arm of the Republican Party.

In February, Scott set forth a stunning agenda of far-out right-wing extremism that he says his party will push if they retake the Senate this November, including:

•   Implementing new federal taxes on the poorest half of Americans. So—as Scott puts it—they'll "have skin in the game."
•   "Stopping socialism" by terminating Social Security and Medicare.
•   Spending unlimited billions to build Donald Trump's folly of a border wall (and, ironically, naming the scam after The Donald).

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

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

Let me say one word to you: Nuts.

Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz.

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

They've become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can't rightly be called a lawmaker, for he's not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies.

Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: Fictional icons. He's been padding his right-wing credentials by going after Mr. Potato Head, Mickey and Pluto, and, believe it or not, the Muppets.

This U.S. senator has dedicated the power and public resources of his office to demonizing popular creatures on "Sesame Street," specifically Big Bird and loveable little Elmo. Ted rants he has proof that Muppets are covert tools of "government propaganda." So, this ridiculous excuse of a senator is saving America from… Muppets.

But for a whole bag of assorted nuttiness, you can't beat Senator Rick Scott's 11-point plan to "Rescue America." A disgraced former healthcare mogul, Cruz's mega-millionaire colleague reinvented himself as a wingnut Florida senator, and he now chairs a policy arm of the Republican Party.

In February, Scott set forth a stunning agenda of far-out right-wing extremism that he says his party will push if they retake the Senate this November, including:

•   Implementing new federal taxes on the poorest half of Americans. So—as Scott puts it—they'll "have skin in the game."
•   "Stopping socialism" by terminating Social Security and Medicare.
•   Spending unlimited billions to build Donald Trump's folly of a border wall (and, ironically, naming the scam after The Donald).

Fiddle-faddles like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud U.S. Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

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

The post Anti-Poverty Programs Work and New Census Data Proves It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Shailly Gupta Barnes.

The House Jan. 6 committee hearings have raised two overarching questions. The first: Will the Justice Department indict and prosecute former President Donald Trump for leading a criminal conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election? The second: Will Congress enact essential reforms to protect our democracy from a future presidential coup attempt or insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol?

The first question can ultimately be answered only by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Congress is now considering the second.

A bipartisan group of senators led by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., proposed two measures on Wednesday that would significantly reform flawed 19th-century laws that still govern U.S. presidential elections. Changes must be made to the Presidential Election Day Act of 1845 and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, into which the 1845 Act was incorporated.

The proposed bills open the door for the Senate to address the grave problems in these laws — problems alarmingly dramatized by Trump’s attempted presidential coup. It is increasingly clear that loopholes in the 1845 Act and problems in the Electoral Count Act were at the heart of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election.

The Collins-Manchin proposal needs to be carefully vetted to ensure it will prevent future presidential coup attempts. It will also need 10 Republican senators to oppose a filibuster and no opposition from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to get through the Senate.

In addition, the Jan. 6 panel’s vice chair, Rep. Lynn Cheney, R-Wy., and senior member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. issued a statement late Wednesday that the panel would be proposing its own bipartisan fix for repairing the Electoral Count Act.

Congress has the power, under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution to determine when presidential electors are chosen. The 1845 Act sets the official quadrennial presidential Election Day on which voters chose the electors. It also provides that if a state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day, then the state’s presidential electors may be chosen “in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” There is no definition of what “failed to make a choice” requires.

This means a state legislature could simply decide that voters “failed to make a choice” based on allegations of widespread voter fraud — or any other grounds the legislature chooses. It could then substitute its own choice of presidential electors for those voters chose on Election Day.

Sound far-fetched?

It was — until Trump and coup strategist John Eastman tried to use that loophole to overturn Joe Biden’s win.

We heard at the House Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 session how the planning and plotting unfolded. Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified about a letter that Jeffrey Clark, then acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, pressed them to sign.

The letter claimed — falsely — that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns about voting irregularities in multiple states, including Georgia. Once the letter was signed, Clark, working on behalf of Trump, planned to send it to Georgia’s governor, House speaker and Senate president pro tempore — all Republicans.

To solve this fabricated problem, the letter proposed that a special session of the Georgia Legislature be called. It would then “evaluate the irregularities” and “take whatever action is necessary” to ensure that the correct slate of electors is sent to Congress — that is, the Trump slate, even though Biden won the state.

The letter cited the loophole in the 1845 Act as the basis for the Georgia Legislature to override voters and choose its own presidential electors.

Most critically, the letter cited the loophole in the 1845 Act as the basis for the Georgia Legislature to override voters and choose its own presidential electors. The letter said the act “explicitly recognizes the power that State Legislatures have to appoint electors” when voters “failed to make a choice” on Election Day.

Clark’s proposed effort also involved the Justice Department sending similar letters to other battleground states with Republican-controlled legislatures.

Rosen and Donoghue flatly refused to sign the letter — and a constitutional crisis was averted.

The blueprint, however, set forth a path for future coup plotters to follow. They would not even need the Justice Department. State legislatures could do it themselves — and many in key battleground states are now controlled by Republicans.

The 1845 Act’s “failure to choose” loophole is a ticking time bomb. Reform is essential to remove it and take away state legislatures’ ability to override the voters’ choice.

A second serious problem in the 19th-century laws was illustrated by Trump’s January 2021 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump spent an hour pressuring the state official to change Georgia’s presidential vote count.  “All I want to do is this,” Trump said in the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”

In other words, Trump tried to get Raffensperger to rig the vote. Raffensperger refused.

Trump’s call certainly appears to violate both federal and Georgia state law. But this case shows how a rogue secretary of state or other empowered state official could certify the wrong presidential electors or refuse to certify any electors.

A presidential nominee adversely affected by such an action must be able to effectively challenge this in the courts. Precise reform provisions in the Electoral Count Act must be clearly spelled out to avoid any vagueness that could create ambiguities — and thus create new opportunities to overturn a presidential election.

The reforms must provide a specific cause of action to challenge a wrongful certification or a failure to certify. They should also provide the right to expedited federal court review.

And the adversely affected presidential candidate must be provided with timely relief, because a new president is required to be certified on Jan. 6, only two months after Election Day. This does not leave much time for legal proceedings.

The plot to steal the 2020 presidential election was eye-opening. Congress must act now to ensure that any future attempt to steal the presidency does not succeed where this first one failed.

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

The U.S., the UK, and Russia sent delegations to India in late March to rally support for their positions on Ukraine. Yet India has remained steadfastly neutral, and repeatedly abstained from voting at the UN to condemn Russia’s invasion since it began on February 24.

U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh, who visited New Delhi on March 30-31, warned of consequences for any country seeking to “circumvent or backfill” sanctions on Russia, and further stated the United States would disapprove of any rapid acceleration of India’s energy and other commodity imports from Russia.

One week later on April 6, Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, announced that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term” for India.

The Biden administration was no doubt hopeful that India would be on board with condemning Russia and complying with sanctions. India is the world’s largest democracy and has enjoyed increasingly positive relations with the United States and Europe since the turn of the century. U.S. President Joe Biden has also promoted the Indian heritage of high-ranking members of his administration and contributions of the Indian community in America.

In addition to annual military drills with the United States, India is part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, which also includes Australia and Japan. The four-nation partnership, which emerged in the 2000s, has increasingly come to be seen as a loose political and security bloc aimed at curtailing China, and its members have increased military drills together in recent years.

But Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to avoid condemning Russia reflected India’s commitment to maintaining its “strategic autonomy.” To balance India’s relations with major powers, the country’s foreign secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, has urged India to “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play.”

Also in the mix is India’s troubled history with the West over the last few centuries. European powers (notably the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British) initially sought to trade with India following Vasco da Gama’s landfall in Calicut in 1498. This later developed into outright colonialism, as well as exploitation through entities like the Dutch and British East India Trading Companies.

India gained its independence from the UK in 1947, but relations between it and the U.S.-led West remained complicated during the Cold War. Tensions peaked during the India-Pakistan War of 1971, when the United States dispatched its 7th Fleet in support of Pakistan, though it avoided engaging in hostilities.

U.S. sanctions against both India and Pakistan for their nuclear tests in 1998, in addition to continued support for and cooperation with Pakistanduring the 20-year war in Afghanistan, have also irked New Delhi in recent decades. Coupled with Europe’s history in the region, New Delhi is understandably wary of being lectured on foreign policy.

This is in contrast to the relatively positive historical relationship between India and Russia that developed during the Cold War. Despite India being one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, ties between Moscow and New Delhi flourished, and the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation formalized their partnership in August 1971.

When the India-Pakistan War of 1971 broke out just months later, it was the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s presence in the Bay of Bengal that pushed the United States’ 7th Fleet into standing down. The Soviet Union also provided India with weapons shipments, gave significant assistance to India’s space program, and further formalized bilateral cooperation through the Integrated Long-Term Program of Cooperation (ILTP) in 1987.

A constructive Indian-Russian relationship persevered after the Soviet collapse. Nurturing this partnership has since taken a renewed urgency in Moscow, with the Kremlin keen to promote ties with major powers as its relations with the West have plummeted.

As the world’s largest weapons importer, India is a crucial market for weapons manufacturers. Russia remains India’s top supplier, and trade has surged in the 21st century as India’s economy has grown, and as India’s leadership has remained concerned over its traditional disputes with Pakistan and China.

Russia’s dominance over India’s weapons market has fallen in recent years. However, India’s need for maintenance, spare parts, and upgrades, inoperability with foreign imports, and friendly relations with Russia means it will be militarily tied to Russia in the midterm at least. This was further reinforced by the 10-year defense pact signed by Putin and Modi in December 2021.

India has also been able to rely on Russian backing in global forums and institutions, and Moscow has historically used its veto power at the United Nations Security Council to promote and defend Indian interests, notably its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. India also views Russia as having a moderating influence over China.

This has naturally resonated across India’s political establishment and voting base, with no major party supporting further action against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and an #IStandWithPutin campaign emerging across Indian social media.

Russia and India have also taken steps to expand energy ties in recent years. Russia’s oil giant Rosneft and other Russian companies secured a $13 billion takeover of India’s Essar Oil in 2017, while in 2020, India agreed to the first annual import of Russian oil as part of wider efforts to diversify its supply lines.

Underpinning the urgency for energy security in India is the current energy crisis in Sri Lanka, with ongoing riots taking place in parts of the country since March. Since the Russian invasion began on February 24, India has purchased 13 million barrels of oil from Russia compared to just under 16 million for all of 2021.

Russia also supplies India with much of its coal, while the first direct Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) arrived in India last year (followed by the signing of a 20-year contract). And in January 2022, Rosatom, Russia’s state-run nuclear power company, began building its sixth nuclear reactor in India after beginning construction on the fifth the previous June.

Europe’s lingering dependence on Russian resources has also elevated perceptions of Western hypocrisy in regard to criticism of India’s growing energy relationship with Russia.

Talks remain ongoing over a potential free trade agreement between India and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and the two countries are exploring the possibility of a rupee-ruble currency payment system to lessen the effects of sanctions.

India’s efforts to evacuate the thousands of Indian students from Ukraine as the invasion began required Modi to use India’s ability to work with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Forcing India to pick a side in the conflict would significantly undermine India’s strategic autonomy in global affairs. But India’s decision also points to the difficult task of attempting to isolate Russia, whose influence is more than enough to further entice India into acceptable neutrality.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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